Resurrected (Resurrected Series Book 1) Read Free

pain of this kind of loss. I have the names of some grief counselors if you’d ever like to talk to someone.”
    It took me a minute to understand he wasn’t talking religion to me. I saw him for the first time – took in his short, round body and equally round face, his receding hairline and eyes so dark they were almost black. But what was that behind those dark eyes? Compassion? Sadness? Kindness? Great. Now I was going to have to give up mocking priests.
    I shook my head. “Thank you. We’ll go.” I stood and reached out to touch her casket one last time; the sun had warmed it so that it felt more like an incubator rather than a tomb. I couldn’t stay with her forever. It was time for me to go.
    I glanced up, where the rain clouds had mostly drifted eastward and the brilliant blue Texas sky broke through the gray. The rain was moving on to Louisiana. And my afterlife had just begun.
 
     
     

Chapter 1
     
    Two years later
     
    Have you ever had a dream that seemed so real that when you woke up, you weren’t quite sure what was reality and what was imagined anymore? Because I often dreamed of her still. Cooking dinner. God, she was such a good cook. Folding laundry while we streamed The Big Bang Theory. She thought it was funny. I thought she was adorable when she laughed. Making love then talking in whispers in bed, which was completely ridiculous since no one else lived with us but it never seemed right to speak louder while laying naked in bed. Her falling asleep on my shoulder, as she so often did, and as I stroked her hair, thinking this is more a Heaven than any place Man had dreamed up.
    Sometimes, I still woke up expecting her to be in bed with me, and when I reached over for her and felt nothing but empty sheets, I expected to hear the steady drip, drip, drip of the coffee maker or the muffled voices of the television coming through the bedroom wall. Perhaps she had just gotten up to watch TV, like she did sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. And so I would lay in the blackness of that empty room and listen. I would listen until my ears started ringing from the complete silence surrounding me and I finally gave in and admitted that this was, in fact, not a dream. This was my afterlife. And I was alone.
    Our apartment hadn’t changed much. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of any of her things. Right after the funeral, I had let her mother come through here to find the vestiges of her childhood. Boxes of awards and certificates and graduation gowns went back to Louisiana; a few yearbooks, and some of Lottie’s favorite movies. But mostly, there was nothing in my apartment that could give Cathy Theriot her daughter back, and she had left Houston begging me to still come for Easter. I had promised her I would. Cathy had lost her husband a few years before and Lottie was an only child. If she wanted me to drive to Alexandria for every single holiday, I would.
    But about a year after Lottie died, Cathy remarried, and our phone calls became fewer and farther between. I was just the man who was still in love with her daughter’s ghost. She kept telling me I would eventually move on too. I knew that I never would. Eric never tried to convince me of that; he never told me to consider dating again, or that one day, it would hurt less, or I wouldn’t still smell her everywhere in this apartment. He usually just brought beer and pizza or Thai takeout and watched baseball or football with me. If he was feeling really sorry for me, I might be able to talk him into watching a soccer match.
    And so, for two years, I had kept everything as it was. Her clothes still hung on her side of the closet; her shoes still lined the floor; her books were everywhere around me; her music was still on my iPod. I wouldn’t delete her from my life. She had so many things I had no use for. I couldn’t cook – I didn’t even know what a wok was for and why it was any different than a skillet, or why we had three different