“I just think you should have told Jack the truth, that’s all.”
“That I spent half a day making out with you instead of doing my job?”
She giggled; she couldn’t help it. He looked so aggrieved. “Maybe that is your job, American Gigolo.”
“Sure. Right.” He went to the bed, sat on it, became Lotus-Tom, and then Ghost-Tom stood up out of him. “So!” he said cheerfully, carefully climbing down (she could relate—if you moved too fast, you went under the cabin) and approaching her. “How about another kiss for your favorite psychic medium?”
“Did you say psychic or psychotic? And how about not?” She fended him off with a hand under his chin, trying not to giggle. “Is that all you’ve been thinking about? Being a ghost and making out?”
“Well, yeah,” he admitted, knocking her hand away and grabbing for her, causing them to fall through the chair, the wall, and into the bathroom. “Pretty much.”
“Have I mentioned I really like you shirtless? In fact, you should go shirtless all the time. Pantsless, too.”
“Ditto.” Their clothes (were the clothes incorporeal, too? must be) went flying (through the bathroom wall!), and she was kissing him with wild kisses, kissing him the way a desert survivor drank water, kissing him and loving being touched, being caressed, being groped. He wanted her at least as badly as she wanted him, so there weren’t any flowers or candles or tenderness, just two bodies urgently trying to get into the same place.
She groaned as he entered her, but when he gritted “sorry,” she responded by wrapping her legs around his waist and pushing back.
“Sorry, save your sorry and fuck me,” she muttered, and his hand slapped the tile beside her head and curled into a white-knuckled fist, and he shivered over her.
“Better not say that again,” he groaned, “or we’ll be done right now.”
“So one of your powers isn’t stamina?”
He groaned again and laughed at the same time, and their stomachs slapped against each other as they quickened to some internal beat, a song only they could hear. She wouldn’t come, of course, she was the kind of woman who needed at least ten minutes of foreplay, but that was all right, because just being touched, being with him, was enough for—
She came. She came so hard she thought the top of her head would come off. And he was right there with her the whole time, and he never stopped touching her, and she never wanted it to stop, not any of it, not ever.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Look at this,” she said, picking her shirt up and putting it back on. “Is it a real shirt? Why do I have to put it back on?”
“You don’t.”
“Funny. But why do we even have clothes? Are they ghost clothes? Why am I always in this shirt and these shorts?”
“Because that’s how you saw yourself—casually dressed, comfortable, attractive.”
She touched her hair and tried to look modest. “And you said the dead have no sense of time—how come?”
“You’re not ruled by clocks like the living. How long have we been stuck in that shitty bathroom, making love?”
“Half an hour?” she guessed, stepping into her shorts.
He looked wounded. “All day. We missed the lunch bell and the supper bell.”
“Oh. Well, it was a great day,” she assured him. “Don’t you want to go eat?”
“I’ll stay here with you.”
“Both of you?” she asked, a little creeped out. Here was Ghost-Tom, strolling around naked, and here was Lotus-Tom, sitting like someone frozen to the bed.
“I can only touch you in this form,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, but Tom, you’ve got to take care of your—your living body.”
He shrugged, indifferent. “Want to go for a walk?”
Yep. Definitely broken. “Uh, sure. But it’s no problem to wait until you’ve eaten. Hell, I probably won’t even notice if you leave for half an hour; it’ll seem like thirty seconds to—”
There was a rap on the hut door, which Tom ignored. Nikki, being the kind of person who always had to answer the phone or the door, stuck her head through the wall and said, “It’s the manager. Don’t you want to answer it?”
“No.”
“But it might be important.”
“Is he holding phone slips?”
She peeked again. “Yes.”
“It’s just job offers.”
“Job offers?”
“Jobbbb offffers, arrrre youuuuuu haaaaaving trrrrouble hearrring meeee?”
“Very funny. You’re turning down work to hang out with the dead girl?”
He shrugged; a maddening habit, but eloquent. “Your friends paid me plenty.”
“But still. Don’t you want to get back to work?”
He looked at her. “No.”
She was surprised to discover that a ghost could blush. “Oh.”
“So how about that walk?”
She smiled. “Sure. I’d love a walk. I can show you all the places I’ve been haunting.”
He laughed. “Two ghosts, no waiting. Wouldn’t the tourists just shit?”
“What if one of them is special, like you?”
“Nobody’s like me,” he said simply. Not bragging; stating fact.
“Well, that’s the truth.”
“Say it twice,” he said smugly, and held out an arm, and escorted her through the wall.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Tom . . .”
“Mmmm?”
They were in the pool, walking around in the deep end holding hands. It was a riot! They both ran and jumped to get momentum, and here they were. Nikki kept holding her breath from force of habit, then remembering and letting it out with a whoosh, which Tom found endlessly amusing.
“This has been a great couple of days—”
“Three weeks,” he corrected.
“Right. And it’s been awesome. Don’t get me wrong. But . . . when are you going to go?”
He frowned at her. “Go?”
“Yeah, you know. Hop a plane, get back to you life. You must have one.”
“A plane?”
“A life.”
“I like it here,” he said, sounding wounded.
“Well, yeah, but Tom—you can’t just stay here indefinitely with me.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? What do you mean, why not? You just can’t! It’s not like we’re a normal couple. I’m dead, for crying out loud.”
“So?”
She stopped walking and pulled her hand out of his. A pair of legs appeared in the shallow end and she had a Jaws-eye view of the swimmer.
She ignored it and addressed the (rather large) problem at hand. “Let me get this straight. My problem was Jack and Cathy couldn’t move on, and now it’s that you can’t move on? You’re not eating, you’re not taking work, you’re in limbo just like me.”
“Just like you.”
“No, Tom, that’s a bad thing. That’s why you’re so god-damned skinny: You escape your life by hanging out with ghosts. And you lose track of time, just like I do. Have you considered the fact that one of these days you might just starve to death?”
“That would be awful,” he said without a shred of conviction.
“Oh, come on! That’s not a plan, is it? A seriously fucked-up plan?”
“Would it be so bad if it was?”
“Tom, you have a life! You can’t just—just throw it away so we can hold hands and watch the sunset. Come on!”
“Can’t we?” he asked quietly.
“You. Have. A. Life. This.” She gestured to the legs flailing above them. “Is not. A life. You’re alive! You’ll be dead soon enough, even if you live to be eighty.”
“It’s different for everyone,” he said, still so quietly she had to strain to hear him.
“What?”
“It’s—I think it’s whatever you can imagine. If you see harps and angels, that’s where you go. If you see hell, that’s where you go. If you think yo
u have unfinished business, you stay here. The afterlife—it can be anything. Anything at all. And I don’t know if—what if I live to the end of my life and go somewhere else? What if I can’t find you again?”
“Are you saying—are you saying that you love me and want to be with me?” Because he hadn’t said it. She hadn’t, either.
They’d had sex all over the island—once on top of the bar in front of six patrons who couldn’t see them.
They’d talked about things, private things, they had never told anyone.
The only thing they hadn’t talked about was the future. Because, of course, there wasn’t one. Not for them, anyway.
“Because I—” Love you, she started to say, then stopped. Wasn’t that making things worse? How could he move on if she told him? And that was the worst of it: four months ago (or six, or eight, or whatever) there had been one ghost trapped on the island.
Now there were two.
“Of course I don’t love you, how could I love you?” he cried, and his voice was bitter, so bitter. “You’re the same as all the others, why can’t I think of you like all the others? You’re just one of them.”
“Them?” But she knew. Sure she knew. Here was Tom, spirit walking with a dead woman because that was better than anything else he had planned for that day, that month, that year. And here was why.
“Just a—just another ghost who distracted my dad. I couldn’t get any fucking attention from that guy unless I was working. Do you know what it’s like to be eight years old and totally jaded on the human condition, but still want your dad’s approval more than anything?”
“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t.”
“Well, it fucking sucks. And you—you! You’re just the same, just another dead person who only cares about what she can get so she can move on, just me-me-me, and never mind that maybe my dad and I should have had a life, never mind that there was never enough money in the bank account to satisfy him, there was always one more job, one more person to help, never mind Christmas, never mind my birthday, we gotta drop everything because some idiot didn’t look both ways and got creamed crossing the street, and now she’s freaking out about not telling her husband about the new checking account.”
He paused and gulped in a new breath (not that he needed to in this form, but old habits died hard and if she didn’t believe that, just look around her), and she waited for more tirade, but he deflated like a stuck tire. “I guess that’s all I have. Your turn.”
“Uh, I’ve got nothing like that.”
“Nobody has.”
“Now who’s being self-involved?” she teased.
“I’m sorry for what I said,” he said dully.
“It’s all right. I know a lie when I hear one.”
He met her gaze with difficulty. “I love you. I’d die for you.”
“I love you, too, and I absolutely forbid it. No dying allowed.”
They linked hands and walked through the pool wall, through the earth, and up into the sunlight. “You had to work on Christmas?” she finally asked.
“Yes.”
“Where was your mom?”
“Dead. She died having me. She was the first ghost I ever saw. She—” He swallowed and she heard the dry click in his throat. “She tried to get me away from my dad, tried to talk me into running away to my aunt’s. She wasn’t afraid he’d hurt me, just that he’d . . . use me up, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“But he was my dad.”
She knew. You could never walk away from your parents; they trapped you with sticky webs made of love. You were the fly to their spider. But they only ate you because they loved you.
“Nikki, where’s your family? You seemed so concerned about Cathy and Jack—”
“They’re my family. I was an only child, and my parents died when I was a freshman in college. Cathy sort of adopted me, you know? We’ve been friends for a long time.”
“What happened to your folks?”
They were walking through the sand now, headed for his cabin. “Well . . .”
“Is it horrible? It’s horrible, isn’t it?” His fingers tightened over hers. “You can tell me. There isn’t a thing I haven’t heard, honey, you can trust me on that one.”
“No, it’s not that horrible, but you’ll make a big thing out of it.”
“Because it’s horrible!”
“It’s not. Okay, calm down, I’ll tell you. Just—don’t read into it. It’s not a big thing. Okay?”
“Mmm. Tell me.”
“Well, I was the first person in my family to go to college, right? In fact, I thought that was my name for a while; my mom never introduced me as Nikki or Nicole, it was always ‘This is The First Person In Our Family To Go To College.’ You could actually hear the capital letters.
“So, anyway, we didn’t have a pot to piss in, so I got a scholarship and a part-time job, started at the U of M that fall, blah-blah. My parents were so proud; I’d finally made my other name a reality. Then I get a call from Mom’s neighbor: big car accident, they’re both in the hospital, some dipwad drunk driver ran a red.
“So, I call the hospital—Abbott—and my mom’s conscious, but my dad’s in surgery and can’t talk to me. And my mom’s all, ‘Don’t come, don’t come, we’re fine, it’s finals week there, right?’ I mean, she knew my schedule better than I did.
“But I was all, ‘Come on, Mom, you guys are hurt, I’ll come see you.’ And then Mom tells the biggest lie of all: It’s nothing, we’re fine. We’ll call you when we get discharged, come see us after you take your tests.
“And, of course, they died. Dad wasn’t in surgery; he was in a coma. Mom died on the operating table. She cheated me out of saying good-bye because she didn’t want me to miss my exams. Stupid! Like the school wouldn’t have let me take them after the funerals. But Mom didn’t know anything about college. Because I was—”
“The First Person In Your Family To Go To College.”
“Yeah.”
“So. You weren’t there for them when they needed you.”
“Yes, and I felt tricked and betrayed, and do not be going and making something out of this. It’s got nothing to do with what’s happening now.”
“No, of course not. I’m sure that’s not significant in any way.”
They were cuddling on the bed now, looking up at the ceiling. Nikki wondered why they bothered—they were incorporeal, they could sleep outside. Heck, they could sleep in a grove of trees and never get bitten by a bug. But old habits.
Lotus-Tom was sitting in a chair across the room. She was used to having two Toms around by now, and scarcely noticed him. “So, back to the business at hand. I love you. And you love me.”
“Yes,” he said, sounding—could it be? Happy? Well, she’d fix that in a hurry. “I love you and you love me.”
“So. You have to go.”
“No.”
“Yes. Tom, you have to. There’s—there’s no hope for us. I’m stuck here and you have a life, and if you stay, I’ll walk into the ocean and never come back.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“You better. Because I’m not going to have your death on my conscience, Skinny.”
“And what kind of a life am I going back to? Being at the beck and call of crackpots?”
“They’re not all crackpots,” she said quietly. “Some of them need your help. For some of them, you’re the only one who can help them. You can’t turn your back on your life’s work for me.”
“It’s my father’s life’s work,” he said bitterly, “and just watch me.”
“Tom. Isn’t it bad enough that I’m in limbo? You have to be, too?”
“I won’t let you send me away.”
“Yes, you will. You know why. I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye once, and it’s cast a shadow over my life—and death. You have to let me go, just like I have to let you go. That’s what all this is. There’s a lesson to be learned, and I’m by God going to learn it this
time, you know?”
“No,” he said again. He sounded fine, but she could see tears trickling down his cheeks; how they shone in the moonlight! He squeezed her, held her, hugged her hard. “No, no, no.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow.”
“No. A week,” he begged. “Another month.”
“You think this will be easier in a month?” To keep him company, she was crying, too. “It’ll never be easier than it is tomorrow—only harder. You have to go. You have to let me go. And I have to let you go. It’s the only way we’ll be free.”
“Freedom is fucking overrated,” he said, almost shouted.
“Don’t lie to me, Tom. I can spot one a mile away. Now ask me why.”
He groaned. “I know why.”
“Now ask me how I can let you go.”
He picked up her hand, kissed the knuckles. “I know that, too.”
They held each other all night and Nikki thought she had never cried so long or so hard, or seen a man cry at all.
And she thought: your heart can still break when you’re dead, oh yes.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She waited until he fell asleep, and left. She couldn’t watch him leave. If she did, she would weaken, beg him to stay, happily watch as he indifferently starved himself to death, had a heart attack from potassium deficiency, toppled over in bed, and suffocated because he had no one to watch his body. Whatever, just die and be with me. Except there were no guarantees that he would be with her. And just because her life had been cut short, why should his?
No, she wanted him to live for a hundred years, five hundred, just like she wanted Cathy and Jack and their baby to live for a hundred years. A hundred years at least.
She was going over the same ground again and again (literally; she was on the south side of the island again) and tried to think of something else. Anything else.
She closed her eyes and thought of Tom. His smile, his rare beautiful smile. His long fingers. His eyes, so wounded and so bright. His skinny legs and bony arms; God, he was scrawny. In her heart’s eye, she loved it all, even the way he nibbled on his hangnails when he was distracted.
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