“What do you mean?”
“I mean how are you doing? How is your relationship?”
I squint at her, not sure what she’s getting at. “I just talked to my shrink about this. You want to hear the same thing I told her?”
“You have the look of someone who just had a bloody good shag.” Her eyes dance. “That’s all.”
My eyes go wide and I quickly look at Lucinda, who thankfully isn’t paying us any attention.
“Oh, don’t worry about her. She can’t hear us,” Rebecca says, her red lips twisting into a smirk. “But you did, didn’t you? That’s what it is. I can always tell, especially since I’m not getting any. I have a sixth sense for it, which is quite unfortunate.”
My mind reels back to yesterday, how utterly insatiable and dominant he was with me, like he’s been a lot lately.
But I don’t talk about my sex life with Rebecca, much to her disappointment, and I’m not about to start now. “Things are good,” I tell her, smiling with relief at the waitress who comes by to take our orders, interrupting the awkward talk.
After we’ve decided on a bottle of white wine, as well as pasta for ourselves, Rebecca orders a slice of cake for Lucinda.
“Cake for lunch?” I question.
“It’s my trick for getting her to behave in restaurants,” Rebecca informs me. “I make sure she eats before we go out, that way she’s full and happy and the dessert is a nice treat.”
“I’ll have to remember that,” I tell her, reaching for the bottle of Pellegrino in the middle of the table. I catch her eye and she gives me a funny look.
“What?” I ask, unscrewing the cap and pouring some in my glass, then doing the same to hers.
“I think this is the first time I’ve heard you allude to having children.”
I busy myself with the mineral water and have a sip, shrugging lightly. “I’m sure I’ve done some alluding in the past.”
She shakes her head. “No. You haven’t. You’re always so cagey about it.”
I swallow, rubbing my lips together as I try to figure out whether to talk to Rebecca about this. She’s my friend, not my psychologist, so I should feel comfortable confiding in her. I guess what’s holding me back is the fact that she’s Dex’s good friend too, perhaps more so than mine, and since he doesn’t know how I feel, I don’t want to burden her with a secret.
“Perry,” she says gently, putting her hand over mine and giving it a light squeeze, her dark eyes prodding me. Then she suddenly gasps and slaps her fingers on the back of my hand. “Bloody hell. You’re pregnant!”
I literally spit out my drink in an arcing spray across the table. My eyes water, I have bubbles up my nose, and, yep, now I’m coughing loudly, the whole restaurant turning to look. I grab for my napkin, pressing it to my mouth, shaking my head at Rebecca, while Lucinda giggles loudly at my outburst.
Rebecca dabs a napkin at her face in amusement, but I’m quick to shoot her down when I can. “No. Sorry. But no. Not pregnant.”
“Could account for why you’re all glowy.”
“That’s the sex, okay?”
“Hmmph. Well, I was right about something, then.”
The waitress comes back with the bottle of white wine and pours us each a glass. Rebecca raises hers in a toast, smiling at me. “Regardless, here’s a toast to the birthday girl.”
“That’s not for another couple days,” I remind her, raising mine.
“Yes, but you’re not spending it with us, you’re going to be with your family. Oh, and this meal is just part of your present. I’ll get the rest to you later.”
“You don’t have to get me anything,” I protest.
“Of course I do. I’m your friend, Perry. That’s what friends do.” She takes a sip of wine, her lipstick leaving behind a crimson stain. Her eyes go back in her head for a moment. “God, this wine is brilliant.”
She’s right. It’s delicious. We have a bad habit of drinking two bottles of wine between us on our lunch dates and getting totally day-wasted. Lucinda is the saving grace today, I hope.
“I’m not pregnant,” I assure Rebecca again, my voice low. I bite my lip for a moment, about to take the plunge. “But…”
“But?” Her brows arch.
“Well…maybe it’s a little ironic that it was over lunch that we first discussed me getting an IUD and now I’m talking to you about getting it…out.”
She blinks at me. “You’re what?”
“I want it out. I want to start a family. I want a baby.” I don’t know why it sounds both immature when I say it, my voice shaking and everything, as well as incredibly right, but it does.
“You’re kidding me!” she exclaims. “What? Really?” I nod and she claps her hands together gleefully. “Yay! Perry. Oh my god, no wonder you’re having all the sex. What has Dex said? He must be over the moon!”
“Uh, well,” I say, taking a quick sip of wine to steady my nerves. “He doesn’t exactly know.”
“What? He doesn’t know?”
I nod. “No. Only you and Dr. Leivo. And you have to promise me you won’t tell him.”
Her mouth drops open. “You can’t do that to me!”
“You have to promise, Rebecca. I’m going to let him know when I’m ready to let him know, so for now, just keep it to yourself.”
She crosses her arms and makes a huffing sound. “Well, that’s rubbish. Why am I always caught in the middle of you guys with all your secrets? You know how hard it was to pretend he wasn’t going to propose to you? And now I have to pretend that you don’t want to have babies.” Her features soften and she sighs, giving me a weepy face. “Oh, Perry, you’re going to have babies. Beautiful little babies. God, I hope they get all of your personality.”
I laugh. “Good lord, that would be a tragedy. No, I need Dex in there to balance me out. And anyway, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.”
“So why haven’t you told him?”
“I’m just…waiting for the right time, I guess.”
She gives me a soft smile, her eyes twinkling. “He’s going to be so bloody happy. You have no idea. He wants to be a father so badly.”
My heart does a backflip at hearing that.
“He does? Really? He doesn’t talk to me about it all that much.”
I know he’s brought it up a few times, in a very light, almost joking way, but I’ve always brushed it off, refusing to let myself really think about it and what it means.
Still, to hear this from Rebecca, that he wants this badly enough to talk to her about it, well, fuck. I’m positively melting inside.
Rebecca scoffs. “Maybe he doesn’t talk to you about it because you’re always so squirrely around the subject!”
“I have my reasons,” I protest. And he knows that, too.
“Yes, well, I have to say I’m glad you’re ignoring all that shite and going for it. It’s not like you’re cursed, Perry.”
“I know,” I tell her.
Or do I?
“Please tell him soon,” she implores me. “I need to live vicariously through your romance.” She takes a big gulp of wine, her expression wistful as she looks down at Lucinda who is glued to her game. “You know, I wouldn’t trade Lucy for the world. She’s the best thing that has ever happened to me. I just…” She closes her eyes for a moment, exhaling. “I wish I had what you and Dex have.”
“Things with Dean still weird?” I ask. Rebecca’s history is all sorts of complicated. For one thing, she’s a lesbian (though now she says she’s more pansexual, but doesn’t want to label things), had a girlfriend named Emily, and went through a bad breakup, which resulted in her sleeping with Dean and then getting pregnant. She and Dean have this Ross and Rachel baby mama drama thing where they live together but aren’t together, and the last I heard was they were screwing each other. I don’t know, it’s hard to keep up.
“Yeah,” she says, lowering her voice and glancing at an oblivious Lucinda. “Things were getting too much, too complicated
. I love Dean, I really do, but I don’t…I don’t feel that fire. I want to be with someone I do feel the fire for. And the more I’m, you know, with him, the more I feel like I’m leading him on. He wants more, something I can’t give him.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, knowing what a tough spot she’s in. “Have you thought about moving out?”
“Well, honestly, now that I’ve got the show going, and he’s working, we don’t really see each other that often. We’re basically trading off shifts with Lucy Goose and that’s it.”
Rebecca used to have a show called Wine Babes (alongside she who shall not be named) with Shownet, the company that put EIT on the web. For a little while there, she was even a third member of our crew until we decided that shit got too real and we needed to walk away. After floundering for a bit, she finally got cast as a host on a Seattle house-flipping reality thingy. At least this one is a little different from the rest because it’s two (hot) women doing the flipping, Rebecca as the interior design expert.
“You’ll make it work,” I tell her while the waitress brings us our food. “I know you will.”
We all dig in, Lucinda putting her game away to devour the cake. I don’t talk much, the truffle pasta blowing my mind as it always does, and we comfortably sit in silence until I’m absolutely stuffed.
I push my plate away and pour the rest of the wine into our glasses. “So, how is your co-host anyway? Claire?” I ask her. “She’s…” I glance at Lucinda, who is staring at me with big eyes, cake on her face. “Very pretty.”
Rebecca can pick up on what I’m getting at because she gives me a flirty kind of smirk, which tells me she thinks she’s quite pretty indeed.
“Claire’s great,” she says emphatically while she takes her napkin and wipes the cake off her daughter’s face. “Someone I’m eager to get to know better.”
Just as I thought.
I gulp some wine, smiling at her when suddenly the hair on the back of my neck starts to raise and the air around me goes shockingly cold.
I stiffen, quickly swallowing, trying to get my bearings on why I’m feeling creeped out all of a sudden, when my gaze goes to Lucinda.
While Rebecca dabs her napkin on Lucinda’s sleeve to get a smear of frosting off, Lucinda’s eyes go as round as saucers, staring across the restaurant.
I blink at her and then slowly turn my head, following her gaze.
The nearest table has a single woman sitting at it, her back to us.
Her hair is long, all the way to her ass, and black. Wet, even. Actually, the more I look at her, the more I realize she’s soaked to the bone, dressed in an almost translucent, white lacey gown that sticks to her skin.
Her hand is pale, smeared with blood, and it’s holding on to a chain leash that disappears into the blackness under the table.
Everything inside me goes absolutely still.
Holy fuck.
I’m looking at a ghost, aren’t I?
More than that, it’s the leash that’s getting me, the way it leads to something that I can’t see, that I don’t want to see.
I’ve seen something like that before.
So has Rebecca.
“What is it?” Rebecca whispers harshly. “Lucinda? Perry!”
I pull my eyes away from the dead woman and glance at them.
Rebecca is looking between the two of us, frowning, while Lucinda’s eyes are still fixed on the woman in a look of both fear and curiosity.
“What are you looking at, Lucy?” Rebecca asks, her voice growing higher.
Lucinda doesn’t answer.
I look back toward the woman, expecting her to be gone.
But she’s still fucking right there.
And now…now there’s a hint of a leathery tail sticking out from underneath the table.
My mouth goes completely dry, the room starting to spin. I press my hands down on the table to steady myself.
“You don’t see her?” I manage to ask Rebecca, not taking my eyes away from the tail that’s twitching ever so slightly.
“See who?”
“The lady,” Lucinda says quietly. “The lady with the monster.”
“What?” Rebecca hisses. “Lucy, please love, what are you talking about?”
I try to swallow and look at her, hearing the fear in her voice. “I’m seeing what Lucinda is seeing.”
“A ghost?” she whispers, her arm going around her daughter, pulling her close. “Please don’t tell me she’s like you.”
I frown, feeling a pinch in my heart just for a moment. Then I shake my head. “Kids can see things until a certain age. Doesn’t mean she’s like me.”
I look back at the woman, only this time she’s in the middle of slowly turning her head to look at me.
I don’t want to see her face.
BAM!
Something hits one of the large windows looking out onto the street, making everyone in the restaurant jump and cry out in alarm.
My eyes move to the window where there’s a large crack forming in it, some people ducking beneath their tables, others peering outside.
I quickly look back at the woman, but she’s gone.
There’s no one at her table at all.
“What the hell was that?” someone yells out, pointing to the window.
“A seagull,” a man says in horror as he presses against the glass, looking down onto the sidewalk. “A damn seagull just flew into the window. Broke its neck.”
Fucking hell, that’s disturbing. I love birds and absolutely hate window strikes. A seagull flying into a glass, this fast and this low, in the city? Almost unheard of, and yet not the most alarming thing to happen here in the last five minutes.
While the commotion at the window continues, I look back to Rebecca and Lucinda. “The woman is gone, isn’t she?” I ask Lucinda.
She nods. “Yes. She disappeared. The monster did too.”
“Did you get a look at the monster?” I whisper to her.
“Perry,” Rebecca says sharply. “Please don’t scare my child.”
“I’m not scaring her,” I tell her, though it does make me pause. Maybe I don’t have a right to be talking about this with her. “I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “I just…it looked familiar.”
“Familiar?”
I lower my voice. “The woman was holding a leash that went under the table. You know where we last saw that, don’t you?”
The one time in her life when Rebecca Sims saw a ghost was when we were investigating a haunted school on the Oregon coast, which was also an ex-sanatorium where hundreds of children died from TB, as well as from the hands of their evil caregivers. There was a monster there that the children called “the bad thing,” that one devious ghost girl kept on a leash. The bad thing was a demon, and once it was off the leash, it terrorized the three of us. I’ll never forget the look in Rebecca’s eyes the moment she finally saw what we were all so scared of. It didn’t help that the demon was probably the most demented, disturbing creature of all.
And from the look on Rebecca’s face, she’s reliving that fear right now.
“Wow, that was pretty awful,” the waitress says, making us flinch in our seats as she comes back over. “I’ve never seen a seagull do that before. Can I take your plates?”
We absently nod, while Lucinda asks Rebecca if they can go home.
“Sorry this birthday lunch ended this way,” Rebecca says as she pays the bill. She glances at the empty wine bottle. “I have to say, I wouldn’t mind finishing another one of these right now. Want to come back to our place?”
I shake my head. “I would but I have to help Dex with some production stuff.”
I can tell Rebecca doesn’t want to be alone though so I add, “Why don’t you and Lucinda come over? We can pick up another bottle of wine, and I can get it done pretty fast. It’s such a short walk and the sunshine will do us some good.”
She agrees to that, giving me a grateful smile, and though Lucinda puts up a minor fuss at the change of p
lans, that all changes when I promise her she can play with Fat Rabbit.
The three of us leave the restaurant, the outside feeling so free and bright compared to the restaurant that seemed to turn on us all of a sudden.
But the moment I see that dead seagull, still lying on the pavement with its neck bent at an impossible angle, blood spilling from its beak, the despair comes back. We walk to the apartment, trying to leave it all behind us, but I can’t help but think about the woman at the table, and the broken bird.
Wondering if that was a one-time thing.
Wondering what it means.
“Can you do me a favor?” I ask Rebecca a few minutes later as we step inside the shop across from the apartment to get a bottle of wine.
“Anything, love,” she says to me as she peruses the scant selection of cold whites.
I lean in close, getting a whiff of her tobacco and vanilla perfume. “Let’s not mention anything to Dex about what Lucinda and I saw,” I whisper into her ear.
She frowns. “Really?”
“I don’t want him to worry,” I tell her. And that’s the truth. Just as I didn’t want to tell Dex who I saw at the window in the house, just as I’ve kept other ghosts close to my chest, I don’t want him to think I’m being haunted again.
Especially if I’m going to broach the whole baby subject with him. If I thought he was overprotective now, what’s he going to be like when I’m pregnant?
“Well, I won’t say anything,” Rebecca says, her eyes going to Lucinda who is holding on to her hand and looking around the store. “Can’t say the same for her.”
Thankfully, when we step inside the apartment, Radiohead’s OK Computer blaring from the stereo, Lucinda is immediately attacked by Fat Rabbit, who scampers right to us and jumps all over her in a flurry of licks and kisses.
“I’m jealous,” Dex says to us, sauntering into the kitchen with a mug in his hands. “Smelly bastard doesn’t even lift his head when I come home.”
He’s wearing his day-off clothes, black sweatpants and a tight white undershirt, obviously not expecting company, but also not caring just the same. I have to say, Dex on his day off is one of his sexiest versions, probably because he’s all messy hair, muscles, and tanned skin, tattoos on display. The cut of his tank makes his shoulders look broader than ever, tapering down to a narrow waist, his sweatpants barely staying on his hips. He meets my eye as he walks past me, his lips curving into a smile as he leans in and kisses me on the cheek. He knows when I’m ogling him.
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