The Afterlife series Box Set (Books 1-3) by Willow Rose

stopped the search.
    “Well … If you really have to know, then yes.” He looked at me and saw my concern. Then he sighed. “Listen. Don’t worry about it,” he said with an awkward smile. “It was nothing. I’ll be fine.”
    I had embarrassed him, I could tell by the look on his face. He didn’t like to appear weak in front of me.
    “So how have you been?” he asked. He found his jeans and began to put them on.
    “Busy with school, I guess,” I lied. I didn’t want him to know that I had been worried about him day and night. I looked out the window. It was another beautiful and clear starry night.
    “Good. Busy is good. That keeps your mind of things.”
    “It sure does,” I said and smiled. As I turned my head my eyes caught something on the floor. It was our puzzle, all the pieces in one big pile, the cardboard ripped into small pieces.
    “What happened to our puzzle?” I said.
    He looked at it as well. “We might have to start over,” he laughed, a little embarrassed. “I tried to collect all the pieces, but I’m not sure I got them all.”
    I sighed. “Let me guess, your step-dad?”
    Jason nodded. “After you left he went kind of crazy and started throwing things around in the bathroom. He was sure I was hiding someone and he searched the whole house. What an idiot.”
    “Was that when he did that to you?” I grabbed his arm and turned it so I better could see all the bruises. Jason pulled his arm away.
    “Nah. That was another time. He just smacked me around for awhile. It was nothing, really.”
    I looked at him like I definitely didn’t believe him. Being smacked around could never be nothing. It wasn’t until now that I remembered that time passed faster on earth so what had been only weeks for me had been months for him.
    “Really. It’s nothing. I’m tough, you know. I can handle it.”
    He was tough and that was a good thing. He was a big guy, tall and muscular, and that was a good thing too. But he didn’t seem like the fighting type. My guess was that he would never fight back.
    “Just be careful, okay?”
    He smiled and approached me. He put a shirt over his head and pulled it on. It was tight on his body and made him look strong.
    “I’m a big boy,” he said with that boyish smile of his.
     
    I visited Jason every night after that. It became a habit  and something I would look forward to all day in school. We began working on the puzzle again and it came along nicely, but slowly, since we spent most of our time talking about everything and nothing. About his dreams for his future, about the universe, about school and his friends, and I would even sometimes grumble about Portia and her pack. 
    I couldn’t quite figure out if I wanted to see him so badly because I wanted to keep an eye on him in order to protect him or if it was because I was falling for him, but I enjoyed the nightly visits and after a couple of weeks we became really close friends. Naturally I couldn’t tell him much about my life, since I still didn’t remember much about my life on earth. I had to keep most of my life at the Academy secret, so we mostly spoke about him. But after some time it became harder and harder to avoid all of his many questions. He kept asking what it was like and I tried hard not to make it sound great. I didn’t want him to wish he were dead.
    “But you can fly! That must be so awesome,” he said one day when we were staring at the stars from the window in his room. “You can go anywhere you want in the world. You could even visit the stars!”
    “Well I don’t know about the stars, but yes, I can fly anywhere I want to,” I said, trying not to seem to enthusiastic. But that was, in fact, one of the things I really loved about being a spirit.
    “And the going through doors and mirrors and stuff, that is so cool.”
    “I guess it is,” I said. “But it also means you have no physical body.”
    He looked at me with big eyes. “No body. Just think of it. My