I nod.
“Good girl.”
He draws slow circles around my sensitive bundle of nerves before sinking his fingers deep again. The powerful stroke makes my vision spark.
It was bound to happen, given our lack of self-control. If sleeping in his arms was a mistake, then this is armageddon. Theworld beyond the tarp is a shiver of dying leaves—copper, gold, and rust. The past. The future. They don’t matter.
He does it again.
And again.
I see stars behind my eyelids, my legs parting further, my will coming apart far too easily. I bite down on my bottom lip to stifle the sound building in my chest, forcing every gasp inward and swallowing them as I rock against my dead lover’s hand.
I float when he touches me.
Not just in the way people say it, not some pretty exaggeration—but truly, terrifyingly unmoored. Like my body has forgotten its own weight, and every piece of me suddenly loosens and lifts, carried somewhere higher than I’ve ever been allowed to go. There’s no rush to it. No frenzy. He takes his time, like he knows exactly how far I can be pushed before I break—and walks me right to the edge.
No one has ever touched me like this, in such a controlled and precise manner. Every movement is calculated, every pause longer than the last, but he doesn’t tease—he builds. He layers my pleasure on top of euphoria, brick by brick, until I’m suspended in that strange, fragile place where everything feels too bright and too open.
And then he stops. Eases just enough to keep me up high, dangling, aching for heights I can’t quite reach on my own. This forbidden need to break under his touch in spite of everything, in secret, in shame, boils my blood.
“You’re so fucking good to me, little fox. Tell me how I make you feel,” he commands.
“You make me feel like dying.”
His throat rumbles with approval.
“Next time, I’ll stuff my cock right here, deep in your sweet pussy”—he reaches far, far inside me—“and fuck you hard andslow. Next time…” he grins against my shoulder. “I’ll make you scream.”
He presses his hand hard over my mouth and shoves me over the edge in one hard stroke. The single most wrongful pleasure I’ve ever felt.
Tears flood my cheeks as rapture sweeps through me, hot enough to lick my bones clean, sharp enough to destroy every fear I’ve carried here.
Every part of my soul fractures on impact—only the pain is exquisite, splintering into something brighter, sharper, almost too much to bear. It breaks and breaks again, each wave giving way to another, until I can’t tell where it ends. Just a rush of something electric, impossibly sweet, impossible to hold.
And it hurts—coming down from such heights. Crashing back to earth, my body trembling, haunted by the echo of that blissful, aching sweetness.
The worst part is not the intensity or the way my body shatters for him.
It’s knowing that whatever he unlocked in me—this lightness, this impossible, breathless height—I’ll never find it again. Not without him.
Shame and pleasure thud in my blood, indistinguishable from one another. I told myself I wouldn’t do this. That I would wait, that I needed answers, clarity, and distance. Instead, I let my body lead.
E muffles my moans with his hand and licks the tears off my cheeks. “Shhh, it’s over,” he whispers, brushing his mouth near my ear. “But when we’re alone,” he murmurs, his voice low, threaded with satisfaction. “You won’t get off so easily.”
“For a man who said he couldn’t wait because this might be his only chance, you’re awfully set on the future,” I croak.
He rests a hand over my stomach with a small sigh. “You’re mine, now.”
The entire scope of the dream creeps back into my mind uninvited. I was so focused on the latter parts of the vision that I almost forgot about the flying man coming to meet my mother through the mirror.
I should ask E if he remembers anything about her, but the thought brings bile to my mouth.
I can’t bring myself to believe they knew each other. Mabel wouldn’t have taken care of a ghost who had fucked over my mom like that. She would have warned me against him.
Unless she didn’t know…
What if long-buried memories are bleeding through in ways I don’t understand yet?
