When he kissed me, I explained, “You don’t need to ask forgiveness. That huge, big, all encompassing good feeling you just had…”
“Yes?” he asked, brushing my damp hair off my forehead and touching my face like a man reading Braille.
“That was an orgasm and a good, good thing and you don’t need forgiveness.”
He grinned. “I want to do it again,” he said.
“You and me, both,” I laughed. Then my head was full of bells and I was struggling to sit up and pushing him out of my way.
Alex turned, maybe not hearing my bells but hearing something. “What?”
“I think it will have to wait, the doing it again,” I said, pulling on my jeans fast, barefoot and suddenly chilled I searched the mess of a foyer for my top.
And then there she was. Our first ghost. Tall and pale, impossibly thin the way only young girls can be. Like some awkward bird who hasn’t quite figured out its wings yet.
Eighteen? Nineteen? Young. A young, young, hesitant soul. “Hi,” she said.
I gave her a finger wave, the cold and the tingling overtaking me. I wanted food, then, massive amounts of greasy fast food. I wanted wine. I wanted Alex to fuck me again. My body revved like an engine, trying to process all that was now required of it.
It takes a lot of energy to communicate with the other side. “Hi,” I managed.
“Hello,” Alex said, buttoning his button fly and finding his navy blue pullover.
“How—”
She cut him off. “So, am I like…interrupting?”
I could only laugh.
“Of course not,” Alex the angel said. “This is Harper Brown. She owns the house.”
I gave her a nod and sat with my ass on the edge of the table. Was he going to invite her for tea next? I waited without speaking as Alex found his shoes.
“You’re the one,” she said to me. “But he—”
“He’s a whole other issue,” I said. “He’s not human. He’s…” Alex shook his head, barely visible, but I stopped. I guess I wasn’t supposed to say. “Just visiting,” I finished.
“I need my dad to know that Johnny had nothing to do with my death,” she said.
Her dress was white and not something a young woman would pick out to spend her eternity in.
It was basically a horrible mix of an oversized pinafore and a wedding gown.
“You know you can change that,” I said, nodding at her dress.
She looked down as if she’d never seen the dress before. Maybe she hadn’t. “I…”
“Just focus on what you’d like it to be and think hard until it shifts. Manifest your mental reality,” I said. Then I waited.
It didn’t take long and my new ghost seemed to marvel at that. There she stood in her skinny jeans and a yellow V-neck Forenza sweater. She wore it backward in classic eighties fashion. Her feet were in silver flats and huge chandelier earrings swung from her lobes. Her hair was teased high and sprayed out. Big hair, indeed. An eighties girl.
So, what? She’d been dead for a few decades. “Wow,” she said, looking at what I can only imagine had been her favorite outfit in life.
“Now that you’re more comfortable. What’s your name?”
“Molly,” she said.
I smacked my forehead before realizing it was rude. Molly? What next? Farmer Ted the ghost? I shook my head. Was this an eighties movie or a nightmare? But then Alex put his arm around me, reading my frustration like a book and I sighed. So it was real.
And the attraction that slammed me in the solar plexus was very real too. We had to deal with Molly because I wanted Alex all over again. I knew it was hormones mixed with supernatural emissions. I knew that I was an ethereal tuning fork, basically. But it did not stop or even dampen my want of him.
“Right. I’m Harper as you know, this is Alex. Lead the way. Where is your dad?
We’ll tell him Johnny’s in the clear.”
“I only live up the road. And I’ve been waiting such a long time…” she trailed off and my heart broke a little bit.
Rules to being a successful sensitive include not getting emotionally involved with your ghosts if you can help it. In the end, they are still dead and you cannot change the past. Also, it’s sort of like breaking up over and over and over if you grieve when they finally move on for good or just up and go poof as ghosts are prone to doing.
“I hear you. Come on, then, Molly. Let’s get your dad straight.”
Alex took my hand and beamed at me as if I had done the most wonderful magical thing ever.
“What?” I whispered. I don’t know why, Molly could still hear me if she wished. “It’s what I do. It’s how I’m programmed.”
“Yeah, but nowhere in the rules does it say you have to be compassionate. Or nice.
Or patient.” He leaned in and kissed me right on the collarbone and all of me turned to one giant nerve ending, wanting Alex. Craving him the way I used to crave a cigarette after a long flight when I still smoked. I curled my fingers in his shirt and tugged him in for a hard kiss.
“Ahem,” said Molly.
“Of course! Let’s go! Lead the way,” I said on a sigh and she disappeared through the wall.
“Well, we can’t follow you that way!” I yelled.
I heard Oops in my head and then she was waiting for us outside the front door. She gave us the follow me hand gesture and off we went. A sensitive, an angel and a ghost.
Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke told in a bar by old drunk men.
I was starving, but the food urges would have to wait. I tried to distract myself by grilling Alex.
“So you chose me, eh? Was it because of my fabulous beauty?” I teased.
Come to think of it, I wasn’t even made up today. Beat up jeans, beat up boots, moving clothes. I hadn’t even put on makeup. Just big sunglasses on my head to pull over my naked eyes if need be.
“Oh, I can’t see you up there,” he said, swinging my hand like a young boy. He seemed to be fascinated with my skin, repeatedly rubbing it with his fingertips like a good luck charm.
“You can’t?” I was shocked.
“Well, we can. But not the way you see. It’s a whole other kind of perception.” Alex leaned in and smelled my hair, touched my eyelashes. It made me laugh, and truth be told, blush.
Molly looked back, her face caught somewhere between a frown and a smile. She seemed a bit sad, a bit jealous and a bit amused. But who could blame her. Being dead wasn’t easy.
“So what can you see up there?” I reached out and stroked his forearms—the warm skin, hard muscles, the freckles and a scar. I wondered how he got a scar. Was it already on the body he chose?
Like distressed jeans are already worn and broken in.
“Came with the body,” he said, in my head again. “Up there—” He looked over instead of up.
Then he shrugged. “It’s really all around us, not really up.”
“Oh,” I said. “That makes my head hurt a bit.”
“Anyway, I could see your soul.”
“As dark and gnarled as it is?” I joked, feeling conspicuous and naked at the moment for some odd reason.
Alex stopped and pulled me in to a shockingly tender hug. “It’s bright and shining like a ball of light,” he informed me with great tenderness. My heart hurt a little at how gently he was treating my fucked-up emotions. “But with the smallest gray and navy blue striations. Sadness. I was intrigued by you. That’s something special. We tend to be a bit…flat? Like we view you all as equals instead of special and unique.”
“Wow,” I said. More because I really believed him about the whole angel thing than anything else.
“Yes, a lot of my fellow angels really see snowflakes as more unique than humans.”
“What makes you different?” I asked.
Molly had stopped in front of a small red cottage similar in shape to mine. She sat on the low stone wall to wait for us. He kissed me quickly. “You. You made me different. N
ow do your job.”
I gaped at him, unsure of what he meant but feeling a gushy, uncomfortable slide of girlish feelings for this possibly mental man. “Um…”
“Go on, help Molly. There’s plenty of time for us.”
“Okay. No pressure there,” I said and followed Molly.
Chapter Three
“Mr. King?” I asked.
Molly’s father looked past her, at me and then at Alex who smiled that heartbreaker smile and gave a respectful nod that men somehow always manage to pull off. “Yes?”
He looked open but confused.
“We’re here about your daughter Molly.”
His face went taut with the look of grief that never quite fades, even with time.
“What about her?”
He didn’t invite us in but he did open the door a bit more and stand more securely in his doorway.
“I’m here with…” This was the tricky part. If the recipient was a believer I could just out myself and pass on the message. If the person had a very definitive set of rules for the universe and the communication between the dead and the living, well, then things were trickier.
“Yes?” He only sounded a tiny bit annoyed, to his credit.
“I’m here with a message from your daughter,” I said swiftly.
He looked hopeful, angry, happy, livid. It all flashed across his face in an instant.
Like watching an oil slick drift across clean water. Ugly and beautiful all at once. In one instant it is a marring effect, in the next you see a gorgeous rainbow.
“Who is it, Ed?” This was Mrs. King. A tall, lanky woman in her late sixties to early seventies .
“Someone about Molly.” He faced me like we were about to fight and her face did a caving in thing that broke my heart. Their grief was still very fresh over the loss of their daughter.
I turned to Molly. She said, “The best way to address it is to just bully through.
That’s how my dad is. Just tell him to stop blaming Johnny for my death.”
I sucked in a breath and said to Alex, “Jeez. I don’t know if I want to do this.”
He came up and nodded again to the dad. He put his hand on my waist and said softly in my ear.
“You don’t have to, you know. Free will and all.”
Molly said nothing, simply waited. And so did her father who couldn’t see his own daughter. I blew out a sigh. “Look if you need some help or something—” Ed King started but I shook my head.
“No, no help. I’m just here to pass on a message from your daughter.”
Molly’s mother sucked in a great wounded breath that broke my heart. “Listen, lady—”
I barreled on fast before he could shut me down, or worse, shut the door. “Mr.
King, your daughter needs you to know that Johnny didn’t have anything to do with her death and she wants you to stop blaming him for it.”
I stood there, holding my breath and biting my tongue as Alex ran his thumb along my lower back in a soothing gesture that no one but the ghost could see.
“How dare you,” he said, starting to swing the door shut. His face stark with anger and pale from shock.
“Ed!”
“Quiet, Kelsey.”
“Ed!”
I stuck my foot in the door, looking at Molly, begging her for more. I was angry and panicky and a bit put out. It all twisted in my belly, a toxic soup of emotions. I could see her mouth moving but it was really hard to pick Molly’s words out of the ether. But I managed. “She says to…she says to stop calling Johnny on her birthday and hanging up. But only after he knows it’s you.”
Molly was talking frantically, I was struggling to hear and Kelsey King said, “Ed?
Do you do that, Ed?”
“Who are you?” Ed said to me.
I struggled to hear his daughter above all the ruckus. “I am a friend of…I am a friend,” I finished.
“She says to stop drinking so much that you pass out on the day she died. That’s no way to remember her.”
“Ed?” Kelsey said again, her big gray eyes ricocheting between me and him. Her body language said so much of this was news to her.
“She said that she was the one who got the drugs and that Johnny tried to talk her out of it. She tried them anyway. He…” I shook my head.
Molly was yelling now but her voice seemed so far away. My upset and her mother’s fear and her father’s anger were all working together to dampen my ability to hear her. Alex said, “He tried to save her.”
I turned to the Kings and said, “He tried to save her. He even put the drugs in his pocket to preserve her memory. So you would feel better about her. He took the blame.
And she wishes he hadn’t.” I gushed now that I could hear her. I didn’t breathe. I rushed to push it all out at once. “But they weren’t his, they were hers and she bought them with the money from…”
Here it was. I could tell by the urgency with which she said it. This was the part that would convince Ed King that his daughter had given him a message. “The money you paid her to help you pick out the pink leather purse for your wife. You spent the day together and you laughed and you joked and you slipped her a twenty to let you take all the credit for the gift,” I breathed.
Ed King stared at me and his wife took his arm and then his face seemed to fold in on itself and he wept. Hard and long and deeply. It was like watching someone dance naked or have sex. I turned to say something to Molly but Alex squeezed my shoulder and said, “Good job, Harper. She’s gone.”
* * * * *
“That seemed too easy,” I said.
Alex took my hand and we walked up the dark road. So different from the city, this dark moonlit section of road in the middle of the country. The fall wind cut right through my jeans and cardigan and I shivered. Alex, ever the chivalrous angel, took off his loose-fitting duster and draped it around me. “Easy isn’t wrong.”
I snorted. “That’s why you like me,” I said.
Not much on the humor, the angelic. He looked confused and then ponderous and said, “I’m not sure why I’m drawn to you but I am.” He turned and put his huge toasty hands on my waist. I didn’t think, I stood on tiptoe and I kissed him.
“I like you, too,” I said. I remembered seeing him walking somewhat absentmindedly up my road and liking him on sight. Being attracted to his broadness and tallness and darkness. I smiled as he kissed me some more. His hands slipped up under his own coat, cupping my breasts through my sweater. The heat of his skin seeped through the cotton and had my body ready for him that fast. In a blink. In a heartbeat.
“I’m glad you like me, Harper. Am I allowed to…” Alex walked me backward onto the side of the road that was wooded. We stumble-stepped in a drunken kind of synch until we were in the thick section of trees. No houses, no people, just a barely moonlit trickle of a stream. My back hit the rough trunk of an oak and Alex bit my lip by accident.
I hissed and Alex reached up to touch my mouth. “I’m sorry, Harper. So, sorry! I lost my balance and—”
I grabbed his hair and pressed my front to his front. “Would you think I was a freak if I said I liked it?”
Alex shook his head in the silvery light. “No. I could feel that you liked it. But I was afraid that I had hurt you. And I never want to hurt you,” he said.
“Unless I want it,” I corrected.
“Yes, unless you want it.”
“Gently. Just bite me gently,” I said and let his mouth come down on my throat as his hands returned to pinch and stroke my breasts. He pushed up under my cardigan, my skin growing chill at first and then warming with his touch. When he feathered his thumbs over my nipples I moaned low, feeling the tug of arousal deep in my pussy. I wanted him again. I wanted him deep inside me, filling me and fucking me.
His teeth nipped so that bright sparks of pain sparkled on my skin. My nipples spiked harder than before, my pussy going wet so that I could feel the slide of warm fluid in my panties. “Harder,” I said.
Sensitive Page 3