Page 47 of His to Haunt

Without thinking, I sigh, repressing the urge slowly rising inside me. I can’t want his mouth on mine, tasting. No.

“Do you have lip gloss?” he asks, and there is a tiny twinkle in his grey-green eyes.

“Oh…uh—“

“I can help with that,” he says, and suddenly, his arm is extended over me, resting his hand on the sofa as his hair falls around my face, his full lips pressing into mine, making me moan in surprise. Losing myself in the moment, I mumble something unintelligible.

His mouth feels and tastes like pure, unadulterated sin, his satin tongue seducing me into a melted thing—raw, wild clay readied for wet processing, adeptly shaping me into my beholder’s desired form.

He gently releases me, his tongue slowly sliding from mine, his lips floating away. I sway, closing my mouth with a lick of the lips.

He looks at me with a satisfied gleam. “Your lips are reddened, plumped, and shiny now.”

With that, he returns to his canvas, and I watch his languid, towering frame, studying him, mesmerized as he removes his shirt, exposing his long, strong muscles before resuming painting. Did he really just kiss me to make my lips darker and shinier?

“Yes, you look like her. But different,” he says in a delayed response. So, he is comparing us, then.

“I am not my sister,” I say defiantly.

He glances up at me, the corner of his lip lifting slightly.

“No. Indeed, you are not.”

For a few long seconds, he holds my gaze, and my breathing stops. The look in his eyes causes my insides to jolt—what is it? What is he thinking? Some emotion or feeling dwells just under the surface of his stormy gaze.

“Close your eyes,” he whispers, but it’s as if he whispered into a microphone, the magnetized sound producing an electrical current coiling inside me.

My stomach jolts, a zinging sensation, and, feeling self-conscious, I gladly shut away my thoughts with a close of the lids. No, this can’t happen. I will pretend that the kiss and the feeling before and after were nothing more than a fleeting thing in the making of art.

I let my mind drift to Rachel.

“She said she saw a ghost,” I say, peeking.

He has no visible reaction.

“Ah, yes. The Moonvine Ghost,” he says in a teasing voice. “They say it lives beneath the house and travels through the walls. Ghost hunters would pay good money to come here. Close your eyes, Leena.”

The memory of the eyeball jumps out at me, and an annoying row of chills creeps down the back of my neck. It was my sister’s nightmare, or me dreaming as if I were her having it. That is all.

“So, you think that Rachel let the rumors go to her head?”

“Perhaps. Some monsters in life are real.”

“Like the monster who hurt her.”

He says nothing, and the vision of the eyeball lingers in the dark behind my eyelids, followed by the muscle memory of the man at my thighs, inducing erotic fear—my sister’s phantom?

My legs stiffen, the space between my thighs tightening as I lay on the sofa on my side, my cheeks flushing and spreading down my neck.

I came here hoping to have a career in clinical psychology, not to feel as if I’m living in a psychological quagmire, as if my sister’s nightmare is becoming my own.

Predicted her own death. Too much blood loss to still be living. Presumed dead.

Tears flood my eyes, and I quickly wipe them away, but more keep coming. Not now.

“Sorry,” I say, sitting up.

Almost instantly, he is standing over me with a tissue in his hand.

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