Hollowed: Return to Sleepy Hollow, the Complete Duology

by Candace Wondrak

The thought made me happy—which was odd. I mean, we grew up together. I’d seen him through his dorky phase and his gangly phase. He saw me through braces, my acne-riddled year of ninth grade, and when I ate so much candy from one of the town festivals that I threw up all over his shoes.

  We weren’t the same kids we were back then. Time had changed both of us, though I felt like it had its hand on him a little more. There was almost no trace of the boy he was; everything about him was full-on, red-blooded American man.

  But, even so, the notion also made me feel conflicted, because even though I was attracted to him—because hell, look at him. Who wouldn’t be attracted to him?—this couldn’t last, unless he was willing to leave Sleepy Hollow to continue to see me. I wasn’t going to live here, and I knew that once you were a townie, you were always a townie. You never left Sleepy Hollow.

  “Why are you sorry?” I asked.

  “I’m nervous,” he said, laughing at himself. “It’s stupid. I’ve known you forever. I shouldn’t be nervous.” He was mainly talking to himself now, trying to muster up his courage to be on this date with me.

  I made Bones nervous?

  “You’re not the only one,” I said, shrugging. “It’s been a long time, Bones. Being nervous just means you care, right?” He grinned, agreeing with me by nodding. “So, tell me what you’ve been up to these years without me.”

  Turned out, Bones had been busy. He went to the police academy, graduated and got a position in Sleepy Hollow. He’d bought his parents house and fixed it up while his parents downsized and got a smaller place. It didn’t sound like he had any time to himself.

  We had our food before us. I ordered some pasta alfredo while Bones got some kind of chicken parmesan. Our plates looked delicious, but still not worth whatever they cost. I twirled my fork in the noodles, lifting it to my mouth as I said, “How’s the dating life around here?” I’d mainly meant it as a joke, but…well. Also seriously.

  He shook his head. “Oh, you know, I haven’t had much time to date. I’m pretty focused on my work and the house.” Bones stuck his fork in a piece of chicken, his azure stare lingering on me, instilling a warm feeling deep within me. “I haven’t dated much. Have you?”

  Under the table, I had to cross my legs to try to ignore the hungry longing in my core. How long had it been since I’d had sex? I couldn’t even remember. “Not a lot, no. There were a few, but…” I trailed off. “None of them lasted long. It’s like—”

  “You couldn’t get into them,” Bones finished, and my mouth dropped. Those were nearly the exact words I’d been about to say. What the hell?

  “How did you—”

  “Because I felt the same,” he said, eyeing me up as if he couldn’t believe the coincidence either.

  I found myself laughing, really wishing I hadn’t sworn off alcohol for the night. Now would be a nice time to pop a bottle and take a few, extra-long swigs of whatever it was, even if it burned my throat on its way down.

  “I thought about you a lot, Kat.”

  Those words made me freeze. He thought about me a lot. I…I used to think about him a lot, especially the first two years of college, right after I’d stopped visiting my dad and Sleepy Hollow when I’d turned eighteen, but eventually thoughts of him stopped coming. Or at least they stopped being so frequent. Anytime I caught myself thinking about him, I pushed him aside, because then I’d start to think about my dad and this town, and I didn’t want to lose myself in Sleepy Hollow like Dad did.

  Once I regained myself, I managed to ask, “Why?”

  He looked at me then. Really, truly looked at me. Bones looked at me so hard I could feel his stare in my soul. He could see me, all of me, and he refused to look away. I wasn’t just the daughter of the town weirdo; I wasn’t the namesake (and apparent reincarnation) of Katrina Van Tassel. I was just me, and the way he looked at me right now made me feel like I was enough.

  “I liked you,” he said.

  “You did?”

  Bones nodded. “I thought you knew.”

  I refused to believe it. “I—I liked you, too.” I hurriedly spoke the words, fearing that if I took my time in saying them, I’d think better of it. If he liked me and I liked him…fuck. We missed out on a lot of summers where we could’ve made out and done other stuff. Were we both really so blind?

  Now it was Bones’s turn to say, “You did? I didn’t…wow. We are both huge idiots, aren’t we?” He grinned, his dimples making an appearance, and for a moment, we both laughed at our stupid younger selves.

  If only we could get that time back, I knew I’d do things differently. Alas, that wasn’t how life worked, so here we were today, laughing about it like it didn’t matter. The thing was…it did matter. It mattered more than I could’ve imagined.

  His blue stare crinkled a bit, and his eyes dropped to my chin. “I wish I would’ve known. Would’ve given me the confidence to tell you that I liked you.”

  “And if you would have told me,” I chimed in, weaving my fingers together as I leaned on the table, “I would’ve had more confidence to tell you.” It worked both ways, dork. A sexy, manly, infuriatingly hot man, but still a dork deep down.

  He could’ve been my dork, if things had been different.

  “True,” Bones finally relented, his smile deepening into something more, something…that made my stomach harden. Suddenly reaching over this table, grabbing him by the collar and pulling his mouth to mine didn’t seem too crazy. If anything, I wanted to do it.

  Him, in other words. I wanted to do him. I wanted to bend over and let him take me like an animal, or ride him until he exploded. Either way, I didn’t care. All I knew was that there was an aching, burning need between my legs, and sitting here and eating this fancy meal wasn’t going to cut it.

  Not for long, at least.

  The need to get ahold of his dick didn’t even go away when he brought up Crane, the single subject I wanted to stay away from at all costs—which meant one thing. I craved this man like my body craved chocolate when I was on my period. “How did your conversation with Crane go today?” As he hedged, he held my stare, trying to see if…if what? If I felt something for Crane?

  Oh, the man was tall and lean, but weird, and he reminded me entirely too much of my dad. Me and Crane would never happen. Me and Bones, on the other hand…that was much more realistic.

  I wrinkled my nose. “Do you really want to talk about Crane?”

  His wide shoulders rose and fell with a chuckle. “Maybe not. Let’s talk about you. Tell me what you’ve gotten yourself into while you were away.” Away, as if I was always meant to come back. Back to Sleepy Hollow and back to him.

  So I talked about myself for a while, as boring as it was. I had no interesting stories. Mine was: graduate high school, go to college, graduate there, and, here’s the big surprise, get a shitty-paying job in the retail field because my degree was near useless. Useless degrees weren’t something colleges told you about, and most parents nowadays, including my mom, bless her, were clueless as to which fields would be hiring in four years.

  Ah, well. Not only hiring but paying well.

  “You could move back here,” Bones said. “You have a house. You could get a job here.” He was about finished with his meal now, and he pushed the plate aside. A light breeze blew past us, tickling my nose as I stared at him.

  Move back here? Live here, where things were trying to kill me? Where something might’ve killed my dad? If Bones knew the truth, surely he wouldn’t suggest something like that to me. Surely he’d understand why I had to leave Sleepy Hollow and never come back.

  “This town,” I said, a chill sweeping over me, causing me to shiver, “is not where I belong.”

  “Then where do you belong?”

  My mouth opened, and I was ready with a snarky comment along the lines of anywhere but here, but when I saw his earnest expression, I stopped. He’d only take something like that as an insult, so I couldn’t say it. Instead I found myself whispering,
“I don’t know.”

  And it was the truth. I didn’t know where I belonged, but I knew it wasn’t here. Not with the spirits and all the other weird stuff that was apparently real. I couldn’t belong here. I’d go crazy just like my dad if I stayed here, assuming it was safe.

  The look Bones gave me then made me feel bad, and I ignored it as I finished eating. Bones paid for the meal once the waiter brought the check, and I walked with him to his car. I had no idea if this was it—if this was our date—but ever since admitting I didn’t know where I belonged, I hadn’t felt right.

  I felt bad, actually. I could tell I hurt him by saying I didn’t belong in Sleepy Hollow, but I didn’t know why. It wasn’t like I told him I didn’t belong with him. If I’d done that, it’d be a different story.

  We got in his car, and once again, he held the door open for me. He had a habit of doing that; if he didn’t knock it off, a woman might start to get used to such treatment. A woman might start to miss such things when she left Sleepy Hollow.

  Dusk had taken over the landscape, but it wasn’t dark quite yet. Bones glanced at me, his blue eyes twinkling. “There’s one other place I wanted to take you, if you’re still up for it.” His tone was unsure, and I hated that I’d made him rethink this whole thing.

  I reached for him, seeking to comfort him by placing my hand on his arm. “I’m up for anything,” I said, and I meant it. I didn’t want tonight to end, mostly because it meant I had to face facts that this—Bones and I—could never be.

  Bones smiled, and he took us…to the cemetery. One of them, anyway. The oldest one in town. The one that was nestled in between pine groves, the one with a small creek running through it. It was such an old cemetery that no one had been buried in it for ages. Growing up, all the funerals that I’d seen during my summers always led to one of the other cemeteries.

  This one…had a lot of history. Old headstones, their limestone faces washed off due to the acidity of the rain. Most of them you couldn’t even read anymore, the lettering so dull and washed away.

  This also happened to be the cemetery Bones and I spent a lot of time in as kids, playing hide and seek and tag and all that. Generally being kids, bored during the summer. He always ditched his school friends to hang out with me. I guess that should’ve been my clue that he liked me a bit more than a friend.

  We parked in the pebbled lot just outside the cemetery’s gate, and Bones was slow to unbuckle his seatbelt. I sat there for a moment, wondering if it was even smart to go walking through a cemetery when the Headless Horseman was after me.

  Fuck. The more I thought about it, the crazier I thought I was. I hadn’t seen or felt anything since this morning, at Crane’s house. Not a single thing. Maybe I’d made it all up. Maybe this place was causing my imagination to overexert itself…or maybe the Headless Horseman was just biding his time.

  There was only one way to find out.

  I got out of the car, breathing in the musky air as deeply as my lungs could handle. All around me, nothing but nature. The town had left the cemetery and its surrounding woods alone, mostly. There was no one else here but us.

  Bones walked beside me, rubbing the back of his neck as he glanced at me. “I thought we could take a little walk, kind of like how we used to.” Dropping his arm, he tentatively found my hand, his rough, calloused fingers intertwining with mine ever so slowly, wordlessly asking me if it was okay to hold my hand.

  It was, but just for tonight.

  He took me through the gate; it was an old stone archway with a metal iron gate that no one ever locked these days. Why bother? Nature had already taken everything from the gravestones, all of the names and the dates, and the families of today wouldn’t be able to find the headstones of their ancestors. We started walking through the rows of headstones, the giant trees towering around the area. It was a peaceful night, a bit eerie to be walking in a cemetery at night, but still peaceful.

  At least it was until Bones said something I wasn’t expecting: “Kat, I have to be honest. I still like you. I don’t think I ever stopped.” The hand holding onto mine squeezed, and our legs slowed.

  I gazed up at him, wanting to say the same—for at least a part of it was true. How else could I explain the easy way I felt around him? How else could I explain why I felt so drawn to him? It was like I never stopped crushing on him, even though I hadn’t seen him in years. But I couldn’t, because I got so lost in his eyes, their dark blue hue, and the way his lips were parted slightly.

  Fate.

  Was it fate? Did I believe in fate? I wasn’t sure. At this point, I didn’t know what I believed in anymore. This town had turned what I thought I knew inside-out and upside-down, twisted it up a bit, and then threw it all in a blender, handing it back to me as some unrecognizable substance. I didn’t know if I believed in fate, but in this instance, if I did, I’d say I believed my dad was always meant to die so young.

  How could I ever agree to that?

  As I stared up into his eyes, their blue hue shrouded in the darkness of the night, with the cool breeze nipping at my back, I was unable to say anything in reply, but it didn’t matter—because even if I had something to say, even if I begrudgingly agreed with him and told him I still had feelings for him, I wouldn’t have been able to say them.

  Why?

  Oh, no big reason.

  Just that his lips were suddenly on mine, stifling any words I would try to say.

  Brom Brunt was kissing me, and the worst thing about it was…I was loving it.

  Chapter Seven

  Bones had yanked me to him, the hand holding mine releasing me only to snake its way around my lower back, keeping my chest pressed against his. His other hand went for my neck, tilting my chin up. His eyes were half-lidded, semi-closed, and the moment his mouth met mine, I closed mine, too.

  Kissing Bones was not like kissing anyone else. I’d had boyfriends before who I’d done everything and more with, but when our lips melded together, when our tongues collided in a hungry, wanton display of pure passion, it blew every other kiss out of the water. No other man was in my head when he ran his tongue over my lower lip, nipping it slightly. I forgot about everything else in my past as he walked us backward, our mouths never unlocking, pushing me up against the nearest tree trunk.

  Caught between a hard, muscled body and a rough, unforgiving tree. It wasn’t the worst place to be. In fact, I rather liked it, because I liked him. God, I liked Bones so much, so much more than I knew I should.

  Our bodies rubbed against each other, molten desire flooding my core as I heard him moan into the kiss when I tangled my fingers in the mop of blonde hair on the top of his head. The world could fade away, cease to exist completely, and I wouldn’t care. Not right now. Right now there was only Bones and me, nothing else. No one else.

  Years of pent-up longing and passion went into our embrace. I wanted to break away to breathe, to catch my breath, but I was afraid that if I tore my mouth off his, the magic would disappear. The eternal fires of passion would simmer, leaving me to stare at him and wonder whether or not this was all some huge mistake.

  Was it? Would I regret this later? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I just didn’t care. The only thing I wanted was Bones, and I had him utterly and completely.

  His teeth grazed my lip, teasing me as he trailed kisses along my jawline, burying his face in my neck, kissing the tender, sensitive skin just below my ear. I let out a low moan, arching my back against the tree, grinding my hips against his harder. A low rumble came from Bones’s chest, and I reveled in the sound. A growing hardness pressed against my midsection, and it wasn’t a belt buckle. It was something I never paid much attention to while growing up, because I’d thought they were gross.

  His dick. His cock. Whatever you wanted to call it. It felt hard and, from what I could feel, more than average in size. Realizing what he was packing under the waist, I practically mewled like a cat in heat.

  I guess I sort of was in heat right now,
because the only thing on my mind was Bones, and shedding all of these clothes.

  Was it weird to have sex in a cemetery? It wasn’t like anyone would stroll up and interrupt us. Was it disrespectful? I wasn’t sure, because this cemetery was hundreds of years old, all of the headstones unreadable. It wasn’t like there were any recently-dead buried here.

  Hmm. Maybe I was just making excuses. Maybe I just wanted to fuck. Maybe I just wanted to find out how good Bones was with his thick, hard dick.

  “I’ve wanted you for so long,” Bones murmured against my neck, licking and nipping, sending waves of chilling pleasure down my spine. I held onto him, grinding against his hips, my eyes closed, lost in the sensation of our bodies pressed together. “So long, Kat.”

  One of his hands moved, starting to travel down my front, undoing the buttons on my jeans. Then the zipper. But he didn’t pull anything down; he slipped his hand under them, running his fingers along me in the most earth-shattering way possible.

  I let out a fluttery sigh, throwing my head back against the tree. Bones was good with his hands, apparently. He knew just what area to focus on, what to circle, how to slide his fingers back to my entrance and gather some of the slick wetness there, use it to make it feel better. His mouth showered my throat with hungry kisses, and I let him touch me until I felt like I was going to explode.

  Either he was ridiculously good, or I was starved for sexual attention. Maybe a bit of both. It didn’t take me long to start rocking my hips along his hand, soft sighs escaping me. The budding pleasure in my core took hold of me, and I felt my muscles tensing up. A louder cry came from me as the orgasm shook me, gripping me so hard I wanted to collapse and fall over, but Bones had me, held me up.

  And his fingers weren’t done yet.

  He slipped one inside of me, and with his mouth near my ear, he whispered huskily, “You’re so wet.”

  Yeah, that didn’t surprise me at all, considering what was happening and how skilled Bones was. I mean, holy hell. You’d think I’d never been touched down there before with the way my body was reacting. Like it was ravenous. Like it had never known what a real man was, what a true man could do, until tonight.