Free The Dead Love Longer by Scott Nicholson Page A

and peeked through the glass.
    A man with a gun stood behind Lee. She was writing something on a piece of paper, probably something she didn't want to write. Her face was calm except for her trembling lips. Her eyes were puffy from crying, but I was sure the tears were for my death and not her own.
    You ever know what it's like to be loved? Not a lot of people do. Lack of faith had dogged my every step as a mortal, even when wonderful women fully expressed their love, opened their hearts and souls, and invited me to consume all I wanted. Unconditionally. And still I doubted. But, at that moment, seeing my sweetheart weep, with my photo on the table surrounded by a dozen wads of tissue, I knew.
    My, she was beautiful. I had been afraid that seeing her would drain me, rip my ethereal fabric into existential shreds. Instead, I was energized, boosted, fueled by anger and love and the hope of an eternity together.
    Hope. There it was again.
    So big and true even a phony like me couldn't deny it.
    I went through the wall.
    Into Diana.
    Not just bumping into her, like when you see some ex-lover on the street and give that embarrassed grin and get through the "How are you?" and "See you later" with not much in between.
    No, I was into her, merged more deeply than we'd ever managed when engaged in bedroom acrobatics.
    I'll admit, my idea of love had mostly been skin deep, and my only expression of affection was to follow the one part of me that always seemed to be pointed off a cliff edge. I'd tangled with some wonders, and I treasured them all, even though there was no way I could ever respect anybody stupid enough to fall for me.
    So this intense, abrupt intimacy really threw me off my game. Diana had never invaded my thoughts, not to any real level of depth, and now here she was in my spirit meat, her ethereal fabric woven into mine, two angels dancing on the same pinhead.
    "We have to talk," Diana said/thought/screamed/whispered.
    "What are you doing here?"
    "I made a promise. To make your life a living hell. Why stop right when it's getting fun?"
    I glanced over at Lee, and she was still scribbling, the Goon With Gun unperturbed. Diana and I appeared to be invisible.
    "Get out of my goddamned head," I said.
    "Come on, lover. You said I was your soul mate, remember? And now that it's literal, you're getting cold feet."
    "Because my feet have been dead for a couple of days."
    I tried to shrug her off the way you might shake a pet monkey off your back, but she was duct-taped to my innermost being. The deepest, blackest part of it.
    I recalled something my caseworker had said, about regrets and using up second chances. And the big thing I'd been running from.
    Guilt.
    There, in the mausoleum of my heart, the "Diana" coffin was full of the most maggot-riddled, corpulent putrescence imaginable. I thought I'd walled it off, that it was so safely buried that the stench would never arise.
    True, I hadn't killed her. She'd taken that particular choice herself, in consultation with whatever cosmic guide she'd consulted. My failure had been in refusing to let her be fully alive.
    No, she hadn't been Diana Kelly Rognstad Steele, a creature of love and light, one of God's special children. She hadn't been a woman, a sacred entity that I nurtured and honored and celebrated. She hadn't been a temple of all that was valuable and worthy.
    None of that.
    She'd been nothing but a dump for my pain and darkness and selfishness.
    I couldn't see her, but I felt her, and she took that journey with me, into the deepest hollows of my soul. Her eyes widened in surprise and maybe a little sympathy.
    "Richard," she whispered, and it was the voice she'd used in her most tender and generous moments, when times had been good, when we were virgins to each other, exploring and brave and not walled off from one another.
    "I'm sorry," I said, and that was enough. For the first time in my life, I'd said it without an inaudible "But..." trailing after it, backloaded