Disclaimer: Dead Like Me? Not mine. This story? Totally mine.

George's POV, still.

Chapter 21: My Name is Mud

I was glad the house was dark when we got home. Either Daisy was well into an evening of beauty sleep—which wasn't likely considering the way she'd been camping out in our living room the last few days—or she was out with some poor, dumb schmuck. My money was on the latter.

Whatever. Some poor, dumb schmuck's loss is this girl's gain, I thought. Yeah, we made sort of nice while she was helping to tart me up like a high-class call girl, but still. It would be nice to be rid of Daisy's bullshit, if only for a night.

The ride home with Mason had been about as fun as Chinese water torture. We'd managed to make it through the reap just fine, then boom! He went into complete radio silence. He'd been sulking since he'd asked me for my iPod. I'd taken it out of my bag and handed it to him, and that's when it all inexplicably went to shit. I put the stupid player in his hand, he took it, and all of the sudden it was like I was watching someone with lightning-quick speed process four of the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining and depression—in the span of about 10 seconds.

Or, if I wanted to be really specific, when I handed Mason my iPod, he looked at me like he was Wile E. Coyote and I was the Road Runner, and we were at the exact point in the cartoon when I'd foiled his plan, yelled BEEP! BEEP! (y'know, just to be an asshole and add insult to injury), hightailed it away and left him to realize he's holding a live grenade. Cue the "Oh, shit!" cloud (POOF!) over poor old Wile E.'s head, and BOOM! That asshole Road Runner has fucked him once again.

I was watching Looney Tunes and eating cereal one morning when I realized it was a pretty apt analogy for any reaper, actually. Because just like Wile E. Coyote, we repears don't die when someone blows us up (or when some paranoid, drug-addled crackhead we're trying to reap, say, shoots us in the face at point-blank range), but it doesn't mean we can't still experience every single awful feeling that accompanies it: confusion, indignity, panic, pain, anger. Sure, we heal fast. But like Wile E., there's a period of time we're standing there all fucked up and left to clean up the mess.

I had no idea what horrible thing I'd done to Mason to send him into such a rapid cycle of anger and despair, but I was too tired to argue.

I knew I'd been a real bitch to him the past couple days, and I felt more than a single twinge of guilt about it, but I didn't think that was to blame in this situation.

Besides, I'd recently begun to consider the probability that Mason was telling the truth about Daisy, although I hadn't had the chance to tell him that. Mason could be a lot of things, sure—he could be a drunk and a layabout, a horny bastard and a skirt chaser, a sometime junkie and petty criminal, but one thing I'd never, ever taken him for was a liar. He didn't have to, because he was completely open about himself. I knew Rube and Roxy thought Mason was shady and sometimes they underestimated him because of it, but even they would admit he'd never tried to hide his self-destructive tendences. His unlife was an open—if sometimes extremely sordid—book.

Mason's book was a story in two parts—both long and twisted tales—but they followed a singular, coherent theme.

Daisy, on the other hand … well, she was an entirely different story. If Mason's book was perhaps a bit too open, Daisy's was always closed. Her book was a pretty pink diary wrapped in a big shiny bow, but its insides didn't match its outsides. The insides were a collection of too-short (and sometimes too-sad) sketches of a girl's life, with horrible, scary monsters doodled in the margins.

But, hey, that was okay, because the outside was pretty enough to be distracting, and besides, the insides were locked safely away.

Daisy's story also was in two parts, but even though they were packaged the same, the second volume hadn't been fitted with a lock. Therefore its scenes were very carefully crafted, and there were no monsters sketched in its margins because monsters, well, monsters simply weren't palatable for public consumption.

Still, even if the first part of Daisy's story remained largely a mystery, I didn't feel too sorry for her. She'd made it work to her advantage. If Daisy, Daisy Adair had never quite made it as a movie star in her lifetime, she was making up for it in spades with one helluva star turn in the ever-unfolding drama that was her unlife.

Rimshot! Thank you, ladies and germs! I'll be here all week. Tip your waiter. Try the veal.

I began to genuinely, really smile in spite of myself, and it felt good—that is, until I caught Mason sneaking a peek, and he looked a bit like a puppy someone had been kicking for fun. I remember when it was Daisy who used to make him look that way, and how gross it was to watch her dangle herself in front of him like a tasty blonde Milk Bone when she thought no one was looking, only to kick him again as soon as someone turned around.

It really sucks to realize that this time, apparently, I'm the gross one.

I'd gone through a lot of crap myself the past couple days thanks to Mason, but looking at him now, I suddenly realized it was only fair that I be the one to extend an olive branch. I had to try to make it right, and if I couldn't do that, I had to at least try to make it better. Because if nothing else, we'd always been friends, right? If I was really honest with myself, and it appeared to be the route I was taking, he was probably the closest thing I had to a best friend. I mean, Daisy and I basically just tolerated each other because of the house; Betty had been gone for what seemed like forever now (and I still missed her every day); Rube had to talk to me because he was my boss, as was Delores (and I did like Delores, but seriously, she set up individual Twitter accounts for every one of her cats and had recently begun spending most of her spare time adhering to a strict schedule of writing and posting each of their tweets in a timely manner—shudder); and Roxy—well, okay, Roxy's cool and stuff—but deep down, Roxy she'd always intimidated the crap out of me.

Factor in my undead status, my trainwreck first time with Trip, and my social calendar wasn't exactly bursting at the seams.

Until Mason.

Ah, Mason, Mason, Mason, I thought reflexively. My lips began to curl up at the corners in spite of themselves.

Mason and his stunts, his schemes, his peculiar habits, his odd daily existence ... that accent, those blue eyes, that dead sexy grin. I forced myself to stop smiling; after all, letting myself smille when nothing was resolved would be like tellling people I'd gotten the job when I hadn't really even had an interview yet. It would probably jinx everything, and if I was being honest there was no way in hell I was about to do anything to risk jinxing this.

Because deep down, it was true: Mason really was my best friend. If that wasn't going to be the case anymore, from now on, at the very least we were still going to be colleagues—I mean, hell, we might have to work together, to see each other every day for the next hundred or two years.

Then again, considering our shared, (un)chosen profession, we might not. Which would be a whole lot worse.

Whatever. The point is, no matter what happens, he and I need to be able to at least tolerate each other, right?

Luckily I didn't have to stand there and keep agonizing over it too much longer, thank God, because I realized my olive branch was sitting right there in front of me in the kitchen: Booze. Hooch. Good old alcohol.

If this was a story, I thought, this would be a pretty convenient deus ex machina.

Unfortunately, though, it wasn't a story. It was my life, my unlife. It was important.

So I took a deep breath and set my jaw.

OK, George, here we go.