Out of the Blue Dying Embers of Love: Out of the Blue, #3

By Jack Gunthridge

In the third part of the Out of the Blue series, Jack and Candice are united in human form only to learn the cost of a forbidden love.

As the darkness grows around them, teenage emotions run rampant.  Young love is on the brink of falling to lies, fear, and misunderstandings caused by a great evil force.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jack Gunthridge Studios, LLC
• Release date: Jul 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781498947565

Jack Gunthridge

Jack Gunthridge has a high functioning form of autism known as Asperger's Syndrome. He is very open about his autism diagnosis and doesn't consider it a disability. It is a difference in thinking that people like Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein are believed to have had.Jack wants to encourage readers to give his books a try. If you look at his reviews, they are either positive or negative with very little in the middle. Since he has a different way of thinking, his books will be written differently. Some will find this refreshing. Others won't quite know what to do with it because it doesn't fit the standard pattern or expectations of what other authors are producing.

Book preview

Chapter One

I suppose you think I’m a terribly silly girl.  I had one night of being alive again, and I spent it with you.  It’s not that there weren’t other things I would have liked to have done.  As soon as I felt the air in my lungs again and beating of my heart, I wanted to do so many things that I hadn’t done in the longest time.

As I walked to the school to meet you, I passed by my parents’ house.  I wanted so desperately to tell them I was okay and to have them hold me again.  I wanted to smell my mother’s home cooking, sit on the sofa and watch TV with them, or even sleep in my own bed.  I wanted to see my brother and sister and see my nephews and nieces.  I wanted to have a family gathering like we used to have at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

When I was alive, I had always hated walking to school.  I couldn’t wait until I turned sixteen and was able to drive there.  But that night, it was more than just the anticipation of seeing you that made the walk a breath of fresh air.  It was more than walking in the old yellow dress I had worn since the night I died or walking in high heels for the better part of a mile.  It was more than a chance of being able to relive the events of the night I had died, but with another man I had grown to love over the years.  It was the act of walking, the ability to feel the cool, crisp wind on my face, being able to smell the leaves as they were starting to lose their green color and fall from the trees.  It was everything that we take for granted when we are alive.

I can’t begin to tell you what it is like to be able to hear birds again or to see squirrels running to the nearest tree as you pass by.  I went to the gym that night for a chance to be with you, but it was so much more than that.  It was a chance to be alive again with the possibility of having a happy ending this time.

A silly girl would look at this as some Cinderella story where the girl in rags was able to be with the man of her dreams for one night.  I had been dead for far too long to look at it that way.  Making you love me would not just give us a chance to be together and the happily ever after that I had secretly wanted.  Making you love me would give me life again.  The love we had shared in the secrets of the nights between our souls would be enough to give the angel that had brought me back to life the strength to make it permanent.

One night of love would be enough to end the curse of death I had been living under.  I would be human and mortal again and not trapped in a world that had moved on while I was stuck in the last moments of my life- never able to go forward or change the past.  Whether I was successful in securing your love that night meant being human for just one more night.  I was thankful for that chance and all that it meant.

I wasn’t being silly in spending it with you.  I was enjoying every precious moment of being alive again that people so often take for granted.  And you made me appreciate it even more than I would have.

Waiting for that perfect moment creates so many expectations.  I had dreamed about what it would be like to finally be with you in the flesh.  But dreams are