Free Beyond (Afterlife book 1) by Willow Rose

said. “Can you
distract me then?”
    He smiled and put a hand through his
sand-colored hair.
    “ Sure. Give me a second,”
he turned around and started walking but then stopped. He looked at
me again.
    “ By the way, my name is
Jason,” he said.
    “ I’m Meghan.”
     
    He was only gone for a few seconds but
that was enough time for me to worry that someone else in the house
would wake up and find me here. Also I had started wondering what
my friends were doing on the other side of the mirror. They had
gotten awfully quiet and since they had tried to pull my hand, they
didn’t seem to have tried anything else. Knowing them, I guessed
they had run and left me here.
    “ I found the perfect
distraction,” I heard Jason’s voice say. He had come back to the
bathroom and was holding something in his hands. He showed me what
it was.
    “ You have got to be
kidding!” I said. “A puzzle?”
    He smiled again. I was about to burst into
laughter. I hadn’t made a puzzle since I was a kid. At first I
thought he was trying to make me laugh, but little by little I
realized that he was serious.
    “ It is not any kind of puzzle;
it has eight thousand pieces. Believe me, it will work,” he said
and took off the top of the box. Then he tipped out the many pieces
on the white bathroom tiles. Then he took a big piece of cardboard
and placed it next to the pieces.
    “ We’ll make it on the cardboard.
I always do,” he said and looked up at me with anticipation in his
brown eyes.
    “ What? I can’t even reach
them. I am stuck, remember?”
    “ You can tell me which
ones to pick and where to put them.”
    I sighed. This had to be by far the
stupidest thing anyone had ever suggested to me. He turned the top
of the box and showed me the picture. It was very beautiful—a woman
and a man kissing in the window of her bedroom.
    “ It’s Romeo and Juliet,” I
said. “The eternal story of two who can never have each
other.”
    Jason looked at the box. “I guess you’re
right. My mom gave it to me. It’s good for me to have something to
do, she says. So I won’t think too much.”
    “ What do you worry
about?”
    He gave me a curled smile.
    “ Nothing … and everything,
I guess.”
    I sighed. “Listen. This will take forever
to make, and I really have to get back soon.”
    I didn’t want to break Jason’s heart, but
a puzzle wasn’t really me and especially not now, when I was this
stressed out and in kind of a panicky mode.
    He looked up at me while showing me a
corner piece. “I found the first one,” he said and looked at the
picture on the box. “It looks like this goes in the right upper
corner.”
    He placed the piece on the cardboard.
“There,” he said and smiled like he had finished the whole eight
thousand pieces.
    I couldn’t help smiling. “Only seven
thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine to go,” I said.
    He didn’t seem to mind my reluctance. He
just kept going and soon some of Juliet’s face had grown out of the
pieces. I kept pulling my arm but the more I did, the more it
seemed to be stuck. I was really getting tired of this situation,
but didn’t know what to do. So I stared at Jason who was eagerly
building the puzzle on the floor in front of me. Now I saw him
searching for a piece of Romeo’s hat. As his fingers went through
the pile of pieces I saw the red hat with the green feather. Jason
didn’t seem to have seen it and just kept looking.
    “ There,” I said and
pointed with my free hand. “His hat. It was right there on your
right.”
    Jason searched and picked out the piece.
Then he looked at me with a smile.
    “ That’s the one I was missing.
Thanks,” he said, placing Romeo’s hat and completing the
head.
    I couldn’t help being fascinated by his
passion for this puzzle and soon I was just as much into it as he
was. I looked for the pieces and directed him to them and in the
next couple of hours we made big progress. And I actually had fun.
It became like a small competition