She wasn’t the woman Colby had fallen in love with.
She was a friend. In his eyes, that was all she’d ever be. Delusional ghosts… Bree figured being grounded in reality wasn’t much of a concern for them anymore. Quietly, she repeated, “It doesn’t matter if he missed me. Yeah, I missed him too. But he missed a friend, Lys. That’s all I ever was to him. That’s all I’m ever going to be.”
Alyssa rolled her eyes. “Man, you are so stubborn.”
Bree blinked, then snickered. “Me? You’re the one hanging around here, determined to play matchmaker. A year, Lys. It’s been a year. And you’re not showing any signs of moving on.”
With a melodramatic sigh, Alyssa said, “I can’t move on until I know you’ll be happy. Both of you.”
Tugging her gloves off, Bree shoved her damp hair back from her brow and then fisted her hands on her hips. “You can’t force this to happen, girl. Things happen because they are meant to, not because you force them.” Rising, she strode away, determined to get a little peace and quiet.
Of course, the way her luck ran, Alyssa would just follow her.
But to her surprise, that didn’t happen.
She settled down in a flower bed near the back of the garden and worked in peace and quiet. It occurred to her that Alyssa had given up a little easier than normal this time, but maybe that was because Alyssa was finally getting the point.
Chapter Three
Alyssa didn’t understand the deal with being dead but it wasn’t what she’d expected. She hadn’t gone on to some glorious place in the sky, she wasn’t roasting in some pit of endless torment and she hadn’t ceased to exist either.
She hadn’t intentionally clung to the land of the living, but apparently, in her subconscious, that was what she was doing. She faded in and out of conscious existence, sometimes lost inside herself for hours, days at a time. But never for too long.
It had happened again, just now. One minute she’d been talking to Bree, teasing her, chiding her, nagging her and then, just like that, Alyssa was gone. Time passed and she wasn’t even aware of it, just that Bree had left and now Alyssa was alone in the house with a man who refused to see her.
She wasn’t always here—here being on Earth. Sometimes she was someplace…other. No place she could describe, but it seemed as if it were a prelude to what waited, if she could just move on.
She wasn’t always alone there, either.
People came and went. Some lingered for just a few heartbeats, but she’d been told that others had waited there endlessly. Trapped—trapped by their memories and regrets from a life that was over.
She didn’t want that. She didn’t want to be trapped between life and death, here and now and the hereafter. Which mean she had to move past what held her bound to her life. According to what she had been told, at least. And she believed it. It made sense.
Colby and Bree—they were the only people who mattered to her any more. None of the others from her life even seemed real. Just Colby and Bree. Almost surreally real, if that made sense. Thinking of one of them was all it took to go to them. She’d been watching them almost from the moment she breathed her last.
Bree had seen her the very first night but Colby continued to fight the knowledge. If he didn’t want to see her, she couldn’t force it on him. It had frustrated her to no end, but now she was glad of it. Maybe his stubborn refusal to see her could come in handy.
A wistful sort of yearning moved through her as she found herself in their bathroom, staring at him through a steamy panel of glass. He was in the shower, blissfully unaware of her. Leaving her to stand there and stare at him and remember. Lost in the memories, she thought of the way his hands had felt on her, the way he had touched her—careful, gentle—as though he feared he’d bruise her or mark her somehow.
She didn’t miss sex. That was seriously weird, but she attributed it to being dead. Sex was for the living. She did miss the idea of it, missed being close to him, able to touch him. But it was a distant ache, almost as though he’d been lost to her for years and years.
The pain wasn’t fresh, it wasn’t vivid and it hadn’t been, not even from the first. More weirdness to death, she supposed.
And another weirdness—her ability to know what they were thinking.
It was as though the words passing through their minds created a sound only she could hear. Now that had taken a while to get used to. Hearing his grief had been harder on her than anything else since her death. Sometimes it was still so raw, if she could have wept with him, she would have.