31
Demi
“This is all for me?” Tristan asks.
After the shower, we lounge in bed, me in a robe and Tristan with a towel wrapped around his waist. The bed is cluttered with half a dozen tote bags.
When I went into town today, I stopped at a menswear store and picked out some new clothes for Tristan.
I’m not sure how ghost clothing works, but I’m fairly certain he doesn’t have much in the way of apparel, and since he’s a real boy now, I figured I’d help the guy out.
I picked out some button-up shirts, jeans, undershirts, and some black boxer briefs.
He stands to yank up a pair of the latter, and once they’re on, he says, “Oh, these are nice.”
I smile.
He looks… god, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so handsome in real life.
He’s pulled his wet hair into a bun at the back of his head, letting me really see his exquisite bone structure unobstructed by his pretty hair for the first time.
His jaw could cut glass. Those gray eyes of his shine like silver.
His body, unencumbered by clothes, is impossibly tall and broad.
He’s well-muscled, but not in a gratuitous way.
I’m particularly drawn to his forearms, corded, veins rising in sharp relief without even flexing. His big, long-fingered hands—
“You need to stop looking at me like that,” he says .
I drag my attention back to his face. His eyes have gone a little darker, a little hooded, and I like the way this expression makes him look kind of dangerous.
Biting my lip to hold back a grin, I say, “Like what?”
Tristan slides back onto the bed and looms over me, fists pressed into the mattress on either side of my hips, caging me in. He smirks.
“Like you’re circling your prey,” he replies. His eyes focus on my mouth, then move down, cataloging the swath of skin between my breasts, left bare by my half-done robe.
Funny he should say that, because right now he’s looking at me with animal intent.
If anyone is the predator here, it’s certainly him.
I marvel at the way the past twenty-four hours have ignited the primitive side of a man who, up until now, has been nothing if not a stoic gentleman.
Something about that dichotomy makes me press my thighs together.
The shy, observant man turned completely feral for me alone; there’s power in that.
Amid my musings, he leans in and captures my mouth in a kiss.
It starts playfully and a little rough, with his teeth dragging my lip into his mouth.
Then it slows. He takes a long, slow breath in through his nose and sighs into me.
The kiss changes, and— oh, god— it feels different.
It feels like an answer to a question I didn’t even know I needed to ask.
It feels like two puzzle pieces clicking together after you’ve spent hours trying to determine where they belong.
Our mouths separate, and we’re left suspended in space, staring at each other. I can tell by the look on his face, the crease between his brows, that whatever I just felt, he’s feeling it too. He might even feel it harder because his chest is rising and falling faster than it should.
My phone rings.
The moment breaks, and Tristan clears his throat, shifting to sit next to me instead of leaning down over me.
I grab my phone from where it sits halfway beneath one of Tristan’s new shirts and glance at the screen. It’s Blue, and for the first time since we were teenagers and I stayed out all night without telling her, I feel a well of dread open up in my gut at the thought of speaking to her.
Blue is the one person I wish I could talk to about Tristan.
I want to sit on the couch in her lighthouse cottage with a lap full of snacks and tell her about how he touches me the way I’ve always wanted to be touched, how he looks at me like I’m the first sunrise he’s ever seen.
I want to tell her how powerful I felt when I spoke the incantation to bring him back, and how proud I am of myself for pulling this off.
It’s a big deal, bringing a man back from the dead.
Tristan is here, he’s alive, and I made that happen. I could be given the choice to do the spell to bring him back a hundred times, and no matter the consequences, I would still bring him back to life. That’s not even a question. Be that as it may, facing the consequences won’t be easy.
I know my aunts well enough to know how disappointed they’ll be in me.
Proud that I decided to dabble in the craft, maybe, but black magic and necromancy are two things that are decidedly “do not touch.” And, not only did I touch, I dove right into the deep end and bathed in it.
Their disappointment will be as gentle as they can manage, I know that, but it will be heart-rending.
My sister, on the other hand, will be merciless.
“Why is he still calling you?” Tristan asks, his voice careful but low, like he’s trying to sound casual despite the undercurrent of something else, something very much not casual.
It snaps me back into the moment, and I find myself confused at the question.
“He? Who?”
Tristan nods at my phone. “I’m assuming it’s Owen.”
“It’s Blue,” I say, shaking my head.
“Oh.”
“What made you think it was Owen calling?”
“The look on your face.”
“That bad, huh?” I ask, cringing a little.
“It wasn’t a happy look, that’s for sure. Everything okay?”
My heart is heavy when I send Blue to voicemail, and I sigh.
Tristan takes my hand in his. It’s so casual. Like we’ve been holding hands for years. But the soft smile at the corner of his mouth when he looks down at our entwined fingers reminds me that this is a big deal.
“She’s going to be livid when she finds out what I did. The aunts will be mad, too, but Blue is going to be pissed.”
“What did you do?”
I look at Tristan for a moment, then gesture at his body. “Performed a necromancy spell unsupervised after promising not to abuse the book they gave me. Brought a ghost back from the dead, which is, canonically, against the laws of nature. And kept the whole thing secret from them.”
“Ah,” he says. Understanding smooths out his tense features, and he nods slowly.
“I’m in deep shit, Tristan.”
“To be fair, you’re a fully grown adult. You can’t be in trouble with your family.”
“You don’t know my sister.”
He squeezes my hand. “I don’t like that.”
I can tell that he’s starting to get defensive on my behalf.
Part of me is flattered by it; it’s sweet that he’s willing to take my side even though I am obviously the one in the wrong in this situation.
At the same time, my aunts and sister have always been overly protective of me, and I’m not sure I need that from Tristan as well. Moreover, I don’t think I deserve it.
“The aunts told me that the book was for research purposes only. I chose to use it to bring you back to life. They are going to have opinions. Strong ones.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, looking down at our interlocked hands. His thumb caresses a path up and down my index finger. “I don’t think it’s fair for them to punish you for it.”
“Technically, they haven’t punished me yet. I’m sort of just pre-emptively punishing myself in preparation.”
“That’s not fair, either.”
“Tristan, I’m the one in the wrong here.”
“Impossible,” he says with a playful smile. “You can do no wrong.”
I roll my eyes. “Yes, I can.”
“No, I mean it. There isn’t a thing you could do that would make me not be on your side. ”
The heaviness in my gut starts to dissipate. It’s amazing how good Tristan is at that: putting me at ease.
“What if, instead of bringing you back to life, I’d accidentally raised a horde of zombies instead?”
He grins. “Easy. I would have blamed it on the incantation. Latin is a notoriously difficult language.”
“What if I decided to stage a coup and take over the world?”
“I’d say,” he brings our hands to his mouth and presses a kiss to my knuckles. “Long live the queen.”
I lean back against the headboard and laugh, my entire nervous system going from rigid to pliant. I gaze at Tristan with his handsome man-bun and his clear gray eyes and his broad, bare chest, and I think that maybe, with him in my corner, coming clean with my family might not be so bad.
“Thank you,” I say.
“For what?”
“For being a good guy.”
He smiles. “You deserve good.”