Chapter 3
THREE
Christopher
I’d lied about my parents. I wouldn’t know my father if he glided past me, but my mother I might recognize. She’d been there my first four years on the planet…until the day she left. I’d tried to forget her face. I’d learned to bury my memories of her to avoid the pain. And it worked. Who really remembered before age four? It was like being under murky water and trying to see. But if I saw her, all the hurt and recognition would bubble to the surface.
“Christopher? Please keep talking to me,” the young ghost begged.
I sighed. “All right…we could talk about religion if you want. Some ghosts find it a comfort.”
“No, thanks.” His jaw tightened.
Somehow, I knew not to push. A strong, tingling sensation raced down the back of my neck. It was impossible to know why, but his essence was familiar to me, even as his looks were excitingly new.
“Tell me more about you. You have no family?” he asked.
“I got my wife, Abby.”
“You’re married?”
“Ex-wife,” I admitted. “But Abby and I still care about each other.”
“Ah,” the ghost said. He gave me an interested once-over.
Every moment I spent with this ghost was making me hot and confused.
Why was I noticing him?
From the thin material of his T-shirt, where it hugged his skin, to his hair stuck up in the front, to his mouth, I was noticing.
Like right now, I was seeing how his lips were naturally pink. More than Abby’s ever were without her lipstick.
What … the … actual … fuck?
Why compare his lips to Abby’s at all? I was not a sexual person. Far from it.
Uneasy, I almost offered him the flask of whiskey I kept in my jacket. Fuck, I could use a shot. But ghosts didn’t eat or drink much. It was one of the few things I didn’t envy about them. Ghosts had their senses, but taste was the least developed one. The experience of eating didn’t leave them fulfilled, so they tended to skip it.
Me? I loved food, especially breakfast. Flaky biscuits with scrambled eggs. Or buttermilk pancakes swimming in syrup. Crispy bacon. Bread with jam and butter. I’d eaten a lot of breakfast for dinner since my divorce had gone through. Because…why not? The human race was difficult to be among. If I had to live there, I needed some pleasures. My solidly built frame and slight belly indicated how much I loved food, and I didn’t care. When you went hungry as a child, you took seconds if they were offered.
Abby claimed there was more to it. She argued that I “ate my emotions.”
Maybe she had a point. I didn’t like to examine my feelings, and I was carrying about twenty extra pounds.
“I don’t know if I was in a relationship.” He sniffed. “What if I was married, too? I’m just a fucking blank.” He wrapped his arms around himself. “Who am I without my memories?”
“You’re you,” I tried to explain. “The essence of you is still here. Your tastes, desires, fears, hopes, likes and dislikes are here. The parts that make up your personality don’t change, not at the core. That’s what I sense, what I see. Some ghosts do retain fragments or more, some believe in multiple past lives, others visit the human realm for fun, but they’ve lost their tether to it.”
“That’s so sad.”
“Not for the ghosts. For the humans, yes. But really, it’s just a different way of thought. It’s like when you stop believing in one god who sees all and judges each life, and instead believe in a god who is part of all and everything, but is not aware of you as an individual?—”
“Stop.” He held out a hand.
“Okay.” I cocked my head, studying him. “Religion seems to be a trigger for you.”
“If it is, I don’t know why…”
He might not remember anything, but his whole demeanor had changed at the word “religion.” While they didn’t have factual memory, most ghosts had reactions to certain words, good or bad, and that indicated experiences.
For example, the word “cat” had made my last client’s ghost-grandma go all mushy inside. A smile never failed to cross her face and she’d touch her thighs as if to make a lap. So, no true recollection of it, but she must have loved at least one cat. As her granddaughter heard this in my official report, she wept openly, saying her grandmother had needed to rehome her cat, Milo, when she’d moved in. My client had severe allergies, so there wasn’t a choice, but her granny had kept Milo’s picture on her nightstand.
That was where my job came into play. When given the right prompts, some ghosts could recover pieces of their lives. Never the entire existence, but crumbs, little traces of their past lives. And desperate families and lovers would pay me for those breadcrumbs. Even if the ghosts didn’t remember anything, they were often willing to visit for shits and giggles.
My most successful case lately was a still-alive, elderly husband who was happy to let his wife haunt him. “It’s better than trying to replace her,” he’d told me. “Can you imagine dating at my age? I don’t have the patience for somebody new.”
And his ghost-wife had enough memories of him—the brand of cereal he favored, how often he changed the bedsheets—to make the visits successful. They didn’t confess their everlasting love, or ask for a kiss, which I was happy about as I channeled her ghost. The visits seemed more like a friendship to me, but what did I know about it? My marriage had ended. Who was I to judge a couple who’d weathered nearly fifty years before their end?
“Will you work for me or not? I need to find out who I was. I’ll find a way to compensate you.” He licked his lower lip.
“Good, ’cause I don’t do charity.”
Something about this ghost got to me in ways I didn’t like or understand. And it was the truth—I charged for my help. I’d grown up poor and didn’t miss it. Some had told me I shouldn’t openly want money. Or that I needed to offer my gifts for free. To that I said: Those people hadn’t gone to bed hungry. Or worried that their next foster family wouldn’t keep them.
I didn’t hurt others if I could help it. I kept my word to people. I was an average human, psychic powers aside, going along in the world. I didn’t understand my reaction to the swipe of his lip or the plea in those big brown eyes. Why it made me want to say yes to him—even though we both knew he couldn’t fucking pay me.
“I bet your wife would tell you to take me on,” he cajoled.
“Ex-wife,” I snapped.
Abby and I met in high school when I’d transferred to a better foster home, where she was already living. We’d clicked right away as people who took the world seriously, and we’d helped each other get through the foster system. I’d married Abby at nineteen, and we’d divorced two years ago.
“I still love you, Chris,” she’d told me. “You’re the first steady thing in my life. But the ghost stuff has become a lot. You’re obsessed with the spiritual realm, and that leaves me behind. And, most importantly, I want kids and you don’t. Hell, you don’t even want to have sex most days. I like sex, I miss sex. I deserve sex!”
What could I say? She wasn’t wrong. I was wrong and always had been. There was a lacking in me. Lacking of what, or why I lacked it, I couldn’t explain.
“We have to divorce, or we’ll end up hating each other.” She’d begun to cry.
I’d patted her back awkwardly and tried to wipe her tears. I’d wanted to give her the world. I’d loved her and had liked being married. But she’d been right about me; not only had I hesitated in the bedroom, uncomfortable and not always able to perform, but I’d had zero interest in having children. Not after the disaster of my childhood. Abby was the opposite. Wanting to have kids to prove she could overcome her past and love them. I’d let her serve me divorce papers, given her the house, and moved out. It was the right decision for us. But sometimes, the loneliness made me miss being a husband and belonging to another person.
After Abby and I broke up, I didn’t join any dating services or check out any strip clubs. None of that interested me like it would some guys who’d had just one serious girlfriend. When I did venture out, I only felt lonelier in the dating scene. I sure as hell didn’t have a spark of attraction for other girls. I began to wonder about my lack of a sex drive, even beyond Abby. I’d almost gone to see a doctor for it. My lack of sparks.
But, man, I was feeling a spark now. For this newly dead, grieving, hot, male ghost.
My cheeks flamed; my pulse raced.
For years, I’d talked myself out of needing anyone’s touch. I’d loved Abby, but I was never in love with her. Maybe I was too afraid.
Now something in me had stirred to life. Something hot and dirty, making me sweat.
I tried not to imagine him touching me. The press of his fingers on me, demanding a response.
“Look, I got a job to do.” I turned, hugged my arms to my chest, and hurried to stalk away. He might not believe in past lives, but I did. And his lost pleas only made me more certain I had known him—somewhere, somehow. That I could help him, even. But these other sensations? How I felt when his scared eyes locked with mine? Those confused me.
“Wait!” He grabbed my hand, his fingers latching on to mine with a surprisingly strong grip.
I stared at our laced fingers, a jolt of chemistry making me hard.
No, this can’t be right. It’s just … too long since I’ve been touched.
“Please,” he said, still squeezing my fingers. Then his eyes widened. “I can feel you! Can you feel me?”
“Yes.” I held his gaze, but I took my hand away.
“Oh, God. I’m so glad. I imagined being immaterial and unable to touch you or anyone ever again.”
“Well, in the human realm that’s true. You could only see me there, watch me, not touch me. But this is your plane of existence. You’re real here, same as you once were there.”
“I don’t know who to visit, even if I could go there. I had people who cared about me. I can feel that much. It’s like my name—their names—are on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t—” He broke off with a frustrated noise.
At least he had people. When Abby and I separated, our friends had gone with her or drifted away. A sobering thought struck me: This young ghost had been touched more recently than me. Loved more recently than me. What the hell did that say about my life?
He eyed me. “And somehow, you’re real in both realms?”
I gave a curt nod.
“Wow, okay.”
“But I have more control in the human realm. Ghosts have the control here.”
“What control?” He snorted.
Fuck, he was a newbie.
Ghosts could change their setting at will. It could be a beach one day and mountains the next. It was like a dream you could control to a degree. And it was real for them. The salty spray of a wave, snowflakes on an outstretched tongue. If anything, ghosts’ senses were sharper than humans, except for the taste thing.
But newbies had to learn this skill, so for them the background was like a white screen—tiny clouds floating by, but that was all.
I glanced at some ghosts nearby. They were whispering to each other, having what appeared to be a minor argument. Unfortunately, ghosts were a cliquey bunch. Like middle school fuckery all over again. They’d teach the young ghost…in time, but only once a certain ghost group approached him with an offer. Until then, new arrivals drifted, aimless and afraid. The exceptions were ghosts who died together. Lucky bastards, those. And the babies. They were taken in by a group on arrival and well cared for.
“Okay, look, I have some time. I know a few tricks that might help you remember something. No promises.”
“Thank you!” He flung himself at me, but I quickly sidestepped the hug.
“Don’t thank me so fast,” I growled. “If you do recall things, I’m charging you somehow for my time. I’ll bill you the hours if we get lucky. And I’m still stopping the moment I see my actual paying-client’s father.”
The truth was, I could spend days in the ghost world and it would be mere minutes at home with my client. But he had no clue about how time was. Ghost-boy had no clue about anything.