Cold Kiss

hand on Mr. Purrfect, her orange tiger cat. He blinked at me in the dark when I peeked through the crack in her door, yellow eyes cold and uninterested.
    I never know what to tell Danny when he asks questions like that. Your funeral? The fact that Becker still hasn’t come back to school because one of his legs doesn’t work right, and he’s flying on painkillers most of the time anyway? The way Ryan can barely look at me anymore? How much I really hate running into your mom in town, and how often she still looks like she just finished crying?
    “Wren?” Anxious, almost pleading. Needy. His fingers tighten around my arm.
    “French,” I whisper, letting my lips brush the cool smoothness of his cheek. “Madame Hobart’s been on the warpath lately. And I still fuck up pluperfect conjugations.”
    “I told you, you should’ve taken Spanish,” he says, and he almost sounds like the old Danny when he laughs. “I think Mr. Hill is stoned most of the time.”
    I can’t help but smile at that, because he’s right. Mr. Hill wears the same tie for days at a time, and blinks like a startled owl when anyone asks him a question. Danny was always talking about him, back when he was … well, still in school.
    And still alive, a voice in my head whispers. A nasty, accusing voice, even though I wasn’t the reason he died. That was his fault, his and Becker’s, for being assholes and taking Becker’s car out to the park way on the west edge of town after they’d been drinking. The roads there, a giant spiderweb through the walking trails and trees, are narrow and twisty enough when you’re sober and it’s daylight.
    After I saw a photo of the crash site, Becker’s hand-me-down Celica accordioned into the broad base of a chestnut tree, I realized how likely it was that I could have been in the car with them. Give me a beer and I don’t make the greatest decisions either.
    What was scarier, though, was realizing that, for a minute, I wished I had been in the car. That I was gone, too, wherever you go after you die, with Danny.
    That’s when it started. Knowing that I couldn’t turn back time and climb into the backseat the way I had so many other nights, but wanting Danny with me again so much that I started to give serious thought to whether or not I could make that happen.
    When I remembered that fluttering white paper bird, I was convinced.
    I look at Danny now, just as pale, just as delicate somehow, and he smiles at me. Reaches out to stroke my cheek, tucking hair behind my ear. Snugs his hips closer, all lean, hard bone beneath the jeans I convinced his mom to give me. “He wrote my name on them,” I’d told her, pointing to where he’d written it in Sharpie on the inside of one calf, and she’d swallowed tears before she kissed my forehead.
    He’d been buried in a dark gray suit and a white shirt with an ice blue tie knotted at his throat. I’d burned it all the day I brought the jeans home. I’d picked up a couple of shirts at the thrift store downtown. The suit smelled like the graveyard, dark and sour, and in it he looked nothing like the Danny I knew.
    He brushes his mouth against my hair now, and strokes along my hip, fingers curling in my belt loops, pulling me closer still. I swallow hard, trying not to shudder.
    He’s so cold now. Always so cold, skin icy smooth. And his body is so quiet—the distant bump of a heartbeat, the thrum of blood flowing through veins, never seemed noticeable until it was gone. I wriggle around to tilt my head up and kiss him, hoping it will be enough.
    It never is anymore. For a little while he’ll relax, kiss me slowly, lingering and tasting, but it doesn’t last.
    It’s hard to go backward, after all. Even for me, because I can remember what it felt like to let our kisses wander away from our mouths, to peel off clothes to reveal new places to touch, to taste.
    I remember the way I could feel his heartbeat in the pulse at his throat, racing and stuttering. How warm he was, his cheeks fevered, his hands hot and firm.
    But it’s not like that anymore. Not for me, anyway, and every time I have to pull away I’m aware of how strong he is, how much he wants something I can’t give him. I can’t believe he can’t sense the way I tense up, stiff and panicked, or the jackrabbit thump of my own pulse, poised for flight.
    Gabriel would . The thought hits me out of nowhere, so unwelcome that I blink and push Danny away too roughly as I struggle to sit