Page 62 of Kiss Slay Replay

“You’re not an asshole. I just got ahead of myself. I’m not a live-in-the-present type. My head is always in the past or the future. Idealizing.”

He looks at me, his eyes marbling gray, unrecognizable. His lips quiver. He’s scared. “I don’t want to be in the present anymore. Not right now.”

“Tokyo, then. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Fuck it. First-class. Where will we stay?”

He smiles. His gums ooze this thick, obsidian substance that I don’t think is blood. It has a smell. It’s putrid. It leaks out of his mouth and dribbles down his chin.

“Danny. I’m going to call for that ambulance now, all right?”

I ignore the movement in my peripheral vision. The jolt of the dresser. Someone’s trying to get in.

The strange, ghostly man in the top hat. I hear him. The faint tick of his pocket watch.

Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

I realize I can’t call 911 because I don’t have my phone. It’s in my bag, which I dropped when I bandaged Danny’s wound.

Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

“Do you hear that?” he asks me. “Do you hear it?”

“I don’t hear anything,” I lie. “It’s fine. You’re going to be fine. This isn’t…It’s not happening.”

It’s not happening because it can’t be happening. Just like last night didn’t happen. It’s not real. How could any of this be real?

“Willa,” Danny whispers. “Willa, I can’t feel my arm. And I can’t see. Everything’s dark.”

“You’re going to wake up, and none of this will have happened. You won’t even remember. I don’t think. I might but you won’t. You’ll be fine. I swear.”

The whine of hinges. The dresser rattling.

Someone’s here. Someone’s in the doorway.

“Willa?”

It’s Ravi.

8

His face is all scraped up, and his jacket is pulled over his head like a hood. He pushes the dresser back and squeezes inside the cabin.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“What happened to him?” Ravi sinks to his knees to get a better look at Danny.

“A raven. His hand…”

“Hey,” Danny says. He clears his throat, attempts to sit up straighter, propping himself on his functioning arm.

Ravi nods, takes a breath, and then he’s up, closing the door, pushing the dresser back in front of it. He walks over to the corner and gets a bottle of water out of the mini fridge that I somehow failed to notice. He twists off the cap and gives the bottle to Danny. “Here you go. Water.”

“Thank you,” Danny says. His hand is too shaky to bring the bottle to his lips, so I hold it for him, help him drink. Ravi watches, his expression intentionally blank, determined not to let on how he’s feeling. It’s devastating, how much he seems like a stranger to me in this moment.

“What’s happening out there?” I ask him.

He doesn’t answer. He pulls back the burlap curtains, looks out the front window.

“Ravi?”