by Meg Harding
It’s freezing outside, in a way he’s discovered is unique to Chicago. It cuts right to the bone, slicing through layers of clothes like they’re nothing. His hair sways in the wind, sweeping across his forehead. He turns his back to it in order to light his cigarette, cupping his hand protectively around the end. Even so, it takes him three tries before the flame catches.
Despite the chill and his shivering and shaking, he takes his time smoking it down to the filter. He has no desire to go back inside and mingle. The smoke burns his throat and leaves a stale taste in his mouth, but when he’s done with the cigarette, he’s tempted to smoke another. His fingers are numb, though—he stupidly didn’t wear gloves—and he can’t feel his nose at all. If he takes too much longer, he’ll turn into an icicle.
His footsteps leave deep depressions in the snow.
He remembers—the images coming to him like it happened hours ago and not ages—being nineteen and spending Christmas in the French countryside with Brady. They’d had a moment in time where they were finally alone, and they’d sprawled out on their backs in the snow and stuck their tongues out to catch the still-falling flakes. When William had rolled, shifting to straddle Brady, the outline of his body and where their hands had been joined was clearly outlined in the thick snow. When they’d finished kissing and taking each other apart, they’d been unable to feel certain appendages, and their indentations in the snow resembled a messy blob.
It’s always been one of William’s fonder memories, despite their fear that they were going to lose fingers and toes to frostbite. At nineteen it had seemed worth it. With a smile, William thinks it still was. He’d do it again in a heartbeat if he could.
Reentering the kitchens with memories of Brady so close to the surface, he’s not all that surprised to be imagining Brady’s voice. It’s more what the Brady in his head is saying that throws him off.
“That chicken is overcooked. Throw it out.”
William rubs his forehead and frowns. Talk about random.
He hears it again a few steps later.
“Five minutes before go time. Pick up the pace, people.”
“Add a little more lemon seasoning.”
“That chicken looks dry as hell. Toss it.”
“How are the vegetables coming along, Monica?”
It’s like the familiar, warm voice is echoing around the room, following William to the doors into the ballroom. Maybe William’s losing his mind, because he has no clue why Brady would be saying any of those things. They’re certainly not things he’d heard Brady say when they were together.
Spine tingling, he turns and glances over the busy kitchen.
There are a lot of people in black-and-white catering uniforms and white chefs’ outfits. That’s it. Brady isn’t standing behind him with a smile on his face, uttering cooking instructions. And why would he be? Shaking his head at letting his mind (and hopes) run away with him, William pushes the swinging door and heads out to face his colleagues.
Chapter Three
APPEARING AT his side like magic, Trisha holds out a flute of champagne.
“Drink up. You give your speech in two minutes. Maybe this’ll make you sound less like a robot for it.”
People are starting to filter to their seats, preparing for him to take the stage and their food to arrive.
He tosses it back like a shot and grimaces. Yeah, champagne is not meant to be drunk like that. And he’d need ten more to achieve even a little buzz.
“Isn’t there an open bar? Couldn’t you have brought me something like whiskey? Rum?”
“I want you to not be so nervous or wooden for the speech. I don’t want you to be slurring or stumbling through it.” She takes the empty glass from him. “Have you looked at what I wrote?”
“Nope.”
He fidgets with his tie, and she bats his hand away. His plan is to read right from the cards.
“I switched around the table cards so you’re sitting next to me at the chocolate fountain table and not with the other partners.”
He narrows his eyes at her, smiling despite himself. “Was your name even at that table?”
She shrugs, smirking. “It doesn’t matter. It is now.”
There’s a whump sound, and then Paulson’s voice fills the room. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Paulson and Sons’ twenty-sixth annual Christmas party. We hope you’re having a lovely time and that you enjoy your meals. There’s a silent auction if you’d like to partake in that throughout the evening, and one of the partners at our firm has prepared a little speech to start the night off right. I’d like to welcome William Mashinter to the stage.”
Trisha hums the “Imperial March” as she shoves the small of his back.
He takes the stage, shaking Paulson’s hand and forcing a smile for the audience. He wonders if they can tell how much it’s paining him to be on display like this. “Hello,” he says, pulling Trisha’s cards from his pocket and dropping them on the podium. He clears his throat. “It’s that time of year again. Where we all come together to celebrate what we’ve accomplished in the last year. We look forward to the future—the bright things ahead. Christmas is a time of giving, and we’re here to acknowledge those who have given to the company.” He rattles off a list of names, titles, and notable deeds of employees. The next part of his speech is a monologue on the miracles of Christmas, and he can’t help but wonder if Trisha got all this from a package of Hallmark cards.
He’s in the middle of discussing how he always feels rejuvenated around this time of year—really, Trisha?—and wondering how his nose isn’t growing from all these lies, when his patience snaps and so does his brain-to-mouth filter. “Does anyone really want to hear this? I should be able to thank all these people for their hard work without having to spout on about a holiday I hate. Not all of us like Christmas. There. I’ve said it. I think this holiday su—”
His voice is overshadowed by the sound of ceramic hitting the floor. A big platter of it. It falls, a loud crash, followed by gasps and a few startled shouts and a bitten-off curse in a choked, familiar voice.
Broken china is scattered across the floor, having shattered and bounced in all directions. The food splatter is less wide but still messy. They’d been serving soup and salad, and the soup is leaking along the grout of the tiles and slowly traveling away from the center of the disaster.
It’s the center of the fiasco on which William’s gaze is fixed. Because he’s pretty sure he’s hallucinating. He can’t be seeing what he thinks he’s seeing. Because what he thinks he’s seeing is a man he’s been pining for for the majority of his life. A man he loves beyond words and hasn’t seen in two hundred years.
Maybe his old brain has finally rotted and is giving out on him.
In the center of a sea of broken dishes and ruined food stands a man with a riot of curly auburn hair. It frames his pale face—with the brilliantly blushing cheeks. It’s a little too long, a few of the curls hanging nearly in his eyes. His black slacks encase legs that appear to go on for miles. He’s wearing a chef’s coat and not the white-and-black shirt and waistcoat of the waiters. He’s standing next to Paulson’s table. The chef serving the bigwig. From this distance William can’t see his eyes, but he bets they’re a brilliant green. And when he smiles, there will be dimples. One in each cheek.
The silence in the room feels poignant. William can’t seem to breathe. He feels like he’s frozen in time.
Trisha coughs. It’s loud and echoes. William startles, fumbling. He glances at his speech, flicks through the cards to reach the end. His voice is strained, shaky as he says, “And I’d like to take a minute to ask that you give to those in need. Proceeds of the silent auction benefit charities that aid youths and LGBT individuals in need.”
He’s off the stage before anyone can start to clap—not that they’re going to—and he doesn’t head for the waiter who looks like the man of his dreams. Nope. He runs for the exit like his ass is on fire. He needs to get outside and let t
he crisp frozen tundra that is Chicago shock reality back into him. First he was hearing Brady, and now he’s imagining clumsy waiters are turning into him.
He has problems. Big ones.
Can two hundred years with a broken heart lead to lucid hallucinations?
Honestly, he should be grateful this hasn’t been happening the whole time. Brady’s there in his dreams quite often—and he hears his voice all the time, like he’s the angel on William’s shoulder giving him advice and commentating on his life—but this… this is new. This is too much.
His heart feels like it’s cracking with his grief. Hasn’t he suffered long enough?
The cold air blasts his face, and he’s standing outside, snow falling on his coatless body. Flakes are sticking to his eyelashes, melting on his cheeks. Each gasp of breath is a harsh inhale and exhale, ragged and tight in his chest. He throws out a hand to brace himself against the building. His knees are wobbling.
He’s had some bad Christmases since Brady was killed, but this is taking the cake.
The door behind him bangs open, and he braces for a barrage of questions from Trisha, or possibly one of his colleagues. He’s going to clutch his chest and cry heart attack to avoid answering. That’ll even get him out of spending the rest of the evening here. They think he’s in his early forties—younger people with his job have had them. He can pull it off.
Hand over his heart, he hunches over and, stumbling, turns.
The hallucination of Brady is standing behind him. His curls are whipping in the harsh Chicago wind, blowing around his head like they’re in one of those hurricane simulators, and his chef’s coat is billowing around his lean frame. The Brady in front of him has a scar on his chin—right down the center of it. His Brady hadn’t had that.
But those are the same laughing green eyes. There’s a fleck of amber in the right one. He’s got barely there crow’s-feet around his eyes, not near as many as the real Brady had. Then again, the real Brady had been alive in a time where twenty-eight was practically middle age. The quality of living has definitely gotten better over time. He’s going to give his mind credit for hallucinating an up-to-date Brady in such minute detail. He even filled in all of Brady’s hundreds of freckles.
He reaches out, wondering if he can touch him. If his mind thinks he’s real, will he feel it? The skin beneath his fingers feels solid and like ice to the touch. Fake Brady’s lips part, and hot air rushes over his hand. William rubs his thumb over the chin scar, wondering why he’d conjured it.
And then he pokes it. Hard.
Fake Brady flinches back, raising his hands to rub at his face. “What was that for?” he demands.
William blinks. His hallucination talks too. “I wanted to see just how far gone my mind is.”
“What are you talking about?”
Fake Brady reaches for him, skims his hands down William’s arms to his hands.
William tangles them together, because why not hold hands with his hallucination? It’s certainly not the most unbelievable part of all this. “Well, if a hallucination feels this real, I must have really lost it.”
Fake Brady’s nose scrunches up, and his grip on William’s hands goes painfully tight for a second.
“I’m not a hallucination. I’m real.”
He pushes into William’s space, backs him against the opposite alley wall. William glances at the Fire Exit Only sign blinking at him. Oops. Fake Brady is shaking against him as he drops his head to William’s shoulder.
He does feel pretty real like this, William will admit.
“I’ve been imagining this day for two centuries.”
William turns his face into curls that smell like apples. That’s definitely something his mind would make Brady say.
“I remember every life. I always looked. I never stopped.”
His lips are trembling against William’s neck, their hands locked so tightly William’s knuckles ache. His breathing chokes.
“I thought I was crazy. But it’s you, and I’m not. My memories are real. You are real.”
Bricks are grinding into William’s back, and they don’t feel all that pleasant. He barely registers the pain.
Is it possible…?
Is fake Brady not a hallucination?
“What’s your name?” he whispers, the words pressed to Brady’s forehead. William shuts his eyes, trying to ignore the burn in them. Please, please, please, he chants.
“It was Brady Gallagher. And then it was James Marshall. Now it’s Sidney Bishop.”
It’s probably his imagination, but his heart kicks so hard he’ll swear his chest is in danger of cracking at the force. “Sidney.” He rolls the name on his tongue. “Bishop.” It’s not the name he’s had in his heart and head all these years, but that honestly doesn’t matter. What matters is that Brady—Sidney now—is here. And that if this is a dream, William is not going to survive waking up.
“And you’re William Mashinter. The third. You have a mole in the shape of a spade on the inside of your right thigh and a scar on your left asscheek from falling out of a tree when you were seventeen. You told me you were trying to rescue a cat, but really you were hiding from your tutor. There’s a scar on your arm from it too. Right here.” He disentangles their hands and strokes his forefinger over a section of William’s bicep. Where there is indeed a jagged scar. He moves up, cups William’s face with his palm. He brushes his thumb over the scar on his cheek. “And this one… this one is from Jennifer.”
He leans in, presses a soft kiss to it. William’s skin heats, his cheek tingling from the contact.
“All my scars are different. I don’t have the one on my foot from stepping in that fox trap. Or the burn on my thumb from trying to put out a candle with my fingers. I’ve only had one scar that’s traveled through time with me.”
Brady—Sidney, it’s Sidney now, and damn if that isn’t going to be weird adjusting to—had always had a sense of humor. So William braces for a joke about a broken heart or something along those lines that is going to be lame and painful but that’ll probably make him cry because he’s missed those winceworthy attempts at humor so much.
He finds, as Sidney takes a step back to put space between them, that he can’t let go. William sends the signal to his brain for his fingers to uncurl from his clothing, but his fingers cling tight. They’re not having it. What if he lets go and Brady—Sidney. It’s Sidney. At least you got it right once—is gone forever?
That’s not a risk he can take.
“Can I call you Brady?” he asks. “I can’t…. My head is not wrapping around Sidney right now.”
“You can call me whatever you want.”
Brady’s laugh makes William’s knees weak and his heart stutter a beat.
“I’m not going anywhere.” He pries William’s fingers free, and then he starts unbuttoning his chef’s coat.
William reacts on instinct. As much as he’d like to have sex—so much times infinity he would like to—he doesn’t want their reunion sex to be in an alley. When it’s freezing. He doesn’t know if even his passion for Brady can combat the cold on his family jewels. So he grabs Brady’s hands and stills them. “Not here,” he says. “We can go back to my place.”
Brady blinks at him, long, dark lashes sweeping down over his brilliantly green eyes.
“It’s good to know that your one-track mind hasn’t disappeared after all these years. But this isn’t about sex.” He shakes free, and he parts the fabric of his shirt.
There’s a ragged pale scar slashing over his heart.
William traces it without thought. It looks rough, the edges shredded, but it’s completely smooth beneath his searching fingers.
Brady exhales shakily. “I’ve always had it. In both of the lives I’ve lived since it happened. I always look relatively the same, and I always have this one scar. Everything else changes. I have been through so much trying to get back to you.”
Mirroring Brady’s earlier action, William ducks his head and k
isses the scar from end to end. He hovers over it when he’s done, resting his forehead on Brady’s chest. His nose is almost touching it. Brady’s stroking his head, carding his fingers through William’s gelled-to-perfection hair.
“I want to take you home,” he says, emotions clogging his throat and too many feelings whirling in his head. How can he express it all? How will anything ever say it enough? “And not let go.”
He’s going to spend the rest of his life figuring it out.
WITH THE privacy window in the car shut, William and Brady sit side by side. They’re plastered to one another, might as well be sitting on the other’s lap for their closeness. Their joined hands rest on their thighs where they touch. Given that it’s been two hundred years since they last got to be this close, William thinks it isn’t overkill at all that he wants to spend the next two hundred with no space between them.
He sweeps his thumb along Brady’s knuckles as the car inches along.
It’s Christmas Eve in downtown Chicago. The streets are packed with last-minute shoppers and people who apparently don’t know how to drive in snow. It’s slow going, but William couldn’t care less. He’s going to use this time to try and manage rational thinking. He’s certainly not going to be able to conjure it once they’re home.
He’s not sure where to start.
He opens his mouth. Closes it. He’s got nothing.
Brady nudges him. He shifts and slings his leg over William’s knee, wiggling his foot between William’s legs. “My memories of everything are crystal clear, but I spent a long time thinking I was insane. Possessed, even. There’s always been this gaping hole inside me, and with my first life after Brady… it wasn’t great. It was really bad until I met this guy in Romania. He said I had an energy cloud around me, and it fascinated him. He figured out what was going on. It’s cloudy for the first twenty years, has been both times. It all seems more like lucid dreams, and then one day it just slams home and I remember it all. I guess if one of us constantly has to come back, it draws out how long it’ll take to eventually find one another again. Hence my dying and your living-forever shtick. That ex-wife of yours was way vindictive.”
