Page 115 of Love at First Fright

Nothing more.

And I exploded.

No warning. No build-up. No chance to hold back or delay or pretend I had any semblance of control.

My orgasm slammed through me like a freight train—no, like the entire fucking rail system. Years and years of pent-up want and loneliness and desperate need erupting in one spectacular, mortifying moment.

Ectospunk spurted across Charlie’s face.

His cheek.

His lips.

Dripping down his chin.

Everywhere.

Oh god.

OH NO.

Oh, no, no, NO!

He inhaled sharply.

I lost control of everything. My body. My solidness. The careful concentration required to maintain physical form scattered like notes from a bad chord.

The bed disappeared beneath me.

I fell.

Through the mattress. Through the floorboards. Through empty space and dust and the memory of what it meant to occupy a single point in reality.

Past the ground floor. The entrance hall. The kitchen.

Down. Down. Down.

The basement loomed below me. That terrible, forbidden door with its metal bands and the presence behind it. The thing I’d spent years avoiding. The entity that made even Lady Grimthorne tremble in terror.

No. Not there. Anywhere but there.

I grabbed onto something—some invisible thread of will or stubborn refusal to be swallowed by whatever darkness waited below—and yanked myself back together.

Forced substance back into my limbs. Weight. Mass. The sensation of existing in one place instead of everywhere and nowhere at once.

I stopped falling.

Hovered in the darkness between floors.

Breathed. Or pretended to breathe. Whatever the equivalent was for the incorporeal.

Then shot upward as fast as my panicked consciousness could manage. Back through ceilings and walls. Back toward Charlie. Before he thought I’d abandoned him again. Before he thought this was some sick joke. Before he—

I burst through the bedroom floor.

Charlie stood beside the bed, wiping his face with his hand. Staring down at the substance coating his palm with an expression I couldn’t quite read.

The ectospunk shimmered faintly in the dim light. Opalescent. Like oil on water or the inside of a seashell. Already beginning to fade at the edges.