24
Tristan
“What do you do all night when I’m asleep?” Demi asks.
It’s been a few hours since she touched herself for me in the library.
We spent that time talking in the kitchen while she ate a sandwich, and I tried to act like my entire world hadn't just turned upside down.
I fear I will never recover from what the sound of her moans did to me, or the look on her face when she came.
Now we’re standing at the doorway of her bedroom. She’s in a pair of sweatpants and a tank top, and her face is freshly washed, glowing with her nighttime moisturizer.
“Do you want the truth?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Most nights, I sit outside your door until morning.”
“Really?” The softness in her eyes nearly unmans me; they’re so blue and clear that I feel myself drawn closer to her, like she’s hooked me in the gut and is slowly reeling me in.
“Really,” I reply. “Is that weird?”
She makes a show of thinking about it for a second, her expression wry and teasing. Then her face breaks into a smile, and she shakes her head.
“Not weird. But maybe you can sit inside my room, instead of outside, from now on. ”
This woman.
“I can do that.” I don’t even bother trying to hide my grin when I say it.
Sitting by her door has started to feel like a little too far from her for my liking.
Especially now, after talking her through the prettiest orgasm I’ve ever seen, all I want is to be near her, next to her. Close enough to feel her warmth.
“Come on,” she says, and I follow her into the room, pulling the door almost closed behind me, leaving a crack in case Mittens wants to come or go.
I stand across the bed from her, and her fingers hook into the waistband of her sweatpants. She starts to nudge them down, revealing the slopes of her hips, then stops.
“I don’t wear pants in bed. I roll around too much, and they get tangled.”
I hold my hands up. “Dealbreaker. I have to protect my virtue.”
A wicked light gleams in her eyes. Demi bends forward and starts to shimmy her thick hips out of her pants, giving me a glimpse of her creamy thighs and a peek down her tank top at the same time. Her hair falls over one eye, and she smirks.
“Your virtue? Where was that virtue when you were asking me to show you how wet you made me?”
“Fuck,” I groan. I’m so far out of my league with her.
Demi gives me a dark chuckle as she steps out of her pants and slips her delicious body between the covers in her bed. Once she’s settled, she reaches out her hand to me and waves her tattooed fingers.
“Come here,” she says .
Without hesitation, I join her in bed and lie down next to her.
For a moment, we just look at each other.
I don’t know what she’s thinking, but for me, I’m staring into her eyes and remembering how she looked sitting on the desk in front of me with her legs open.
The way she looked at me when she was about to come. The trust she gave me, what a gift.
I’m devouring her eye contact, afraid I might disappear if she looks away.
“Will you hold me tonight?” she asks.
My heart almost breaks. “Of course. I just wish you could feel my arms around you.”
“I wish you could feel me in your arms.”
“Me, too.”
“I wish… a lot of things, Tristan.”
“Me, too.”
“If there was a way…” She trails off and bites her lip.
“A way to, what?”
“If there was a way for you to come back, would you try it?”
Of all the things I thought she might say, it never occurred to me for it to be this.
The suggestion hits me like a storm. It barrels into me, leaving destruction in its wake.
There’s nothing I want more in the world than to come back, to be the man Demi needs.
To taste food again, to touch her and actually feel it, to be alive.
The longing is so complete and encompassing that it’s painful to think about.
“Demi… I don’t think I could survive hoping for something like that and it not working. ”
“To be fair, you’re already dead,” she teases, trying to lighten the mood I’ve suddenly made heavy. “If I could find a way, would you try?”
I search her face and find hesitant excitement, the spark of a secret. “ Is ?there a way?”
“I’ve been reading the spell book. There are a few resurrection spells in it that seem relatively straightforward.”
“I don’t know about that. If it were easy to bring someone back from the dead, millions of people would do it every day.”
“All I’m saying is, what would it hurt to try?”
“Pretty sure every horror novel I’ve ever read warns against this type of magic. There’s always a consequence,” I say.
I don’t know why I’m arguing against it so much. Maybe it’s because it came out of nowhere, and I can’t wrap my head around it. It’s too much for one night. I’m still reeling from watching the woman of my dreams fuck her hand in front of me. Now she’s talking about bringing me back to life?
Disrupting the balance of life and death is for the gods, not a girl and a ghost.
And yet…what if?
“I’m willing to risk a consequence if it means bringing you back,” Demi says.
“You are? Why?”
“I like you, Tristan.”
“Liking me is enough for you to dabble in black magic?”
“Well, I like you a lot.”
My phantom heart skips a beat .
“That’s enough for me. That you like me.
” I say even though it's only half true.
Her affection and even the admission that she feels anything for me is more than I could ever ask for.
I feel blessed to even be in her presence, to be seen by her, to be near her.
At the same time, I want her so badly that it makes me feel greedy.
It makes me want more, want everything, want her all to myself forever.
Her mouth pinches, and I’m filled with the sense that I’ve let her down somehow. It’s the worst feeling in the world.
“So, you wouldn’t want to try? If there was a way?” She asks, and I can’t stand the way she’s looking at me, like her hopes are dashed, like I’ve made her sad.
Desperate, I reach out and touch her face. She shivers, and her expression softens.
“Demi, I would do anything to be able to touch you for real,” I say, and she relaxes even more upon my reassurance.
“It’s because I want it so much that it scares the shit out of me.
To be so close to being yours just to have it ripped away if the spell doesn’t work, or for something bad to happen to you if it does. ”
“You worry a lot for someone who’s already died,” she says.
“Maybe it’s because I’ve experienced death that I worry.”
Demi rolls her eyes. “I guess I can’t argue with that.”
“Listen, I’m not saying no to this. I just don’t want to get my hopes up,” I say.
“I get that. We can keep our expectations low.”
“And I know I said I’d do anything to touch you, but there’s one thing I won’t risk. ”
“What’s that?” she asks.
“You,” I say, caressing my knuckles along her jaw. Her eyes flutter closed at whatever sensation greets her when my energy touches her skin.
“You must really like me.” Her smile is tender, sleepy.
“More than like.”
~
I spend the night basking in the sound of Demi’s soft breathing as she sleeps next to me, and thinking about the resurrection spell.
Could she do it? From what I know of witchcraft, it’s like a prayerful science.
It honors the Earth while using components from nature to weave spells.
I don’t know how much skill it takes or whether a witch needs supernatural powers for the spells to work.
Has Demi ever performed a spell before? And if not, does she really want to cut her teeth on a spell like this?
The spell book lies on the damask fainting couch positioned at the end of her bed. I grab it and find Demi has slipped a bookmark between the pages toward the back. The very paper seems to hum against my fingers as I open the spell book to the place she has marked.
Her makeshift bookmark is an old photograph of me.
Bemused, I smile at the faded Polaroid, wondering where she found it and what thoughts went through her head when she looked at it.
It was taken at a concert, which one, I couldn’t say.
I only know because I’ve got a backstage pass around my neck, a camera in my hand, and a smile on my face.
“‘78” is written in splotchy blue ink on the back. The year I died .
She used it to mark a page of the book with a resurrection spell called “Anima Voco: Call the Soul.” ?It reads almost like a recipe in a cookbook, with the ingredients at the top of the page and numbered instructions below.
The only difference is the addition of the Latin incantation, written in stanzas like a poem.
When Demi said the spell seemed relatively straightforward, I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but now that it’s in front of me, I see she wasn’t downplaying its simplicity. A list of items to gather (herbs, soil, salt, water), instructions to mix them, and words to say.
Hope kindles like an impending disaster in my chest.
What if? What if this type of magic is real, and this spell can really bring me back to life? What if this woman, who has already made me feel revived after half a century dead, could make me alive again?
The risk would be whatever balance we upset by giving a dead man a life that no longer belongs to him. The risk would be experiencing death again, someday, with an inevitability that would hang over my head like a guillotine blade for as long as my borrowed time lasts.
But here’s the truth: I would risk dying again just to touch her skin once.
Once.
Hours later, when morning rises gray through the windows, and misty-soft rain begins to trickle down the glass, Demi wakes with a stretch that puts her warm body on artful display for me. She opens her eyes, smiles at me, and despite the storm clouds outside, all I see is the sun.
“Good morning,” she says, inching closer to me and pulling the blankets to her chin .
I could get used to this, waking up with Demi St. James.
“Morning, beautiful.”
At that, she blushes for me. “I had good dreams last night.”
“About what?”
“A repeat of the library,” she says. “Only this time, they were your hands.”
“I wish,” I groan.
Her gaze ticks down to the spell book on my lap, then back up to my face.
“What do you think? Should we give it a go?” she asks.
I know what I want, so I don’t argue this time, and I don’t hesitate.
“Fuck it,” I say. “Bring me back to life.”