I decided to blame him.

“You’re a ho,” I accused over my shoulder, a sly smile spreading across my face.

“What does that mean? I haven’t slept with anyone besides —”

“Look at this room.” I stepped off the staircase and started for the table Reyes had clearly reserved for us, because every other table in the joint was taken, and several other people waited up front. “They’re only here for you.”

We wound past chairs full of women hungry for an item that was most definitely not on the menu, and men craving either the same or Reyes’s demise, many toxic to the core with jealousy. Reyes did bring out the emotions in people.

He wrapped a hand around my arm from behind, and I turned, my brows drawn in curiosity. He pulled me close to talk soft, even though we were still in the middle of a crowded room. “It’s not me,” he said, and the sting I felt radiate off him sliced into me.

I placed a hand possessively at his h*ps and stepped closer. “Reyes, what?” I asked.

“I’m not – I don’t mean for this to happen.” He scanned the crowd, feeling the exact same emotions I was feeling, only they were all zeroed in on him. All focused directly at him like laser-guided missiles. “I never asked for this.”

“I was just kidding,” I said, flexing my fingers against his hip. “I didn’t mean to imply that you do this on purpose.” I looked around helplessly. “I was just kidding.”

I didn’t know what else to say. My remark had actually hurt him.

He leaned in and confessed in my ear, his voice soft, hesitant. “It’s suffocating.”

The possibility of his being hurt by the emotions of others had never occurred to me. Being able to feel others’ emotions was both a blessing and curse. At times like this, it leaned toward curse. For me, anyway. I’d never imagined it would bother him. Why should he care what others think?

But he was right. Sometimes the emotions wafting off others were so powerful, so… well, suffocating, I had to block them, a trick I’d learned in high school. Up until that point, school could be utter agony. Sure, I knew things others didn’t, but I also knew things I didn’t want to know. No one could “talk behind my back.” I always knew the truth about how they felt about me. It kept my friendships to a minimum. The bare essentials. And once I lost my BFF, Jessica, I really didn’t have another person I could call a best friend until I met Cookie a couple years ago.

One thing I’d learned growing up: People were never, ever, ever 100 percent honest about their feelings.

Never.

But that was something I’d learned to live with a long time ago.

This time, I wrapped my hand into his and led him to a small hall that accessed the restrooms and a storage closet. I held up an index finger to Cookie to let her know we’d be right back, then pulled him around a corner and into me. “I’m sorry, Reyes. I didn’t mean that. It was just a joke.”

He kept his features schooled. “I was just kidding, too.”

“No, you weren’t.” I lifted my hand and ran my fingertips along his lower lip.

But just like every other time I’d tried to get him to open up, he grew resentful. He edged me against the wall, his hand placed lightly around my throat, his body pressed into mine, effectively changing the subject. He knew better than to order me to stop: To stop caring. To stop empathizing. To stop feeling. We’d been over it a hundred times. He couldn’t just order me not to care. But he could switch the focus off himself and onto me. And he was very, very good at that.

He held me loosely against the wall, considered my mouth a long moment before I felt the tension ease out of him. This was his life. He could hardly run from it. People just… wanted him. He had a singular animalistic allure, a steely magnetism that anyone who looked at him had a hard time ignoring. He’d once told me that his attraction was so powerful, a girl he met in one of the plethora of apartment complexes Earl Walker had dragged him to throughout his childhood tried to kill herself when they’d moved out a month after unpacking. They moved out because their rent check had bounced, but Reyes was relieved. The girl’s desire had been so thick. So palpable.

Then he began to tell me another story, one that involved a boy in the apartment building where I’d first seen Reyes, over a decade ago – the one where I watched Earl, the monster who’d raised him, beat him bloody. He’d dropped the anecdote abruptly and refused to elaborate on what happened, so I took it upon myself to look into the history of the building around the time he’d lived there. A thirteen-year-old boy hanged himself in his closet a couple of days after Earl had absconded into the night with Reyes and his nonbiological sister, Kim. According to the boy’s parents, he’d become very distraught after his best friend moved away, but the kid’s friends had said he was in love with a boy from the building who didn’t reciprocate. After the boy moved, the kid killed himself.

That neighbor had to have been Reyes. And he knew what the boy had done. What would that guilt do to a person? How would it affect one’s psyche?

And the ogling didn’t stop there. I’d noticed departed hanging around more and more. But Reyes looked different to them than he did to humans. He was forever enshrouded in a dark mist, and underneath that mist was the soft glow of a fire. The angrier Reyes became, the brighter that fire. I’d seen it only once, after almost dying at the hands of a raving lunatic. And, as incredible as Reyes was in human form, he was startlingly beautiful when seen from another plane. I’d been told I could perceive things from that plane, and in that form, whenever I wanted to, but I had yet to master said talent. Because of this handicap, I wasn’t sure if the departed who followed Reyes around were like the humans – insanely attracted to him – or like some form of spiritual gawkers, unable to believe what they were seeing, curious about him, testing their own courage by how close they could get to him.