by Carla Blake
Except for the house I was standing outside. Like the others either side of it, it was tidy and in good repair. Outside the white painted front door, a couple of small shrubs swayed about in terracotta pots and the flower beds were free of weeds. It should have been ordinary, instantly forgettable and it would have been if not for the aura of inexplicable sadness it had about it.
I went inside. I didn’t knock, mainly because no one would have heard it and I didn’t open the door, I just went inside and found myself standing in a long, narrow hallway. To my right, a flight of stairs led up to the second floor whilst in front of me a length of floor led to two doors, one to the left and one straight ahead.
I peered through the one on the right and glanced into what was obviously the lounge with a sofa, chairs, and TV plus a dining room set at one end. A few pictures, mainly of atmospheric seas ordained the walls whilst a plant, tall and frond like, stood sentinel over a coffee table scattered with newspapers and candles and a mug of half finished coffee.
Through a connecting door I found myself in the kitchen and there she was, peeling potatoes and humming along to the radio.
Feeling like the intruder I was, I stepped back a little and observed her from around the door. She was, I guessed, slightly shorter than me with very dark hair that reached mid way down her back. She was wearing black jogging bottoms with a white stripe down the leg and a white T shirt and her hands were busy, peeling, chopping, dropping small chunks of potato into a pan of already boiling water.
I glanced at the clock. Lunch time. The radio was playing songs from the eighties, inviting the listener to guess the year and she was talking to it, giving the deejay her best guess and tut-ting when she got it wrong.
I stood patiently, waiting for her to turn round so I could see what she looked like. I could, of course, have just walked over and taken a look, she would have been none the wiser, but I was enjoying the anticipation and looking forward to seeing if the face went with the hair.
When finally she did, I felt my own face break into a smile. She was lovely. Her face was oval and her eyes green. She had full, soft looking lips and a continence that would have made an Angel weep, because she looked so utterly sad. I would, I admit, having given almost anything at that point to simply hold her and tell her everything was going to be okay, but I couldn’t, I could only watch as she delved into the freezer for a pie and slipped it into the oven.
I watched her all afternoon, going about her daily routine. After lunch, she washed up, dried and put away. She fed the fish in a pond in the back garden and pulled out a couple of weeds on her way back. She read, the latest bestseller from Philippa Gregory and watched a bit of television. She did ordinary things, stuff I would have done had I been living alone but all with such an air of melancholy I felt tears prick at the corners of my eyes.
I so wanted to make her smile and take away the lines of unhappiness that surrounded her eyes, but I couldn’t and it dawned on me that I was going to be rubbish at this.
I thought, come evening, she would again watch the TV, but she didn’t. Instead she sat in an armchair by the window and watched what little of the world walked by her house. Her breath, when she sighed, steamed up the glass and she drew a heart in it, interspersing it with a crooked line that clearly represented heart break.
“What happened to you?” I said out loud and jumped when she suddenly wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. Had that been me? Had I caused her to feel cold?
“Hello.” I tried again. “Can you hear me?”
But she didn’t move.
I shouldn’t have followed her into the bathroom. Decorum should have prevented me from crossing the threshold and forced me to wait outsides, but when I saw she was running herself a bath, I couldn’t resist.
Her bathroom was a good size and had a modern shower cubicle as well as a bath, toilet and basin. Her towel rack was heated and a couple of white painted shelving units, one floor standing, held all the usual accoutrements a girl could need. She also had a wooden penguin standing on the floor and I envied her that. I’d always wanted a penguin.
I watched her turn on the water, hold her hand under the stream until it reached the right temperature and then insert the plug.
And then I watched her undress.
She did it quickly and without fuss- seeing as there was no one watching- dropping her clothes in a pile on the floor until she was left standing in just her bra and panties. The bath filled and she poured in bubble bath, swishing it around until foam gathered at either end.
After tying back her hair, she stripped off her bra and allowed her breasts to fall free and Oh God, they were lovely, full and soft with pale nipples that I longed to scoop into my mouth and suck forever. I even reached out a hand, before sharply drawing it back again, not because I feared she would see or feel me but because I would not have been so presumptuous when alive.
Her panties followed and so did my eyes, drinking in the sight of her fluff, dark against her pale skin as she stepped into the bath and slipped beneath the water.
Sitting on the toilet seat, I watched her and wanted her, my eyes never leaving her hands as she soaped herself with the suds and scooped handfuls of water over her shoulders. She wriggled her toes and fashioned herself a foamy bra before blowing the froth away. She hummed a few lines of a song and topped up the water twice, and all the time her breasts glistened with water and her nipples grew hard as she finally finished messing about and lay back with her eyes closed.
The water must have been cold by the time she eventually got out, but I had not stirred from my seat and I watched as she stepped out of the bath, dripping thin trails of foam and reached for her towel, wrapping it around her exquisite body before turning to pull out the plug. I thought then that she would simply rub herself dry and put on a bathrobe or something, but she didn’t. Instead, she let the towel fall and holding onto the edge of the bath with one hand, she bent over it and started to play with her nipples.
My mouth fell open. My God, she was going to pleasure herself and squeezing her nipples in turn until they were hard and dark, she started to gasp in a way that could only mean whatever she was feeling was going straight to her pussy and making it throb. An assumption that proved correct when her hand started to travel down over her glistening skin, sliding over her still damp stomach to the dark triangle between her legs where her fingers delved into the coarse hair, probing and pushing and spreading her pussy lips so she could get at her clit.
I moved then to sit beside her, my back pressed against the side of the bath, as her finger disappeared inside herself and she began to thrust, in and out, in and out with slow movements that saw her finger come almost all of the way out, before plunging back in again right up to the knuckle. It was the most erotic thing I have ever seen and I felt myself grow wet just watching her.
“Fuck yourself.” I murmured and was rewarded with her eyes suddenly popping open. But again I didn’t know if her reaction was down to me or the fact she was getting close to orgasm and I wasn’t going to say anything more in case she stopped.
I stared at her breasts, her mouth; the smooth dampness of her skin. My eyes roamed over her stomach, her thighs and back to her hand, busy at her cunt as she gasped and withdrew a finger covered in cream that I so easily could have licked clean for her. Running it along the slick channel of her pussy, she found her clit and began to rub.
It didn’t take long. In no time at all she was coming, her back arched, her fingers tight around the bath rim as her orgasm ripped through her and she said it, the name that was causing her all this pain. “Faith.”
Naturally, I hated this Faith the moment her name was uttered, wretched woman. What had she done to this gorgeous creature to cause her such pain? Who could possibly have come along who was better? Damn her to the pits of hell.
A sigh returned my attention to th
e bathroom and there she was, slumped on the bath mat, chest heaving, the hand she had fucked herself with hanging over the side of the bath, her beautiful, naked body curled mere inches from me.
Tentatively, I touched her thigh and looked into her eyes for a response. She frowned, so I touched her arm and smiled when she reached up to scratch it. I was having some sort of impact then, I just had to figure out how best to use it.
I lay next to her all night, listening to her sleep and staring at the ceiling. Her bedroom was cosy, the bed linen clean and white, the décor a soft yellow. She had a tall vase of artificial flowers in the corner and matching bedroom furniture. On the window sill a photo of her with what I assumed were her parents stood next to another of her with her arm wrapped around another woman whom I assumed was the awful Faith. In a fit of pique, I got up and tried to knock it flying, but all I managed was a slight nudge to the left.
Half way through the night, she grew hot and tossed the duvet aside. Beneath it she was naked except for a pair of knickers and I couldn’t resist.
I touched her, running my hand along the length of her soft thigh and over the fall and rise of her stomach. I cupped a breast, my touch as delicate as silk and ran my palm over a nipple. She sighed and shifted but did not wake and leaning over, I planted a kiss on the side of her face.
For the next few days I followed her around like a second shadow. I discovered her name was Evie Holebrook and that she worked in the local hospital as an administrator. She seemed to enjoy her job and was good at it but she never went to the after work drinks. She shopped for food in the nearest supermarket and appeared to be on good terms with the local shopkeepers but she didn’t go out with friends, never rung anyone for a chat or looked on any Internet social sight. She just ‘drifted’ as my visitor in the graveyard had said. It was almost too terrible to watch. She needed to be with someone I deemed, to have a hand to hold and company to go out with and get drunk and have a laugh. She needed to bloody live!
I couldn’t get through to her though, although I did try. Buoyed by the fact that although I hadn’t broken the damn photo in her bedroom, I had at least moved it a little, I tried to shift other things. A mug, a magazine, the corner of her sweater as she sat watching a soap opera, but it always took me so long to summon up enough energy to accomplish anything that by the time I did actually manage to make something move, Evie had usually left the room and she didn’t even notice my efforts. It was flippin’ frustrating!
So I went back to the graveyard and sat there all day and most of the night before my torch bearing visitor finally showed up again.
“It’s no good,” I said, as she sat down beside me and offered me another daisy. “I’ve tried, but I can’t make her see, hear or feel me. How am I supposed to offer her comfort and make her smile if I can’t do any of that?”
“Do you like her?” She asked, turning her head up to the moon as if its light might tan her skin. “Do you want to help her?”
“Of course I do, to both questions.”
“Or do you simply wish to get even?”
I frowned. What did she mean?
“It seems to me,” she replied, “that you are so caught up with being angry at Faith that all of your energy is being wasted on a futile desire for revenge. Why? Faith is beyond your reach. Concentrate instead on Evie. Romance her, give her cause to smile, make her feel like you would have liked to feel if someone was courting you. You don’t want her to end up the same as you, do you?”
I didn’t. I wanted Evie to be happy.
“Ok, I see what you mean...”
But she had gone again, a trick that was really starting to wind me up.
I returned to the house. I had left Evie sleeping and she was still there. One hand tucked under her chin, her dark hair spread out on her pillow. She looked achingly lovely and reaching out to brush a few stray hairs away from her eyes, I noticed I was still holding the daisy.
Careful, so as not to wake, her, I reached over and placed it on her bedside table.
She found it the next morning.
From ‘my’ side of the bed, I saw her pick it up and frown, twisting it back and forth in her fingers as she tried to figure out from whence it had come. Getting up, she looked out of the window at her garden before realising the window was shut and nothing could have blown in. Still, she held it, bringing it up to her nose even though daisies had no scent and brushing it against her lips.
And then she smiled.
It was the first real smile I had seen her give and the fact it had been the result of my simple daisy caused me to smile too.
After that, I wanted to give her something else. Ideally the fuck of her life, but seeing as that was probably a bit beyond me, I sought around for something a little more realistic.
I didn’t want to frighten her, that was the thing, because I could just see her running screaming from the house if I did something too outlandish.
I had to be subtle, unthreatening and ‘nice’.
I was probably going to give myself a headache thinking about it.
Eventually, I decided to stick with the daisy theme. Evie had loads growing in her garden, so when she wasn’t looking, I summoned all my ghostly energy and picked a few, leaving them in unexpected places around her house. And to my relief, it seemed to go down okay. She didn’t scream or faint or shout for whoever was doing this to ‘leave her alone!’ She simply gathered them up and made a daisy chain out of them, leaving the finished product on her kitchen windowsill which presented me with an opportunity too good to miss and whilst her back was turned, I formed the shape of a heart.
It startled her but she didn’t touch it or knock the design askew, instead she took a picture of it on her phone and left it undisturbed all day.
That evening, she took it to bed with her. I could tell she still didn’t want to disturb the design by the way her hand hovered over it for several seconds before she finally took the plunge and picked it up, but once she had, she carried it up to her bedroom and lay it on her bedside table.
“Do it again,” she whispered as she sat on the edge of her bed. “Make a heart.”
Her words made my own heart sink because I couldn’t. My energy levels were still sapped from the last time and I don’t think I could have moved a feather let alone a daisy chain.
She was disappointed, I could tell and after a good ten minutes of waiting for me to achieve the impossible, she sighed and got up to get ready for bed. I felt awful.
Naked, she climbed beneath the duvet and checked the daisy chain one last time. Nothing had changed and feeling miserable I watched her turn off the light and snuggle down for the night.
I needed, I decided, to up my game. Or discover some way of not getting so bloody knackered every time I attempted to manipulate the ‘living world’, and for want of anything better, I went back to the graveyard and waited and waited and waited some more. Then I got cross, shouted a bit that it wasn’t bloody fair and turned to leave.
To find her standing on the path, surrounded still by that ethereal glow.
It brought me up short and embarrassed by my outburst, I apologised for what I’d said and then went on to vent my frustration anyway.
She shook her head. “You haven’t figured it out then,” she said, looking at me as though I were dim. “Your energy comes from her. You give her a daisy, she smiles and that smile gives you the energy to pick a dozen. It’s simple.”
Like hell it was! I didn’t know what I was doing here and it was alright for her to come up with these perfectly feasible suggestions, but I hadn’t had access to the manual.
“So the happier I make her,” I reiterated, “the more I’ll be able to do stuff, is that what you’re saying?”
But she had bloody gone again! For fuck’s sake!
Returning to Evie’s house and the bedroo
m, I immediately kicked myself for ever having left at all. Evie had clearly not been able to sleep and whilst I was away had started to pleasure herself again and her knees were drawn up to her chest and her legs spread wide as she fed two fingers in and out of her juicy cunt whilst her other hand rubbed at her clit.
It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and I hastily positioned myself at the end of the bed, feasting my eyes on her glistening pussy and gorgeous breasts and her fingers, driving in and out of her hole as she creamed up nicely. God, I wanted to fuck her!
Her body tormented me because while it was amazing being witness to her fucking herself, it was also incredibly frustrating not being able to join in. I wanted it to be my fingers that were thrusting in and out of her tight, little hole, my hand rubbing her engorged clit. I wanted my mouth to be sucking at her nipples, my hands to be cupping her breasts and I so wanted to bury my head deep between those luscious thighs and lick her out till she came.
It was driving me crazy!
Instead I could only be a spectator, aware I should be feeling guilty for spying on such an intimate, private moment but not giving a damn. She was lovely and I knew, despite how stupid and futile it was, that I was falling in love with her.
“Oh!” She gasped and my eyes rushed up to her face, but Evie’s eyes were closed, her forehead creased into a frown as her hands worked furiously towards her orgasm, fucking and rubbing her pussy, her legs spread so wide I could see everything as gasping again, she concentrated solely on her clit, rubbing it round and round, moaning and sighing as the passion built inside her and juices flowed from her cunt, soaking her fingers and encouraging her to start fucking herself again.