There is so much to succumb to. The wet sound of his mouth as he eats me out, how his moans vibrate through me, the smell of sex in the room. My fingers grab the sheets, begin to claw at them, unable to hold back any longer.
“Oh god,” I suddenly gasp, the words ripped out of me. “I’m coming.”
And it happens instantly, like the world I was standing on is ripped away and I’m just a shaking, crying, incoherent mess who has no control over her brain, or her heart, or her body anymore.
It’s as I’m coming—hard, so fucking hard—that I realize how damn lucky I am, because the man who is doing this to me, the man who is making my eyes roll back in my head, making me see through time, is the man I trust more than anyone else in the world. I trust him with my body, with my heart, with every inch of me.
There’s nothing better than that. Nothing. To feel so fucking wild and free and safe all at the same time.
He has me—all of me.
“Dex,” I manage to say, my fingers a vise on the sheets, my heart in my throat. “My fucking god.”
My eyes are pinched shut, mentally trying to return to the world and reality, but even so I can tell he’s smiling.
“At your service,” he says, pulling away. “Now if you want my cock instead of my finger next time, you know who to ask.”
I laugh, feeling like the bed is swallowing me whole, I’m so exhausted and spent and happy all at once. “It’s not your birthday, Dex.”
“It will be some day,” he says, and I feel him lift off the bed.
My eyes snap open. “Where are you going?”
He saunters out of the bedroom. “To get your breakfast going, baby.”
I feel guilty. I know how damn turned on he gets when he goes down on me, so it’s rare that I don’t return the favor. But even as I’m thinking that, I start to drift off to sleep again, my body turning to mush, my thoughts following.
“Happy birthday,” I hear Dex say, and then I’m opening my eyes again, my nose assaulted by the small of bacon and eggs. I have no idea how long I’ve been asleep, but obviously that orgasm really took it out of me.
He’s placing the tray of food down beside me. “You can keep sleeping if you want to. We had quite the night last night.”
Memories come flooding back, what we did in the house.
What happened.
What I saw.
For a moment I thought it had all been a dream but…
Maximus.
“I’ll get you coffee,” Dex says, leaving the room, and I try to sit up to make sense of everything. My brain feels so sluggish and rattled at the same time.
On one hand, Dex just made me fucking breakfast in bed and it looks and smells so good, my stomach is grumbling, not to mention he just made me come so hard I passed out.
On the other hand, I’m trying to come to grips with what happened last night.
We went to the house, Dex got locked in that room, and I saw Maximus.
The fucking ginger bastard kissed me.
How could that have even been real?
Maybe it wasn’t. The more I try and think about it, the more it slips away from me. I know I felt him, I saw him, I heard him. But Dex didn’t. He’d warned me that Dex wouldn’t, but isn’t that convenient?
Dex comes back in the room, holding a mug of coffee while Fat Rabbit follows hot on his trail, little legs moving fast.
He hands the coffee to me, leaning in to kiss me on the cheek before sitting beside me on the edge of the bed. I take a moment to look him over. He looks exceptionally bright this morning. Though his hair is messy, his dark eyes are clear, watching me curiously. He seems happy, energetic, a smile dancing on his lips.
“There you are,” he says softly, peering at me.
I know I must seem so out of it. I give him a quick smile. “Morning.” I take a sip of my coffee and the flavor stings my tongue. My eyes go wide. “What did you put in here?”
He grins. “Just a little brandy. You only turn twenty-seven once.”
“Ugh, I feel so old,” I tell him, taking another sip, the brandy sinking into me.
“You watch your mouth or you’re going to get a spanking,” he says.
“Always with the threats.”
“I have nine years on you, kiddo. If you’re old, what does that make me?”
“Also old.” I grin.
He raises his chin. “You’re lucky I spent a lot of time on this breakfast, otherwise I’d be flipping it over, and this palm” —he raises his hand— “would be making very hard, loud contact with your ass.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
He lets out a growl. “You’re impossible to threaten, you know that?”
He starts to get up but I reach out and grab his arm. “Where’s your food?”
“Already feasted on you, baby,” he says, pulling out of my grasp and getting to his feet. “I need more coffee, minus the brandy.” He points dramatically at the tray. “Now eat.”
I do as he says, taking advantage of the breakfast. Dex usually takes care of the dinners around here, but I often get up earlier than he does, so breakfast falls on me. And as much as I love bacon and eggs, I usually go the quick, healthy, and boring route with oatmeal, which he loves to complain about, even though he secretly enjoys it.
While munching on a piece of bacon, my mind trips back to last night again. I’m tempted to tell Dex what I thought I saw, but something stops me. What if it was real? What if it did happen, and it really was Max? I know part of me thinks that maybe the house was just playing elaborate tricks on me for reasons I don’t understand yet. But the other part of me thinks that it was as real as it felt.
The weird part is that I don’t really remember the rest of the night. It’s just a vague blur of us getting in the car, coming back to the apartment, Dex taking the dog out for a walk, and me falling asleep right away. It felt like a dream.
“Are you done with your food yet?” Dex yells from the kitchen.
“Almost,” I tell him, wondering why he’s being so insistent. I glance down at Fat Rabbit who is staring up at me with big eyes, his tall white ears twitching, and give him the last piece of bacon.
“Okay. Close your eyes.”
I watch the dog gobble down the bacon and then place the tray beside me on the bed, doing what he says. I have no freaking clue what Dex has planned. We don’t tend to go all out on each other’s birthdays, which keeps things really low-pressure for the both of us.
I hear him come into the room, feel his presence beside me.
“Open your eyes,” he says.
God, it’s going to be his dick, isn’t it? I knew that butt stuff would come back to haunt me.
But when I open my eyes, it’s not his cock he’s holding.
It’s a motherfucking Twinkie with a cigarette.
“What on earth?” I say, laughing.
“Happy birthday, kiddo,” he says to me, placing the small plate in my hands. “I’ll get rid of that.” He plucks the lit cigarette out of the Twinkie, and pops the end into his mouth, giving me a salacious grin. “Mmm, sure beats menthol.”
My eyes go wide as he inhales. “What are you doing? You can’t smoke inside.”
Or, like at all, considering he’s quit a million times already.
“I’ll put it out,” he says, the smoke falling from his mouth as he smiles at me. “Just let me have my moment.” Then he gets up, heading to the kitchen. “You better eat the damn thing. It’s symbolic.”
I pick up the Twinkie and peer at it. Never did understand the appeal.
“Put the cigarette out!” I yell, knowing he’s taking his sweet time trying to suck back as much of it as he can. “And don’t tell me you had to buy a whole pack just for this.”
I hear the sink run and then he comes back into the bedroom, looking proud rather than sheepish.
He moves the tray out of the way and gets on the bed beside me, so we’re sitting shoulder to shoulder, then he takes the Twinkie and breaks it in h
alf, handing me one part. He smells like smoke, and the scent of that combined with the yellow confection takes me way back.
“Can you believe this was four years ago,” I tell him, cautiously nibbling on it. I can taste the chemicals.
“Time fucking flies,” he says.
I turn my face to his, marveling for a moment at how far we’ve come. If I stare at him long enough, I can imagine his eyebrow ring back in place. He does wear it sometimes. He’s more beardy now than he was then, but aside from some laugh lines around his eyes and a little grey scattered in his hair, he looks the same as he did back on my twenty-third birthday on D’Arcy Island.
Only difference is now I know what every little scar or mark on his face is from, I know how many different shades of red and gold are flecked in his dark brown eyes, I know that his eyelashes get longer in the summer (the fucking bastard, it isn’t fair), and that there’s a tiny patch on his beard that just doesn’t seem to grow in as thick as the rest. I know that his mouth is just as expressive as his eyes are and what every little curve and twitch and movement means.
He raises a brow, conscious of how close I’m staring at him. “Admiring how handsome I am?”
My heart feels like it’s blooming. “Why does it feel like I just met you? And when I first met you, why did it feel like I’d known you my whole life?”
His mouth curves into a warm smile. “I know you believe in soulmates.”
“Don’t you?”
“I didn’t until I met you,” he says, placing his palm on my thigh. “But to be honest, sometimes I think there’s something deeper than soulmates. That’s just shit that someone made up. Probably Hallmark.”
“Then what do you think it is?”
He shrugs. “Maybe we knew each other in another life.”
“Like a past life?”
“Or a parallel one. All I know is that I have you in this one. I can only hope that all those other versions of myself are just as fucking lucky. They’d be nothing without you, baby.”
My blooming heart continues to unfurl.
Dex, I want to start a family.
The words dance on my tongue. Everything in this moment is right and I’m this close to just projecting those words into his head so I don’t have to conjure up the courage to say it.
But then he takes my half of the Twinkie, pops it into his mouth, and grins at me with his mouth full, like a complete goofball.
“I can’t get too sappy you on you,” he says as he chews, climbing off the bed. “I’ll lose all my street cred.”
“You’re a moment ruiner, you know that?” I mumble.
“So I’ve been told,” he says cheerfully. “Come on, we have a bit of work to do before we head to Portland. And you have some brandy to finish off. I want you good and drunk all day.”
The drunk part sounds good, especially after what happened last night. But I play it safe. Yes, I have another cup of coffee with brandy in it, then Dex and I get to work. I answer a few emails from clients, schedule some videos that Dex has to shoot in the coming weeks, then we sit down together and go over some of the footage that we shot last night.
It’s pretty fucking good. I mean, I sound like a total amateur but we can just cut me out and do some voice over work instead. But the blood running under the door, the banging, the EMF meter going nuts, the door down the hall swinging open by itself, all of it is on here. Of course, people will say it’s fake, but even if a literal ghost showed itself to us on camera, people will dismiss it and say it’s CGI anyway.
“Well, what do you think?” he asks me as he turns the computer off. “Think we have something here?”
“Maybe. The start of something anyway. If she communicates with us.”
“I have no doubt she will. There’s something about that house that…”
“What?”
“I don’t want to freak you out because so far, I’m really loving how involved and interested you’re being in all of this. But with Atlas and Harry lying about god knows what, the mysterious mother, not to mention whoever else the fuck is in that house, well…I just think there’s a lot going on and a lot to uncover. It might get fucking scary.”
“Might get scary?” I repeat. “Don’t pretend you weren’t scared shitless when you got locked in that room.”
He studies me for a moment. “And you were surprisingly calm and collected, considering.”
I give him a tiny smile. “Someone has to be.”
He laughs, eyes wide. “Okay, now you’ve earned two spankings today.”
He makes a grab for me, but I giggle and run out of our office and into the bedroom to pack.
Even though we’re just staying at my father’s house for a night, we’ve got two nights at Cannon Beach after at some super romantic resort that Dex booked. I’m not sure what super romantic means coming out of his mouth, but maybe it’s where we were supposed to stay for our wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, which got postponed.
Either way, I’m looking forward to getting away for a few days. Rebecca and Lucinda are staying here to take care of the dog, so really it’ll be like our first vacation in a long time.
When I’m packed, and Dex has just thrown a bunch of shit in a duffle bag and called it a day, we bid adieu to Fat Rabbit and head down to the underground garage. We have just stepped off the elevator when Dex tells me he’s forgotten something. He gives me the keys to the Highlander and gets back on the elevator.
I shrug and continue toward the car. The underground parking is all one level and brightly lit. It’s never given me the creeps.
Until today.
I look over my shoulder as the elevator doors close and take a deep breath, wondering why everything feels so off all of a sudden. Because of all the shit that’s happened in our past, I’m so highly sensitive that I’ll make myself problems or give myself anxiety and a panic attack because of how my mind overreacts.
To combat the prickling feeling on my neck, I raise my chin high and walk at a faster pace, dragging my little suitcase behind me, a black faux-crocodile print affixed with stickers of all my favorite bands, some I’ve been lucky enough to see in person, others I’ve just dreamed about.
I pass by Putt Putt resting with a few other bikes and motorbikes in a stall, and keep going. It’s not the first time I’m wondering why our designated parking spot is so far from the fucking elevator.
And then I hear a faint fuzz and pop.
The space in front of me grows dimmer and I don’t have to turn around to know that one of the bulbs behind me just blew out.
Great.
I pause, even though I know I should just keep walking, and I slowly turn around.
It’s dark behind me, only faintly lit by the bulb above my head. The garage seems to hum at a low frequency, and I feel every hair on my body rise in response, including the ones on my head.
My nostrils flare, trying to breathe deep, to calm myself, my fingers gripping the suitcase handle for dear life.
And that’s when I see it.
Between me and the elevator, half-hidden in the shadows, something low to the ground and bigger than a dog, longer somehow, slinks across from one line of cars to the other.
The only thing I can really make out is the way the light catches on its claws as it pulls itself along the concrete, disappearing behind a truck.
A long leathery tail is the last thing I see.
“Your curiosity will go a long way,” a low woman’s voice says from behind me, her words crackling like static.
I let out a yelp, whirling around.
There’s nothing.
There’s nothing but deep mocking laughter in the air that reverberates around the garage, filling my ears.
I drop the suitcase, my hands flying to my ears to block the noise.
And yet it gets louder.
It’s coming from inside my own head.
“Stop it!” I scream.
And it does stop.
The garage hums with silence
again, except for a faint scraping noise in the distance.
The sound of claws on concrete.
I hold my breath, trying to listen hard, to figure out if the claws are getting closer or further away, but I can’t make it out, I—
The elevator doors open.
A scream dies in my throat.
Dex steps out, backlit, seeing me standing in the middle of the garage, looking like an idiot.
“Perry? You okay?” he asks, adjusting his duffle bag on his shoulder as he comes closer.
I don’t move. I know it’s him, but all the same, I need to be sure. In the dark it’s hard to tell.
“Did all the lights go out?” he asks, stopping in front of me, and before I can move to see him at a better angle, the rest of the lights go back on.
He frowns, putting his hand on my shoulder. “What happened?”
I open my mouth to speak but I don’t know what to say. I don’t want him to worry about me. If I tell him I want to get pregnant yet he knows there’s weird stuff going on, he’s going to put his foot down.
But I also hate lying to him. And I’ve lied to him enough already.
“The lights went out,” I tell him, feeling breathless. My heart is going a million miles a minute. “And even before they went out, I knew something was wrong, something was off.”
“It’s okay,” he says, though clearly from the intense mania in his eyes, it’s not okay. He places his hand at the back of my neck. “I’m here.”
“There was…” I lick my lips, my throat feeling beyond dry. “There was something in here. With me.”
Anger flares in his eyes but he nods, trying to keep his cool. “Okay. What was it?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. It had…claws.”
The whites of his eyes pop. “Claws?”
Yes. Claws we’ve seen before. At a sanitorium.
But I don’t tell him that. For some reason, it feels like I need to protect him.
“I just saw a hint of them. It was too dark. But that’s what it looked like, what it sounded like.”
He purses his lips for a moment. “I hate to sound like I don’t believe you, because I do, but is there a chance that we’re locked in here with a raccoon? Because you know how I feel about raccoons.”
I press my lips together and nod. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
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