Ghostly: A Paranormal Romantic Comedy (Perks of Being Paranormal Book 1)

Chapter 16

Aslamming door awoke Gabriel from peaceful slumber. He snorted and turned in bed, only to be disturbed again by a knock, coming from below. Ida had promised she wouldn’t disturb him during the night, and ever since those first days, she hadn’t. She was also in a good mood because of Perry’s arrival; no reason for her to mess with Gabriel.

Unless she wasn’t doing it intentionally. Had she gotten stuck in a loop again?

Gabriel got up, wrapped a robe on top of his pajamas, and headed downstairs. No humming from the statue. No Ida stuck in the doorway, or fixing the bookcase. The sounds had quieted, too, but Gabriel only grew worried—what if she’d already done something because of a loop?—before he caught sight of her. Ida was in the backyard, easy to miss if she hadn’t moved right as he passed by the living room window.

She usually spent the nights in the music box. What the hell was she doing outside?

Gabriel hastily drew on a coat and some shoes and rushed to the back. Frost immediately bit every inch of his exposed skin, but as he reached the backyard, a wave of peace and contentment, emanating from Ida, hit him.

Ida sat on the ground, her hands resting on her drawn-up knees. “Evening,” she greeted, her tone light and conversational, as if they’d simply met for brunch.

“It’s two in the morning.”

“I’ve nowhere to be tomorrow.” She shrugged, raising her eyes to the sky. “And the stars are beautiful tonight. Clear skies, thank goodness.”

They waited in silence. He shifted his feet as cold leached through his shoes.

“Want to join me?” she asked.

“It’s freezing.”

“Oh. Right.” She tapped the snow-covered ground. “I didn’t know how cold it was. Explains why the sky is so clear.”

Her voice was gentle and dreamy, and Gabriel couldn’t resist saying, “Wait a minute,” and he disappeared inside. He set water to boil on the stove, retrieved an old, fuzzy blanket he’d found in the bedroom, and returned outside with it and two cups. He spread the blanket on the ground and nudged Ida as he sat down.

“I don’t need…” She bit her lip. “Task four of trying to appear human. Got it.” She scooted onto the blanket; it was big enough for both with a few inches left between them.

“And I got us this.” Gabriel pushed a mug over to her. “Tea to haunt.”

“Not coffee?”

“Even I’m not crazy enough to drink coffee in the middle of the night.”

Ida smiled and pretended to wrap her fingers around the mug. “Thank you.”

He’d left a light on in the kitchen—just enough for a soft illumination of the backyard, but not too distracting for stargazing. His hand threw a blurry shadow on the blanket; Ida’s hand, instead, almost shimmered, as if the light was also inside her.

“So, what are we watching?”

“Well, you have your standard members. Taurus, Orion, Sirius, that small, but bright cluster over there is the Pleiades…” Ida pointed at various places in the sky; all Gabriel saw was a bunch of stars. Pretty, but the names didn’t mean much.

“Though I’m not here for them tonight. I’m waiting for someone special.”

Gabriel almost choked on the tea. Who else did she know? Perry couldn’t see her. The townspeople couldn’t. Had she found another ghost? Why hadn’t she told—

“His name is Wright-Maxwell.” Ida observed Gabriel for a few moments, a sly smile spreading on her face. “It’s a comet.”

“Oh. Obviously.”

She laughed. “It comes by every fourteen years. Tonight is the first night it reappears.”

“Astronomy book?”

“Actually, a tenant. A family that lived here in the forties. Their young daughter was an astronomy enthusiast.” Ida lay down on the blanket, and Gabriel followed suit, placing the mug on his stomach. “She’d lie like this, night after night, watching the stars. During the day, she’d compare what she’d seen to the books. She liked talking to herself as she pointed out various constellations, as if she were practicing for a test. I never needed to haunt her books. She told me everything.”

Gabriel turned his head to Ida, but she was busy staring at the sky. “That’s sweet.”

“I wonder what happened to her after they moved out. If she ever went on to defy the expectations of the time and became a famous astronomer. Maybe discovered a space object of her own.”

He wanted to suggest a web search, but kept his mouth shut. Perhaps the girl followed her dreams, or perhaps not. It was easy to get misled or discouraged in life, and the harsh reality had no place here, tonight.

“Task five of being human,” he said instead. “We never stop learning. Neither did you.”

Ida nodded, lips pursed in approval. “How many people can say they picked up astronomy after death?”

“How many people can say they learned astronomy from a ghost?”

“You haven’t learned anything yet. Do you remember which star is Sirius?”

Gabriel made a vague motion toward the sky. “The bright one, obviously.”

Ida’s chest lifted off the blanket as she shook with laughter.

Warmth, nothing to do with the tea he’d sipped, spread to the tips of his toes. He should be looking at the sky—that was the point of him freezing out here, and the millions of blinking lights were like nothing he’d seen before, or at least not in a long time. Yet, Gabriel couldn’t pull his gaze away from Ida.

He couldn’t believe months ago, he only wanted peace from her so he could focus on regaining his life. Somehow, from a distraction, she’d turned into the solution. She filled the holes left by anger, dissatisfaction, self-pity. Another one of her supernatural abilities? He didn’t think so. It was just her. Who she always had been. She’d once told him the little things were what made her human. She used every opportunity she got to cling to that humanity and somewhere along the way, she made him enjoy those things again. When he’d offered to do the renovations, he did it because it would make her happy—and honestly, because he was looking forward to it. It had nothing to do with needing work to distract or prove himself.

Stargazing may have made Ida feel human—but Ida made him feel human again.

Ida turned her head, and their eyes met. Her wide, playful smile lingered for a moment before turning to a half-open mouth that sent the strangest shivers all over his body.

He’d been wrong. Whatever he felt for her—lust, attraction—it hadn’t been prompted by him missing his old life, and one person in particular. Ida didn’t bring those memories to the surface; she replaced them.

When he wanted to kiss her—such as, right now—it was only because of her.

***

He was looking at her that way again.

In the near-darkness, the green of his eyes changed to that of the deepest sea—or space, perhaps. The two could be eerily similar. But what mattered more was the emotion behind it. Not soft, but intense; not friendly, but heated. It was the gaze from the morning she came out of the statue, following her outburst. The gaze…

The nibbling memory fell into place.

He was looking at her the way Armando had looked at Jane.

Ida blinked, and again, and again.

Gabriel’s eyebrows drew together. “Are you okay?”

Most definitely not. She was daydreaming during the night.

She forced her attention to the sky instead, to something that existed outside of her imagination. And just out from behind the tree— “It’s here!”

A bright point of light, on par with the biggest stars, appeared low on the horizon, a short, white tail announcing it as a comet.

“Wright-Maxwell,” Gabriel said. “See, I learned.”

Entranced, Ida kept her eyes on the comet. Who’d have thought simple space dust, blown away by the sun, could look so magical? And she probably would’ve never known or cared about it if she hadn’t been stuck in this house, in her condition. Perhaps she hadn’t made the best use of her time while she was still alive, but she hadn’t wasted all of it afterward.

Gabriel was right. She continued to learn and grow.

And if she could do that, was it possible to fall in love, too?

“Has it changed?” Gabriel asked.

“Huh?”

“The comet. Is it any different from the other times you’ve seen it?”

His matter-of-fact question felt so jarring against her thoughts. Couldn’t he, how did they say, read the room? One would think a lawyer would be perceptive.

Maybe he could sense her way of thinking, and decided to steer the conversation away. Ida swallowed. Don’t forget: space dust—reality, thinking ofGabriel as Armando—fantasy.

“Uh, no. It wouldn’t. Smaller comets might diminish into rocks as the sun strips away their tail, but not this one. It always stays the same. At least to our eye. It’s possible it breaks apart, but eventually, the pieces get sucked back together. Reformed. And when it comes back around everything appears as it always did.”

“Space dust is weird.”

“We’re all space dust.”

At the edge of her vision, Gabriel’s hand stirred. He stretched it out on the blanket, halfway between them.

“I like that it stays the same,” she said. “It comforts me. People come into the house, age, and leave, and the furniture changes and TV shows end and trends die, but the comet always comes back. Sometimes, I’m all alone, watching it. Or I have a tenant, but he’s inside, glued to the TV. Or it’s cloudy, and I wait all night for a sliver of sky to show, thinking this time, it may come and go without saying hi to me.”

“Sometimes, you have companionship.”

“That was nice of you.”

“Well, I’ve nowhere to be tomorrow, either.”

Still, he had to be freezing, and judging by his lack of interest in space up to this point, comet-watching surely wasn’t that exciting.

“Next time, you’ll have companionship, too.”

“What?” Did he mean it? That he’d stay? But the comet’s orbit was fourteen years—that would mean—

“You’ll find friends. Meet people,” Gabriel said. “When we bring you back to life. Maybe you’ll even find an astronomy society, and you can have midnight barbecues with comet watching, or whatever it is they do…”

Oh. Yes, she supposed she would meet people. Why had she thought Gabriel would stick around?

“Perry hasn’t said yes yet. We don’t know if I will come back to life.”

“We’ll get Perry on our team. I promise.” Gabriel drew in a raspy breath. “Ida, I—”

“You should go back inside. You must be cold.” It had been a beautiful night so far, but she was clinging to the last strands of her fantasy, and Gabriel was surely preparing for another session of listing off facts that would reassure her in the resurrection plan.

Life might be very different by the time Wright-Maxwell rolled around again. Or everything could fail, and she’d remain the same, only gazing at the stars alone.

Gabriel rose to a sitting position. “Are you going to be fine?”

“I’m a ghost. What could happen to me?” Besides pieces of her soul being stripped off by the sun—or a particular man, in this case—and rearranged again, and now feeling all alien and right and wrong at the same time.

Gabriel nodded and collected the mugs, but left the blanket. Once he was gone, Ida stretched her hand to his side of the blanket, imagining she felt the lingering warmth. “Good night, Armando.”