Page 115 of Midnight Valentine
In a weak, scratchy voice, the words halting and almost unintelligible, he whispers, “It wasn’t enough.”
“What? What do you mean?” I can barely speak, I’m crying so hard. My entire body is racked with sobs. When his lips move but no words come out, I lean closer, putting my ear near his mouth and begging him to say it again.
On the faintest of exhalations, he does.
“One lifetime wasn’t enough to love you.”
I fall to my knees as a team of doctors and nurses bursts into the room.
Epilogue
Theo
Two months later
Fucking yellow balloons.
It’s the dumbest thing to be scared of, right? Right. So imagine my surprise when I woke up in the hospital after my accident—my first accident, that is—saw a kid carrying a yellow balloon down the hallway, and got so scared, it felt like I was having a heart attack.
That was the first clue something strange was going on.
At first, I assumed it was the brain injury. Getting your head rammed by a steel rocket doing eighty miles per hour isn’t good for the old noggin, we can all agree on that. But then the voices started. Faint little whispers at my ear. One female, one male. The male was a pain in my ass, to be honest. Always going on about lightning strikes and football stats and B&Bs. Made no sense whatsoever
.
The female voice, though. Hearing her was like hearing an angel.
She had this amazing laugh, as silky smooth as flowing water. That laugh was sexy as fuck. It rang in my ears like music.
Yeah, I had a thing for the imaginary voice in my head. Don’t judge me.
And don’t get me started about how my own voice had changed and now sounded exactly like the other whispering voice in my head—the irritating male.
If things weren’t looking fucked enough, I had all these memories that didn’t fit. Things I hadn’t done, places I’d never been, people I’d never met before.
Then the dreams started.
Nightmares, technically, because they were so scary. It wasn’t so much the dreams themselves that were scary, but how vivid they were. It was like I was there, in them.
Like I was living someone else’s life at night.
Then there were all these new habits and desires I suddenly had. Bear claws for breakfast every day? Sure, why not. French wine that costs two hundred bucks a bottle? Yeah, gotta have me some of that.
Oil painting, though I’d never picked up a brush before and couldn’t draw a straight line to save my life?
Bring it on.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, I developed an obsession with this old, empty Victorian house on the coast. More than an obsession—a compulsion. I had to be near it. I couldn’t stay away from it for more than a day, at most. It was like the thing was a giant fucking magnet, a powerful black hole drawing me helplessly in. I spent hours wandering its rooms, wondering what the hell was happening to me.
The only logical conclusion was that I was going insane.
Oh—I forgot to mention the precognition.
I knew she’d be there, that night at Cal’s Diner. I knew it in my goddamn bones. By that time, I’d spent five years with her voice in my head and her face taking shape over and over on my canvases. Part of me hoped that by painting her, I’d get rid of her, like there was a finite amount of her that would eventually deplete, but the supply was apparently endless.
I loved her long before we met.
If that sounds ridiculous—it is. But it’s also true.
