Chapter 18 #3
She wants to tell Elsa she’ll never leave. Wants to promise to stay Henry’s assistant so they can have forever. Wants to explain that she’d choose Elsa over and over. Because maybe this, with Elsa, right here, right now, is the future she actually wants.
More than anything else.
But Elsa kisses her, tugging her down to kneel on the mattress, and Frannie can’t find her words anymore.
Everything is the drag of Elsa’s fingers, the hot slick of her mouth, the wonderful press of their bodies together.
The tingling, static strangeness of her ghostly form is as real and perfect as anything Frannie’s ever felt.
Frannie rucks Elsa’s soft cashmere sweater up, delighting in Elsa’s breathy moan and answering smile.
She glides the shirt up and over Elsa’s head, tossing it triumphantly across the little loft.
Her lace brassiere hugs her beautiful breasts perfectly.
It’s black like her sweater, with a strip of satin fabric below the cups that wraps around her torso, just begging Frannie’s fingers to slip beneath and—
Suddenly, her sweater is back on her body.
They both yelp, falling away from each other. Elsa catches Frannie’s elbows and they teeter there, breathless and shocked, staring at each other wide-eyed.
“Did you know that would happen?” Frannie asks, her voice loud against the quiet of the loft.
“No!” Elsa squeaks, taking back one of her hands to run it down the front of her sweater. “I can take off my shoes, I assumed I could take off everything else.”
“And your shoes don’t … rematerialize on your feet if they’re on the floor and you’re on the couch,” Frannie agrees, shaking her head a little to ground herself.
She could easily let herself get thoroughly caught up in ghost physics—in the fact that she’s about to have sex with a ghost, and how strange and unreal that is. They could spend all night debating the how and why of it.
But her heart is still pounding in her chest. Her body is still tight and tingling. She doesn’t want to discuss ghost physics. She doesn’t want to focus on the how and the why. She just wants to have sex with Elsa, to hell with what she is. It’s who she is.
“So … maybe it’s a distance thing?” Frannie says, trying to sound sure and definitive.
“My clothes have a radius?” Elsa wonders.
“It makes as much sense as anything else,” Frannie says with a shrug, letting her fingers trip down to the hem of Elsa’s sweater again. “Here, up.”
Elsa frowns but lifts her arms willingly, allowing Frannie to more slowly drag her turtleneck up and off. She places it carefully over the head of the air mattress and onto the floor, and then waits. They stare at the sweater for a moment, breathing together, and nothing happens.
“Okay. Ghost clothes have a radius,” Frannie says, attempting an air of finality.
“Okay,” Elsa says, meeting her eyes when Frannie straightens back up. “Good discovery.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t want your underwear coming back at an inopportune moment,” Frannie says, smiling when Elsa giggles.
“That would kill the mood. Like your shirt is now. Tit for tat.”
“Tit for tit,” Frannie corrects, just to hear Elsa laugh again.
The heart lights twinkle around them and Frannie whips her shirt over her head, grinning at Elsa’s little gasp.
They kneel there, staring at each other shirtless, everything crackling so delightfully around them.
Elsa reaches out, her fingers trailing down from Frannie’s neck, her touch a soft, static loveliness that makes Frannie sigh.
The import and gravity of what they’re about to do is heavy around them. And then they crash back together.
Otherworldly and at the same time so blissfully, brilliantly, beautifully real, they shed clothing and exchange open mouthed kisses, hands roaming, learning each other with touch and taste and sound.
It’s more than Frannie ever dreamed it could be—more than it’s ever been with anyone before.
And sure, the light halo around Elsa’s body is different, but it’s really just that it’s Elsa.
Letting her touch, and kiss, and build, and crest, and fall with her. Sharing this with her.
“I love you,” Elsa murmurs later, as they lie sated and naked and joyfully together.
They stare up at the wooden crossbeams of the loft, everything still bathed in that pink plastic glow. Frannie decides that pink is her favorite color. It hasn’t been since she was three, but it is now.
“I love you too,” Frannie says, cuddled into Elsa’s side. She rolls her neck on Elsa’s chest to stare up at her beautiful face.
Her blond, usually coifed hair is an absolute mess, her cheeks bright pink, her lips plump. She looks debauched and blissed out and Frannie finds a giggle of pride cutting up her throat.
Elsa smiles at her. “We’ll make creative use of your work laptop while you’re gone.”
Frannie laughs and surges up to press their lips together. As much as the potential for forever swirls in her stomach, pushing at her throat, desperate to be verbalized, there’ll be time for decisions and promises later. Time to really consider her future, their future.
Tonight, she wants to savor the time they have, before she leaves for two weeks for the holidays.
“It’s a date,” Frannie says into her mouth.