4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Axel

T he sound of the door closing reverberated through the room and seemed to find a home in the center of my chest. It was impossible. There was no way it was him … but I was intimately familiar with the pain tearing through me.

I knew the sensation that forced the air from my lungs and nearly made me scream.

And I knew the feeling of my body freezing in some strange mixture of horror and soul numbing pain.

He was walking away.

Again.

The last time he'd walked away from me was the last time I'd ever seen him. And I hadn't told him…

Fuck…

I'd shouted at him. I'd told him to get the fuck out… and I…

I…

Sunshine.

"Xavier!" his name came from my chest in a near scream, and for a moment I wasn't a grown man. I wasn't a forty-two year old who ran a successful business and had seen and burned more dead bodies than I could keep count of.

I was a twenty-two year old, and I was horrified at the thought of experiencing the same gut-wrenching loss that I had that night.

It was nearly impossible to draw enough air into my lungs to shout his name again, and it was pointless anyway. The door was closed.

He was probably halfway down my driveway already—halfway out of my life again, even though he couldn't have walked back into it. Xavier was dead.

Maybe this was all a dream.

If it was, I didn't want it to turn into a nightmare. It certainly felt like one, because my breath was still squeezed tight in my chest, caught up against the shattered pieces of my ribs… and I…

I couldn't move.

I had to move.

I couldn't let him walk away from me again.

And maybe if I could pretend this was all a dream, it would be easier to think it could be real .

Because, somewhere in the back of my mind, a phone call I'd gotten a few months ago was playing.

I know this sounds impossible, but it's Kade.

Kade Neil.

Who was also dead.

"Impossible ," I breathed, but my legs finally decided they knew how to work. I flung my door open and yelled his name again.

My words echoed in the silence.

Was this just another dream after all?

But no… In the distance, I could see a flash of light from a cellphone as someone rounded the corner.

Even though it couldn't be Xavier—even though this couldn't be real—I listened to the instincts surging through my chest that demanded I follow him.

I wasn't sure if he heard my footsteps as I took off after him, or if this was all just a game to him, but as soon as I rounded the corner, he took off running.

Which… was honestly a very Xavier thing to do. We'd done this song and dance a dozen times before—we fought, and he stormed out. Every time, I'd usually end up following him.

And every time…

As I rounded a corner, I felt his fist connect with my jaw. It was different than before—he wasn't as strong. The punch was weak enough that it barely split my lip.

And I was bigger. Broader. My hand flashed out and wrapped around his throat, and in a quick burst of strength, I shoved him against the brick wall of the alleyway he'd tried to duck into.

"What the fuck Axel?" he snarled. "First you don't believe me, and now you're—"

I didn't give him a chance to keep complaining. I didn't give him a chance to lie , or try to convince me of who he was, who we were.

A stranger could have learned every fact about my life from the time I was born until now.

But a stranger wouldn't feel the way Xavier did when we kissed.

Maybe I was lying to myself. Maybe some part of me knew all along, even though it seemed impossible.

Or maybe I just wanted to feel—even if it was just for a second before I realized I was delusional—like I could press my mouth against his one more time and whisper all the things I'd never had a chance to say… every sorry that was caught on the back of my tongue, bitter and jagged like shards of glass healed over into scars in my throat.

Impossible to swallow.

Impossible to speak.

But the press of his lips against mine was so familiar it drew the poison from the wounds and made them burn.

It didn't matter that the kiss tasted like blood—if anything, that just made it feel all the more real. So often when we fucked, it was right after a fight. One or the other of us was usually hurt—I knew there was something toxic about it, something that most people would never understand, but it was a part of who we were.

We fought and we fucked and we loved, and all of it was just as fierce and just as passionate.

The man who couldn't be who he said he was kissed me with that same fiery ferocity now. When his hands fisted into the front of my shirt and he bodily moved me until I slammed against the wall, everything around me seemed to melt away.

The fact that we were in public, the fact that he was shorter than me… the years.

Twenty-two years slid off me and fell to my feet in a puddle—logic could tell me all it wanted that there was no way the man in front of me was Xavier.

Memory said logic was wrong.

Memory told me I knew the body pressed against mine, and something that existed even deeper in the center of my chest seemed to spark to life for the first time since I'd last held him.

It was that part that made my arms snake out, that part that had my hands fisting his hair so I could pull him back for just a second.

Just a breath.

Just long enough to see that ring of green burning hot and demanding.

"Xavier…"

Impossible…

But breathing the name made that soft flame in his eyes flicker to life and turn into a wildfire. Saying his name brought his lips back to mine and drove his tongue into my mouth.

When his knee slid between my legs, it was only natural for me to open up for him—it was what we'd done hundreds of times before… never mind that he was smaller than me now.

Never mind that the logical part of my mind was still trying to demand I realize this was completely impossible.

Never mind any of it, because my heart—my soul— recognized him.

I recognized the broken sound that spilled from my lips when I pulled back again—some strange mixture of a half sob and a half moan. It was the sound I made when I dreamed of him, the sound I made when I woke up from precious stolen moments of impossibility that he was still alive and still in my arms, and then I was thrust back into the reality that he was dead . Gone.

That I couldn't hold him anymore.

That he was ashes on my fireplace, and he didn't exist , even though my mind refused to let him go.

Maybe that was what was happening now. Maybe this was simply my mind refusing to give up on him, refusing to believe that he could be gone forever, that I had to live the rest of my life without him in it.

If this was a dream, I didn't want to wake up. If I closed my eyes and let myself feel , it didn't matter what the man in front of me looked like. It didn't matter that his body was wrong. Because he felt right, because he felt more real than any fantasy I'd had for the last twenty years.

When he pulled back again, I couldn't stop the words that spilled from my lips. I felt helpless, powerless—like the past and the present were colliding, and somehow I couldn't tell the difference anymore.

"Do you believe in ghosts, Xavier?"

A flare of recognition burst across his face, and his head tilted. "Do you, Axel?"

And it was there—this moment where I could choose if I was going to let this happen, if I was going to let a complete stranger waltz into my life and convince me that this could actually happen.

I was a practical man .

I didn't believe in ghosts.

I didn't even believe in love anymore.

But…

"Best not take a chance, right?"

Xavier's lips curved into a smile I thought I'd never see again on this side of Hell, and he nodded.

"Right."

Apparently, words like impossible didn't matter. I wasn't sure if I'd completely given in to the insanity that was Xavier somehow being here, now, in a body that didn't look familiar, but with a touch that I would have recognized even if I'd lost my sight… or if I was just too tired to fight it.

No one else kissed the way he did.

No one else touched me the way he had in that alley.

And honestly… when he'd looked up at me, when I saw the vulnerable expression on his face, it was too much to resist. It was the expression he could have had if I'd gone after him the night he walked out, the night we'd fought. If I'd followed my instincts then instead of letting him go, I would have never had to know what it felt like to miss him, what it felt like to have a part of me completely ripped away.

That part was inexplicably back. I could say it was impossible all I wanted, but I couldn't deny the sensation of every jagged piece of my chest realigning when I'd pressed our lips together.

And I couldn't stop my fingers from entwining with his as we walked home. If this was all some fucked up trick to get close to me, whoever orchestrated it had won. I led him back to the house in silence, picking up the bag he'd dropped on the porch, and didn't stop him when he peeled off from me and headed to the shower.

At least I had the sense to go to my bedroom and lock myself in after I'd thrown some leftovers into the microwave for my unexpected guest. And if I ignored the gentle rap of his knuckles knocking on the door in favor of trying to grasp at what was left of my sanity, he let me get away with it.

That was probably the most un-Xavier thing he'd done.

As I lay beneath the sheets with every part of my physical being somehow aware of the fact that there was another person in the house with me—another person I could feel along every nerve ending that I had even when he wasn't in the room with me—my mind drifted.

Back to that night a few months ago.

Back to my phone ringing and a very familiar voice spilling through the speakers.

Kade.

Only… Kade was dead. He'd died a bit after Xavier. It was like the best of the best suddenly lost their game with luck, with fate, and had been unceremoniously taken out without so much as a second glance. They were both gone, and when the man had said he had a job for me, I'd nearly hung up on him.

I did hang up after he told me who he was, told me that there were going to be a lot of bodies popping up in the future. I was the best. He wanted the best.

And apparently, Kade Neil only worked with the best.

But Kade was dead, and the second he started with a let me explain , I'd done the exact opposite.

When the number called back, I'd ignored it.

And now, I was wondering if there was a very pissed off Kade out there somewhere, ready to kick my ass for having the audacity to blow him off.

I was wondering exactly how many impossible things were actually happening.

"I'm too old for this shit," I murmured, but it didn't stop me from standing up and inching toward the door. I couldn't hear anything on the other side, but if I closed my eyes, I could picture him. Only… it wasn't the man in my house I was seeing.

It was Xavier as I remembered him. He'd probably pulled his shirt off and dropped it onto the hardwood floor like a complete asshole, then stretched himself out on the couch instead of taking any of the spare rooms that weren't locked. I'd found him like that more than once when he'd come in late from a job and he hadn't wanted to disturb me.

When I'd asked him why he hadn't used a bed , he'd informed me that there was only one bed he wanted to sleep in.

Our bed .

It had been our bed since the second he'd stepped into my house, because it was the bed he'd woken up in. When he was bleeding out, when I was half afraid of him dying in the middle of the night and half afraid of him waking up and trying to kill me… I'd put him in my room under the excuse of keeping an eye on him.

It was total bullshit, and we both knew it. I could have just as easily kept an eye on him in the guest room, but…

I wanted him close.

I wanted him where I could see him, where I could keep him.

Even then—from the very first moment—I'd known Xavier was supposed to be where I could see, where I could touch. Where I could feel.

There was a reason his ashes were over the fireplace…

There was a reason I'd never been able to scatter him to the winds like I was sure most normal people did.

I hadn't been able to let him go then, and I wondered if that was why I was so willing to believe what was happening now.

I wondered if that was why I opened my bedroom door like a damn fool and silently padded to the living room.

His jacket and pants were on the floor.

Xavier was stretched across the couch in a t-shirt and boxers.

And even though he didn't look like the person I remembered, everything about him screamed familiar, screamed right.

Maybe I was too tired to fight it. I knew I was too tired to stop myself from making my way across the room and sitting in the empty space he'd left for me.