Page 176 of A Dead Girl's Guide to Living
“The ashes were the last thing on my mind when we got here,” I defended. “We literally had to brace ourselves to spill this wild story to you, Jedd.”
Liv snickered, and Jedd snorted at the same time.
“Where are you guys staying?”
Ellis stiffened for a fraction of a second, and I knew what was coming before the words even left her mouth.
“Um, I haven’t actually booked anything yet,” she admitted, a small flush creeping up her neck. “Today has been… today has been a lot.”
It surprised me. Ellis never let things slip through the cracks—hell, she had ordered Jedd to sort out food in his own home so she could take her tablets. I grinned at her, trying to ease the worry in her eyes at her own slipup.
Jedd shrugged and took another piece of pizza. “Stay here. I have a spare room. It’ll make working on the fireworks easier as well. Just bring your car in after. Very nice car, by the way.”
Ellis smiled shyly and shrugged. “It was my grandad’s. His words were,‘Get the fuck out of Dodge, kid.’And then Liv showed up and demanded I drive across the country, so, you know—fate or whatever.”
I took a sip of my soda as they spoke, my mind already flitting to tomorrow, fighting against the sudden lump in my throat. Tomorrow. That would be it. The last of Margaret.
I ate my pizza in silence after that, the sobering thought enough to take the air from my lungs.
By the timewe brought the car inside the gates and grabbed our stuff, my eyes were burning and Ellis was yawning loudly.
The room we settled into had a small ensuite, pale blue walls, and a freshly made queen bed. A chair sat in the corner with a set of drawers. When we closed the door behind us and dropped our bags, I realized the silence stretched and wasn’t filled with sarcastic remarks, no playful whistles. No Liv.
Ellis perched on the edge of the bed, yawning softly. “I think Liv went up to Jedd’s loft.”
I glanced at her, noting the tightness of her jaw and the storm unburied behind her eyes—as if, now that the door was closed, all her hidden emotions were free to surface. As if here, in this room with me, she was finally safe enough to feel them.
I knelt in front of her, resting my hands on her thighs. “You okay?”
Ellis hesitated, her green eyes locking on mine, full of shadows but steady. “I don’t know. I—it hurts. I hurt for her. I hurt for him, and I hurt for Bri. All of them. And—and I keep circling back to what Liv said. How she thought she was a coward. How she thought she ran. And she’s been living with that feeling for the last year.” Her voice broke, and she gripped the bedspread. “It kills me that she believed that about herself, and then had to watch me mope and wallow.”
I shook my head and cupped her face gently. “Ellis, listen. None of this—none of it—is your fault. It’s not on you. If you want to blame someone for why Liv died, blame the sick asshole who walked into that club with hate and bullets. That’s where the fault belongs. Not with Liv. Not with you. You’re entitled to your feelings, and you’re certainly entitled to whatever trauma you had after that surgery, and all the grief and trauma before it. Just because someone else has pain doesn’t make yours any less valid or important.”
Her lips trembled, and I ran my thumb along the soft flesh, sweeping her hair back with my other hand. Her watery eyes searched mine for a moment before she leaned in to kiss me, and I melted into her—melted into her softness and the sweet taste of her breath.
When she pulled back, her eyes were wet, but a small smile danced on her lips.
“How do you do that?” she asked, poking my shoulder.
“Do what?”
She shrugged and looked down at the bedspread, where her hands were still curled. “Make me feel like I don’t have to carry it all.”
“Because you don’t,” I told her simply, leaning my thighs against the wooden base of the bed and wrapping my arms around her waist, pressing my head into her shoulder tiredly. “Not anymore.”
She let out a quiet laugh and rested her head in the crook of my neck, and for a long moment we just breathed together—like a soothing balm spread over the burn of a long, emotionally exhausting day.
I was drained beyond belief, exhausted and emotionally destroyed, and I could only imagine how Ellis felt.
“I got a text earlier,” Ellis mumbled into my neck. “From Thomas. He’s in L.A.”
I raised a brow and leaned back to look at her. “Your brother?”
She nodded, biting her lip. “Yeah. Mom told him I made it to L.A., and he’s here too, with some friends from the army. They’re having downtime. He wants to get lunch tomorrow.”
My heart clenched for her. I understood the strained, fractured history between them—the way years of sickness and survival had carved wounds neither had realized until it almost seemed too late.
“Well, you should go,” I murmured, brushing a thumb across her cheek.
