Page 157 of White Lights
Did something happen?
Has death arrived?
No, Asher only looks … surprised.
“What were you just saying?” he asks.
“I … um,” Dez tries to remember. What happened? Why aren’t they kissing? “I think the last thing I said was that I was back. I had to come back.” She adds, “After all, you have my favorite sweatshirt.”
Asher tips his head. “What?”
“I’m kidding,” she assures him. “It wasn’t just the sweatshirt.”
But she feels the flinch in his palm, and then his fingers loosening so that she has to hold more tightly than feels natural. Confused, she loosens her grip slightly. Both their hands drop to their sides.
“What sweatshirt?” Asher says. He smiles, but it’s no longer an intimate smile. There’s politeness in it that makes Dez’s stomach twist. What’s happening? Was she too forward?
How could henothave wanted that kiss as badly as she wanted that kiss? It doesn’t seem possible, and yet, something has shifted.
Dez’s mind spirals. Was she wrong about the sweatshirt she saw folded on his dresser? She doesn’t think so. It’s a distinctive item. But is he seeing someone else who owns the same one? She shouldn’t have leapt to this conclusion. She has no memory, no access to the night he says they shared in his bed.
But the way his Lifeline had zoomed in on the sweatshirt when Dez watched from the Vault, it felt significant. It felt like he’d been thinking of her.
“Never mind,” she says.
“No, tell me.”
“It’s blue,” she says, “with a white hibiscus embroidered on the sleeve. Didn’t I leave it at your house?”
Asher stares at her blankly. “You’re thinking of someone else.”
“No,” she says. “When we spent the night—”
“Now you’redefinitelythinking of someone else,” he says coldly.
Dez is baffled. Only minutes ago, he’d brought up that night. With fondness.
Then she tried to kiss him.
“Weren’t we just talking about that night?” she says. “How I left your bed at dawn? How we watchedA Trip to the Moon?”
As Asher stares at her, curious in the way you might be curious about a feral animal, Dez gets the terrible suspicion that hetruly doesn’t know what she means. But how is that possible? Only moments ago he did.
“I haven’t seen you since the day we met,” Asher says slowly, “since we filmed your short on the pier. We … never spent the night together, Dez.”
Her face flushes. “But we ran into each other. On the beach. And … I don’t know, one thing led to another …” She trails off, panicked. She doesn’t have access to the details needed to fill in this story. Asher’s the one who knows what happened. Why is he pretending, all of a sudden, that he doesn’t remember that night?
Because maybe, all of a sudden, hedoesn’tremember that night.
A sick feeling twists in Dez as she feels how tenuous that beach memory always was. It wasn’t real in the first place. Now, it seems, it’s gone.
Asher turns away from her, gazing out at the ocean. For several seconds, neither of them speaks. Dez doesn’t know what to do next. She’s embarrassed. But no matter how weird Asher thinks she is, she’s still here to save his life. She wants to tell him he should really take two steps back from the edge. The drop is steep.
But the easy trust they’d had only moments ago is gone.
Asher turns away from the ocean back toward Dez—and startles at the sight of her standing right behind him.
“Excuse me,” he says, stepping around her like she’s a stranger, then continuing on the path.
