Shane sat cross-legged on her bed doing her assignment. Silver gleamed across her naked thigh, flared red, then pale peach. The stopwatch read 23.55. She measured the flat side of the razor against a ruler taped to the wall and wrote "R thigh. 3 long. .5 deep. 24 sec." This was six seconds faster than yesterday. Her wrists and hands repaired fastest of all, her cheeks slowest. Bones could take at least ten minutes if she wasn't paying attention, but she hesitated contriving a way of breaking her arm. She knew it would heal, but who would do it anyway? She would stick to the catharsis of skin, little slices the melted back to smooth flesh. She pulled the razor across her left bicep and clicked the stopwatch.
She did not manage to record this result.
"I've been thinking a lot about what you said. About me being dead. I don't buy it."
She dropped the razor, her muscles suddenly limp. It clinked to a stop in front of Eliot, who picked it up on the bloody side and examined it. "You've been cutting yourself?"
Shane shut her eyes against the torrent of thought and emotions all desperate for escape and expression and would not allow them through the gateway of her eyelids until the stopped jostling about so much. Eliot wasn't real, just an appealing illusion she had to resist. Or he was real and long dead, a ghost that was pulling her toward his grave. Or he was...
Holding the razorblade. The very real, entirely too substantial razor blade.
He asked again and she replied by grabbing him around his waist, feeling the firmness and warms of his hips through the denim. She pulled him into a kiss, hot saliva mingling.
For no more than the blink of an eye, Shane considered that this was a ruse, that this was something wearing the form of her love. But she realized how little she cared. If it wasn't Eliot and truth, the imposter has done his homework well enough to act like him, dress like him, ever bear the herbal scent. Olfactory is one of the strongest harbingers of memory and every ounce of passion she had ever felt for him, every secret midnight longing when she was between her lonely bed sheets, every moment at the pond kissing his neck and stomach flooded back to her. She was awash.
"Now I am damn sure I'm not dead!" he smiled when she released him from her arms for a momentary breath. The second embrace lasted another twenty minutes of fumblingly frenzied fondling and creatively carnal kissing. The twenty-first minute gave way to conversation, both on lying on the bed with the air but not practice of post coital lovers. Much as Shane wished she didn't have questions, they pricked at her skin and word only allow momentary suppression while her tongue was otherwise occupied.
Airily, she asked, hoping this question could seem relaxed, "Where are you when you aren't here?"
Jake opened his long lashes -- it really was cruel that boys naturally got the kind of eyelashes for which women spend far too much -- and peered at his surroundings if for the first time. "Where is here?" he asked.
"This is my room, the attic of the Annandale Library..." she began and, seeing it was too long a story, stopped.
Eliot looked at the ceiling overhead, one arm around Shane back, tracing the straps of her bra and the other behind his head. "I don't know where I am when I'm not here. I'm just elsewhere. That should probably bother me, right?"
She nodded and kissed his neck. "You said you were thinking. How long?"
"Couple of days, I guess. Thinking seems really clear, but that's about it."
"It's been about a month," she replied, sliding onto him to brush some hair out of his face. She forgot how much she missed that.
"Oh."
"But I really don't think you are dead. You don't feel dead."
Eliot shifted. "Sorry, but you got me excited. Apparently, it's been years since we've done this..."
"See, the dead don't make really bad jokes like that."
In absence of any answers for Eliot, they kissed more. It was too swooningly strange, but thier lips were concrete. Actually, they were much more like the eager lips of pot adolescents. Eliot had not aged a day, leaving Shane to catch up. They wanted only this room and neither would have given over to sleep even if they craved it.
A lull came in their passions. While Eliot made Shane and he a snack from the plastic wrapped contents of a purloined mini-fridge, Shane caught him up on her own life. He did not ask of the weirdness that permeated this all and she was grateful. She was so tired of having her life, no matter how short it was going to be, defined by her condition. She didn't want to thing of what happened to Virgil or what was happening to her.
"Seeing anyone?" he tried to ask casually, but this question can never seem anything but slight awkward.
She could lie, but the honest start she had with Eliot never finished. "I sort of was, but it's over now."
She wished his back wasn't to her as he made food or that she could hear the breath with him to know if it grew shallow.
"Who was he?"
"There was no he, just a she. And I didn't love her, I was just so scared and lonely. We weren't even really together. I'm sorry."
He turned to her with a plate of cookies and soymilk (it tasted better in her tea). His face was still sweet and kind, if a bit amused.
"You're not mad?" she asked, taking a cookie and just holding it. The chocolate chips melted on her fingers. v"No. I'm a little jealous, but let's be reasonable. I've been gone and you thought dead for over a year. So you kissed some girl. Worse things have happened. I love you and I'm back now."
She smiled and bit into the cookie, now soft with her body heat. The chocolate smeared on her lips. Eliot leaned forward to kiss her stained lips clean, but he slid through. Shane swallowed and grabbed his face, but he was insubstantial. His lips moved, but she couldn't hear him anymore. But she understood.
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