I sat down, pulled in by the skin show. “I think I may have under estimated this sport.”
“And you always thought I was nuts for watching football.”
“Is this why you watch soccer too?”
He answered with a, “Hmmm-mmm. Soccer butts are amazing.”
I was strangely drawn in by all the male anatomy, but my writing demanded attention. I got up. “Well, have fun, and no drooling on the upholstery. Hey, should I make a lot of noise if I come back down? Ya know, in case you decide you need some private time to take yourself to the next level here?”
Mike threw some serious shade at me. The man perfected the disapproving side glance, laser eye. “Don’t be crass.”
I laughed then started to run up the stairs.
“Wait, Gilly, I’m glad you’re home. I have to ask you something.” Mike had swiveled around to look at me. He sounded pretty serious, so I changed direction and plopped back down on the couch next to him.
“S’up?” I hadn’t noticed any quaver to his voice, but he actually looked concerned, his dark almond shaped eyes wide. Suddenly, he looked like a frail Korean boy-band singer, pretty and over dramatic.
“Mike, you okay?”
His appearance took on a whole new pallor as he thought about what he needed to say. Crap, I hope he wasn’t evicting me. I paid my rent on time. He took a long moment, centering himself. He held his hand to his chest, long narrow fingers resting below his collar bone.
“I’ve been seeing something the past few days on and off, and today, it freaked me out.” He took in a deep breath.
I squinted at him, tilting my head in question.
“Gilly, I think we have a ghost.”
I sat back and bit my thumbnail.
“You can see him too?” I whispered.
Mike gasped, covered his mouth as he pulled back from me. “I thought I was crazy, but I swear I keep seeing a big cat on the stairs. You’ve seen it?”
I sighed, relaxing a bit. I thought he was talking about Peter. Yes we had a cat ghost. I was so used to it walking in and out of my life, I really hadn’t thought about it. Poor Mike, the cat really was freaking him out.
“Yeah,” I drawled out the word, trying to figure out how to tell Mike he really was seeing a cat, and hoping he didn’t freak and kick me out. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you about him. He’s a friendly, if that helps.”
“Warn me? You moved in with a pet ghost? I might need a security deposit for that,” Mike giggled. Good, he was relaxing.
“I’ve had this spirit cat following me around off and on for the past ten years or so,” I began explaining. “He, I think it’s a he, showed up in college. He usually just slinks around the hallways. He’s shown up at almost every place I’ve lived. I’ve even gotten into the habit of telling him when I’m getting ready to move so he knows to follow.”
“And you didn’t think to share this with me?”
I snorted. “Right, and just how does one announce when looking for a place to live they are bringing their ghost animals with them?”
“Good point,” he conceded.
“Honestly Mike, you’re the first roommate I’ve had who has ever seen him. He must like you.”
“What does it mean, why is he here?” Mike was searching for some deeper meaning to the cat.
I shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. He never seems to precede some kind of danger or stress. So, he’s not a harbinger of any kind. He just shows up and makes me wonder why there’s a cat there. I think he’s comfortable here.”
“So, what you’re saying is he’s a nice ghost kitty?”
I nodded. I thought about telling him about Peter—then again maybe not. He freaked out over the cat. When people don’t see spirits regularly, I understand how it would freak them out. Heck, Mr. Cat caught me off guard more than once and spooked me a few times. I decided I wouldn’t tell Mike about the other cat—the Thing.
I had two cats that would visit me, occasionally. They would wander around for a while, then curl up in a window and “sleep” mostly. I guess if it looks like ghost cat is sleeping, that is what ghost cat is doing.
Now, the Thing could be positively freaky. The Thing was big and grey, and it swam. I wasn’t really sure what it was. Dolphin? Shark? Matinee? Kraken? When the Thing would swim past and brush up against me, it made everything go ice cold and I could feel the water ebb and flow around me. In all fairness, I hadn’t seen the Thing in several years, unlike the cats who I saw last month.
I decided to not tell Mike about the Thing. Cats were one issue—the Thing was a whole different level of ghostly weirdness.
I had started back up the stairs before I remembered to ask, “Mike, when you saw the cat, what color was he?”
“What do you mean what color?”
“I was just wondering if it was the big black one or the ginger tabby.” I ran up the stairs.
Mike called after me, “There are two of them?”
“Yep, we’ve got two ghost cats.” I ducked into my room. I was trying not to laugh. I had whammied Mike there at the end.
Peter sat on my side chair chuckling
“Did you hear all that?” I asked out loud before switching to head talk. I didn’t need Mike finding out about the full grown human ghost too.
Yeah. I’ve never seen these cats of yours, Peter confessed.
Can’t you see other ghosts? I asked, curious if there were more spirits or entities out there that I couldn’t recognize.
Not that I can tell. But then again, I can’t talk to people either. I can get inside their heads, and I can hear them if they are projecting their thoughts. But you seem to be the only one who can hear and see me.
As interesting as talking ghost capability skill sets was, I wanted to show Peter what I had worked on. I kicked off my shoes and took the stack of notebooks into the center of my bed. Peter joined me. I opened the most recent one—I had half-way filled my third spiral notebook.
I wrote about when Peter, I mean Johnny, first started acting. It was a tension filled scene between him and his music manager. As an aging pop sensation, Johnny struggled to stay relevant. His original fan base was older, he wanted to age up his art to maintain their fan dollars. His bubble gum sappy love songs were no longer on trend. Musicals were struggling to make a comeback. One of those would be a perfect transition into film for the singer. Instead of admitting that he didn’t know how to take Johnny into film, his manager sabotaged his shot at a leading role.
I like it. Brings in some tension so that the love story will be a welcome sigh of relief.
I flipped forward to another scenario I had thought about. Since vampires and werewolves were so popular, I thought it would be awesome to make Johnny one.
Look, I pointed to a passage I written. Here, if Johnny is a vampire, we can explain how or why he’s injured.
You want the injury for me to become a vampire? Peter sighed heavily. Then I can’t go on to have children. He shook his head discontentedly at me, like I was a dumb kid that should know better.
Okay, no vampires. I wanted him to be a vampire. I had also started developing some ideas in case Peter hadn’t liked the vampire concept. I wasn’t going to present them to him until they were more fully formed.
So, then what needs to happen here? I tapped the writing with my pencil. Talking to Peter felt like I actively and purposefully thought through a concept with myself. Even while working closely together like this, I had doubts to his reality. After all, if I talked to pencil lines as I drew, why not talk to characters as I wrote?
The injury needs to be bigger. I shook it off like it wasn’t a big deal. That was a mistake.
I scribbled, trying to get the words out as fast as I could.
Johnny leapt. This was an easy jump. The camera angle would make the jump appear at least twice as far as it really was. He had already practiced it several times. The leap leaving the gondola was well-choreographed. It should have been a simple two quick steps
then jump.
Something went wrong as he pushed away from the gondola. His feet hadn’t taken the right stepping sequence. He was off. His arm smashed down on the corner of the bricks. Sharp white pain shot up his arm and down into his fingers. His palm should have made contact first but his wrist caught the edge making his hand go numb. He scrambled to grab hold with his other hand. His grip wasn’t enough to hold him. This should have been a simple stunt, he thought as he dropped. The fall wasn’t from a great height, but it wasn’t anticipated. He wasn’t in position to catch himself properly.
“Fuck!” Johnny bit out as he landed, his ankle buckled, and then his leg twisted and collapsed under him. The leg was painful, but it was the unexpected jar to the back that knocked the breath out of Johnny, causing him to drop to the ground and rock back and forth in pain.
I swung the notebook around for Peter to see. He was quiet as he regarded what I had written. I wanted to see him with my eyes, but I couldn’t, so I closed my eyes and looked with my brain.
His eyes were large and round when he looked up at me. That’s exactly how it happened, how? He shook his head.
This is what you’re putting into my head as you talk. Your words are describing events but I’m also tapped into your memories somehow. You’re giving this all to me, the more you talk, the more I know about your life. So, I opened my eyes staring into the empty space where his body wasn’t, before closing them again in order to see him, does it work?
Peter nodded.
I continued to write. Making the injury and Johnny’s reaction to it bigger than what Peter had gone through. Peter had fallen. He had not caught himself properly on a leap from a hanging gondola to a brick wall. The drop had only been about twelve feet, but unprepared, it was enough to really mess up his back.
Peter’s injuries had consisted of a wrist abrasion, a twisted ankle, and what was discovered much later, fractured vertebrae. Not taking his injury seriously and not going to a doctor right away, put him on the wrong path—away from proper healing and recovering. Johnny had a similar fall, but I wrote that he broke his leg and his back. The broken leg put him in a position where he had to get taken to a hospital and be properly x-rayed.
Peter, trying to be a tough guy in real life, did himself a disservice. I made Johnny more humble in a way Peter realized he should have been in his life.
We kept working like this for a few more hours. I wanted to make Johnny a werewolf after Peter said no to the vampire idea. He did not like that idea either. I tried a variety of shape shifter animals out on him, thinking that maybe if I tapped into the right spirit animal for him he would acquiesce. I thought he would make a beautiful were-tiger.
We managed to fill the rest of that notebook before my phone started pinging with a bunch of text messages.
I grabbed it. “It’s David. Goodnight, Peter.”
Goodnight. He chuckled. He knew what I was getting ready to do. Peter didn’t fade away, one moment he was there, the next he was just gone. I cleared the notebooks off my bed, and snuggled back into the pillows. It was time for flirty, dirty sexting with my boyfriend.
5
The more I wrote, the easier it got. I seemed to instinctively know what had happened in Peter’s life. I knew exactly how to change it up for Johnny’s version of the story. I wrote almost every night. I had no idea what I was doing, just writing. Without knowing how many words made a book, I started estimating word counts in some of my favorite romance novels. They all seemed to have around a hundred-thousand words. That’s an intimidating number. My best guess was I had about ten thousand words per spiral notebook. I was going to need to fill at least ten notebooks to be even close to my needed goal.
My typing skills were something to be afraid of. I was a speed pecker. I typed with no more than four fingers total, on both hands. I was clueless how to even begin learning how to touch type. Getting the handwritten words into the computer was a daunting task I was not yet ready to face.
Writing had become an addiction. I thought about it even while at work. My days filled up fast, and I had no free time. I spent it all writing. If I wasn’t careful I was going to burn out. The only down time I seemed to allow myself anymore was watching Trouble Trouble with Mike. During Trouble Trouble I could turn off and enjoy watching Peter. However, my mind kept cranking out story content whenever I tried watching other shows.
I started thinking in narrative. My actions were mentally noted in third person—Gillian noted with some concern the light at the bottom of the stairwell flickered. It reminded her of too many horror movies. She thought if she went down one more level of stairs there would be a jump scare waiting for her. This was work, which was scary enough. Would the jump scare be zombies, a crazed killer, or merely Holly, the office manager walking through the door at the exact same moment Gil starts to pull it open?
I constantly looked for better adjectives and verbs. I stopped speaking and began enunciating, growling, or whispering. My speaking vocabulary slowly began to evolve as well. I no longer said ‘awesome’ about everything that I found mildly interesting or cool. Interesting became intriguing, captivating, or something would pique my curiosity. Cool became more definitive as delightful, all right, or my new favorite—hunky-dory. The thesaurus became my new best friend.
I continued my weekly lunches with Trina, whenever she didn’t cancel on me, but I begged off lunches with my office manager Holly in order to write. I focused so much on Peter I was afraid my relationship with David would begin to suffer. I had already started letting my friendship with Holly slip because I had a new and exciting friend. I really didn’t want to mess up with David.
David and I were destined to be together after we met at a Halloween party a few years back—the fates doing their finest work. My roommate “dragged” me out for the evening to a fabulous party full of pretty men. David came dressed as the Doctor from that popular British show. He wore a pinstriped suit with a dark blue shirt and an ugly tie. He actually looks like the actor with short brown hair, a broad brow, sharp cheekbones, a straight sharp nose, a sharp chin, and thin lips. Even his name was David. I thought he was so cute, all tall and skinny and geeky—and straight. Just my type.
It had to be fate because I dressed up like a different character from the same show. My hair was long then, so it was perfect. I wore a short black skirt, a white shirt, and a black vest that I had painted “POLICE” in white across the back. I wore it with a little checkered black and white scarf around my neck. Only, I was a bit more extreme than the TV character, since I really was in drag-queen level make up, and my hair was teased about a mile high.
As soon as we met, I didn’t leave his side. We got along like a house on fire. And when he kissed me the first time, I felt it tingle in my toes. I was instantly smitten, and it seemed like he was too. Toward the end of the night, when he held out his hand and said, “Allons-y,”—I went.
David stopped taking me out as much during the week, and until Peter made some snide comment questioning my loyalties, I hadn’t even really noticed. I reacted negatively to that. Peter was my imaginary friend, not my boyfriend, and not someone I was going to cheat on my boyfriend with—not that I even could if I had wanted to, with him being non-corporeal and mostly made up. I was in a committed relationship—one that I hoped would become even more committed in the future.
As soon as Peter pointed that out, I immediately texted David. We needed to put in some quality relationship time.
“Hey I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.” I texted.
“Who are you again?” David replied.
“Ha ha, funny. Seriously I miss u. Can u talk?”
“Can’t talk, but can text. What’s up?”
I sighed, what was up? I wasn’t seeing David as much as usual. How did I tell him without sounding clingy? Humor and demands would be my approach.
“You need to feed me and show me your naked body soon.”
“Lol Gil, sure. When?”
“Yo
u tell me.”
“How about sushi and naked on Thursday?”
Sushi? Who the hell did David think he was talking to? I was not a sushi fan. I was so not a sushi fan. I tried it once, my gag reflex kicked in and with cosmic bad timing, I threw up all over the table, in front of everybody, in the middle of a crowded restaurant. Not my finest hour. Between the texture and being humiliated by raw fish, there was no way I would ever try it again. David knew this. Clearly, he wasn’t thinking, or I was texting a different David.
“You realize you are texting me right?”
“Yes, Gil.
“Sushi? WTF?”
“Sorry, Gil, distracted. Thursday I’ll pick you up at work. We can decide on food later ok? I need to focus now.”
“Ok, can’t wait.”
David needed to focus. He regularly attended Meet-up groups and other presentations for work. I figured that was what I distracted him from.
I turned to Peter. “Are you happy now? I have a date on Thursday.”
It’s not about my happiness, Gilligan, it’s about yours. He sounded smug.
“Oh, yum. “ I gushed enthusiastically as the waiter delivered dinner. Lamb kabobs over saffron rice.
“You’re drooling,” David said as if he had never seen me around food before.
I had already eaten slightly more than half of the stuffed grape leaf appetizers. The savory warm smells tickled my nose and teased my stomach.
“Thank you.” I smiled up at our waiter, and tucked in with a large scoop of rice right into my open maw. “Have you met me?” I asked around a mouth full of food. I had the metabolism of a teenage boy on meth. Empty calories and I were good friends, I just wished at some point they would convert to boob fat.
I stared at David like I was looking at him for the first time. He was so cute, but something was different. He gave me a pleasant smile and tucked his napkin back onto his lap. He ate with precise, fussy movements. Typically, David would be “that guy” who held onto the skewer and bit straight into the meat before sliding the chunks of grilled goodness onto the plate. Not that David was tacky, he was fun. Maybe obnoxiously fun at times, but fussy and precise table manners were something he would reserve for dinner around my grandmother.
Dead Sexy: Second Endings 1 Page 3