87. Dollie—present day
Dollie—present day
T hree.
That lucky number.
Three months.
Three months since I survived the effects of delayed strangulation.
Three months where Ambrose still isn’t a murderer...yet.
Three months since Shane’s useless body slipped into a coma, following a hanging that the town believes was suicide.
Three months in therapy and wearing pretty dresses.
Three diagnoses... none of them physical.
Three months of living with Ambrose as a couple.
Three months of being known to the locals as those weird brother and sister who fuck.
And I don’t even care.
All I care about is here and now, and that feeling in my stomach and the tingle between my legs as Ambrose’s tongue flattens to my pussy.
“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!”
“That’s right.” He laughs, looking up at me from the footwell of his car. “Say my name.”
“Shut up and get back down there.” I push at his head. At the brown wavy hair I no longer see in a warped vision of blue or green.
My psychologist says I saw him that way because my fear of clowns was so intense that my brain morphed their scary features with the person I loved most to help me overcome them.
And I can’t say it didn’t work, because I no longer see them on every corner.
All I see are stars, as I scream out his name and come on his tongue.
Sparkling eyes find me again, a cheeky look on his face as he licks his lips. He places my underwear back in position, pulls down my new dress, and pops open the door. “We’re gonna be late.”
“You sure this is a good idea?” I’m still kinda doubtful as I accept his hand and let him help me from the car.
Stepping behind me, he makes sure my pretty pink off-the-shoulder dress is covering my ass, and he leads me toward the door and the people who mull around it.
Ignoring the whispers, I focus only on what Ambrose says.
“It’ll be fine. We don’t know they’ll come through, and even if it happens, all it will do is prove everything I’ve told you.”
I nod, swallowing down my nerves.
It’s weird, but I haven’t seen any ghosts since seeing my doctor. And yet here I am, wondering if any will come through and talk to us tonight.
I walk inside in clog-like shoes, spotting Annabelle and Nyx at the large table set up in the center of The Funhouse. Both munch down one of my cupcakes. Abandoning her cake for a second, Annabelle licks a little frosting from Nyx’s cheek, then laughs about it.
Valaria has given me a contract now, and this is probably my fifteenth or sixteenth gig where people have enjoyed my baking.
I take a seat next to Annabelle as Ambrose heads to the bar to get us some drinks.
It’s funny, having a date in a bar.
Shane and I did it once, and we ended up arguing. If I’d ignored every feeling and stayed with him, he’d have had some choice words over me attending this kind of thing.
“Oh, Lancie, don’t go to that shit. You’ll be seeing ghosts again if you do. Have a night in.”
“Do we really have money for two nights out?”
Because he’d have definitely been going out.
A wave of gratitude for that relationship being over greets me. My gaze wanders through the sea of people to Ambrose, who’s gotten caught up at the bar by people who haven’t realized he isn’t working tonight.
His eyes meet mine, those perfect greens, like emeralds, set against tanned skin. Each silver scar moves under purple lighting. Some would say they are imperfections, but to me, they only make him more beautiful.
I can never get enough.
He shrugs, the people pleaser in him wanting to help because the bar is rammed.
Smiling, I sign, it’s okay.
His lips curl, and he signs back, a few minutes, no more.
Annabelle whispers something in my ear, I wanna say it’s her asking about the dark and me being nervous, but I don’t catch it as everyone pulls out their seats.
Spotlights appear from somewhere and illuminate a woman in a long purple dress as she cuts in front of different members of her audience.
“Oh, that’s better.” Annabelle smiles at me.
Painted faces stare around the room, following the lights and the darked haired woman, we all came to see, that they shine down upon.
Most of the audience are people in sheets with eyeholes cut out. This is what the majority came up with for their spooky costume, which wasn’t a requirement. But this is The Funhouse, and costumes are common amongst staff and customers.
Ambrose moves around the bar, refilling glasses, avoiding the rims stained with lipsticks of different colors, sticking to the stems of each glass.
Twisting away, I give my attention back to the big table we sit at. Annabelle and Nyx aren’t in costume, either, but we keep drawing the attention of the locals.
The majority of people have realized who I am, and that’s why so many are gawking over here, rather than watching what they paid for.
Facing ahead and ignoring them all, I watch as the lady directly opposite us is gets a reading from the woman standing in front of our giant rectangular table.
“Do you accept what they’re saying?” she, the spiritualist in the purple dress and a pair of ankle booties that I love, asks.
And the lady, someone considerably older than me, nods.
“Okay, they want you to know they’re with you. And I’m gonna say goodnight to them here because I feel like they could talk all night.”
“Thank you.” The woman smiles over the message from her late partner and his sister, who both died in a car accident last year.
“Goodnight and bless them. Bless you.” The spiritualist moves from one side of the table, returning to us in the center, then moving left again when I dip my head, avoiding her gaze.
Why did I agree to this?
I don’t need messages from beyond, not now that I can finally keep the spirits at bay.
“You got a message for me, hot stuff?” shouts a man, who’s been eyeing the psychic since my arrival, from the far end of the table. He looks like an older version of a boy I remember called Lincoln, and if this is who he grew up to be, he’s always been a little brass.
His eyes linger on her long legs, peeping through the thigh-high slit in her dress, and there’s a hunger in them that makes me feel uncomfortable for her.
“Not you.” The Great Natalia walks, unfazed, halfway back to us. Then back again. “God, I feel like I’m being pulled in half here.”
Valaria looks on, hanging near our table, watching the woman she hired intensely.
“You, guy with all the glasses,” Natalia says, her long, pointed nail aimed at Ambrose. “Set them down and come over here, please.”
Freezing with two hands full of glasses, he eyes me, then Valaria, who shrugs. She nods, her curled hair falling into big brown eyes, encouraging him to accept the reading.
He sets the glasses on the bar, and she moves to take them, handing them to another bartender with loud instructions to place them into the dishwasher below.
She heads back to her spot, and Ambrose heads to me. The seat at my side is no longer empty, occupied by a young lady with huge glasses on the end of her pointy little nose.
Lifting me, he scoots onto my chair and slides me into his lap.
The room fills with loud and unkind whispers, and Lincoln, it is definitely Lincoln, laughs.“This should be fun.”
“Oh, shut up!” Annabelle snaps, her eyes in his direction.
“Are you comfortable like that?” The Great Natalia asks. “You have a bad leg.”
Did she notice that, or did someone on the other side tell her?
Eyes stay on us, the weird, inseparable siblings who haven’t been seen together in ten years.
“Your mother doesn’t want you aching.”
“She probably doesn’t want him fucking his sister either, but does he listen?”
“Linc!” Nyx is the one to scold him. “Leave it alone. You’re interrupting their reading.”
“Yeah, and the whole town wants to hear this one,” another voice says from the crowd.
I don’t recognize the voice. It’s hard even to hear it over the pounding in my ears, echoing from my chest.
But I hear Lincoln, again.
“They are siblings, just so you know. Like the flowers in the Attic type,” Lincoln warns The Great Natalia, then takes a drink from his beer bottle. “But still, siblings, and it’s fucking weird.”
“Just mind your own business.” Nyx takes a drink, too.
“Seriously! Can you shut up?” Annabelle fumes again. “The Great Natalia is trying to give a reading.”
The Great Natalia keeps her distance, like everyone else, who lean back in their chairs now that Ambrose is at the table.
“I know who they are.” Her eyes lock on us, so much sadness in the icy depths. “I have a message from your parents, and please bear with me, as I’ve never witnessed the kind of images they’re showing me.”
The room goes deathly still, aside from Valaria and her click-clacking heels as she brings the four of us some drinks over. “Here’s some liquid courage. You might need it.”
Her click-clacking stops when she takes a seat at the next table.
I clutch my glass and hold it in a death grip. “Oh, God. I can’t do this.”
“You can do this,” Annabelle whispers.
But it’s Ambrose I turn to. Focus on. The softness in his eyes and the way his fingers dance along my shoulder and down my arm, for all to see.
The Great Natalia stands frozen, her eyes wide on us. A tear falls. My eyes dart between her and Ambrose.
“Okay.” She shivers. “My apologies. That was a lot to process.” She leans her weight on the table.
“Do they hate?—”
“Your parents don’t hate either of you,” she cuts me off.
“They haunt me.”
“They’re sorry you feel haunted,” she whispers. “They’re very sorry. But they’d never again do anything to hurt you.”
Never again. The room doesn’t hear what I do. Sound bursts out in whispers, all saying they aren’t the ones who should be sorry.
A loud whistle breaks up the hate-filled chats between friends.
Many of us turn, seeing Valaria’s pursed lips.
“One more hiss about my barman or his relationship, and you can drink somewhere else tonight! Am I clear?”
Clear… and intimidating.
The room silences, again.