LITMIR.BIZ

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my skirts and lifted them so I could scale the steps two at a time. The squeaky elevator carried me to the third floor. I almost ran into Libby, one of the housekeepers, when I turned toward Cole’s room.

      She had sheets in her hands.

      Past her, Cole’s room was empty. The posters were off the walls, the bed was bare, and the dresser and nightstand where his alarm clock, pictures and watch normally sat, were empty.

      “You just missed him. He left about five minutes ago.” Libby smoothed the sheets in her hands. “I was just about to make the beds with new linens.”

      Upon closer inspection of the room, the only thing he’d left behind was a picture of us in a goofy pose stuck in the mirror.

      I dropped my skirts and my hands dangled at my sides, lifelessly. I was so numb. When I finally got feeling back in my hands enough to move them, I took the picture down.

      I was sticking my tongue out, but Cole was looking at me.

      He looked at me as if he was looking at the soul inside me and that it housed the sun. Too painful to look at without cringing slightly, yet too breathtaking to look away.

      My fingers trembled, and I almost dropped the picture.

      What was this craziness going on inside me?

      What had made Cole decide tonight that he was leaving?

      Why couldn’t he have said bye to me himself?

      I turned and took the picture with me.

      On the second floor, at the last bedroom on the right before the stairs that led down to the main floor, I stopped, a strange pull leading me to put my hand on the door handle. It had been the deceased owner’s room. So, if all the stuff Trevor had told me was in fact true, it had been mine and Cole’s.

      How could I not remember?

      How did he get to?

      I had avoided that suite of rooms at all costs, though I’d seen Cole close the doors behind him many times. He always gave himself entrance to the room just as if it had been….

      Holy.

      Crap.

      I stumbled into the room and shut the door behind me. My chest swelled with breath I couldn’t release and my eyes burned with tears. I staggered to the bed and sat.

      I yanked the draw cord on the claw foot lamp on the nightstand.

      This room held ghosts.

      Not ghosts that I could see but memories I could feel. My soul spun with a whirlwind of emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, terror, humor, love, and last but not least, a completeness—that made me feel more empty than I ever had in my whole life without Cole there to explain them to me.

      I tried to walk around the room and look at some of my past belongings, but the air became thicker, Cole’s cologne found my senses. The smell of his neck when he’d hugged me from time to time wrapped around me. I suddenly couldn’t breathe in the thickness of a past that hadn’t been mine until only hours ago.

      I had to get out.

      I ran right into my mother as I fumbled to shut the door behind me, still clutching the picture in a death grip.

      “Are you okay?” she said.

      I rushed past her. “Why don’t you ask my husband? Apparently, we’re cursed and haunted by a ghost.”

      Her gasp echoed through the hall and down the stairs.

      I kept going. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

      “Everything from your past lives is upstairs. On the fourth floor. You need to see it all.” Her voice trembled.

      I stopped on the next to the last step. “Why? He’s gone. It doesn’t even matter. If it was true, he should have at least told me. Gave me a chance to see how I felt about it.”

      “The reason he didn’t is because it’s true. He didn’t want you to suffer if the curse was over, if the part that involved you hurting for eternity on end was over. He felt like he was the cause of that hurt.”

      I gripped the banister still facing away from her. “No. He was a coward. He didn’t want to find out how I really felt. He couldn’t face rejection. If that’s what it would have been.”

      “As angry as you are right now, I don’t think it would have been.”

      “We’ll never know, now will we?” I continued my descent down and went out the back door. It was my turn to take a long walk.

      Living without him wouldn’t be that bad. I had for this long. I’d be fine.

      Maybe things would be better now.

      * * * *

      The day before Christmas Eve, I was sure I’d see Cole over the holiday. I didn’t want to be without a gift for him, so I shopped until I found the perfect thing. A new journal and a pen that I had his name engraved on.

      He wrote in a journal every night. Surely he could use a new one.

      On Christmas Eve, I sat up staring at the Christmas tree long after everyone had opened the traditional one gift that we always opened in celebration of Jesus’ birth. After everyone went upstairs, I sat in the glow of Christmas tree lights, the rest of the room darkened, with the box in my lap.

      No one had mentioned Cole.

      My heart had punched my chest every time I started to ask if they’d heard from him.

      So, I had opened the gift Mama got for me and left Cole’s gift under the tree until everyone left the room. I stared at it until four in the morning.

      Mama had had many talks with me between the junior prom and Christmas. She, Shelby, Trevor and Jordan wouldn’t age. To hear them tell it, Mama and Shelby were ancestors of one of the most powerful witches ever known in these parts. They could do things only most witches could ever dream of.

      I was the love of a shapeshifter’s life.

      If they’d told me that part along with the whole reincarnation thing back at the prom, I probably would have run away, but now Cole’s long walks in the woods made total sense. Though he could scarf down a gargantuan amount of normal food, his metabolism called for much more protein that normal human consumption allowed.

      And he was so hot.

      Not just looks-wise.

      Because he was.

      I had been too blinded and pissed at him for all his hovering and moping to notice how much.

      He’d always been warm as if he was running a bit of a temperature. If we’d ever cuddled, which was rarely, like during a scary movie or after the loss of my favorite pets—and there’d been many, being the animal lover that I was—he was always toasty and comfortable. Looking back, I wished I had taken the opportunity more often. Maybe then emotions I was supposed to feel would have slapped me in the face or kicked me in the ass.

      They crushed me now, and according to everyone in the house, no one knew where he was.

      Sure, he’d called to check in, but he wouldn’t disclose his location. He’d finished up high school at some other school out of town and had begun college level classes earlier than expected.

      Of course. Because he was brilliant. He always knew how to do everything.

      It all made so much sense now. If he’d lived all those lives, he’d learned a century of irritating skills to make me feel stupid.

      I’d always felt so inadequate where he’d been a freaking genius.

      I sighed, as pain wrenched at my chest.

      If he’d just come home, I would have given him an apology. And probably yell at him. Some. I wanted to say to him how sorry I was for acting like a spoiled brat all those years and that I hoped he would

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