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However, he knows me better than I know myself, and apparently has for longer than I’ve been awake. My jumbled thoughts tell me I need to leave. I need space from him, even if it’s not permanent. But I need the space, at least for now. I need to go home and remember how to be Saylor, and figure out how to stop my thoughts from running around in dangerous, chainsaw-shaped configurations in my head.

When my hands close on my camera, however, I pause. The thought I’ve had this whole time comes back to me and I turn the camera in my hands. “Can I…take a picture of you?” I ask, and immediately see the look of surprise and uncertainty flicker across his face. “Not like that. You can say no. I don’t want to go to the police or anything. It’s not that, it’s just?—”

“Yes,” Jed interrupts, the word warm and sure. “Yes, Saylor.”

My lips pull into a smile even without me willing them to. I pull my camera to my face, and watch him through the viewfinder as he lays back onto the bed and just looks at me.

It’s exactly what I want. I take a picture of him, then another when his eyes slant away, toward the ceiling. It makes my heart twist, because he really is just as perfect as I knew he would be.

Everything about him is perfect, after all. Except for the chainsaw-wielding maniac part. That’s the thing that still hurts. That still terrifies me when the lights are on and the sun is up. At night I can ignore it. Yesterday, after everything, I could pretend that I didn’t care about it.

But today, this Saylor, the one that lives in the real world, can’t help but care. I can’t brush it off. At least not so easily.

My fingers itch to reach out and touch him again. Especially when he looks back at me with that sweet, affectionate look on his face. “I’ll never push you,” he reminds me, voice soft but without the roughness of last night. “Even if you never want to see me again.” But at that I can see the flicker of uncertainty in his face.

And I swear, for maybe a microsecond, he’s afraid that’s what’s going to happen. I want to reach out and comfort him. Part of mebegsto assure him that’s not the case. That I just need some time away from all of this to come down and remember what normal eating is while I try to revive my plants.I just need time, I want to wail. But I can’t promise that time won’t be forever.

It all depends on how I feel when I break this magnetic connection between us and go back to my real life for a little while. And that right there is the worst part of it.

Still, before I can stop myself, I jump to my feet, knowing I need to either break away now or fall back into bed with him. It’s hard when one of those options is a lot more alluring than the other, but I manage to walk away from him without touching him again. Without saying something I’ll regret.

Though I wonder if walking away is going to be my biggest regret of all.

My Jeep is outside, in the spot where his had been parked before. And no part of me can really be surprised by it, or the bottle of water sitting in the console. Jed is the most considerate man on Earth, I’ve decided, and I’m evenlessshocked to see the full tank of gas that I’m sure I didn’t have when I’d been at the preserve.

And here I am, walking away from all of this. From him, and the best relationship I’ll probably ever have. “Fuck,” I mutter, my heart twisting and protesting in my chest while I pull my car around to the real driveway instead of the two roads that lead me further into the woods.

“Fuck!” I nearly yell it the second time, as I wait for the gate to open to take me back to the main road. With my GPS on and working to lead me home, I can see that we were never that far away from Akron. Hell, I’ll be back home within an hour or so. It feels…wrong somehow. Like I shouldn’t be this close to reality.

It feels like I should be hours and hours away from home, not just fifty-four minutes.

“Bye, Jed,” I tell my steering wheel as the gate opens wide enough for me to get through it. “I just don’t know if I can do this.” Because someone like me, who cares for her plants and eats Lunchables, might not be able to accept someone whose skills lie in carving up bodies and lying to the police.

Chapter

Nineteen

For the entire first day after I get back to my apartment with my wilting plants and glaring landlady, I sleep. It’s crazy how exhausted I am, even though I’d basically spent the last night at Jed’s sleeping and eating grilled cheese.

After he’d made my wish come true and disrespectfully wrecked me, of course.

But the only times I wake up for the rest of the day are to scarf down Lunchables and brush my hair. Though I’m pretty sure I’d fallen asleep for the second task, judging by the fact I’d woken up with the brush on my pillow and my hair still tangled.

For two days after that, I try to remember what it’s like to be a normal human, and fail miserably. Though, I manage to write a reasonably convincing email to the preserve giving them an excuse for why the photos are late. They even believe it, and give me an extra twenty-four hours to get my work submitted to them. It’s not quite as much as I’d like, but if I have to spend all day editing and picking out the best photos, then I will.

All in the name of getting paid, at the very least.

When that’s finally done and sent, let myself be distracted by the thing I’ve been trying to avoid for the whole time I’ve beenworking. What I’ve set to the side, my stomach twisting into origami swans every single time my eye finds them by accident.

The pictures I took of Jed.

But finally, when there’s nothing else left to do and I can’t give myself any other excuses, I draw my laptop up onto my knees and lean back in my recliner, eyes fixed on the two photos I’d taken before I left his cabin.

Somehow, he looks better than I remembered him. And that’s saying something, since in my memory, Jed is perfection personified. I feel almost as if I could reach out to the pictures and feel the silkiness of his hair, though I know I’ll just hit the glass of my laptop screen instead. In the first, he’s looking away from me. Gazing up at his ceiling with the length of his neck and upper body on display. He looks so thoughtful and so…sad. But resigned, in a lot of ways. Like he’s losing something important to him, but he knew it was coming all along.

And that makes my heart twist into knots, just like my stomach. I hate the feeling of being almost unable to breathe when I look at him; it just gets worse when I open the other picture and it covers the first.

In this one, Jed had been looking directly at me. His blue eyes were sweet, lashes sweeping across them with that small start of a smile on his lips. Gorgeous could never begin to cover how he looks. Especially when he’s looking atmelike this.