Page 146 of Life and Death

She laughed—it was a trilling sound, not quite human. “I missed you, too. Isn’t that strange?”

“Why strange?”

“You’d think I’d have learned more patience over the last hundred years. And here I am, finding it difficult to pass an afternoon without you.”

“I’m glad it’s not just me.”

She leaned over to swiftly kiss my cheek, then pulled back quickly and sighed. “You smell even better in the rain.”

“In a good way or a bad way?”

She frowned. “Always both.”

I don’t know how she even knew where we were going with the downpour—it was like a liquid gray curtain around the Jeep—but she somehow found a side road that was more or less a mountain path. For a long while conversation was impossible, because I was bouncing up and down on the seat like a jackhammer. She seemed to enjoy the ride, though, smiling hugely the whole way.

And then we came to the end of the road; the trees formed green walls on three sides of the Jeep. The rain was a mere drizzle, slowing every second, the sky brighter through the clouds.

“Sorry, Beau, we have to go on foot from here.”

“You know what? I’ll just wait here.”

“What happened to all your courage? You were extraordinary this morning.”

“I haven’t forgotten the last time yet.” Was it really only yesterday?

She was around to my side of the car in a blur, and she started on the harness.

“I’ll get those, you go on ahead,” I protested. She was finished before I got the first few words out.

I sat in the car, looking at her.

“You don’t trust me?” she asked, hurt—or pretending to be hurt, I thought.

“That really isn’t the issue. Trust and motion sickness have zero relationship to each other.”

She looked at me for a minute, and I felt pretty stupid sitting there in the Jeep, but all I could think about was the most sickening roller-coaster ride I’d ever been on.

“Do you remember what I was saying about mind over matter?” she asked.

“Yes . . .”

“Maybe if you concentrated on something else.”

“Like what?”

Suddenly she was in the Jeep with me, one knee on the seat next to my leg, her hands on my shoulders. Her face was only inches away. I had a light heart attack.

“Keep breathing,” she told me.

“How?”

She smiled, and then her face was serious again. “When we’re running—and yes, that part is nonnegotiable—I want you to concentrate on this.”

Slowly, she moved in closer, turning her face to the side so that we were cheek to cheek, her lips at my ear. One of her hands slid down my chest to my waist.

“Just remember us . . . like this. . . .”

Her lips pulled softly on my earlobe, then moved slowly across my jaw and down my neck.