Page 29 of Possess Me! (I Want You To)

“You don’t know that,” Violet raised her voice over mine. “I’m only telling you this because I love you, Luca. Seriously. Ghosts are dangerous. Getting rid of them isn’t simple. It’s not like it is on TV. Freeing him from the spell he is under is a complicated, maybe even impossible process. Which you can’t do because you don’t even know how to do it. He could hurt you. In fact, he could kill you, depending on what it is he wants.” Her breath stuttered. “Promise me you’ll tell him to go away.”

Prudence’s earlier words echoed in my mind, and I shuddered.

Are you prepared for it to hurt?

Somehow I didn’t think that was the kind of hurt that Violet was talking about.

I’d always been the responsible one, the one in charge of everyone’s happiness at the detriment of my own. Even now, every day was filled with the guilt of letting my family down and for once in my fucking life I was ready to take what I wanted. What I deserved.

So, I lied right to her figurative fucking face.

“You’re right. I’ll be careful,” I promised, discarding the honesty I’d worn like a mask for years, as I embraced the part of me that had long been buried. The part born from hunger and necessity. The manipulative part. The one that knew how to lie and get exactly what he wanted.

“Okay,” Violet sighed, relaxing, and I unconsciously mirrored her, even though my heart was racing and my lips were dry. I hadn’t realized how tensed up I’d become. “You’ll call me if something happens?”

“Of course.”

“I promise I’ll believe you this time. I really am sorry about before. It wasn’t cool.”

“I forgive you.” My heart thumped and I squirmed, the wooden chair I was sitting on suddenly completely uncomfortable as the weight of my dishonesty settled over me. “I’m sorry too.”

As my now mushy cereal sat in the bowl beside me, only steadily getting softer, I could only think one thing.

Liar, liar, liar.

There was an awkward pause that went on for long enough I thought Violet had hung up the phone. But when I checked, she was still there. Quiet. I couldn’t bring myself to end the call, even though I had the feeling that staying on the line meant I was about to hear something I didn’t want to hear.

When she spoke, I wasn’t wrong. “I trust you, but…before I go, I need to tell you what the real risks are.”

I was still reeling from what Violet had told me, but—in typical me fashion—I’d decided the hot ghost was worth the risk. It had taken an embarrassingly short amount of time to come to that conclusion. Sure the risks were…honestly pretty fucking high, but… Ghost booty? Boo-ty? Yeah. Hashtag, worth it.

Unfortunately, after I’d decided to fuck everything else (and Prudence) and take what I wanted, things didn’t work out that way. Prudence didn’t come back. For days I waited, ready to drop my pants at any moment like a horny pink porn star.

Without his penis to distract me I was forced to confront the fact that I only had a hundred bucks left from the money Prudence made me steal—stolen for me? I wasn’t sure what the ghostly logistics were. Either way, cash was dwindling—along with my cereal stash. Maybe it made me a bad person, but I was seriously contemplating selling the watch Paul had given me for Christmas to cover next month’s expenses.

Not that I didn’t love the watch. It was great. Totally a Paul gift. And I meant that in the nicest way possible. As great as it was though, rent and food—those were my priorities, and I was quickly running out of a way to pay for both.

I mean—fuck. Since I’d been home I’d already plowed through my snack stash, my emergency snack stash, and my extra-emergency snack stash. Ramen was pretty much the only option I had going forward if I didn’t want to starve. And it was that scary thought that finally made me realize something needed to give. I couldn’t keep wallowing like this.

The time for sadness was over.

Instead, I had to move forward.

But how?

Blinking blankly at the canvas laying on the ground in front of me, palette full of paint, brushes lined up in a pretty little row, I waited for inspiration to strike. I stared, and stared, and stared—but nothing happened. With my creative juices clogged, I was about as useful as a dried up lakebed in the desert.

So, I contemplated my options.

I could get a job. In fact, I’d have to.

But before that I’d give painting this one last, final try. If I couldn’t do it, I’d move on. Simple.

As I sat pretzel-legged on the scratchy carpet in my bedroom, my fingers itched to tell the world how I was feeling. I wanted to paint the turmoil, to splatter and slash the paper in a red so bright people would be forced to look at it—to understand how it felt to hit rock bottom. To discover the loneliness that accompanied personal failure.

My fingers twitched. My eyes burned. My chest was tight.

I wanted this so bad—

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