ahead and start packing up the clothes in the bedroom,” he said. “I’ll get this crap.”
“Sure, Tucker.” Josh said it, but as they were walking by him to the bedroom, Andy was the one who reached out and squeezed his shoulder.
The contact burned, almost as bad as Angel pushing the ghost energy out, but Tucker controlled his gasp. They disappeared into his bedroom. Telling, wasn’t it? That he didn’t feel as though his privacy was being violated by people in his bedroom, but he couldn’t bear to let them touch pictures on the shelves?
He went into the kitchen for plastic grocery bags—which he usually recycled—and pulled out the mitt and the ball to wrap them up.
His hands only shook a little with that one.
He was okay as he wrapped up their baseball trophies from grade school.
His hands started shaking harder when he started with the pictures.
By the time he had the last picture wrapped in plastic and was reaching for the sealed urn, he could hardly breathe.
He’d been living with this—with all of this—open and looking him in the face every day. And it hurt so bad. His throat was raw with the screaming he wasn’t doing. His chest ached with the sobbing locked inside.
Oh God—had this been his life every day since Damien died?
How could God or the gods or the Goddess or whoever make exorcising ghosts his calling? Could they not see that he couldn’t even exorcise his own?
He managed to get the heavy sealed urn in the corner of the biggest box and taped the top closed. I don’t have to unpack this. I can take it back to Daisy Place and find a closet, maybe in one of the disappearing rooms. I can put Damien in the back of one of the closets and leave him, and someday when I’m dead, another promising young man will stumble on it, and Angel will say—
Oh, Angel!
How was he going to tell Angel that this shrine to a lost friend had become his life?
He didn’t even want to think about it.
And then he remembered his scrapbook.
Oh hell. The damning scrapbook. He didn’t even wrap up his monument to the times he hadn’t failed but something had. He rooted through the bookshelf, because he didn’t want Josh or Andy to see it either, and threw the damned thing on top of the box. He tried to blank his mind against what Angel would say about that too.
Grimly determined not to imagine spilling his soul to that perceptive set of green eyes, he schlepped the first box down, then the second. By the time he got back after the second, Josh and Andy had heaps of clothes in garbage bags, ready to go down into the truck too.
There were dishes at Daisy Place, but Tucker brought his comforter, pillow, fuzzy blankets, and some of his linens, as well as his backup toiletry supplies and one of two dressers.
“This one is shorter,” he said apologetically. “My computer will fit on it better.”
Andy shrugged. “Your system,” he said.
They lugged that down next, and then Tucker stood in the middle of the apartment and looked around.
He’d been going to take his recliner, but it matched the couch, and Josh told him he and Rae had a club chair and an ottoman that would fit in Tucker’s bedroom.
“It’s leather,” he said. “Real nice. And this way, we can leave Andy here with a matched set of furniture.”
Andy darted a furtive glance at Tucker, and Tucker understood. That way, Tucker wouldn’t be sitting in the same throne of self-pity he’d inhabited for the last thirteen years, and Andy would have a chance to clear the grief out of the furniture.
Well, if the kid wanted to cut his teeth in the weird psychic half-world Tucker inhabited, let him.
The scars on Tucker’s heart were still bleeding. His psychic scars were now indelibly etched across his skin. If Andy, with his enthusiasm and his desperate need to get laid, could jump into the fight, Tucker was in no condition to stop him.
Tucker could barely take care of himself.
“That’s fine,” Tucker said, summoning a grateful smile from he knew not where. “Is that it? Are we done?”
“Yeah,” Josh said, looking around. “Andy, did you wrap those framed prints in blankets?”
“Yeah,” Andy said promptly. “They’re snug in the back of the pickup. Tucker, can you think of anything else?”
Tucker looked around, and it hit him.
Whether he’d wanted it to or not, his inheritance from Aunt Ruth had officially changed his life.
“I’ll