by Alisa Woods
I want to scream.
I want to kick and fight.
But my whole body is locked up as Rick hauls me backward toward the door—
Then the door flies open, and Rick jerks back in surprise, loosening his iron grip on me. I gasp, and my body comes to life, twisting free of his hold. Miraculously, I still have the mug in my hand. My first impulse is to take a swing at him, the fury inside me just now coming to the surface—but I freeze when I see who’s come through the door.
My angel.
Only… he’s not. He’s the janitor. What? I can’t make sense of it.
But he’s staring down Rick like he wants to knock him clear out to sea.
“What the hell, man?” Rick complains. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
The angel—the janitor—turns to me. It’s impossible. The same blue eyes. The same chiseled cheeks. He’s wearing the crisp blue uniform of the janitorial service, and he has a nameplate that says Cassiel. But it’s him.
My mind is spinning in circles.
The fiery look the angel/janitor had for Rick softens when he turns it toward me. “Go,” he says quietly. He means leave… as in, leave him alone with Rick.
I clutch my mug to my chest, grip my purse, and dash for the door. I nearly brush against this Cassiel-angel-janitor person as I go, and I’m afraid my legs will fail me, but I make it out… and I just keep running. I hear the break room door close, but nothing else… just silence.
Is he going to hurt Rick? Fight him or just threaten to report him or… what? My mind is still spinning as I stab at the button for the elevator and scramble on board, purse and mug in hand, finger shaking as I press the button for the parking garage.
It’s not possible that the janitor is the angel. I know this. The janitorial staff doesn’t even come in for another two hours. But I also know what I saw, and he’s the same man. The angel from my fantasy… is real. Or at least, the man is real.
I blink far too much, sucking in air as I stumble to the Tesla, gaze darting around for vampires to leap out of the dark. I make it safely inside, lock the car, and take several, deep calming breaths. I’m not sure I can drive in this state.
How to make sense of this? Is it possible that I’ve seen the man before? Like… he was part of the custodial staff, and I just inserted him into my fantasy/hallucinations? No. Just… no. I don’t care how dead I was to the living world, a man like that walks in, and you notice. There’s no way I could have dreamed him up based on seeing him before and not remember that.
So… no. The man is real. Or maybe… maybe I just thought he looked like my angel?
Cassiel, said his nametag.
It’s something to go on. I take another deep breath and decide I can trust myself to drive. All the way home, I’m mentally recreating his face. The colors and angles I’ll use. The long lashes—I hadn’t noticed those before. And the lips… they’re the same, full, almost ridiculously sensual lips I remember searing mine. Only now I’ve had a good look at them. And his eyes. And the way his short-cropped hair falls slightly to the side like he’d mussed it with his hands. Perfect in the way runway models are. Like they’ve just had crazy sex then finger-combed their hair. Sexy messy is what my drawing prof in college called it.
Cassiel is 100% sexy messy.
When I get home, I boot up my laptop and search the website of the maintenance company, but they don’t list their employees. I search whitepages.com, but there’s no Cassiel, male or female, first name or last, in all of Seattle. Plenty of Castles and Cassels but no Cassiel. I give up on that and hurry to my studio while his face is still fresh in my mind.
Go, he said, blue eyes blazing at me.
I’m mixing paints for just that color of blue when a realization ripples through me. That voice. It was the same. The same as in my hallucination. I pause mid brush-stroke and stare at the half-formed angel face in front of me. “Who are you?” I whisper. And as hard as I try, I still can’t recreate the masculine beauty of his face. It’s not just my clumsy attempts at painting once again—I’m getting a feel for the colors and the strokes; it’s coming back—it’s just that the man is so damn beautiful. It’s almost like he’s not real… and I’m back to wondering if I’m going insane and just imagining the janitor who busted in to save me from Rick the Sleaze is my angel.
My angel.
I can’t help the possessive. It just feels right. Even though I have no idea if any of it is real, or I’m just losing my mind. I put down the brush and stare at the dozen attempts I made this morning, scattered all around the room, some on easels, some leaned against the windows to dry. They’re all horribly imperfect, but I forgive myself that. I decide I’m trying the impossible—to capture an unearthly beauty with earthly paints.
I stand up and back away.
There’s an agitation in my body that I don’t know what to do with. After so long of feeling dead to the world, this aliveness—this jittery awareness of life—feels like I’m coming out of my skin. Adrenaline is still pumping through me from Rick’s attack and Cassiel’s intervention. I was terrified, then relieved, then… attracted. There’s no other word for it. I’ve already felt his lips on mine, his body against my skin. Unless that was a dream. But even as a dream, even though I’ve never actually spoken to him, Cassiel is making me come alive again.
And my body and mind are coming apart with it.
I stumble backward out of my studio, then head for the kitchen. I grab a bottle of Pinot Noir, a glass, and the corkscrew, then head to my bedroom. Maybe the old routine will settle me down. I need to settle down. There was a time, early on, right after the funeral, when I felt this jittery need to do something. As if some action on my part would change the way the world worked, spin it backward on its axis to go back to a time when Daniel was still alive. When the world was as it should be. In my desperation then, I did all kinds of things. Dangerous things. Things that were no good for me.
A bottle of wine a night was the answer to stopping those dangerous jitters.
I sit on my bed and wrestle the cork out of the bottle, pour the glass, and the wine is sliding down my throat before I realize… I don’t want this. I don’t want to numb this aliveness. I don’t want to stop feeling the excitement. The allure. Maybe Cassiel is just a fantasy, but he’s the best one—the only one—I’ve had in years. Even if I have to live in delusion, I want to enjoy him a little longer.
I set the glass down.
Outside my window, the bridge looms, dark and massive. The moonlight gleams off it, and there’s no traffic. It’s Christmas Eve, but for the first time in three years, I don’t feel like the day or the bridge are taunting me with their specters of death. I no longer need the reminder that I’m still alive. I feel it, deep in my bones.
I will make it through this.
Even if Cassiel is just a figment of my imagination, he’s real in one very important way—the mere idea of him has reminded me I can feel good things again. Like my skill with the brush—it wasn’t dead, just dormant. Waiting for me to be ready to hold it again.
The jitters in my body calm with a suddenness that leaves me light-headed.
I almost laugh with how good it feels.
But then something on the bridge catches my attention. I squint, thinking maybe it was just a shadow—no, there it is again. Something ghostly white, reflecting the moonlight, moving steadily across it. A person. They must have a white hoodie on or something that glows with an unearthly sheen. They’re running across the bridge.
I’m mesmerized.
Who runs across a bridge on Christmas Eve at night? There’s never any pedestrian traffic up there—
The person stops.
Dead center on the bridge.
Alarm jolts me to my feet.
They’re going to jump. I know it even before they start scaling what looks like a tall, mesh barrier no doubt designed to stop exactly this from happening.
I turn and run, grabbing my keys and a coat on my w
ay out the door. I’m in my car, headed for the bridge before I even question why I think I’m the one to stop this jumper. I dial 911 and hastily tell them there’s a jumper on the bridge, but then I get off the phone and focus.
I’ve mapped this route out a hundred times in my head… and I know I’ll get there first.
Chapter Four
There’s no traffic on the bridge, so I just slam to a stop.
Somehow I have the presence of mind to put on my hazard lights before climbing out of the Tesla, but my dramatic entrance has already caught the attention of the jumper. I can see her thin form clear as day, scaled up the barrier that’s supposed to keep people from jumping. It’s not a mesh like I thought—I’ve never trusted myself to come to the bridge or even drive over it—but rather a bunch of thin, vertical metal rods about six inches apart. The girl in the white hoodie is halfway up, somehow scaling it by gripping the rods with her hands and bracing her feet—as if she’s rock climbing a giant jail cell door.
She’s paused in her ascent to scowl down at me. “Go away!” she yells.
“You don’t need to do this!” I yell back. I’m scanning the rods, but I’m no climber. And I’m seriously out of shape—my main exercise comes from wrenching corks out of wine bottles.
“I have to!” she screeches. There’s a weird guttural tone to her voice. “You don’t understand!” Then she turns away from me and keeps climbing.
She’s young—maybe twenty?—and fit and thin. She’s totally going to make it.
“I’m coming after you!” I have no idea what I’m saying, but I kick off my flats, so my feet are bare, then I despair looking down at my office-ready skirt. I quickly unzip that and let it fall, stepping out and hurrying over to the barrier. “I don’t even know how to climb,” I call up to her as I pull on the gloves from my coat and scramble up on the thin edge of the solid base. “But I’m coming after you!”
She says nothing, but she stops to look down at me again.
I give it my best effort. My hands are chilled immediately, despite the gloves. My legs are fucking freezing. But my bare feet give me enough traction that I can climb a couple feet. I won’t die if I fall from this height—probably—but I will if I go much higher.
I climb a couple more feet.
“What are you doing?” Her voice is screechy and scared.
I pause and look up. “I told you. I’m coming after you.”
“You can’t… don’t do that!” Now there’s anger scratching her words.
“Well, I may not be able to.” My muscles are screaming, and the cold is seeping into my hands. I can’t help the chatter of my teeth. “How do you keep hold? It’s fucking cold up here.”
“Go back!” she screams, but I can hear the desperation in her voice.
“Come down,” I say, as calmly as I can with my heart thundering in my ears.
“No!”
“Then I’m coming up.” I reach to haul myself up further, but my fingers are turning to ice. My grip doesn’t hold, and I slide a little. “Aagh!” I can’t help grunting out, but the panic gets my fingers moving again, stopping the slip.
“What are you…” The girl above me lets out a series of curses.
I’m holding my position because my arms are weakening, and I’m honestly not sure if I can go up anymore. But when I look up, the girl is working her way down. To me.
The cursing continues, but I can’t help the smile cracking my face. I try to tame it because I don’t want to scare her off. She’s working her way down slowly, inching like an expert climber—one foot, then the other, then one handhold, then another.
“I really can’t climb. Like at all,” I say, just to let her know that I know she’s coming for me.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” she spits down at me but keeps coming.
I manage not to laugh. My fingers really are going numb.
She pauses and lifts a hand from her grip on the rod to shake a finger at me. “I’m getting you down, but then I’m going up again. Don’t try to stop me!”
“Why would you do that?” I have to shift my bare feet on the rods because it feels like the cold is slicing through them. I shiver, and it almost works my hands loose, making my heart hammer.
She’s working her way toward me again. “I have to. There’s something wrong with me.” She says this matter-of-factly as if she has a broken nail and now she must end it all. But maybe it’s something worse than that. Maybe she has incurable cancer or something.
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with your climbing skills.” I’m not sure what’s the right thing to say. How do you talk someone out of killing themselves? There has been nothing in the last three years that anyone’s said to me that ever made a damn bit of difference.
“I killed my boyfriend,” she says, still coming for me.
That jerks my head up.
“See?” she says. “You’re a fucking idiot to come after me.” She’s still coming. Only ten feet away now.
I swallow. “How did it happen?” There has to be more to this. I wrack my brain, trying to remember if suicidal people generally are murderers and… I have no real clue. I mean, maybe? But she can’t be coming down to kill me—letting me come after her would accomplish that.
Because I really can’t climb. And now I’m having a hard time figuring out how I’m going to get down either.
“He was an asshole,” she screeches. “That’s what happened.” She gets closer, and now I can see the dark circles under her eyes, the wildness of them. Her hair is stringy and long and falling out of the hoodie that’s barely clinging to her head. She stops just a few feet above me and to the left. She starts going sideways towards me.
“I don’t know how to get down,” I admit to her.
“No fucking shit,” she hisses. She’s close now, just to the side, her feet right above my head. “You shouldn’t have come after me.” She scowls at me like she’s rethinking helping me, then she squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, clinging to the bars. “I found him fucking my roommate, okay?” she says, eyes still shut. “And I just… I just… was so angry.” I can hear all the rage in the scratching of her voice. “It was like something broke inside me, and I just hit him with my backpack, again and again, until he… until he stopped moving.” I can see the shudder run through her body. She opens her eyes. “There’s something wrong with me.”
I swallow. “Let’s just get down, and we’ll figure it out, okay? My fingers are frozen.”
She grimaces and then shifts her feet, but one slides out from under her. Alarm jolts through my body. Her climbing shoes paw at the rods but the more desperate she becomes, the more they slip. She groans, hanging on by just her handgrip now.
“Hold on!” I say, but I can’t move. I’m barely holding on myself. “You can do this—”
She slips a little, then her grip catches. She growls out more curses and kicks at the bars. Suddenly, she stops her flailing and just hangs by her gloved hands. I can see her slowly losing her grip.
“No!” I say. “Just slide down. It’s okay. I’ll get down—
“I’m sorry,” she breathes out.
Then she lets go.
“No!” I screech, lunging out to grab her. My fingers hook on her hoodie, but it yanks my other hand loose.
I scream—but before I can fall even a heart-stopping foot, something catches me.
Someone catches me.
My angel.
Cassiel appeared out of nowhere, and now his arm is wrapped around my waist. He’s caught the jumper too—by the wrist—and she’s dangling below us, kicking and staring up at the angel above her with wide eyes. His white wings are spread, and he’s holding me tight against him and his nearly bare chest.
I can’t even come close to breathing.
“I have you,” he says, voice hoarse, his face mere inches from mine.
Yes, you do. But those words stay safely locked in my throat, even as my mouth falls open. Belatedly, I throw my arm around the back o
f his neck, but it’s unnecessary. He has us both. He’s saved us both. The three of us float up slightly, like Cassiel’s catching his balance or something, and then we slowly drift down to the road.
The girl’s feet touch first, and by the time Cassiel and I land on solid ground, she’s wildly trying to flee, leaning as far from Cassiel as she can and yanking on the wrist he still has locked in his grip.
He’s ignoring her, staring at me instead—no, staring at my lips—and breathing hard, like this has taxed him physically. His arm is still tight around my waist, and I feel the rise and fall of his chest. But he’s not winded. I swear he’s going to kiss me… until suddenly, he releases me and turns to face the girl. A blade appears in his hand, and he raises it toward her.
“No!” I yelp, throwing my hands out to stop him.
But he’s already yanked the girl close and sunk the blade into her chest. She screams, and I jerk back, hands over my mouth. The girl writhes against him, and he’s holding her now—gently, like a lover—trapping her flailing arm to her side while he shoves the blade in deeper. She throws her head back, and an unholy wail emanates from her. It lasts and lasts, and I have to move my hands from my mouth to cover my ears.
When it’s done, she slumps against him.
I watch, horrified, but I can’t wrench my gaze away.
Cassiel quickly tucks his short blade in a sheath at his side and cups the girl’s face in his hand. Then he kisses her… and it’s like the sun breaking through the clouds.
A Life Kiss.
He said it before—and my mind is long past questioning the reality of this now; this is happening in front of me—and a strange jealousy is mixed in with the relief that the realization brings me. He wasn’t killing her with that blade… somehow that was saving her. Or something. And now he’s breathing life into her the way he did with me. Watching the girl clutch onto his shoulders, I remember—viscerally—the surge of joy and bliss when Cassiel’s lips were pressed to mine.
