Her eyes were red rimmed and unfocused, addled by either sleep or some kind of chemical. Probably the latter, judging by the overturned prescription bottle that had spilled a rainbow of pills across the table in front of her.
Under normal circumstances—if anything about this scene could be classified as normal—I would have been worried about this girl. However ineffectively, I would have tried to find someone to help her. I would have grasped at her with my dead, incapable hands.
But these were not normal circumstances.
Because just one sight of the girl’s eyes rooted me to the floor. Those eyes, though bloodshot and bleary, were still a luminous green, shining out from a face I knew very well.
My own.
Death, a voice rasped in my head. It always starts with death.
I bolted upright with a shriek.
Immediately, I felt the press of a hand upon mine. My adrenaline surged at the unexpected touch, and I moved to jerk away from it. Whoever had pressed against my hand grabbed it more tightly and held me firmly in place. It took a few more seconds of struggling before I calmed down enough to look at the face of my captor.
He stared back at me, his eyebrows furrowed above dark blue eyes. With one of his hands grasping mine, he ran the other through his black hair and then rested his palm upon the back of his neck—a nervous, worried gesture.
Without warning, I threw my free arm around my captor’s neck and pressed my lips to his.
At that moment I didn’t care that I was dead and shouldn’t have been sleeping, much less dreaming; I didn’t care that I’d dreamed about myself in some unfamiliar, near-death state; nor did I care that I should behave more carefully around the boy I now kissed since I was invisible and he wasn’t.
All I cared was that Joshua kissed me back.
Wherever his hands clutched at my bare skin—my arms, my shoulders, my exposed thigh—they ignited a shower of fiery sparks. Even my lips burned from their contact with his.
This minor miracle happened every time we touched. At each press of my ghostly flesh to his living, Joshua and I both experienced waves of sensation that, with prolonged contact, turned into the actual feel of each other’s skin.
Maybe this was unique to me and Joshua, maybe not. For all I knew, every ghost-to-spiritually-aware-human interaction happened this way. Whatever the case, I knew one thing for sure: I never grew tired of it.
I sighed quietly when Joshua pulled his lips from mine. Although I sighed in disappointment that our kiss had ended, I also sighed in relief. As Joshua leaned away from me, I could see we were alone in his bedroom, lying on his bed. No one had seen us kiss.
But my relief turned into embarrassment when I realized that, during our kiss, I must have rolled on top of him. Joshua was now beneath me, with my thighs pressed against either side of his hips. My filmy white dress—the one in which I’d died and was now cursed to wear forever—had crept up to a seriously inappropriate height on my thighs.
Gape mouthed, I stared down at Joshua. His mussed hair and his lack of a T-shirt told me that my post-nightmare shriek had woken him up, too. And his broad grin told me he wasn’t even slightly embarrassed by our current position.
“Yikes,” I murmured. I moved to roll myself off, but he pinned me to him by wrapping one arm around my waist.
“Aw,” Joshua protested. “No ‘yikes,’ Amelia. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable up there?” His grin turned wolfish as he secured his other arm around me.
I scowled. “Joshua Mayhew, even if I’m in your bed every night, I’m not … cheap.”
Although his bedside clock read 3 a.m., Joshua laughed so loudly his entire family could have heard him, if they were awake.
“Amelia Ashley,” Joshua teased. “The fact that you’re in my bed every night means I don’t think you’re cheap. And, for the record, I think it’s adorable that you used the word ‘cheap.’ You are aware it’s the twenty-first century, right?”
“What can I say? I’m a twentieth-century kind of girl,” I grumbled; but I let him tug me closer, until I had to drop my arms on either side of him to keep myself upright.
Hovering there, I studied Joshua’s face for a moment: his midnight-sky colored eyes, his full mouth, his high cheekbones. Then I peeked at the nearly bare body extending beneath that face. And beneath me.
“Well,” I murmured, “since I’m already here …”
Then I dipped down and pressed my lips to his again.
Beneath my kiss, I felt Joshua smile triumphantly. As he moved his mouth against mine, he placed his fingertips on the delicate skin beneath my jaw. Then he ran them down my throat to my collarbone, where he traced them lightly back and forth.
I moaned quietly, and, in an instant, Joshua rolled us over so that he stretched out above me. I closed my eyes and placed my hands on his bare back, anticipating the moment I would feel his skin, smooth and warm and real. In my excitement, I hitched one leg up and wrapped it around Joshua’s hip.
And with that gesture, I stopped feeling anything at all.
I opened my eyes and sighed, not really surprised by what I now saw above me. Instead of the ceiling of Joshua’s bedroom, a maze of trees branches—bare except for a heavy layer of frost—tangled together. A mix of rain and sleet now fell noisily around me. Luckily, I couldn’t feel the sting of ice as it battered my shoulders.
As I pushed myself into a seated position and took in the rest of my surroundings, however, I didn’t feel very lucky. To my right, a squat brick structure—a chimney, I think—rose up toward the sky. Beneath me, row upon row of shingles sloped precariously down toward a very familiar backyard.
Excellent. I always wanted to know what the Mayhews’ roof looked like.
At that dry thought, I pulled my legs into my chest, wrapped my arms around them, and lay my head on my knees. Then I puffed out a big, angry sigh.
I guess I should have been grateful, considering how short a distance I materialized tonight. The last time this happened, I’d opened my eyes to what I’m pretty sure was an entirely different county.
Before materializations like this one started occurring, I honestly thought I’d learned to control them—learned how to prevent the ghostly vanishings that transported me, unwilling, to someplace else, sometime else.
I was wrong, obviously.
It wasn’t that I wanted to materialize away from Joshua tonight. Far from it. But over the past few months, I’d come to the sad realization that we couldn’t go much further than we already had, physically, without me disappearing into thin air. Every time we kissed too long, or held each other too closely, I’d vanish. If Joshua’s fingers strayed too far below my collarbone—zap, to a deserted car lot. If I loosened just one of his buttons—poof, to the top of a picnic table at some rest stop on the side of the highway.
Each
