Cold Kiss

face. “Oh.”
    It hurts to let the lie hang there, but there’s nothing else I can do. Except glare at the cat, who hisses at me as Robin walks past on her way up the back steps.
    “Turn it off,” Danny says, frowning, when my phone buzzes for the fourth time.
    It’s Mom’s late night at the salon—on Mondays she does bills and general cleanup after closing, so Robin and I are on our own for dinner and homework. And since Robin locked herself in her room for some disgusting lovefest with the stupid cat after I made frozen pizza, I snuck out to the loft.
    Darcia keeps texting me, though, little blips of happiness about Friday, and dumb stuff about school or home, just the way she used to. It’s nice, except for how Danny—this Danny anyway—isn’t used to sharing me.
    “I can’t.” I stroke his back gently. He’s sitting up, drawing something in the last of the big sketch pads I got him. “I told Robin I was going to the library, and Mom’s not home, so I need to answer if she calls.”
    Now I’m lying to Danny, too. Not that I haven’t been all this time, of course, but it feels different to lie to him about everyday things. I close my eyes for a second, swallowing back the instinct to start screaming and never stop.
    He glances over his shoulder at me again, brow still creased. Three fat candles burn in the corner of the room on the floor, the flames casting dancing shadows over his face. For a moment, I’m sure I can see the blunt outline of his skull beneath his skin, the indentations of his eye sockets, and I shudder.
    “Are you cold?” Just like that, his unhappiness is forgotten. He grabs the ratty quilt from the end of the mattress to tuck it around my legs, and his drawing falls to the floor.
    It’s nothing like his usual comic panels or figures. Instead, a huge, gnarled tree seems to grow out of the center of the page. The branches are bony, long arms that stretch into skeletal fingers, dozens of them reaching toward me as I stare at it, a twisted, funhouse tree.
    I shudder again, and Danny moves closer, winding his arm around my waist. It doesn’t help—he’s like marble, cold and unforgiving, his ribs like a cage.
    “What’s that?” I ask him, pointing at the drawing while I try not to shiver.
    He shrugs. “A tree. Can’t you tell?”
    “Well, yeah, but … you don’t usually draw things like that.” I reach into my pocket and pull out the folded sheet of paper, smoothing it open. “You usually draw stuff like this.”
    His sudden smile is startling, the Danny I love surfacing from under a shroud. “That’s you. Yeah.” Just as suddenly, he scowls. “I had to throw it at the cat.”
    I actually gulp, shaking now. “The cat?”
    “Robin’s cat.” He moves away, body tight with tension again, the line of his back a blunt backslash in the candlelight. “Stupid thing hates me now. It used to like me.”
    I nearly tear the paper as I sit up straight, pushing the blanket away and touching his arm. “When was the cat up here, Danny?”
    The noise he makes is dismissive, like it’s no big deal. “Before. Hissed and showed his claws. I used to give him tuna, man. It’s not right.”
    Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God . “Danny, did you leave the stairs down?”
    “I can hear you coming better when I do,” he says, and gives me the sweetest smile. Wide, bright, completely honest—I saw that smile so often, when we met in the parking lot after school, or when he would look up from drawing as I studied on the sofa, or when he lifted his head from the pillows on his bed, flushed and already sleepy.
    For a moment, I want to reach out and trace his lips with my fingers, relearn the generous curve of his mouth, but I know if I do the moment will be ruined. Danny’s mouth is too cool now, lips not as soft as they used to be, and it’s always a reminder. Danny—my Danny—is gone. What I brought back is just an imitation.
    Instead I close my fingers gently around his wrist, my thumb stroking the place where his pulse used to be. “You can’t do that, Danny. Remember? We talked about that. It’s not safe.”
    His smile disappears as quickly as it broke open, and when he leans closer, I realize I’m stiff with fear.
    “But you’re not here,” he says, a low whisper. “You’re not here so much, Wren. I need you here, I keep telling you, when you’re not here I can’t think, Wren, I can’t, it’s all cloudy, and I see the tree, and I smell the smoke, and I