Ghoul Friend Read online

  “Yes?” he murmured.

  I shook my head. Words were a jumble, and I found myself wishing we could just express our feelings in images, colors, sensation—the words I wanted hadn’t been invented, or maybe just didn’t exist in languages I knew.

  It wasn’t love—that was a way’s off, I knew. I’d been ridiculous before Oscar, thinking love came fast and certain. I wanted to be more cautious now. We were new, very new, and enjoying one another while still learning one another. But there was a chance one day… My thoughts spun to a halt as he slipped one lube-slick finger against the tight skin of my hole and pressed gently. “Oh!”

  “There we go,” he laughed against me. “I knew that’d get you out of whatever thought spiral you’d gone down.”

  “I wasn’t in a spiral,” I fibbed. He pressed again, and I groaned. “Maybe a tiny one.”

  He hummed against my throat, and I lost track of everything but how his fingers felt opening me, his mouth on me laving and nipping, the sound of his ragged breath in my ear as I moved onto my back and he moved with me, pushing between my spread legs as I opened for him. Oscar loomed over me, all angles and open ecstasy as he slipped the condom over his erection and started to press into me. He threw his head back and sighed as he slid past the tight ring of muscle, and finally, after what felt like too long and not long enough, he was pressed all the way against me, fully buried inside me. I had to close my eyes, not look at him for a moment because he was too beautiful, too intense in the way he looked down at me.

  I couldn’t hold still when he moved inside me. Wrapping my legs around his back, I braced my hands against the headboard and met him thrust for thrust, sparing a vague thought for whoever was on the other side of the wall and hoping they weren’t in the room yet. He leaned down and kissed me—kissing seemed to be one of his most favorite things to do when we were alone—and the pressure of his body against my leaking cock was almost too much. “Fuck,” I gasped, “gonna come if you don’t move.”

  He grinned at me, changing his rhythm just enough so his sweat-damp belly rubbed against my cock, sending hot white shocks of pleasure to pool in my spine before spreading through my hips, tightening low in my body until the pressure was past the point of stopping. “God, Oscar!” I whisper-shouted, unable to catch my breath enough for a good groan. He hissed yes, yes, yes in my ear, pounding into me as I jerked and arched beneath him, tightening my legs around him until my hips ached from it. He went still for a heartbeat, then gasped sharp and high, something that sounded like my name. The heat of his release filled the condom inside me and making me want to go again, at least in spirit.

  The flesh was considerably weaker at my age than it had been at seventeen.

  “Why are you looking so introspective?” I murmured against his shoulder. We’d cleaned up, ordered Chinese, and were sprawled on the bed under the pretense of watching a movie, but I don’t think either of us could name a single plot point in whatever show was on the television.

  “Just tired,” he said. He hesitated, then rolled onto his side to face me. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Um…”

  “Oh! No, no, no! It’s nothing bad. I mean, did you think it was bad? About us, I mean. It might be bad for me, but I can’t be sure yet because I don’t know what’s happening!”

  Cupping his face in my hand, I pressed my thumb to his lips to stop the flow of words. “Is it something to do with your visa? The show? Are you sick?” I shook my head. “I can’t think of anything else that would be bad unless you mean us and… and I’m kinda hoping you weren’t just being nice right now when you said it wasn’t.” Because, fuck me, we were just starting to figure us out. Relationships, being part of an us that went beyond sneaky, hot hook ups and late-night texts, were foreign territory for me, and the fact I had no idea if it was for him, too, gave me pause. And I wanted a chance for it to work. And I needed to sort my shit out to figure out how that would happen. But if Oscar wasn’t ready for that…

  He turned his head enough to move my thumb and smiled at me, a tiny and thin smile that was almost sad. “It’s not us. Or the show. Well. Maybe the show, but in a roundabout way. It’s just…” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, like whatever he was about to say was overwhelming.

  “You’re scaring me a little,” I whispered. “Tell me and maybe I can help you.”

  “You definitely cannot.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Okay. So. Since we returned from Bettina, I’ve been having problems with my, er, performance.”

  I glanced down between us. We’d cleaned up, but traces of stickiness still marred the hair on my stomach, and I knew if I reached for him again, he’d be more than happy to give it the old college try. “Um…” I gestured at my sticky skin. “I don’t think you have a problem but if you mean like on an emotional level or—”

  “Not that performance! I mean, you haven’t complained, anyway!”

  “And trust me, there’s nothing to complain about!”

  “Good.”

  “Good.” I nodded. Then, “So…”

  “So,” he mimicked, drawing the word out. His fingers moved delicately across my chest and then down, but aimlessly. He didn’t head for my cock as I half-way expected but seemed to just be idly fidgeting, trying to distract me maybe or himself. “Since Bettina, I’ve been… It’s been hard to do what I do.”

  I captured his hand in mine, slipping my fingers through his to still his meandering touch. “How so?”

  Oscar sighed, gently shaking me off so he could roll onto his back, covering his face with his hands. “Since Bettina… I’ve been wondering if perhaps I did something wrong there, if I maybe angered someone, somehow. There’s… there’s a lot about my abilities I don’t know,” He admitted quietly. “Why do I have it? How does it work, really? My grandmother is the one who taught me everything, but she was never very open about who had taught her. I never learned about our history beyond the family line, that we were stronger than the others who were able to contact spirits, but I don’t know why that is. It’s been bothering me, and I think it’s affecting me in ways that are detrimental to my abilities. And I feel like that’s something I should know, that maybe if I just understood how it worked, I wouldn’t be in this particular spot right now.” He glanced over at me between his parted fingers and offered a tiny smile. “I mean as medium-wise, not this spot as in your bed.”

  I waited. Oscar watched me, gimlet-eyed, and, after a long, tight moment, relaxed on an exhale. “I don’t know how to talk about this with you,” he admitted.

  “I’ll keep an open mind.” The look he shot me stung. Badly. “Seriously! I’m not going to mock you or something!” I rolled onto my side and tugged his hands down. He resisted at first, then relaxed and turned towards me, weaving our fingers together again. “I’ll try,” I promised. “It’s all I can do, okay? Try. Try to learn, try to understand. And I care about you, Oscar. A terrifying amount—”

  “Um, thanks? I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not.”

  “It’s a ham-fisted one,” I sighed. “But I care, and I’m not here to make you feel like shit, okay, or push you into talking about something. I respect you. I trust you.” I bit down on the urge to ask him if he trusted me, too. Instead, I said, “And I want you to know that I’ll give you a space place to vent, okay? God knows I bitch all the time, and I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk to me about things that are bothering you.” I held my breath for a moment then said on the rushed exhale, “Even if that thing is me.”

  “It’s not you,” he muttered. “So, get over yourself there, mate.” He winked at me before casting his gaze down towards our bare feet, slipping one of his between my bare calves.

  “Then what is it?”

  “What happened to not pushing?” he grumbled. Then, like ripping off a bandage, he said, “So, it’s getting more difficult for me to contact spirits. Oscar flung his arm over his eyes, hiding. “It’s been getting worse since we got back, but lately,
it’s… it’s almost impossible. It’s like something is smothering me, blocking the communications.” He snorted, adding, “Ezra said it’s like my Wi-Fi is out.”

  “Oh.”

  Oscar opened his eyes and peered at me curiously. “I thought it was something horrible like you were going back to England, or you were into dinosaur porn or something.”

  “One, no kink shaming, mister. Two…” he shifted to put a few more inches of space between us and I felt the change push into the gap.

  I’d fucked up.

  “Two,” he continued, “this is potentially horrible. I don’t know why it’s happening, Julian. This is part of me. A huge part of me. And blowing it off—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, reaching for him again. “I’m sorry I said that. It was a dick thing to say and I’m learning. I’m trying to learn how to walk in your world. And you don’t have to forgive me, but I am sorry. I don’t understand how this works for you and—”

  “And you don’t need to,” he said flatly. “You just need to know it does and there’s something wrong. I just… I want you to care, Julian.”

  Ow. I gathered him in and, after a moment of resistance where I started to let go, he melted into me. “I’m sorry,” I muttered against his hair. “I’m sorry I said that, and I’m sorry you’re having to deal with something awful. I wish I could understand it, but until I do, I’ll try harder to not be a giant, flaming, dick sore about it.”

  Oscar was shaking and, for a moment, I thought he was crying until a small giggle escaped. “Giant, flaming, dick sore?”

  “Douche bag is overused,” I protested.

  “Oh, ew!”

  “Oh my god…” We laughed at one another, with one another, and ended up sleepily fucking one more time before, after half-hearted excuses about getting back to his own room and trying to navigate things slowly between us, we both fell asleep. It felt like just a few minutes, but it was hours later when I woke up to Oscar slipping out of the suite and closing the door softly behind him.

  Chapter 2

  Oscar

  The thing you don’t realize about Texas is, it’s big. Empirically, most people realize this with just a glance at a map of the States, but you don’t really wrap your head around how big it is until you’re seven hours into a multi-day road trip and you’re still in the state with no signs of getting out.

  The place was positively Sartre-esque in that respect.

  When we’d left Houston in the very wee and dim hours of the morning, Julian had assured us it ‘wasn’t that far’ to our first proposed stop, a place CeCe had been practically salivating over called Woman Hollering Creek. “C’mon, Julian, I can see your need to be pedantic simmering just below the surface. You love this kind of thing—connections to folklore, lots of dubious experiences to pick apart…”

  Julian had rolled his eyes but seemed a teeny, tiny bit less bitchy about the road trip than he had in the days leading up to our departure. He’d even spent the first hour of the drive regaling us—well, me, since Ezra had zonked back out as soon as we hit the freeway—with stories about The Weeping Woman or La Llorona, a folktale that was quite well known in parts of Texas but had some international notoriety as well. He’d taken pains to assure me the haunting was, patently, very not real. “They’ve had all sorts of people out to investigate it over the years, from those jerks who like to shout and call everything demons to actual, legitimate researchers looking to determine the possible causes of phenomena around the site. It’s something to do with the acoustics of the bridge and the water rushing over stones.” He shrugged as we sped westward, a heat-hazy but beautiful, marigold and rose sunrise streaking the sky behind us. Allegedly, the first stop was about three hours from our starting point (our extended stay hotel back in Sugarland, a suburb of Houston), but Julian had somehow managed to turn it into an all-day affair. We’d stopped at a few sites of historic interest where Ezra had a grand time filming himself pretending to fire a decrepit canon on an old battlefield that I just knew had to be humming with spirit activity but felt as inert and lifeless as cardboard to me. Julian had shot me worried glances the entire time. And again, when we pulled off the main road to grab lunch at a tiny cafe that was housed in a building that used to be a bank and had allegedly been the site of some Wild West style shenanigans in the 1800s. The hostess who seated us had gone on at length about the lady on the stairs and the crying child at the old well out back and we did our due diligence, making the appropriate noises when the owner of the place regaled us with the (obviously, lovingly) embellished tales, posing for pictures when they found out we were paranormal investigators. But when I politely demurred from holding a séance, Julian shot me a sideways glance that made guilt twinge in my belly.

  I had no reason to feel guilty—whatever was happening, I didn’t seem to have control over it.

  Or did I? The fact I didn’t know made my already aching head want to just split open and let all the frustration spill out.

  By the time we got away from the charming, most likely very haunted, cafe and were back en route to Woman Hollering Creek, it had been the better part of our first day of the trip. We were nowhere near where CeCe had planned for us to be on her detailed itinerary and, in fact, it looked like Julian had decided to take us on a scenic tour of slightly unsettling back roads of rural Texas.

  “GPS said there was a bad pile up on the freeway heading towards San Antonio,” he explained when Ezra woke from his nap and asked where the Hell we were. “I’m trying this back route, but I think whatever satellite the GPS is using is trying to get us killed.”

  The sun was creeping downwards and, while it was still painfully bright out, it was making the shadows stretch long and menacing across the road when we passed thick stands of trees. We passed what looked to be a burned-out house and a half-collapsed barn before the road took a sudden, graduated curve and spilled us out into a long stretch of farmland that looked like the opening scenes of a horror movie.

  “I think I’ve seen this one before,” Julian muttered as the car started to shudder and jerk. “Shit!” The car gave a loud, squealing sound and started to shake, a roaring sound coming from beneath us. “God damn it!” Julian jerked us over to the shoulder, the car giving one last, long death rattle as he turned it off and yanked the key out of the ignition.

  For several moments, we sat in silence, the ticking sound of cooling metal overlaid with the roar of what Julian had assured us were mostly harmless (‘unless you’re a plant’) cicadas.

  “Is this the part of the movie where we get eaten by the reclusive farm folk whose family tree doesn’t fork and who have an entire armoire full of skin suits?” Ezra asked from the back seat. The silence pressing in on us from all sides was heavy and thick, making my ears ache with it. The sun hadn’t completely set yet, but it was a near thing. In less than an hour, we’d be on a dark asphalt road in very rural Texas, surrounded by fields and possibly cannibal farmers.

  Julian shook his head. “No, that’s in act two. We’re still in act one. This is the part where we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle and, with plucky determination, head out into the darkness to find help, sure of ourselves and dismissive of any weird sounds and sights we might see.”

  Ezra nodded slowly. “Right, right. You chaps want to draw straws now to see who gets to be the survivor, or should we just let this happen organically?”

  I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against the headrest. “I regret encouraging the two of you to bond.”

  Julian’s smirk was clear in his voice. “Do you regret it enough to say, Julian, you were right. We should’ve just flown to Colorado?”

  My expression had become mulish, and I flushed with the awkwardness of it. And I knew I looked childish, the way my chin jutted out, and I tilted my nose up. But it could not be helped. I was forever cursed with one of those faces that would look younger than my years—though if I was like Granmere, I’d look youthful until I hit my fifties then, much like Dorian Gray
but with far less pathos, the years would crash down all at once and I’d look every second of my age. In the meantime, alas, I was fated to look like a sulking child any time I had a negative emotion cross my features.

  “I’m taking that as a no,” Julian sighed. He gave the key another turn in the ignition, and we held our breaths as the engine made a whining, choking sound, exhaling only when it failed to catch. “Shit. Okay, one of you bring your phone out so you can shine a light while I check under the hood.”

  Ezra shot me a look over his shoulder, eyebrows arched nearly to his hairline as Julian popped the hood and got out of the car. “Does he have any sort of mechanical aptitude?” Ezra whispered. “At all?”

  I thought about it. “I did see him get the coffee maker to work with the application of a well-placed smack to the casing.”

  Ezra nodded. “Right. Well, in that case, you go hold the light, I’m going to go ‘round to the boot and wait for the zombies to come eat me first and put me out of my impending misery.” We both jumped at the sound of Julian shoving the bonnet up, the creak and pop of the metal preternaturally loud in the rural quiet evening. “I promise I’ll slow the zombies down by being very filling.”

  “What happened to hoping to be the sole survivor?” I asked, as we got out of the car. “Why the sudden interest in being eaten by the shambling dead?”

  Ezra followed me to the front end of the car, apparently giving up on his proposed career path and choosing to live un-gnawed upon. “If nothing else,” Ezra replied, “I’ll come back and haunt you so you can always have a ghost to talk to for the show, just in case a location doesn’t pan out.”

  “Oh, that would be great!” I enthused, turning my phone’s torch app on and holding it over Julian’s shoulder to illuminate the engine compartment, or whatever that space under the bonnet is called. Engine compartment felt right. “This is the engine compartment?” I confirmed.