Page 27 of Possess Me! (I Want You To)

I was a dick.

“Yeah…” I agreed, chewing on my lip as I kicked a leg up and wedged my foot under the back of my knee, wiggling to get comfortable. My chest hurt. My hands were all sweaty. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Remorse tasted like ash on my tongue.

Even though I knew Violet was kinda being a jerk about the whole ghost thing she was still my best friend. I missed her. I hated when she left home to spend the summers in Maine with her family. Even halfway across the country, Violet was dependable as hell. Unlike me. I couldn’t even pay my own portion of rent without scraping my bank account clean with a toothbrush.

Maybe I should start an Only Fans like she had? Except who would pay to see my socially awkward ass?

Prudence, maybe.

Huh.

Except I still didn’t know if he liked me because he hadn’t fucking answered me earlier. And also—he was dead. So how the hell could he pay me anyway? Ghosts didn’t have money. Man. Did his family even know he was still here?

If he stopped being a stoic asshole I could ask him.

But…that might kill the mood.

And I kinda hoped if Prudence were to show up again, we wouldn’t waste time talking. Sure, maybe wanting him for his dick was shitty of me. But at least I was being shitty and sexually-satisfied at the same time. Like a cat who caught the canary, or however that saying went.

Sunrise follows even the darkest night.

Hell yeah, it does.

And my sunrise sounded like sex, smelled like leather, and knew exactly how to torture me into getting off. My neck tingled just thinking about the bruises he’d left behind as he’d choked me to completion. Yeaahhh…It was probably good Violet couldn’t see me right now. I was grinning way too hard, and looked like I’d been mauled.

“Hellooo?” Violet’s voice filtered through my thoughts. Shit. I hadn’t meant to ignore her.

“Sorry! I was thinking about ghost sex,” I blurted, unthinkingly.

There was an awkward pause that seemed to go on for ages. I squirmed, tapping my fingers nervously against the lip of the table. I hadn’t meant to say that. Fuck. If she didn’t believe me before, she definitely wouldn’t now that I’d brought Prudence’s dick into the equation. It was one thing to be haunted, and something entirely else to be haunted by a ghost that wanted to rail you.

“Wait—” Violet’s voice grew hard, the amusement bleeding away as she spoke. “Ghost sex? You didn’t tell me about ghost sex.”

“I told you I hadn’t gotten to the juicy bits yet!”

“You’re not fucking around with Patrick Swayze, Luca. If you’re having sex with a ghost I should definitely be the first person to know.”

“Um, pardon me, Miss-Condescending-Mc-Witchy-Pants. You have made it incredibly uncomfortable to talk to you about the whole thing because you’ve made it obvious you’re just humoring me.” Obviously, she hadn’t realized I’d caught on to what she was doing. Her silence was flabbergasted.

It hadn’t hit me how hurt I was until that moment. The words were already out. That was the shitty thing about words. Once you said them they couldn’t be unsaid.

Violet was a bitch sometimes but she always meant well. She’d been the person to stop me from shaving my head during a bad emotional spiral. She’d been the person who had slathered bleach on my hair, then gently rinsed it away while I stuck my head under the tub faucet. She was the person that watched reruns with me just because she liked to sit beside me. She was the person that had held my hand as I sobbed over bank statements—and the person that had curled up on my bed with me for weeks while I cried my way into sobriety, cursing the very ground Hunter walked on.

So, yeah.

This was out of character for her.

“I’m sorry I made you feel that way,” Violet said softly, remorse coloring her tone indigo. The drive to paint the emotion tingled at my fingertips, and I fiddled with my—her—robe absent-mindedly, aware that the desire to paint would flee the second I left the phone call.

Nothing had been clicking for me lately.

It was a tease, a glimpse at what I had been able to easily reach before, but could no longer touch.

I missed the release that came from painting the emotions that scattered like confetti inside my head. My thoughts were piles of yarn, jumbled together in a mishmash of color that only ever detangled when I was in the middle of a project.

“Look. I get it. You think I’m emotional—” I sighed. Apparently everyone thought I was emotional lately.

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