He presses his lips to mine, stopping not only my sentence but my breath in my throat. He takes my face in his hands and moves his mouth slowly across mine. Every nerve ending in my body is electrified.
He pulls away and searches my eyes. “You haven’t lost me,” he says, before bringing me back to him. Just when I decide that I could kiss him all day long, he says, “Addison?”
“Yeah?”
“What if this is a Search?”
I stiffen. “What?”
“Have you ever thought about that before? What if now, this very moment, isn’t set in stone. What if you’re just seeing a vision of what could be?”
“I think about that all the time.” I run my hand over his chest. He feels so real.
“What if you don’t choose this? What if you decide your other future is better?”
I hug him, resting my cheek against his. “Do you know what’s weird, Trevor?”
“What?”
“In the six years I’ve had this ability, nobody has ever asked me that question. Nobody has ever thought they were negotiable.”
He takes a deep breath. “I want you to choose me, Addie,” he whispers. “I want this to be real.”
“Don’t worry. It is. I always know when I’m in a Search.”
“How?”
“Because I can’t Search within a Search.”
“So you’ve Searched since you met me then?”
“Yes …” I trail off, thinking back. Thinking to all the times I thought about Searching. Just today I was going to do a Search for my dad. But I never actually did. “I … no. But I can. I will. Right now.”
“No.” He stops me just as I’m formulating a simple Search. “Don’t. Not while I’m here. Just promise me something. If this is a Search and you don’t pick me, don’t pick this path, for whatever reason, promise me you won’t Erase me.”
That’s a very serious promise, one I can’t make lightly. Because even though right now, if this was a Search, I can’t imagine not picking him, if for some reason something major happens and I can’t be with him, remembering him and this would be sheer torture.
His eyes seem dark again, which makes his stare more intense.
“I promise.”
He breathes me in and then closes the space between us.
CHAPTER 33
PA-RAl-y-sis: n. unable to move
A numbness starts at the crown of my head and seeps slowly down my body. I want to cry, but every feeling inside me has been nullified and replaced by an overwhelming sense of emptiness. My phone rings, and a glimmer of hope flutters in my chest. Maybe it’s Laila, calling to explain what’s going on. To tell me why she just walked into my boyfriend’s house as though they have been doing this on a nightly basis. I raise the phone. Across the bottom of the lit screen it says, Mom calling…
I pick up. “Hello?”
“Addie, where are you?”
“I’m out … studying.” For the first time, I don’t feel bad lying to her. I don’t feel much of anything.
“Why are you lying to me?”
Obviously I’m still not very good at it. “Don’t worry, I’m coming home.”
“Yes. You are. This is ridiculous. I don’t know what has gotten into you lately. You know you’re still grounded, right? The Addie I used to know would have respected that rule.”
The Addie she used to know did a lot of things differently. Saw a lot of things differently. Or maybe I just didn’t see things that were obviously right in front of me. It’s possible I said goodbye, but I don’t remember saying it. Either way, I had hung up the phone. So when it starts ringing again, I’m not surprised and prepare myself for a lecture about how rude it is to hang up on people. But when I pick up the phone, glowing across the bottom of the screen are the words: Freakshow calling…
The air in my lungs leaks out. The phone stops ringing and becomes eerily silent. How did Poison get my phone number? I look around, weighing my options.
The phone rings again. I answer. “Hello.”
“Addie, just the girl I was looking for. I need a favor.”
I reach my thumb forward to start the car, and my hand comes to an abrupt stop, a foot away from its goal.
“No,” Poison says. “You can’t leave. I need you here.”
I throw my phone onto the seat beside me and use my now free hand to try to move the other one. It doesn’t budge but instead reaches for the door handle. I try to fight against it, to tell my fingers to turn on the car and drive away. They don’t listen. They are following someone else’s orders.
I step out of the car, and that’s when I see Poison standing like a dark shadow under a streetlight, twenty feet away. Screaming is my best bet, but as I open my mouth to do so, my throat constricts.
Not a good idea, he says inside my mind.
I claw at the invisible hand squeezing my neck. Then I walk again on mind-controlled legs. My lungs burn, and the street sways.
When I stand in front of him, he says, “Don’t scream. I just want to talk.”
I nod, and my airway clears. I cough and gasp for breath, steadying myself against the dizzy nausea.
“I need you to make a phone call. Just one little phone call, and you can be on your way.”
I don’t believe him for one second, but in order to buy some time I say, “To who?”
“No questions. All you have to say is, ‘Hello, this is Addie.’ That’s simple enough.”