Cosmic Interference

I didn't mean for the kiss to be our last.

Mostly because I don't remember kissing her at all.

The dead woman on my couch turned another page of my signed first edition of Practical Demonkeeping, using the dust jacket as a bookmark and the actual book as a coaster for what appeared to be spectral tea. I watched a ring of moisture that shouldn't exist form on Christopher Moore's signature.

"You're staring," she said without looking up. Her voice carried the particular timbre of someone who'd died mid-sentence and refused to let that stop her from finishing the thought.

"You're translucent."

"And yet here we are, both stating the obvious." She dog-eared a page. A signed, limited edition page. "We dated, Milo. Briefly. Intensely." She paused, tilting her head at an angle that made her shimmer between solid and suggestion. "Cosmically."

My living room looked like a thrift store crashed into a séance. Mismatched furniture. Candles I'd never lit. A ouija board I used exclusively as a cheese platter. None of it explained the woman flickering on my corduroy sectional.

"Lady, I think you've confused me with someone who has game."

She laughed. The sound made my fillings ache. "Trust me, you didn't need game. The universe sort of shoved us together."

I felt a weird tug behind my eyes, like déjà vu’s clingy cousin who won’t stop texting at 3 a.m..

"I'm Aria," she offered, as if we were meeting at a cocktail party and not in my apartment where she'd materialized sometime between my third cup of coffee and my existential crisis about whether forty was too old to still own a beanbag chair. "Aria Vale. Ring any bells?"

"My bell-ringing capacity is limited to recognizing that you're dead and touching my things."

She set down the book. Finally. Then she reached toward me and everything went sideways.

Rain. A roadside. Headlights cutting through mist that moved too slow, like time had developed a stutter. I stood in the downpour watching myself lean into someone. Into her. Our mouths meeting in a moment that tasted of ozone and inevitability.

Then nothing.

I stumbled backward into my bookshelf, sending a cascade of paranormal romance novels onto my head. Aria watched with the patient expression of someone who'd expected this reaction.

"What the hell was that?"

"Memory," she said. "Yours. Sort of. It's complicated."

"That wasn't me. I've never owned a jacket like that. I've never been on that road."

"And yet." She rose from the couch, her form brightening with something that might have been hope or might have been the particular glow of a spirit refusing to accept the fundamental unfairness of death. "You were there, Milo. Even if you don't remember."

"Well," I said, reaching for sarcasm like a life preserver, "that's inconvenient.”

*******

Bartholomew's Books occupied a corner of downtown that progress had forgotten and hipsters hadn't yet discovered. We sold used paperbacks, overpriced occult supplies, and the comforting illusion that knowledge could be organized by the Dewey Decimal System.

Aria followed me to work the next morning, phasing through the autobiography section and materializing between Self-Help and True Crime.

"You can't be here," I hissed, shelving a water-damaged copy of The Secret. "I have a job. A job where not talking to invisible dead women is implied in the employee handbook."

"I'm not invisible. I'm selectively visible." She examined a tarot deck, her fingers passing through the cellophane wrapper. "There's a distinction."

Jax appeared at the end of the aisle, carrying a box of remaindered astrology guides. He squinted at me with the concerned expression of someone watching their coworker argue with empty air.

"Migraine?" he asked.

"Caffeine overdose."

"Ah." He nodded sagely, as if this explained everything, and shuffled away.

Aria reappeared at my elbow. "He seems nice."

"He thinks I'm having a breakdown."

"Aren't you?"

She drifted between the shelves, occasionally becoming more substantial near certain titles. Love stories made her solid. Tragedies made her flicker. Horror novels didn't seem to affect her at all, which said something about either her character or the quality of our horror section.

I watched her phase through a display of remaindered cookbooks and wondered, not for the first time, if my grandmother had been right about everything. The tea leaves. The cold spots. The certainty that some people walked between worlds without meaning to.

"Tell me about that night," I said finally, keeping my voice low. "The rain. The road. What do you remember?"

Her edges softened. "A storm. My car died on Route 7, that bend past the old diner. Pearl Jam was playing when the engine quit...Last Kiss,' which felt on-the-nose even then." She laughed, but the sound held no warmth. "You appeared. Out of nowhere. Or maybe I appeared. The timeline gets fuzzy."

"Timelines don't get fuzzy."

"They do when two of them overlap."

I shelved three more books before responding. Something about her words had triggered a sensation I couldn't name. Not memory, exactly. More like the shadow of memory. The echo of something that had happened to someone else wearing my face.

The familiar smell of old paper and furniture polish surrounded us. A customer browsed the mystery section, oblivious to the metaphysical drama unfolding three aisles over. Normal Tuesday. Except for the dead woman explaining timeline theory between Agatha Christie and James Patterson.

"I don't understand."

"Neither do I. Not completely." She reached toward a stack of hardcovers balanced precariously on a rolling cart. "I know we kissed. I know everything went bright afterward. And I know”, her voice caught. ”I don't know how I died. The last thing I remember is your face. Then nothing.”

The cart wobbled. Aria moved without thinking, reaching to steady it, her hands passing through the books as they toppled toward me. I caught the avalanche of hardcover Hemingway against my chest, but the gesture remained. She'd tried to protect me. Reflex. Instinct.

She tried to catch them. Even though she can't. Even though she knew she couldn't.

"Fine," I said, setting down a battered copy of A Farewell to Arms. "We figure this out, you move on, and I get my Sunday back."

Aria smiled. The expression transformed her entire face, made her luminous in a way that had nothing to do with being dead. "You always said fate owed us one good day."

I had no memory of saying that. No memory of believing it. But somewhere beneath my ribs, something ached as if I had.

*******

The Starlight Diner looked like someone had frozen 1957 in amber and then let it thaw badly. Chrome stools with cracked vinyl. A jukebox that accepted quarters but made no promises. Neon signs advertising milkshakes and broken dreams.

"We shared a strawberry malt," Aria said, sliding into a booth that had seen better decades. "Right here. You complained about the whipped cream."

"I would never complain about whipped cream."

"You did. You said it tasted like someone had blended a cloud with regret."

That does sound like something I'd say.

The waitress approached, a woman whose name tag read DORIS and whose expression suggested she'd seen everything and been impressed by none of it. She looked through Aria and directly at me.

"You were in here before," she said, not a question.

"I don't think—"

"Few weeks back. With a girl." Doris tapped her pen against her order pad. "Or maybe it wasn't you. Looked like you, but different somehow. Younger, maybe. Or older. Hard to say."

The jukebox kicked on without anyone touching it. Pearl Jam. "Last Kiss." The room tilted.

I saw it again. Fragments, broken mirrors reflecting a scene I'd never lived. Neon glow. Aria's laugh. The condensation on a milkshake glass. I wore a leather jacket I'd never owned, and my hand reached across the table to take hers, and the overhead lights cast everything in pink and gold and…

"Milo." Aria's voice cut through the vision. "Milo, stay with me."

I was gripping the edge of the table hard enough to whiten my knuckles. Doris had retreated to the counter, eyeing me the way one eyes a person who might start speaking in tongues.

"That was him," I said slowly. "The other me. The one who was here."

"Yes."

"But I've never owned that jacket."

"Not you-you. Him-you." She reached across the table, her hand hovering over mine. "Different timeline. Same soul."

I picked up a laminated menu to have something to do with my hands. The prices were from another era. The stain in the corner was eternal.

"We need to go to the road," Aria said. "Where it happened."

"I really don't want to do that."

"I know." Her voice carried a gentleness I hadn't expected.

"Neither do I.”

*******

Route 7 curved around Hawthorn Hill like an afterthought, the kind of road that existed because surveyors got lazy and geography got impatient. The bend Aria directed me to sat at the hill's base, marked by nothing but a rusted guardrail and a memorial cross that wasn't for her.

The moment I stepped out of my car, Aria solidified. Her edges sharpened. Colors I hadn't noticed before emerged: auburn hair, green eyes, a small scar on her chin that spoke of childhood accidents and kitchen corners.

"This is where it happened," she whispered.

"Where what…”

The world doubled.

I stood in two places at once. Here, in the fading afternoon sun, watching Aria brighten against the backdrop of autumn trees. And there, in a darkness split by headlights, rain hammering down, watching a version of myself run toward a stalled sedan while another Aria screamed something I couldn't hear.

The car that came around the bend in the other-time moved too fast. The other-me shoved the other-Aria aside. There was impact. There was light. There was a kiss that tasted like rain and endings.

And somewhere between the collision and the light, two universes brushed against each other. Two timelines kissed. Two Milos occupied the same space for one impossible heartbeat.

I came back to myself on my knees in the gravel, gasping. Aria knelt beside me, her hand on my shoulder, solid as certainty.

"He died," she said. "My Milo. He pushed me clear and the truck hit him and..." She trailed off. "But for one second, the universe glitched. Your timeline and mine overlapped. You were pulled into that moment. You were there for the kiss."

"I wasn't." But even as I said it, I knew it was a lie. The grief in my chest belonged to someone else, but it had taken up residence in my bones. "That doesn't make sense."

"Nothing about this makes sense." She laughed, hollow and hurt. "I died kissing a man I loved, and somehow I ended up haunting his parallel-universe understudy."

"I can't believe the universe third-wheeled me into a tragic romance."

"The universe has a terrible sense of humor."

We sat in silence as the sun dipped below the treeline. I tried to remember being someone else. I tried to forget being myself. Neither worked.

"So I was someone's goodbye I didn't earn?"

Aria turned to face me. In the dying light, she looked almost alive. Almost like someone I could have loved in the ordinary way, with coffee dates and petty arguments and lazy Sunday mornings.

"No," she said softly. "You were someone's last miracle.”

*******

The storm arrived like it had been waiting for permission. Thunder rolled across the hills as the first fat drops splattered against the pavement, and within minutes the world had dissolved into a gray curtain of rain.

Aria stood in the downpour, untouched by the water streaming through her form. She glowed now, bright enough to cast shadows, bright enough to make my eyes water.

"I came to you because you were there at the end," she said. "Even if you were from another world. Even if you weren't really him. You were wearing his heart. You held him together when everything fell apart." Her voice broke. "I couldn't leave without thanking you."

"I didn't do anything."

"You did everything. You were the last thing he saw. The last thing he felt. And somehow, impossibly, you were me, too. For one moment, I got to say goodbye through someone else's lips."

The rain poured. Aria brightened. And I stopped running from the truth I'd been dodging since she appeared on my couch.

"I remember," I admitted. "Not the details. Not the facts. But the feeling." My voice cracked in ways I hadn't allowed since middle school. "I remember loving you. Or he did. Or we both did. I remember thinking that one moment was worth everything that came before it.” The memories weren’t mine, but the ache was.

"It was."

She stepped closer. The glow intensified, warm and terrible and beautiful. "I need something from you, Milo. One last thing."

"What?"

"One final kiss. One that both of us remember. One that belongs to us, not to the glitch or the accident or the overlapping timelines." She reached up, her hand against my cheek, somehow solid, somehow real. "One goodbye that counts."

I should have say no. I should have maintain the boundaries between the living and the dead, between myself and the other me, between what was and what could never be.

I kissed her.

It wasn't romantic. It wasn't passionate. It was the gentle pressure of an ending meeting a beginning. Energy passed between us…memory clarifying, loss acknowledging, two broken timelines finally making peace with their jagged edges.

When we separated, I could see through her. Not in the flickering, uncertain way she'd manifested before. In a deliberate, ascending way. She was becoming light.

"Be someone's first kiss, Milo," she said, her voice already fading. "Not their last."

I wanted to tell her that I'd remember. That some part of me would carry her forward into whatever came next. That the borrowed love hadn't felt borrowed at all.

The light separated. Two timelines untangled, finally distinct, finally free. Aria rose like heat, like hope, like the memory of something beautiful that could only exist because it ended.

The rain stopped. Suddenly. Completely. As if the storm had been hers all along and she'd taken it with her.

I stood alone on Route 7, soaked to the skin, crying without knowing why. The grief belonged to someone else, but I'd carry it anyway. That seemed fair.

*******

The walk home took forever. The sky cleared as I moved, revealing stars that seemed closer than they should have been. Every streetlight I passed flickered once, as if acknowledging something I couldn't name.

I caught myself talking to a mailbox on Crescent Avenue. In my defense, it had a particularly spectral shape in the moonlight. Also in my defense, I was losing my mind.

The mailbox did not respond.

"I'm really not built for this," I muttered, and kept walking.

But that wasn't true anymore, was it? I'd spent years denying what I could see, what I could sense, what I could sometimes touch. The gift I'd inherited from a grandmother who read tea leaves and talked to things other people couldn't perceive. The ability I'd buried under sarcasm and skepticism and a deep, unshakeable terror of being wrong about people.

A car passed, windows down despite the lingering chill. Pearl Jam's "Last Kiss" drifted from the speakers…

The universe absolutely did have a terrible sense of humor.

The memory hit gentle this time. Not a vision, not a doubling. A warmth in my chest where the grief had lived. A certainty that some things mattered even when they only existed for a moment.

My apartment building emerged from the darkness like an old friend making excuses for past absences. I climbed the stairs. I opened the door. I stood in the living room where twenty-four hours ago a dead woman had ruined my signed first edition.

The book sat on the coffee table, unmarked. No water ring. No dog-eared pages. No evidence that Aria Vale had ever touched it.

I sank onto the couch where she'd first appeared. The cushion held no impression. The air carried no trace of spectral tea. The only ghost in the room was the one I'd carry from now on: the memory of a kiss that hadn't been meant for me but had changed me anyway.

Outside, the night settled into something ordinary. Inside, I sat with the weight of borrowed love and considered what it might mean to be someone's miracle.

Be someone's first kiss, Milo. Not their last.

Tomorrow, I'd call my grandmother. I'd ask about the things I should have asked about years ago. I'd stop hiding behind the fear of being wrong and start living with the uncertainty of being open.

Tonight, I sat with the silence and let myself feel everything I'd been running from. Somewhere in the quiet, something shifted…small, like the universe clearing its throat. And for the first time, I didn’t flinch.

I didn't mean for the kiss to be our last.