Page 67 of Run Rabbit Run

I can feel my climax building, a tidal wave of heat and shame.

I'm shaking, my fingers digging into his back, pulling him into me as if I could merge with the monster.

The ghost-Wren on the screen is smiling, her eyes bright with a future that's been stolen.

I hit the peak, and it's not a release.

It's a collapse.

As my muscles spasm around him, as the pleasure rips through me, I feel a profound sense of loss.

It's a funeral.

I'm not coming. I'm disappearing.

The orgasm is a wave of grief that washes over me, leaving me hollow.

I've reached for him, and in doing so, I've let go of her.

The woman in the video continues to laugh, but I can't hear her anymore.

I'm just a body in a bed.

I'm just Ezra's.

He withdraws slowly, his expression unchanged, his control absolute.

Afterward he holds me, and I let him, and the phone screen has gone dark beside us, the video ended, my ghost gone silent at last.

I lie in the arms of the man who caught me and try to call up the sound of my own old laugh.

I reach for it the way you reach for a word on the tip of your tongue, sure it'll come if I hold still and wait.

It doesn't come.

I try for a long time, in the dark, with his heartbeat under my ear and his hand moving slowly through my hair.

I go looking for it the way I'd track anything, back along the trail of it, back to the last place I remember making it freely, and the trail keeps going cold.

Not the diner with Rue, not the drive up the mountain, not any of the training days when I was too afraid to laugh at anything.

Further back. Before Ezra Vane was a name I'd ever heard.

Before Luke's phone call on that morning.

Back to Gramps, in the end, the way every trail in me leads back to Gramps.

The two of us on the riverbank the summer I was twelve, me soaked to the waist and furious after the current took my footing, and him laughing, the big helpless laugh that always started in his chest and cracked open at the top, until I couldn't help it and I laughed too, the water still dripping off me, the anger gone out of me like it had never been.

That's where the laugh lived.

He gave it to me the way he gave me everything, patiently, over years, on that riverbank, and I can see his face doing it, I can see his shoulders shake with it, and I still can't hear it.

His laugh or mine. Both went silent in me at once, the sound scrubbed out and only the picture left, a home movie with the audio stripped.

He'd know what to do.

That's the cruelest part of reaching for him.