We could probably have gone back to our own beds to sleep, mine at my apartment, and Jesse’s at Snail Crossing, since it appeared there was no longer any danger to the girls. But I still had the “study” for my class to complete.
Even if we had, I still wouldn’t have avoided what Jesse asked me as we were walking back into the house after putting all the wine bottles into Brad and Debbie’s recycling bins:
“Susannah, what was it you were going to say to me before in the yard? Something you were worried was going to make me angry?”
I’d laughed. “Oh, I told you, it was nothing. An idea I had for the wedding, that’s all, but I changed my mind. You don’t want karaoke at the reception, right?”
“Karaoke?”
“See? I knew it. Fortunately the deposit’s refundable.”
“Fine. I don’t believe you, but fine. By the way, who sent those flowers that I saw on your desk when I stopped by your office this afternoon?”
“Oh, no one,” I’d said. “Just a grateful parent.”
I don’t know how I’d managed the airy tone, especially when it was clear he’d been reading my mind again.
He knew. He knew perfectly well who the flowers were from, and maybe even what I’d been about to tell him in the yard. Perhaps I’d planted the image in his head, worrying so much about Paul, stirred by the blossoms Lucia had strewn across the floor of her new playmates’ playhouse, the faces of their dolls.
Dead flowers from a dead girl. Live flowers from a live man . . . who wouldn’t stop haunting me over a former ghost.
He didn’t say anything more about it, however, and his kiss good night when we parted ways for bed, me for the second floor, him for the first, was as warm as ever.
That wasn’t what kept me awake.
I don’t think it was the text message Jake sent me, either, saying that he was going to “escort” Gina back to the Crossing from her shift at the Happy Medium. He said he was worried that the “creeper” back at my apartment building might have figured out where she worked. He wanted to make sure she got home safely.
Or the text I got from Gina letting me know that she and Jake had decided to go out to eat after her shift and she hoped I didn’t think this was going to “make things weird” between us.
Also, she knew there wasn’t a “creeper,” it was just another of my “ghost things” (a carnival psychic had spilled the beans in front of Gina about my “gift” when we’d been kids). She wasn’t going to mention this to Jake, though, she added with a winking smiley face.
Great, just what I needed—my best friend going out with one of my stepbrothers. Like it wasn’t bad enough a former high school nemesis had married one of the other ones.
That was enough to send me downstairs to Brad and Debbie’s kitchen for a glass of milk (even though this had never helped “trigger soothing waves of slumber” for me in the past, as experts claimed it would, I kept hoping for a first time).
What I’d actually been hoping for was a chance to slip out of the house and over to 99 Pine Crest Road, to scatter what little rock salt I’d managed to acquire.
But glancing into the living room as I passed it, I knew this was going to be impossible. The sound of my putting the glass of milk I’d just emptied into the dishwasher caused Jesse to roll over on the sofa—which was both too short and too narrow for his comparatively enormous frame—and mutter something unintelligible. One bare arm dangling to the floor, the other flung uncomfortably over his head, he looked about as comfortable as poor Max, still locked up in the garage.
Jesse wasn’t wearing a shirt, and the blanket Debbie had given him had tangled down around his legs as he’d tossed in his sleep, exposing his chest and most of his boxer briefs, including the dark mat of hair between his pecs that then thinned into a tempting highway leading to the waistband of his shorts, where I could plainly see the bulge I felt nearly every day but was (mostly) forbidden to touch until our wedding day.
That’s when I realized all the milk in the world was never going to put me to sleep.
The house was completely quiet. Debbie and Brad had gone (bickering again) to bed hours ago, and the girls had been quietly slumbering when I’d left them.
What would happen, I wondered, if I knelt beside the couch, kissed Jesse awake, then slipped my hand beneath that waistband?
Now who was the one with a dark side? Me. It was me!
And there wasn’t enough rock salt in all the Home Depots in the world to contain it.
Jesse must have felt it, too, since as I stood there staring, he lowered his upflung arm and rolled over, nearly falling off the couch. Startled, I rocketed up the stairs, not wanting him to catch me standing there staring at him while he slept.
I was racing by Debbie’s “craft center” on my way back to the girls’ room when I saw it—the thing that kept me awake for the rest of the night (like the memory of what was beneath that waistband wasn’t enough).
At first it was only a flash, something I wasn’t even sure I’d seen. I walked right by the open door, intent on my own filthy thoughts, before it registered.
Then I froze in my tracks, a chill that had nothing to do with the cold night air going down my back.