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Is she really helping? Or is she the girl who breaks hearts to make her own feel better?
For many, a walk among the dead is macabre, but to her, it’s peaceful.
She longed to do something unhinged and beautiful.
Where do we go? Does the big man in the sky greet people with cocktails and high fives? Or is it an endless black nothing?
“I don’t have time for dates.” Tessie wiggles her brows. “Just the dead?” Ash looks down at the grave beneath her boots. “Something like that.”
“You know,” he says, squinting at her in disapproval, “not dressing like a plague doctor would help with all the sweating.” Ash snorts. “At least I’m not dressed like American Psycho in paradise.”
“You’ll be fine.” Fine. Right. That’s what serial killers say to their victims before they drive them down an old winding road to meet a garden shed full of meat hooks.
“I like Ash and all her fucks,” Augustus says with an adoring chuckle. “She tells it like it is. She’s macabre. She’s quirky. She’s—” “Feral,” he finishes. Augustus tuts. “She’s exactly what this family needs.”
“I may be a lot of things. Ill-reputed. Disheveled. A Scorpio. But I’m no con artist.”
For the next two weeks, he plans to do to Ash what she’s done to him. Make her life a living hell.
“I don’t want to be a main character. I want to be that statue in the corner of the room that sometimes gets mistaken for a ghost and scares the shit out of people.”
It’s not trauma; it’s spicy sadness.”
“And remember: observe, do not absorb.”
She looks menacing and unaffected and unloved. Like a vampire from the Middle Ages. Good.
Tate’s three objectives in life are to get people laid, get people drunk, and get people on his podcast.
“We need a task force that stops white men from starting podcasts for no reason.”
“Okay, I didn’t realize I was speaking with the CEO of coconuts.”
“Did you know you have a better chance of being killed by a falling coconut than by a shark?” “Great.” Nathaniel rakes a hand through his hair. “Another fun, macabre fact.”
She has this. Her life gripped with both fisted hands. Even if 75 percent of her brain space is taken up by what-ifs, grudges and so many ways to die before a person’s time.
It wasn’t fair. Cheaters like Jakob get to survive. Love again. Fuck another person over again. While their victims have to wear the battle scars.
But the worst part was that Ash let him change her. Let him make her feel bad about herself. Let him shame her for the things she wanted.
She refuses to give her heart to a man ever again. To be anything but herself for anyone else.
“How did you get so weird?” She laughs, unoffended. “My mom’s a flight attendant. My father’s an accountant. Instead of forcing me to play sports, they let me be me, and now I’m this person who has no talent or ambition. All I do is float through life like an unsatisfied wraith.”
“When I was ten, I was so unhinged about Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden that my mom had to go to a parent-teacher conference about it.”
Every little thing about her screams untouchable. Mean. Feral.
“Why do people over six feet always walk so fucking fast? Do you have something to prove?” “Only that I’m the master of the universe.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say your favorite color is black and your favorite holiday is Halloween.” “You forgot something.” “What’s that?” “I drink the blood of little children by candlelight.”
Despite the slight cynical edge to her voice, so much of her holds resilience. Bravery.
“We’ve all been where you’ve been,” Tessie continues. “Where we want to fuck up the person who hurt us. And sometimes, when we can’t, we take it out on everyone else.”
“My theory is, when women get drunk, they want their man. If you’re not getting a text or call when she’s drunk, you’re not the one she wants.”
“I couldn’t find you,” he rasps. The instinct she triggers in him is primal. He reaches out, slides his arms around her slender waist to pull her to him. The moment she’s in his arms, his tension ebbs.
Amazingly, befuddlingly, she’s gone from the woman he wanted to scrape from his memory to the woman he can’t stop thinking about.
When did she go from fuck that guy to I want to fuck that guy?
Monstrous. That unwanted, unloved feeling. The way no one stays when they see the real Ash. They all vanish eventually. Like the sun going down over the horizon. It all ends.
Once this vacation is over, they go back to the real world. Reality. He will be in the North Sea, and all he’ll be to her is a pirate doctor she once let finger-fuck her beneath a waterfall.
“So fucking gorgeous,” he murmurs, taking her in his arms. “My morbid little beauty.”
How is it that only four days ago, all he wanted to do was buy her a one-way ticket back to LA? He was obsessed with hating her, now he’s just plain obsessed with her.
He can’t help but want to take care of her. Maybe it’s the doctor in him. Maybe it’s because he actually cares about this chaotic girl. The thought of her being without sugar terrifies him.
She’s a lesson in strength. Resilience. Knocking down obstacles.
For him, sleeping in is like a foreign antigen. He’s always tried to fight it off. Clearly, Ash is a creature of sloth and habit.
His beautiful creature. His dangerous obsession.
The word like is far too simple for Ash Keller. He’s completely gone for this woman.
She and Nathaniel go together about as well as serial killers and normal brain waves.
It’s more money than she should spend, but what is savings if she can’t treat herself and then spiral guiltily afterward?
But inside, he’s like a Cadbury egg. All gooey and soft.
“Fuck yes.” Ash grabs a bottle of red wine. “We’re taking this.” She looks around the shell-shocked table. “And we’re going to go see the fucking future.”
“Humbling a stranger in public has been on my bucket list for years.”
“You are that person for me,” he says softly. “And you don’t have to wear pearl earrings.”
After today, he’s never seen clearer in his life. She’s the woman he’s going to marry. And not someday. Soon.
“One thing about me? I’m gonna make everything about my trauma.”
