Last week, he’d left the house with just that intention in mind. It had ended up a waste of time. He’d gone down to the strip, settled at the bar with a Jack and Coke. Within five minutes, a pretty blue-eyed redhead had settled down next to him, but for all her flirting, Colby had absolutely no interest in her.
They danced, they shared a meal, they walked along the strip, but when she invited him back to her place, Colby had no desire to go. He could have done it. After more than a year without a woman, he knew he could have gone back to her place and spent the next four hours fucking her, but it wouldn’t mean anything.
Colby needed it to mean something. He didn’t know what that made him. Plenty of guys he knew, both from before Alyssa’s illness and after her death, were just fine with quick, anonymous sex. But Colby wasn’t into it and he wasn’t going to get laid just so he could spend the next few weeks feeling guilty.
He had enough to feel guilty about already.
His skin tightened. Goose bumps broke out. Hissing out from between his teeth, he turned around just as the voice started to whisper. Alyssa’s voice.
Squeezing his eyes closed, he tried to pull up a mental image of her. He could still remember the sound of her voice, but unless he looked at a picture, his memory of her seemed to grow fuzzier every day.
“There’s nothing for you to feel guilty about, baby.”
Baby?
Cracking one eye open, he glanced around the room. He wouldn’t call himself baby, not even if he was creating the voice out of deep guilt, need and loneliness. Was he really—
No. No, he wasn’t really hearing her voice.
“How come you’re so certain of that?”
Usually, he managed to not answer these kinds of questions. But this time, the answer leaped out before he could stop it. “I’m not really hearing you because you’re dead.”
The words sounded so damn harsh, he flinched when he heard them.
But she laughed.
It wrapped around him, warm and soothing. “Yeah, I’m dead. But since when did you stop believing in ghosts, Colby?”
“Ghosts.” He shook his head, turning in a slow circle around the room, eyeing the dark corners for wispy, insubstantial figures, balls of light, something. “Why should I believe that my dead wife is a ghost?”
“Same reason any dead person becomes a ghost. Unfinished business. Do you see me, Colby? Can you? Do you want to?”
“I can’t see you.” He slapped a hand against his temple, muttered, “You need to snap out of it.”
“Why can’t you see me? Don’t you want to?”
“Yes.” Simply, flatly stated. Yes. He wanted to see Alyssa.
And then he did. At first, he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing as she shimmered into view, looking as she had before she’d gotten sick, the picture of vitality and life, except he could see right through her. “Lyssie?”
She smiled at him. “Hi, baby.”
Colby could explain away voices. He had an active imagination, he’d lost his wife, he had wet dreams about her best friend—all sorts of stuff that would make a shrink very happy indeed. But he was also pretty damn logical and always had been. Explaining away voices was a lot easier than explaining away the fact that his wife was standing in front of him, wearing her favorite sundress, her hair falling in wild corkscrews all over the place and she was transparent.
Not so easy to explain away.
Voice gritty, he asked, “Are you real?”
Alyssa shrugged. “What is real? Am I here talking to you? Yeah. Am I really a ghost? Yeah.” Then she reached out and laid a hand on his chest.
He could feel it—a cold spot, just above his heart.
“But you can’t touch me. I can’t really touch you,” she finished, her voice sad and quiet.
“You really have been talking to me.”
“Yes.” She grinned and her voice was exasperated as she said, “Baby, you ignored me for months, ya know. Or just rationalized it away. I’m starting to think you should have gone into politics, the way you explain things away.”
Sarcastically, he muttered, “Well, gee, thanks.”
Alyssa drifted away from him, not exactly walking, but not really hovering the way he would have thought a ghost would. It was almost like something tugged her away as she said, “I always thought Bree was stubborn.”
Bree.
The sound of her name had his guilt dropping down like a stone albatross around his neck, dragging him under. Blood rushed to his face and then drained away as nausea churned inside him. “Bree…”
“Why do you feel so guilty, Colby? It’s not like you left me for her. I’m gone. For good. I’m only here to make sure you’re going to be okay and then that’s it. So why do you feel so guilty for needing her?”
Needing her? He didn’t—
But all his dreams over the past six months rose up to haunt him, defying him. And Alyssa stood there watching him with knowing eyes. “Why don’t you want to need her?”
“I made a promise to you. I swore to love you. I don’t want to love anybody else.”
“Not really something we can control.” Alyssa sighed. Her body shimmered, wavered with the sound, before solidifying again until she seemed almost solid. “You did make a promise…and you kept it. You promised to love me ‘til death do us part…then death parted us. You’re free from that promise.”