by Lena Loneson
“I’m always yours.”
’Til death do us part.
“And beyond,” she said aloud, mimicking their modified wedding vows. They’d added it as a joke at the rehearsal but said it solemnly on the actual day.
Minerva ran her tongue across her lips, remembering his. She wished she could taste him the way she had each morning, plunging her tongue teasingly into his mouth before she left their apartment for an audition or he packed his bag, getting ready to teach a class. She’d drink her coffee and Bram his Earl Grey and they’d swap flavors with each other. When she inhaled she could almost smell him here in her dressing room.
She sank her ass into the chaise, treasuring the warmth of the leather. The afghan had gathered between her legs. She pressed her thighs together, holding it between them, grinding herself on the blanket. Sex had always calmed her.
“Though it’s not the same without you.” She ran a hand across her left breast, tracing the nipple, which had pebbled in the cold. Her other hand slid up her thigh, gliding over her skin, up under the hem of her short, sequined gown. She sighed as it moved higher, as the other hands massaged her breasts, pulling and caressing, and a finger began to slip under the hem of her satin panties as she ground her ass into his lap…
Wait a minute, three hands?
Minerva gasped and her eyes flew open.
She was alone. She saw only her reflection in the dressing room mirror, her curls mussed, her face flushed. Minerva’s chest rose and fell quickly as she panted with excitement.
It should be fear. What she’d just felt was anatomically impossible.
There’s nothing to be afraid of.
Bram?
She didn’t say it out loud this time. Speaking out loud would seem too…real?
It’s okay, luv. It’s me. I’m here.
The deep citrus scent of Earl Grey filled her nostrils. She inhaled. It mixed with sweat—a man’s musk, not her own. Her imagination, surely. They’d sat together so many mornings, him with his tea and milk, her with her coffee, black. Teasing each other over their choice of beverages.
Yankee.
Limey.
She felt a chill pass over her breasts, but this time it wasn’t the ice of dread—more like the cool of a fresh dip in the lake on a hot summer day. Tantalizing, refreshing, delicious. Minerva closed her eyes and leaned in to it. Her nipples hardened, pressing forward against her bra. Ghostly thumbs flicked them softly. She let her head fall back against the chaise, sighing an exhalation of thanks. Bram always knew how to relax her and right now she needed it, even if he was a figment of her imagination.
With her eyes shut she could picture his strong, tan hands grasping at her breasts, kneading her flesh, one hand dipping under her dress and finding the lacy bra beneath. His skin was warm against hers, his rough, calloused thumb and index finger tugging at her nipple. Minerva moaned, “I miss you.”
I’ve been here all along.
He had. She’d kept him alive in her memory, talking to him every night when she pulled the vibrator from her bedside drawer. It had never been cold silicon that pleasured her, not in her mind—it was his cock, warm and firm between her legs, thrusting again and again as she moved the vibe in her hand, leaving her wet and panting against the sheets, smelling her own sex in the air.
The leather of the chaise seemed to move beneath her, shaping itself against the outline of her body, holding her close. The afghan folded itself up between her legs, pressing hard against her cunt. The fabric rubbed against her and she shifted her hips to find the best angle. The sequined dress was raised above her waist now. The yarn of the blanket felt rough against the tops of her thighs, buffered against her cunt by her panties.
“I wore red for you today,” Minerva told her husband. Red panties, matching her lips and her shoes—his favorite color.
It’s perfect.
She concentrated on his voice, remembering the lilt in his vowels. The Earl Grey scent in the air intensified and she sucked it in through her nostrils. She wanted him. The memory of him, the ghost of him—it didn’t matter what it was, Minerva knew what she wanted. She opened her mouth. A warmth pressed against it, his tongue hungry and demanding. She whimpered, parting her lips farther. A slick wetness licked at her bottom lip then dipped inside her mouth, the flesh of his tongue hot against her teeth. She bit down, softly, jokingly, as she’d done to Bram many times.
She heard a deep male chuckle that warmed her down to her pussy. Juices formed between her legs. She tasted his tongue with her own, the citrus of the tea, the heat of the man. His tongue tickled at the top of her mouth and as she sucked harder, pulling him farther inside her, she felt a weight press down against her hips, against her chest, Bram’s body leaning in to her, trapping her against the chaise.
It should have scared her but it felt so familiar.
Minerva kept her eyes squeezed shut, trapped between the chaise and the heaviness of whatever pinned her—a memory or the ghost of her husband. She twirled her tongue against his, mixing their saliva, humming with pleasure. His legs curled between hers and she opened her thighs wide, reaching up and running the toes of one foot along his calf, feeling the masculine hairs of his legs, the muscles beneath his skin.
He was naked, just as he’d been the last time she’d made love to him, in their bed. His erect cock pressed against her stomach and she shifted her body upward, sliding him south. Bram’s warm shaft stopped against her clit, grinding into her. The moisture of his pre-cum soaked into her panties, mixing with her own wetness. His mouth still held hers, enraptured. She reached up and felt strong, naked arms beneath her fingers. One of his hands buried itself in her hair, pulling her face to his as he kissed her. Their noses mashed together and she whimpered—she couldn’t breathe. Without speaking he pulled back, letting her take a moment.
This is what she had loved about being married—a man who knew her utterly, who understood the nuance of every sound almost before she made it. He knew what meant “stop” or “pause” or “oh yes, more please”, the latter being most common in their relationship.
She reached up for his hair, wanting to feel the silky softness of the dark, close-cropped curls she remembered. His cock moved against her cunt, straining into the thin, red fabric of her panties separating them, and Minerva opened her eyes, wanting to see him…
There was no one there.
Minerva sat up, gasping with desire and disbelief. The illusion was broken. The pressure on her body, the taste of Bram’s saliva in her mouth—they were gone. There was no one on top of her. The dressing room mirror, floor to ceiling, showed her the truth—a solitary woman with snarled curls, a face flushed with desire, silver-sequined dress stretched and exposing one of her breasts to the air, the pale skin heaving as she inhaled. Red panties peeked out where the fabric of the dress was raised to her waist. The afghan was tangled between her legs.
“Bram?” she said to the air.
There was no reply.
But she’d felt him, hadn’t she? She’d imagined his voice for years, but surely she couldn’t have dreamed up an encounter that felt as real as this one. She wasn’t that starved for sex, was she? Her vibrator and her memories, certainly, had kept her hormones under control. ’Til death do us part, and beyond. She’d remained loyal, more out of pain than because she thought her husband would genuinely want her to be alone forever. But she wasn’t so far gone that she would make up a ghost.
Was she?
Ghosts aren’t real, Nerv, she told herself. This time it was her own voice rather than his. Was she letting this psychic stuff get to her? It was an acting gig, nothing more. Sure, she got some pleasure from helping her audience to move on, but it paid the rent and for extras like her pool or trips to the salon. The latter were business expenses, of course. Gotta look good if you’re on TV.
“Ghosts aren’t real.”
She nodded to herself and disentangled her legs from the afghan, folding it and laying it on the back of the chaise. W
hatever that had been, it had been a figment of her imagination, nothing more. She’d gotten spooked and needed calming down. Her mind had provided Bram as a coping mechanism.
The moisture between her legs reminded Minerva that she was anything but calm. She was primed for sex and there was no one around to give it to her. Sigh. She adjusted herself in the mirror, pulling the gown up over her left breast and down across her thighs. She straightened her hair as best she could, the unruly curls disobeying her as always. Then she moved into the tiny bathroom adjoining the dressing room to brush her teeth and do her business.
A soft, cool breath seemed to brush her back as she left, raising tiny hairs along her skin. With everything she’d experienced today, the touch was so small that it went nearly unnoticed. Not real. She could rationalize away anything. She had to if she wanted to stay sane.
In the cramped bathroom, Minerva splashed water on her face, cooling her skin. Her heart still raced and she could feel her pulse between her legs. She hadn’t been this turned-on in a long time. She cupped more cold water in her hands, savoring the wetness against her fevered fingers. She lowered her face to the pool in her hands, submerging it, taking a moment to blow bubbles in the water, thinking about the times she and Bram had giggled in the bath, blowing against each other’s stomachs. Her heart ached with missing him. She longed to talk to him in person, tell him about the hallucinations—the man in the audience with blood on his hands, the almost-sex with the ghostly remembrance of Bram himself. The feelings were polar opposites, fear and pleasure, but both confused her.
Minerva let the water fall between her fingers, listening to it trickling down the drain. She pressed her hands to the sink’s cold porcelain. In the tiny bathroom mirror, she examined her face. The pink was leaving her skin, and her green eyes were a bright-jade contrast to her pale complexion. Her mascara was smudged. They were finished taping for the day so that didn’t bother her. Brown curls fanned out riotously around her head like the mane of a lioness. Minerva bared her teeth in the mirror as if she could summon the courage of the animal. Chiclets, she thought—what Bram had always fondly called her teeth. Perfect and straight—an actress’s teeth, not a lion’s.
But she had a courage all her own. She simply had to summon it. Somehow.
A few minutes later, Minerva exited the bathroom, breathing normally now. She smiled at the sight of the rumpled afghan on the chaise. It brought back memories of sex with Bram before they’d married, when she’d still been a young, struggling actress and her dressing rooms had been much smaller. A post-performance fuck had always taken the edge off. How she missed him.
Then Minerva turned her head and saw the dressing room mirror.
Blood-red letters were scrawled on the shiny surface—VICTOR GRA—
Her eyes flew to the door. It was locked, as she’d left it. Nothing else in the room was disturbed. She sucked back a scream.
Chapter Four
Bram
He hadn’t meant to scare her. He’d been euphoric upon touching her body, tasting her mouth with his own. He’d gone too far in wanting to feel the heat of her against him, to suck her panting breath into his nonexistent lungs.
When she’d denied him, he wanted to shout, I am real. I’m right here!
But he’d lost control and the body he’d briefly managed to manifest had disintegrated back into the ether. As he’d watched her exit to the washroom, her gorgeous, shapely ass had set up another wave of desire and with it, power.
He’d felt his ghostly fingers return. In a moment of desperation, he’d picked up a tube of lipstick and begun to write on the mirror.
Victor Grayson was the man’s name. Bram hadn’t been able to finish writing it, but it was a start. Now the question was, what would his wife do with the information?
Chapter Five
Home
So. Ghosts were real. That was the latest conclusion of the day. Awesome.
That was sarcasm. It was anything but awesome, but what could a psychic do when confronted with evidence? Sure she was a fake, and a good one, but how could anyone have gotten into the dressing room when it had clearly been locked, and without her noticing? How could anyone fake the way her husband had touched her? The two feats combined went far beyond her bag of tricks.
Minerva took a cab home from the LA studio to her house in Santa Monica, knowing that driving with her shaky hands and racing mind wouldn’t be the smartest idea. She tipped the driver generously and stepped out of the cab, closing the bright-yellow door behind her.
She was feeling calmer already. A slight breeze filled the warm California summer air, and the sun had just set. She loved dusk. Shadows cast by the lush trees in her front yard danced across the pale cream of her Spanish-style house. The multimillion dollar home was small, but more than she needed, and the yard—giving her several lots worth of space away from the neighbors—more than made up for it. It was meticulously maintained by a company owned by Rachel’s uncle. Networking was everything in Minerva’s career and it extended to the rest of her life.
Though “calmer” meant that Minerva’s hands still shook like leaves in the wind as she fished her keys out of her purse, but when she reached the front door and smelled citrus, she steadied herself.
“Bram?” she whispered, her voice tentative with hope. There was no response except for a warm gust across her legs. She opened the door and pressed the code into the home alarm keypad, her red nails clicking on the buttons. She waited for the beep and the reassuring female voice stating, “Armed.” Having the alarm system installed had been one of the first things she’d done after moving into the house. Since Bram’s murder she’d never felt entirely comfortable living alone.
Minerva kicked off her heels as she moved inside, leaving them by the door. A sheen of sweat covered her feet and, as she walked over the hardwood floors, the contact of wet skin on wood made a slight sticking noise. Her dress felt heavy and damp as well and she knew it wasn’t from the humidity in the air—it was a perfect summer evening, no rain on the horizon. She needed a shower. Maybe later a swim?
She dropped her purse and keys on an antique side table and surveyed the room. Photos of Bram and of her cousin’s children sat atop the white brick fireplace. A lush couch and shag carpet to warm her feet kept this room cozy on cool evenings, and large windows let the light in as the sun rose each morning. Though she had a bright kitchen and dining room, Minerva often drank her breakfast in here, sipping a kale smoothie, or out in the backyard on an Adirondack chair by the pool.
She thought about that shower but first padded barefoot to the kitchen and started the kettle boiling. Minerva had to dig to the back of the cupboard, past her tins of fair trade, shade-grown Ethiopian coffee beans, to find what she was looking for—a single box of bagged Earl Grey tea she kept for when Bram’s mother visited twice a year. The kettle whistled, its shrillness startling her as it broke the silence. She pulled out a mug and dropped the bag in then grabbed her laptop computer from the main room and moved outside, punching in the back door’s alarm code before sliding the glass door open.
She inhaled the night air, setting the mug on the wide, oak arm of her Adirondack chair. She balanced the laptop on the other arm and sank down onto the wood. Sequins scraped across the boards of the chair but Minerva figured that between the collapse onstage and near-sex with her husband-from-beyond-the-grave, the dress was done for anyway.
The clean blue water of the pool stretched out in front of her, sparkling beneath Chinese-style deck lanterns. It was set in the ground with rocks surrounding the water, created to mimic a natural setting. A small waterfall at the far end gurgled. The sound of it and the smell of the tea worked to calm Minerva further. The waterfall, as tiny as it was, reminded her of her honeymoon with Bram.
“Are you here, Bram?”
There was no response, not even from her own mind.
She powered up the laptop.
Over the years she’d kept in touch with the detective assigned
to her husband’s homicide. They’d never caught the killer, but Minerva knew that wasn’t the fault of Detective Andrews.
Nor had Bram’s murder been his own fault.
For the first few years after his death, she’d blamed him. He was supposed to be the person who grounded her, a high school science teacher who kept her sane with stories of the kids he taught and who paid the bills on their modest apartment while she pursued her dreams.
She pulled up bookmarked websites that she hadn’t looked at in years. Newspaper articles about Bram’s murder—the details of the case had been shocking and while not front page news, it had taken up more than a few inches in the middle of the papers. It wasn’t every day that a high school teacher was found with his heart cut out.
The articles said little beyond that and “gambling debts”. It had humiliated her parents and broken Bram’s mother’s heart—not to mention Minerva’s own.
She’d had no idea about the money he’d gambled away or the horrible people he owed more to. The thugs, Detective Andrews said, who’d likely killed him and cut out his heart as a warning to others.
The man she’d seen tonight had been holding a heart. There was no way it was a coincidence. Minerva knew the tricks behind every illusion, and little shocked her anymore. But no one else had seen him. How could an illusion reach just her? Drugs? An actual psychic warning, to match an actual ghost? Could the man be the same one who killed her husband?
You’re a fake psychic, remember.
But what was the alternative? Was she losing her mind?
She pulled up her email client and typed Andrews’ address. It filled in automatically after the first two letters. Any updates? She wrote. Does the name Victor Gra-something (didn’t catch the end) mean anything to you? Someone passed on the tip. Any new sketches to look at? Thanks, Minerva