Bat #2
So I just nodded against his shoulder. Pressed my face into the curve where his neck met his collarbone and inhaled. Summer fruits and something indefinably Charlie. Something I wanted to drown in.
His hands moved to my black tee. My second skin. Tugged it upward. The fabric peeled away as I lifted my arms to help him. He tossed it across the room.
Then his fingers found the button of my jeans. Black denim, ripped at the knees, worn soft from years of wear before I died. The sort of jeans that had felt like rebellion once. Like armour.
Charlie struggled with the button. Fumbled. Cursed under his breath. “I swear I’m normally smoother at all this.”
Despite everything—the wild want, the desperate need, the screaming tension in my non?existent muscles—I laughed again. “Here.” I reached down. Worked the button free with ease.
Charlie took over from there, dragging the denim down my hips. Over my thighs. Past my knees. The fabric caught on my ankles, bunched around my Converses, ripping those off too with a helping kick from me.
Charlie stared.
Just… stared.
At me. At my body. At my too-pale skin, that silly bat tattoo on my left shoulder, my horribly sharp angles and the embarrassing evidence of exactly how much I wanted him.
I had to look away. Swallowed hard. Fixed my gaze on the ceiling. On the cobwebs in the corner of the ceiling. On anything except those blue eyes cataloguing every inch of me.
“Stop that,” I said.
“What?”
“Looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
Silence. Heavy and loaded.
Then, “Look at me, Bat.”
“No.”
“Look at me.”
I forced my eyes back to his face. Found him watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite parse. Something intense. Something that made my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with the puncture wound that killed me.
Charlie crawled up my body. Slow. Deliberate. Supporting his weight on one arm while the other hand trailed from my hip—gentle pressure, barely there—all the way up to the bottom of my ribs.
His fingers stopped just where my heart used to beat.
“This body of yours is perfect,” he said.
I snorted. Couldn’t help it. “Don’t be ridiculous. For a start, it’s not even real.”
Charlie pressed a kiss to my ribs. Soft lips against cold skin. “Lies,” he murmured against my sternum.
Then lower. “If it wasn’t real, then I wouldn’t be able to do this.”
His tongue dragged all the way up to my nipple. Wet heat. Then teeth—just a nip, just enough pressure to make me gasp.
The moan that tore out of me sounded feral. Desperate. Like something from one of those badly acted pornos.
“Or this.” Charlie’s mouth moved to my neck. Licked a slow stripe up to my jaw.
“Or this.” His teeth caught my earlobe. Tugged. Then released to suck my bottom lip into his mouth, pulling gently before letting go.
My dick throbbed. Throbbed, throbbed, throbbed. I had to swallow down the words rising in my throat—touch me there, please, please touch me there, I’ll do anything—because I refused to be that pathetic. That needy.
Even though I absolutely was.
Charlie’s hands continued their exploration. Mapped the topography of my chest. Traced the ladder of my ribs, carefully avoiding my death wound. Smoothed over the sharp jut of my hip bones. His palms skated across my stomach—concave, as it always was—and down to my thighs.
Each touch felt like revelation. Like archaeology. Like he was excavating something precious from beneath layers of dust and forgetting.
“Fuck, you’re so cold,” he breathed, marvelling as he stroked every inch of skin he could reach.
“Sorry about that,” I mumbled. “Side effect of being dead.”
“I don’t mind.” His fingers trailed down my inner thigh. So close to where I needed him. Not close enough. “It’s nice. Refreshing.”
I chose to believe him.
His hand moved higher.
Higher.
Charlie hooked his fingers into the waistband of my briefs—black, of course—and I whimpered.
Fucking whimpered.
Like some desperate, touch-starved creature who’d been locked in a tower for a hundred years. Which, to be fair, wasn’t far from the truth.
My brain scrambled. Short-circuited. Sparked like faulty wiring in a condemned building.
Charlie—lovely, gorgeous Charlie—was about to see my dick. Touch my dick. Do things to my dick that I’d very recently fantasised about while hiding in a dark corner of this manor, hand wrapped around myself.
My underwear came off with a whisper of sound, my cock springing free. Long and flushed, thicker than my lanky frame might suggest. Standing at attention like it had been waiting its entire non?existence for that exact moment.
Yes. Yes. Fucking hell, yes!
Charlie stared down at it. His tongue darted out, wetting his lips. Those perfect, soft lips that had kissed mine in the garden. That had sucked on my bottom lip just moments ago.
Then he lowered his head.
Moved his mouth toward my dick.
If I’d had a functioning heart, it would have stuttered to a complete stop. Flatlined. Called it quits right there.
Because I couldn’t believe, absolutely could not process the fact that I was about to be inside Charlie’s mouth. That those lips would wrap around me. That his tongue would—
The warmth of his breath ghosted across the tip.
Just the breath.
Nothing more.
And I exploded.
No warning. No build-up. No chance to hold back or delay or pretend I had any semblance of control.
My orgasm slammed through me like a freight train—no, like the entire fucking rail system. Years and years of pent-up want and loneliness and desperate need erupting in one spectacular, mortifying moment.
Ectospunk spurted across Charlie’s face.
His cheek.
His lips.
Dripping down his chin.
Everywhere.
Oh god.
OH NO.
Oh, no, no, NO!
He inhaled sharply.
I lost control of everything. My body. My solidness. The careful concentration required to maintain physical form scattered like notes from a bad chord.
The bed disappeared beneath me.
I fell.
Through the mattress. Through the floorboards. Through empty space and dust and the memory of what it meant to occupy a single point in reality.
Past the ground floor. The entrance hall. The kitchen.
Down. Down. Down.
The basement loomed below me. That terrible, forbidden door with its metal bands and the presence behind it. The thing I’d spent years avoiding. The entity that made even Lady Grimthorne tremble in terror.
No. Not there. Anywhere but there.
I grabbed onto something—some invisible thread of will or stubborn refusal to be swallowed by whatever darkness waited below—and yanked myself back together.
Forced substance back into my limbs. Weight. Mass. The sensation of existing in one place instead of everywhere and nowhere at once.
I stopped falling.
Hovered in the darkness between floors.
Breathed. Or pretended to breathe. Whatever the equivalent was for the incorporeal.
Then shot upward as fast as my panicked consciousness could manage. Back through ceilings and walls. Back toward Charlie. Before he thought I’d abandoned him again. Before he thought this was some sick joke. Before he—
I burst through the bedroom floor.
Charlie stood beside the bed, wiping his face with his hand. Staring down at the substance coating his palm with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
The ectospunk shimmered faintly in the dim light. Opalescent. Like oil on water or the inside of a seashell. Already beginning to fade at the edges.
“Well,” Charlie said slowly. “That answers my other question.”
I wanted to disappear again. Wanted to sink through the floor and keep falling until I hit the Earth’s core and stayed there forever.
“What question?” The word came out as a miserable groan. “How long do lonely ghosts who haven’t been touched in decades last in bed?”
He chuckled. “No. About whether you could actually come or not.”
I scowled at him, crossing my arms. At some point during my descent or ascent through the manor, my clothes had reformed. Black T-shirt. Ripped jeans. Converses. The full armour of my eternal aesthetic locked back into place. Sigh.
“You’ll be pleased to know that ectospunk evaporates,” I muttered. “Within like, twenty seconds, usually. Sometimes more like thirty if it’s particularly… substantial.”
Charlie’s smirk widened. “Well, that makes for easy cleanup.”
“I’m glad you’re finding this so funny,” I snapped.
Charlie laughed harder, wiping the last glistening traces of ectoplasm from his cheek.
His ridiculous Spider-Man pyjama bottoms did absolutely nothing to hide the very obvious bulge straining against the fabric.
Red and blue spiders. And beneath all that cotton, evidence that he’d very much been enjoying what had just—almost—happened.
Guilt crashed through me.
I’d just given him a facial he didn’t ask for, then literally vanished into thin air. Left him lying there, hard and wanting, while I panicked my way through the floorboards like some sort of perverted poltergeist.
And now I wouldn’t even be able to get him off. Whatever emergency energy reserves I’d tapped into earlier had been thoroughly depleted.
I threw myself onto the bed. Tried to grab a pillow to shove over my face. My fingers passed straight through it. I grasped again. This time I caught hold of the fabric—barely—but lifting it required a monumental effort. Like bench-pressing a piano. Or dragging my consciousness through concrete.
Eventually, I managed to get the pillow to cover my face, though it fell through me, essentially burying me in feathers.
“Listen, I’m so sorry to do this to you,” I groaned into my feathery fortress, “but I’m all out of juice.”
“You mean ghost jizz? I think one taste is enough for now, as delicious as it was. And cold. Like ice cream.”
I made a strangled noise that might have been a laugh or a sob. Hard to tell at that point. “No, I mean energy. To touch you. Suck you off.”
The admission tasted like defeat. Like every other time I’d failed to deliver. Failed to be enough. Failed to be the person someone needed me to be.