The Haunted Victorian #5
I can't tell him it's wrong to kill every man I bring home. Or that it means I'll be alone forever. I'm afraid that's exactly what he wants. So, instead, I appeal pragmatically. "If you kill every man I bring home, one day, they'll trace them back to me, and they'll take me away from you."
I swallow down the other reasons. But it's clinging, this loneliness. Cloying, a sticky tar that's invaded me, and I can't tear it away.
Eric's behavior has become increasingly erratic, so I need to set some boundaries. But the last thing I want to do is hurt him. It's just… we can't keep going on like this. It's wrong. And selfishly, I need more.
His ghostly pressure wraps around my body, pulling me into a hug. I look around the empty room. The TV is off, the screen black, reflecting only me. "Eric…" I whisper.
The pressure rubs my shoulder, attempting to comfort me. It doesn't work. But he keeps going until it does. I sigh, letting my book fall to the floor, and cuddle with my ghost.
He rubs my shoulders gently, rhythmically, and I fall asleep like that, waking hours later when I become weightless. Floating up the stairs, Eric's invisible arms carry me, fueled by whatever strange magic this house possesses.
In my bedroom, the blankets peel back. I lie down, curl up in a ball, and a subtle breeze cools my neck before he tucks me in. But even under the covers, the cool sensation continues, spreading across my skin.
"Not now, Eric."
The fabric rustles beside me while I try and fail to ignore him. The sound continues, fabric shifting. And then the bed starts rocking. Subtle at first, until the joints in the old wooden posts squeak and I let out a laugh.
"You're not funny," I muse into the darkness.
It's the first time I've smiled in days.
The squeaking stops, and the cool pressure returns to my skin, faintly brushing up my legs, beneath my pajama pants.
I part them involuntarily, as though there were no other option, no universe that exists in which I'd ever deny him.
The first time I felt Eric's presence was on a night much like this. Early summer. Everything was in bloom. The nights were getting warmer, and I thought I was dreaming when a breeze danced across my skin. I had the covers over me, after all. It wasn't possible to feel such things.
Physical things, with no apparition.
I've never seen his form. But Eric has a presence.
He's a breeze and pressure and icy confidence, an awareness, always there, always watching.
Some days I wonder if I'm going mad. All alone in this big house full of secrets.
I wonder if I've conjured him up and all the chaos of this house is me.
Something dark and evil in my family line.
It's the only excuse I have, after everything I've witnessed, been a party too, that I'm still craving it. Craving him.
The cool pressure continues to slide up my legs, teasing me the way he knows I like. My knees fall open after I kick off my nightclothes.
My hand slides down my body, and with my fingertips, I tease my opening.
I'm getting wet, so I dip one finger in and swirl the warmth around, circling my clit.
A tingling of cold air concentrates on my sensitive skin, so I spread my legs wider.
His lips feel like a supernova, a burst of luminous stars sparkling across sensitive flesh.
Nothing feels like it, nothing compares.
"I wish I could touch you," I rasp into the dark. His icy lips move faster, more frantic, bringing me toward climax like he's afraid I'll make him stop. After I come, he'll sink his strangely cold cock inside me, and I'll fall apart all over again.
"You're so close, yet in another place entirely," I pant. "I'll never be able to touch you back." It's an ugly thing, existing on the edge of life, like this.
I should take my words back, and yet I say them again, and I can't hold back the sob, even as he pleasures me, even as I climax. "I wish I could touch you. I wish I could hold you."
I wish we weren't always alone, together.
As if punishing me, his thumb presses against my clit, flicking faster. I squeeze my hands under the pillow beneath my head and cry out into the empty room.
Dina
"Do you like how this smells?" I spritz the sample-sized bottle, and a burst of cool air gently caresses my neck, making me giggle. "Okay, what about this one?" I ask, pulling out another sample and spraying in the other direction; a hard smack hits the floor.
"Okay, nevermind, I guess you don't like that one. Oh god, no, you're right, I don't like that either." Then I pause, picking up a third bottle. "Jesus. I'm turning into Greta. This one smells like roses. Always, the fucking roses."
Smack.
"Don't worry, I wasn't going to pick that one. Besides, it's called English Garden. I'm not an octogenarian. Unlike someone I know," I tease, trying to lighten the mood. Nothing like reminding your ghostly lover that he died so long ago, he'd be in his eighties had my great aunt not murdered him.
Things are still weird between us, but this morning, I woke up feeling a little more like myself.
Sighing, I put the samples back in the box, keeping the one he and I both liked.
I pick up the perfume and read the label. "Vanilla and sandalwood. That sounds nice. Maybe I'll wear it the next time I go out."
Smack.
Ignoring his reaction, I huff and get up off the floor, taking the box with me. I leave the sample perfume in the bathroom and bring the rest of the box downstairs, dumping it in the trash.
While washing my hands at the kitchen sink, my attention snags on the gazebo out back.
Innocent enough, a white, round latticed-structure, three steps high, with an ornate metal bench sitting in the center.
Staring through the thick, slightly distorted glass window, I don't notice I've stopped breathing until I'm forced to suck in a shaky breath.
When I moved in, the backyard was a jungle. A mess of untamed thorns and greenery. Now it's a sanctuary. My second favorite part of the estate, but Eric can't come with me back there. He can't leave the house, or he doesn't want to. I'm not sure which.
I took Nix back there. To my sanctuary. I don't know what it was exactly, but I really liked him. Enough to break my rules.
He wasn't just warm. He was fire. Eric's opposite, though that isn't what drew me to him, but the contrast between the two was surreal. He lit the match, flaming all the lonely parts of me.
My fingertips graze my neck where he gripped me tightly, thumbs cradling my face as he kissed the life right out of me.
It's an indulgence, really. Touch. It's something people take for granted.
To be devoured by something so warm, I wanted it to last forever. I stare out at the bench in the gazebo, where we talked and laughed and fucked.
A few nights ago, because I refused to grow old and become a recluse like Greta, I was sitting at a restaurant by myself, and then there he was… This man, this flesh and blood human with a wicked gleam in his eyes.
I couldn't look away. It was unnatural, this heat pouring off of him, but I'd grown so used to the cold, I reveled in it.
All I could picture was this man and my Eric flanking me, pushing into me from front and back—one, a burning inferno, the other, a glacial storm.
A dichotomy of pleasure and pain, light and dark, good and evil.
Those beautiful, bright golden eyes never left mine, as if he could read my filthy thoughts. He confidently strode right up to me and asked if he could sit.
A strange shimmer poured off him, like heat haze on a hot gravel road in the summer.
It reflected in the wineglass, the blood-red tannin legs dripping slowly down the inside of the glass, thick and viscous.
We drank, and I felt unsettled beneath his constant, violently warm, predatory gaze.
It felt like sex and something darker. Like he wanted to devour me.
"Why are you alone?" he'd asked.
I thought of Eric, and rather than saying, it's complicated, I'd replied, "I'm always alone."
"Liar," he'd said, then changed the subject.
And later, when conversation flew comfortably, and things felt lighter, sparking the familiar clawing ache and worry of Eric stuck at home, feeling responsible for his pain, but also just wishing he could enjoy something as simple as dinner out with me, Nix asked, "Why do you look as if the sun has set forever? "
It was a strange thing to say, and I didn't know how to respond. After swallowing a gulp of Malbec, I muttered, "I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm enjoying this. I swear, I'm not… I'm not afraid the sun has set forever," I try to laugh, stealing his phrase.
"If you had no darkness, I might not be so attracted to your light."
My lips parted, and I sucked in a light breath, but he seemed unbothered by the weight of the conversation—that he just admitted he was as attracted to me as I was him, that he could see the secrets hiding inside me, tearing me apart.
The heat between us ratcheted higher, more dangerous than before.
He was seducing me without a single touch.
I shifted in my seat, suddenly needing to escape, but incapable of moving. There was something dark behind Nix's eyes. And maybe, recognizing that darkness, feeling a kind of kinship with it, made me feel safer somehow. He had secrets too, and I liked that. I liked him.
He bought me dinner, and we talked over candlelight until the restaurant closed. And I thought, in another life, maybe, he could really be something to me.
But I couldn't bring him home. Eric would kill him; I knew that. I swear he nearly killed Marv, our neighbor, the other day when he knocked on the door and asked if he could borrow my pruning saw. Eric was becoming unhinged.