Chapter 26 #2
While I struggled to peel off my own wet clothes and change into dry pajamas, she yelped in surprise. “Oh, it’s mint!”
I smiled. “Mint, yeah. Did they have toothpaste in the 1800s?”
“It was powder. And it tasted terrible,” came the reply. “Toothpaste is one of the many marvels of the modern world I’ve never had the occasion to try.”
She spit into the sink, rinsed her finger, then ran the tap again.
When she emerged from the bathroom, her hair was dark and dripping, but it looked more intentional than it had when she emerged from the lake.
Her face was red from scrubbing instead of hypothermia.
She looked fresh and a little wild, like a person who’d come in from a long journey away from civilization.
In some ways, she had. Now that color had returned to her cheeks, I was again struck by how beautiful she was.
Annabelle didn’t glow the same way she had before, but her face was no less gorgeous.
Her eyes were no less expressive without a ghostly gleam.
And she was only wearing a towel.
My cheeks heating up, I thrust a pair of boxers and a tank top at her and turned around while she changed.
“You can take the bed,” I said. Standing side by side in the small room, I realized how Annabelle usually flowed into and around furniture, her ghostly form not taking up space the way a human would. Now that she was here, really here, the small bedroom felt crowded.
“Nonsense, Gibson. We can share.” She sat down on the bed and looked up at me expectantly. When I didn’t move, she added, “Can’t we?”
“Of course.” My heart sped up as I looked down at her face, so open and trusting and beautiful. The boxer shorts I’d loaned her were very short, riding up to show her pale, perfect thighs. I took a deep breath. “We can share. Of course we can share.”
I mentally scolded myself. She literally just came back from the dead and I wanted to jump her? I took the far side of the bed, scooting all the way to the side so that Annabelle had as much room as possible.
She lay down next to me, her hands next to her sides. “Goodnight, dear.”
“Goodnight, Marley.” I said it like this was a normal night, as if we could somehow go back to whatever we’d been before.
Seeing her hand waving from the water and knowing that she had been plunged into the depths of the lake alone made me ache.
It made me angry, too. How was it fair that we found each other but couldn’t be together like normal people?
I closed my eyes. The back of my hand was mere centimeters from Annabelle’s. Instead of the tingling thrum of ghostly energy, I felt warmth. She was here with me. She was real.
Next to me, Annabelle breathed in and out evenly. She was so close I could feel the rise and fall of her chest and hear her breathing. Neither of us moved. A cool breeze drifted through the window, bringing with it the smell of the night air, and all the possibilities it held.
Slowly, carefully, I turned my hand over and reached for her, palm up.
Annabelle took a deep, halting breath, then I felt her skin, so soft against mine. Our fingers twined. I squeezed her hand tightly.
She held me back.
We both turned to face each other at the same time, and either I kissed her or she kissed me, I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter because finally— finally —we were kissing.
I held her hand tightly, smashed between our bodies as we moved closer, removing every bit of space between us.
Our mouths clashed at first, teeth clicking and lips sliding awkwardly.
I didn’t care one bit because I was finally kissing Annabelle, really kissing her.
We eventually found a rhythm. I tilted my head to one side, and she tilted to the other, and that was all it took for us to fit together perfectly. Annabelle moaned into my mouth and clutched tightly to my waist.
I pulled back and said, “I can stop, Marley—”
She grabbed me, sliding her hand on my waist lower and pulling me forward. “Don’t you dare.”
“We don’t have to do anything,” I said. “You’re recovering from—and if you want to rest, I don’t need to—”
Annabelle raised herself on her elbow, then pushed up to straddle me. She pulled back to look at me, her eyes darker than I remembered ever seeing them. “I do.”
“Fuck, yes,” I whispered, then any other words I might have had were drowned in a forceful kiss. She held me firmly and thrust her tongue into my mouth. I melted into it. She tasted like mint. Just ordinary toothpaste and spit and Annabelle.
Above me like this, she was in the same position she had been in before, hovering above me as a spirit. But now, her weight pressed me into the mattress, and I felt her soft curves against my body. Feeling her ghostly self above me had been sexy and strange—but this, this drove me wild.
I ran my hands up and down her sides, slipping my hands under her shirt to feel her skin. She made little happy sounds as we kissed, grinding against each other slowly at first, and then with more and more desperate thrusts.
When she pulled back, I nudged her to sit up again and slipped my hand under her shirt, watching her eyes flutter closed. She bit her lip and let out a little moan.
“Clothes off, now,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, half joking, but her expression changed just enough to let me know that she enjoyed hearing it. She took off her shirt, exposing her glorious breasts, and tossed it aside.
She let me up so that I could take my own top and underwear off, then I helped her shimmy out of the boxers I had loaned her. Then she hesitated and looked away. “It’s, um.” She cleared her throat. “It’s just that it’s been about two hundred years since I ...”
I pulled her back into an embrace and kissed her soundly. “I got you, Marley. I won’t do anything you don’t want.”
She let me guide her back down against the pillows, then said, “But I want everything .”
I grinned. “I’d better get started, then.”
Kissing and licking my way down her body, I savored the taste of her and relished every sigh, moan, and gasp I elicited.
I took my time exploring her, doing my best to give her the pleasure she had been denied for so many years, both as a woman in an unhappy marriage and as a ghost, doomed to roam the island without a body.
She sucked in a breath, then cried out, “Oh god.” I felt her muscles tense everywhere, then she fell limp, breathing hard. “Oh, wow ... wow.” She kept saying “wow” as I kissed my way back up her body.
“Okay?” I asked, pressing a kiss to her sternum.
She nodded. “Do you want me to, um ...”
I shook my head, instead guiding her hand between our bodies and showing her where and how to touch me. She watched as I moved back and forth on her hand, finding a rhythm that worked. Keeping eye contact was too intense, so I kissed her and then screwed my eyes shut as I came.
Afterward, we rearranged ourselves, our limbs entwined.
“Will you still be here in the morning?” I whispered, keeping my voice low as if speaking at a normal volume might influence the answer.
“I don’t know, darling,” she replied as her eyes closed. “Yasmin thinks I can stay the night and on till morning, but Miranda isn’t sure. The books weren’t specific.”
Instead of answering, I kissed her again, and she held me tightly as we both drifted to sleep.