ONE #3
For a moment, I wondered how my cousin had known about this place. It didn’t exist on maps, there were no websites, save for the secure connection portal you couldn’t even reach unless they allowed you to.
My gaze flicked to the chair first – a wicked tangle of cold metal and supple leather straps, promising restraint and surrender. A prickle danced along my spine, my body betraying a thrill I wasn’t ready to admit.
And then I saw him.
He sat on the bed, his broad shoulders spanning the dark headboard as if the shadows had carved out a place just for him. His legs sprawled with careless confidence in an unspoken claim of the space.
The ghostly mask covering his face should have terrified me, should have sent me running. Instead, what it sent was a jolt of heat through me.
He was massive, a symphony of sinew and muscle adorned with scars and tattoos that testified to his darkness.
The black contacts beneath the mask glinted faintly in the low light, hiding his gaze.
It raked over my short dress, but I felt it on the skin beneath it as it peeled back every layer of pretence until all that remained was something raw and aching.
I wasn’t Paula now – I reminded myself. I was Scarlett – a woman carved from fire and hunger, chasing the one thing that might burn down her demons before they devoured her whole.
The weak flash of sweat on his skin caught the light, accentuating the defined planes of his muscles. My eyes followed the trail of dark hair that led from his chest down to the low-slung waistband of his black jeans.
Heat crept further up my neck. And though women today were conditioned to look away – to guard their virtue, however performative – I let Scarlett look. I let her drink him in, lips parting, tongue slipping ravenously through the seam.
I let her hunger for the devil stretched out on that mattress.
My focus skimmed the tattoos on his forearms; a language of symbols and words I didn’t understand but desperately wanted to read. There was something visceral about him, something untamed that both excited and terrified me – as if he could crush me and nurture me with the same touch.
My legs carried me forward until I stood just shy of the chair – too close to pretend indifference, too far to touch.
‘Scarlett,’ he murmured in a tone that reminded me of a slow drag of smoke curling around me. It wasn’t a greeting. It was the first command.
The ‘R’, though – not Italian.
American.
What were the odds?
‘Ghost,’ I whispered back, the word catching on my breath as if it might snare me if spoken louder.
For a moment, silence settled between us. Though I couldn’t see his eyes, I felt the weight of his gaze, the way it lingered on my body as if he could see past the dress and the flesh to the fractures inside me.
The slow, measured rise and fall of his chest was almost serene, but I could sense the storm brewing beneath it. Maybe because it matched of my own.
We just looked – for a long time. As if the quiet between us was saying more than either of us dared speak.
‘Is this your first time?’ He broke the spell, his deep whisper vibrating through the space and straight into me. Like a tether, it grounded me in his presence when I was already so close to unravelling.
‘Yes,’ I whispered, the sound barely audible over the pounding of my heart.
I’d read the instructions, memorised them.
But they didn’t prepare me for this – the intensity of being here, of being seen without truly being seen.
There was something about the anonymity of this, of him.
It stripped away the fear that usually came with being vulnerable.
No name. No history. No face. Just sensation. Just need.
And it all reminded me why I was here – to reclaim my past. My body, my desires. To take them back from the man who had weaponized them against me.
With Ghost, it somehow felt possible. He didn’t feel like a threat; he was temptation in its purest form. A chance to seize what had been stolen.
The thought steadied me, even as the hunger in his voice made me weak.
I wasn’t here for him. I was here for me – the mantra echoed in the back of my head.
‘Then we go slow,’ he murmured. ‘You set the pace. You speak. I listen. Nothing happens that you don’t want.’
He stirred like a ripple beneath still water.
A hand extended, fingers curling just enough to suggest intention. There was no rush – just command, clear and absolute.
My lungs stalled as I stepped closer, my knees trembling slightly, though whether it was from fear or something far more dangerous, I couldn’t tell.
I took his hand, the warmth scorching straight through my skin.
‘My role is to guide and push only as far as you allow,’ he said. ‘Yours… is to feel, respond and speak.’
He let the moment linger as the words settled. For some reason it calmed me. This stranger. This ghost… calmed me.
Fear still lived in me. But I was sick of it – of that twist in my stomach, of flinching at shadows. So I took the risk, and gripped the thread of trust with both hands.