Page 103 of You'll Be the Death of Me

She couldn’t form words to speak, so she simply nodded.

“I am warning you!” the security guard shouted. He’d been joined by another.

“Good,” Cole said to Dell. “Hold on tight and think of the first time we met.” Then he wrapped his arms around her and stepped over the edge.

Dell instantly snapped her eyes shut. Wind screamed past her ears as they plummeted. Apparently, gravity worked the same in the afterlife, because where she might have expected them to float, or even fall slowly, they were speeding like dropped bricks. She wasn’t sure what would happen if they hit the ground, but in a desperate effort to avoid that scenario, she clung to Cole and thought as hard as she could about that day on the ski slopes. She forced her mind to see it: snow, crystal-blue sky. The smell of fresh pine and the purest air.

At the same time, she let the biggest emotion she’d ever felt expand to the edges of her mind.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

She knew it was true with every fiber of her being, and she could only hope this plan worked so she could spend the rest of her life discovering just how deep those feelings went.

Her hope faded as they continued to drop like stones. She was sure they were falling with enough force to do some serious damage, already dead or not.

But then, in their panicking spiral, Dell remembered the instructions for teleporting: physical contact. They were already hugging, but maybe they needed more. Maybe they needed a big jolt to send them back to earth.

“Kiss me!” she shouted over the deafening wind.

Cole didn’t hesitate. They were seconds from the ground rushing up at them like a concrete sea. He turned his head and sealed his mouth over hers. It was...everything. The beginning and the end. The sun and the moon. The answer to every question she’d ever asked. Cole pulled her tighter, and the kiss reached down into her, filling her whole body with a golden warmth. It was the best kiss of her life—and death. All she could do was let herself fall into it as they fell toward the ground.

Chapter 19

Instead of a bone-crushing smash into the concrete, Dell came to in the middle of a ski slope. The fresh air hit her lungs like a pine-mint blast. The sky was bluer than blue, topped only by Lake Tahoe thousands of feet below glinting like a sapphire. And in her arms: Cole.

“Oh my God, it worked!” she said, and looked up at him.

“I knew you could do it,” he said with a smile warm enough to melt the snow.

Dell went to kiss him again, but the sound of a panicked voice stopped her.

“Look out!” a man called as he came speeding down the hill beside them.

They both turned in time to see the man plow into a woman and knock her flat on the snow. Dell shot Cole a knowing grin.

He winced in shame. “I’m still sorry.”

“I will forgive you if you help me save both our lives right now,” she said, and made her way toward the pile of tangled limbs, which was the two of them, alive and clueless.

“We’d better hurry,” Cole said.

They approached their living selves as alive-Cole kept apologizing and awkwardly trying to find a grip on the slanted, frozen ground.

“This is even more awkward to watch than it was to experience,” Dell teasingly muttered.

He playfully smirked at her and dodged the ski his alive-self swung in the air trying to stand. “See you on the other side?”

“See you,” Dell said. She approached herself with a tingling thrill she was about to have her body back. The transition was much easier than with any other host. There was no convincing to be done; she simply slipped in like a hand into a glove.

In the next instant, Cole was pinning her to the snow, staring down at her through his goggles. His face bent into a smile. “Hi. I was only like eighty percent sure that was going to work.”

The sound of his voice sent Dell’s heart—her real, live, beating heart—soaring. “Eighty?!” she said with a gasp. “What was the other twenty percent? We were going to smash into the ground back there?”

“It was a possibility. But look! I smashed into you instead.” He kissed her cheek and tried to push himself up, but Dell threw her arms around him.

“You can smash into me any time you want.” She pulled his mouth to hers and let the searing kiss melt her into the snow.

They made out for half a minute before Dell remembered on this day the first go-round, Jason was coming down the hill right behind her. Sucking the lips off the stranger who’d plowed into her would be hard to explain to him.