Cold Kiss

probably figured it explained why I run so hot and cold, and wanted nothing more than to offer sympathy. Instead, his mouth hangs open as he stares, and I wonder what he’s seeing. The graveyard in the moonlight, candles flickering in a closed circle? The loft with its ratty nest of a bed and the boy waiting on it, pale and still?
    “Wren.” Gabriel grabs my arm again, harder this time, pulling me off the corner and up Forest, behind the screen of a giant maple, its nude branches creaking overhead like bones. “Wren, what did you do?”

CHAPTER TEN

    IT’S TOO MUCH—THAT HUMMING ENERGY surges inside me and a branch snaps above us, clattering to the ground only two feet away. Gabriel’s fingers dig into my upper arm, and he steers me back toward Dudley. I’m breathless, trying to keep up, when I manage to get out, “Wait, stop, my house is that way.”
    “Later,” he says, grim and determined, and we cover two blocks in a blur, leaves crunching underfoot as we head toward Prospect. Five minutes later we’re climbing the stairs inside a rambling old house and he’s shoving a key into the door on the second floor.
    “Sit,” he says tersely, and I bristle.
    “What are you, my father?” It’s stupid, and hardly the point, but I don’t care. I’m horrified and panicked and exhausted, and that’s just on the surface. Beneath all of that it’s even darker, smoky and dirty and wrong and regretful, and I close my eyes as I drop onto the sagging sofa.
    Gabriel ignores me and goes into the kitchen through the arch to the right, and I hear the tap running, the distant snick as a burner is lit. I’m trembling, blood racing so fast through my veins I can practically feel the hot course of it snaking in and out of my heart. I drag my feet onto the sofa and wrap my arms around my legs, willing myself to calm down.
    This is bad. I know there are words worse than bad, but I can’t even think of them. I was stupid to let Gabriel get close, and now who knows what could happen?
    I startle when wood scrapes against the bare floor and open my eyes to find Gabriel sitting on the coffee table in front of me. He hands me a glass of water.
    “Here. Until the tea’s ready.”
    I take it, sloshing some over the edge since my hand is still shaking. It’s cool and wet and just what I didn’t know I needed, and when I’m done, I hand the glass back to Gabriel.
    His eyes are dark gray now, the color of a coming storm, and I swallow hard. He’s seen things about me no one has seen, not even Mom, and it’s frightening. I don’t want to lie all the time, but I don’t want to be judged, either.
    I do enough of that for everybody.
    “Does anyone know?” he says, setting the glass on the table next to him.
    I snort. “Are you high? Who would believe it?”
    He doesn’t even flinch, and I bite my lip. The snark comes naturally, but he doesn’t deserve it.
    “Tell me.” He leans forward, resting his arms on his knees, and he’s so close I catch the scent from my dream, cotton and boy sweat and something else, too, sharp and bright.
    It’s instinct again that makes me delay the inevitable. “Tell you what?”
    “All of it. I mean, I could tell you had power, but this is…” He shakes his head. “Tell me.”
    I wish I could just let him see instead. It’s suddenly so shameful, my grief, my need, my selfish, ridiculous belief that I could have what no one else gets to have without consequences.
    I can’t believe I was actually stupid enough to think I could bring my boyfriend back from the dead and walk off into some movie happy ending.
    I am the kid who sticks her finger in the light socket. I am the person who doesn’t check the expiration date on the milk. I am the idiot who has never looked before she leaped. I am the girl who is falling apart, right now.
    “Tell me,” he repeats, and circles his fingers around the stalk of my ankle.
    Instead of intimidating me, it grounds me, connecting us, and I raise my gaze to his face again.
    “What did you hear about how he died?”
    “Does it matter?”
    It doesn’t, I guess. Death is death, and if Danny had died of some horrible, lingering disease, I can’t imagine I would have mourned differently, or less.
    What matters is how much I loved him. How well I loved him. That’s where it all started, right or wrong.
    I want to tell Gabriel that, explain that much, at least—I didn’t do what I did on a whim. I didn’t take it lightly, even if I didn’t really