🕯Hello Lovie🕯

It was a fucking joke.

"Unhelpful," you'd moped, hanging up on the customer service agent while they were trying to interest you in some buyer's protection service.

Walking into your little kitchen to see a tall, dark, and handsome man sitting at your kitchen table. Introduced himself as John.

You meant to call the cops, of course, but then he disappeared through your walls only for you to find him stretched out on your bed, smiling with a self-satisfied smirk. "You can ring whoever you fancy, but it won't make a lick a difference, sweet'eart. S'your doin' that brought us here."

—

The psychic called the cops on you when you tried to bang down her door. Your emails and calls and negative reviews didn't move the needle.

—

And you know, for a ghost, he was so reasonable. If he wanted to, he could make your life a living hell. He'd see to it personally and would never lose sight of his mission were he to actually do it.

All he wanted — and it was so generous of him not to ask for anything of you — was to live in your house together and just be a happy family. All he wanted, really, was to bury himself into your "child-bearing hips" and fuck the bad attitude out of you. Fuck you into a sweet, pliable thing for him to keep.

"I'm not your fucking wife, you psycho." You'd broken enough things trying to chuck them at him; the only thing that you used now were words, and even then didn't budge him. A fortified wall of a man, constantly amused eyes that knew better, could see from an advantage point that you couldn't.

You tried killing him. A lot. Got creative with it too, but then it became an exercise in avoiding the FBI's interest for your increasingly unhinged research.

"I really hope you were killed. I hope it hurt. I hope you fucking suffered."

You tried showing him different women, ones online who said they really wanted to be fucked by a ghost!, but it was like trying to trick a wolf by throwing a fake stick. You were caught in his teeth.

So you fucked off all the time, staying out as late as possible at the bars, bringing home people to fuck. Didn't work; John scared them off.

S'alright, darlin', I know you just need to get this out of your system

He would say the worst things while his thumb was jammed down your mouth, piecing apart your lips so he could imagine his cock there. Just need to fill this mouth with me to keep you quiet and happy, hm? The worse it was, the harder you came, and a man like him did not miss the connective tissue between the two.

Bit of a party girl, y'are, darlin'. Can't be carryin' on like this when you're a mum.

Lucky you, inheriting (or summoning, according to him) some fuck-ass backwards ghost that wanted you barefoot and pregnant. These hips, good Christ, they're made to take me.

No matter that you had an IUD; John kept throwing out your pills. No matter that whatever the fuck came out of his dick couldn't knock you up, the idea buzzed in his stupid-ass head too strong to listen to actual reason.

Likes to pile drive you into your mattress, smiling down at you all condescending, not really caring if you get off from it, but liking when you come extra hard anyway. His cock stroking all the way deep, deep enough that you punch at his shoulder — "fuck, that fucking hurts!" — until he laughs dark and low, and eventually seizes up and releases whatever that substance is inside you. Feels like cum.

Then there's the crux of the fantasy: he grabs your pillows, and stuffs them under your huge ass so your wide hips are propped up in the air.

Good girl like that, let Daddy's spend do its thing made even more disgusting and potent by his tongue laving around your pussy, never lapping it up, but cleaning the area. Pushing it in deep with his two fingers until you slap and grapple at his wrists with a furious orgasm.

His ring finger, banded.

Yours, matching. Slipped on in the night.

Don't worry, sweet girl. It'll take.

The research stops being fun after a certain point and doesn't help your case.

You've got a leering Scottish dude as a clingy ghost, constantly pressing his big boner into your ass or between your legs. Look, at first, the novelty of it was fun. But when you've got work in the morning, waking up with a cock sliding into your ass and a och dinnae mind me hen jus need to blow off steam against your neck and now you've got to hop in the shower in the middle of the night because you got…ectoplasm? running out of your asshole.

Can't be banished. Can't get closure because Johnny just wants a fun time and someone to party with. He's pretty confident he died in the toilets at a nightclub that closed down in 1989. "Shame, many a night with my heid in a girl's fanny there."

He never leaves your side. Never content to stay back at the apartment or do his own thing, never too curious about the world around him. Just wants a hole to fuck — yours.

"Ye called me, hen."

There's no escaping him. You can't outrun him, can't trick him, can't tire him out. You could grab a flight to some remote island, and his spectral ass would just accompany you on board.

"Johnny, please," you sob, beyond exhausted after a few years. "I need space. Time. Distance. Anything, please."

His mouth is busy rimming your asshole, lapping and circling desperately, his saliva — yes, he produces it all when he's this close to you for this long, how lucky — running down your crack to your cock.

"Shush, hen," he tuts, licking forcefully until you're buckling, face into the pillow. His hairy hand comes between your legs and begins the slow tugs at your cock, and of course you're already leaking everywhere. Starting to shake under his ministrations.

"Want yer cum, lass. All sweet an' just fer me."

"No," you protest with a long, insane whine as your toes curl and the heat spreads low in your belly, your hips fucking into his tight wet fist. "I don't want to. I just wanna sleep."

He spits on your asshole, loud and gross, and you moan. "Ye cannae sleep if ye haven't gotten tae cum, ye daft girl. Gi'e me yer cum an' ah'll let ye sleep."

He won't. He won't be done even then, his cock never falling asleep. Always hard and angry and throbbing.

He milks your cock harder and you pitch forward, pulling away from his warm corporeal tongue with a shrill cry, and och there she goes.

Your pleas are met with light, snapping laughter, and then his cock is being rubbed against your asshole enough times that you finally shift and wriggle into acceptance: please. He hums graciously like he's doing you a favour, slapping your ass hard and making you buck. "Open wide fer me," he coos as he pulls your cheeks apart for his inspection.

Your brain goes offline at this part, and he takes over completely in his dominating, hyperactive, body-buzz electric way about him.

It can tell if you're not taking it seriously.

"I'm talking about my fiance, dumbass. Wouldn't be marrying him if he didn't. Anyway, your turn!"

—

You tell yourself you could've figured it out if he hadn't shown up the night before the wedding, dressed in a suit.

A stranger with soft brown eyes with a strange glint to them that stole your breath away.

Telling you, You're not going to marry him, honey. That's not the way this is going to work. I'm sorry.

He wasn't sorry; his top lip didn't meet his bottom lip in the right way to sell his remorse. The glint and the feverish look in his eyes seeing you in your bridal gown, trying it on one last time before the morning. He looked like a man deprived.

He was patient when you didn't understand. When you cried and cried, he held you, stroking your hair, the waist of your dress, your pretty mantilla veil. His hands were weak at first, so insubstantial that it scared you, but they got stronger as he roved up your dress.

Your protests were salt-thick.

I know, honey, I know.

Soothing words and petting hands and spoken kindnesses draped over you like their own veil, affixed to you and kept in place over you.

Until he found that that you were a traditional girl in some way; had been waiting for the wedding night. His eyes burned dark and hard, his hands forming into hot irons that molded your flesh apart.

What a beautiful bride

He kissed away your tears, sucked them up delicately with his beautiful mouth. He parted you like the sea, like trembling grasses making way, and slicked himself up. Hushed and crooned in your salt-damp neck about how he's the one that he can take care of you the best, isn't that what you wanted? as his cock rocked into you a little bit, small takings and small pitiful sanctions, making deeper passage.

The loveliest bride a man could hope for. Look at your face, darlin, you're a vision. Those eyes open for me so wide, lookin' at her new husband, eh?

Every time your mouth gaped open, he captured it in a new, hungrier kiss, his skin dragging against yours near the end of it. Swallowed up your crying noises, your gasps and hisses and moans, your pathetic keening sounds when his cock stroked the deepest, pressing against places you've never felt.

S'what a groom needs to do, hm? Make his pretty wife come? Make her feel good and jus' right? I'm gonna take care of you the best. You made sure of it, my wife.

A warm hand settled against your clit and began to rub there, slow and delirious, until he no longer kissed to cover up your sounds; his eyes darkened and seem to glitter as your ragged moans filled the bridal suite. An orgasm rippleed out across you, tight and discordant, frightening you beyond your new reality and you pulled at your husband so tightly that he spilled in you with a harsh groan. Pulsed something in you, then dragged his cock out, spilling more over your bridal gown.

Marked. Taken.

—

A few years later, he asks you to go find the dress in the closet. Wants you to put it on so he can fuck you like you're a virgin again; wants to reenact the taking of you.

There are some bittersweet tears you shed while he achingly glides into you, acting like the pressure is too much and too full and he has to slow down for your sake, remembering your fiance's face. The excitement you felt the night before.

The studio is warmer than you expect. Old brick. Tall windows dripping with rain. Canvases stacked against every wall, most of them turned backward, their painted faces hidden from you. It smells of linseed oil and damp wood and (- the sharp stench of a cave where things lie nestled in the dark with sharp teeth and sharper claws, maw dripping with hunger for every unsuspecting little thing that crosses in front of it’s eyes, too close too see the danger until its dragging them across stone floor- )

(And you’ll think about those canvases later. About how each one had been carefully turned toward the wall before you arrived, how easy it had been to assume this was modesty instead of concealment. Artists are strange, you’d thought. Private about unfinished things. You hadn’t yet considered that there might be things Johnny didn’t want looking back at you.)

Johnny puts you in an oversized white shirt (‘s mine, Bonnie, but ye can borrow it- ), says the fabric catches shadow better. Leaves your own clothes folded on a chair near the door (- farther away than they need to be- ) and settles you on a low platform beneath the windows, your knees drawn loosely beneath you, one hand resting against your throat.

The first few minutes pass in silence.

Charcoal scratching.

Rain needling softly against the glass.

Johnny looking at you, baby blue traveling slowly, steadily, returning to the same places over and over- the soft inside of your wrist, the hollow beneath your throat, the place where the shirt slips away from one shoulder whenever you breathe too deeply.

You try to hold still, but your back starts to ache. Your fingers curl against your collarbone. Each time Johnny looks up, you remember you’re being watched and flinch, shoulders rising, knees pressing closer together, chin sinking protectively toward your chest, too stiff.

His charcoal stills.

You apologize.

Ach, dinnae apologize. He smiles when he says it, but something in his expression stays still. His mouth curves. The rest of him doesn’t.

Ye keep foldin’ in on yourself every time I look at ye. Ahm not goin’ tae eat ye.

It’s too perceptive and your laugh comes out smaller than you meant it to. Johnny’s gaze sharpens at the sound, charcoal held motionless between fingers stained black nearly to the knuckle. He sets the charcoal on the easel tray and walks toward you, wiping blackened fingertips against his trousers.

His hands settle on your shoulders and press them down, thumbs sweeping slowly along the tight muscles beside your neck, working circles into the ache until your head tips forward despite yourself.

(That should’ve frightened you too, perhaps, the ease with which he found the softest part of you and pressed his thumb into it. But cruelty rarely introduces itself as cruelty.)

Can feel ye fightin’ me, he murmurs.

You tell him you’re only nervous.

I know, hen.

His mouth brushes close to your ear when he says it- That’s the problem-

You’ve never done anything like this before. Never sat beneath someone’s attention and been expected to let them take whatever they saw.

Johnny hums.

- Got somethin’ that might help-

He leaves you there and crosses to a cabinet near the sink. The bottle he brings back is already open. Red wine, dark enough to look black where it gathers in the bottom of the glass.

He pours while you watch, the glass filling nearly to the widest part before he seems to remember himself and stops.

You tell him that’s more than a little.

Is it?

The dimples appear.

Scottish measure.

You laugh despite yourself, and that seems to please him. He passes you the glass, waits until your fingers close around the stem, then returns to the easel as though the matter is settled.

It’s sweeter than you expect.

Dark fruit and spice, something thick and jammy that clings to your tongue after you swallow. It warms your stomach on the way down and then sits there, a small red coal beneath your ribs, heavy in your stomach, spreading outward in a slow bloom that reaches your fingertips first.

Johnny starts drawing again once you drink, charcoal moving with renewed purpose, and each time you begin to tense beneath his gaze, he tips his chin toward the glass.

You obey because you don’t want to be difficult (- not after he told you that you were the first beautiful thing he’d wanted to draw in months. Pride and vanity always did come before the fall-)

The first glass disappears without you noticing.

Johnny refills it.

You watch the wine climb the crystal, a dark red tide swallowing the clean sides. He pours generously this time, his wrist turning until the glass is almost full.

Johnny-

Ye’re still wound tight.

He presses the glass back into your hand, cups the base and tips it toward your mouth, red wine spilling over your lower lip, a thin ribbon escaping the corner of your mouth to trail down your chin- Swallow, hen, that’s it, good girl- thumb catching the crimson streak on your chin, smearing it gently across your swollen mouth, bringing his thumb to his own lips and dragging his tongue slowly over the wine stained pad, his gaze still fixed on your (- tasting one thing and thinking of another entirely- )

The room softens, hard corners of the platform blurring, rain beyond the glass stretches into silver threads. Johnny’s face becomes something painted in oils- dark lashes, blue eyes, the warm cut of his mouth- each feature bleeding gently into the next whenever you look too quickly.

(You’ll try to remember how many times he filled the glass after that. You’ll count backward later and find nothing solid enough to hold. One glass becomes two only because you remember him pouring. Two becomes three because the bottle was lower when you finally noticed it again. Memory is unreliable even when sober; drunk, it becomes something else entirely)

Your thoughts begin losing their edges.

That’s the strangest part.

Not the warmth or the heaviness gathering behind your eyes, but the way one thought stops connecting cleanly to the next. You think you should check the time, but the idea floats away before you remember where you left your phone. You think you’re thirsty, although there’s still wine in your hand. You think Johnny has been staring too long, but then he smiles and the concern dissolves before it can settle into fear.

Your brain turns liquid. Loose.

Everything inside your skull has melted into something warm and buoyant, thoughts drifting past one another like pale shapes beneath dark water. You can see them. Almost touch them. But each time you reach for one, the motion sends it farther away.

The warmth moves deeper with each glass. Into your thighs. Your cheeks. The soft tissue behind your eyes.

Nothing has edges anymore. Johnny’s charcoal scratches from very far away, scraping down the back of your mind.

You take another sip.

Your tongue feels too large for your mouth.

The wine sits syrup thick in your veins, turning your body slow and porous. You can feel yourself dissolving from the inside, bones losing their hard white calcifications, thoughts melting down into something warm and red and viscous. Your mind becomes a glass overturned on its side, everything inside it pouring lazily toward the lowest point.

Johnny tells you to lift your chin and it takes you a moment to understand him.

Your head feels full of warm red water. Too heavy for your neck, too light to belong to your body. When you turn toward him, the studio follows a moment later, swaying gently around its fixed point. Your stomach seems to remain behind while the rest of you drifts forward.

Johnny smiles. Feelin’ better?

Mmm. Floaty.

The word leaves your mouth thick and childish. You hear yourself say it from somewhere above the platform and start laughing, embarrassed by the way your tongue seems to have grown too large for your teeth.

Floaty, he repeats. Aye, I can see that.

The glass slips sideways in your hand when you try to lift it again, wine cresting the rim, pouring over your fingers in a slow, dark sheet, slipping between your knuckles and tracing along the inside of your wrist. You make a startled little sound at the coldness that breaks apart into a thousand shards against the brick of the walls.

Johnny catches the stem before it can tumble from your loose fingers- careful, hen- and you try to straighten it but some how make it worse. Another red thread spills across your palm, and your laughter returns, thick and breathless, your head bowing beneath the weight of it.

Can’t hold it, you confess.

Johnny looks at your hand.

His smile doesn’t disappear, the warmth staying arranged across his face, but everything behind it grows watchful and still, his gaze following the wine as it crawls toward the soft bend of your elbow.

Aye, he murmurs. I can see that.

He takes the glass from you and places it beyond your reach.

Then he closes his hand around your wrist.

(There are moments when the body understands before the mind does. A pulse quickening beneath someone’s thumb. Fingers curling uselessly toward the palm. Some small animal instinct lifting its head inside you and finding every door already underwater. Yours tries to warn you now, but the wine has made a soft, red grave of your thoughts, and whatever is screaming has sunk too deep to be heard.)

Johnny raises your hand slowly, turns your wrist upward and studies the dark streaks shining there as though you’ve offered him something.

His tongue touches the center of your palm.

Tickles, you mumble, trying weakly to pull your hand back.

Johnny doesn’t let you, fingers tighten around your wrist, dragging his tongue between two of your fingers, gathering the wine with slow, deliberate strokes, his eyes lifted to your face the entire time, stubble scraping your skin, your head tipping drunkenly toward one shoulder while he follows the spill downward. His mouth moves over the heel of your hand, then the tender inside of your wrist, tongue tracing the dark path until it reaches the quick beat of your pulse.

Johnny, you breathe, his name breaking apart around another shy (nervous) giggle.

Shh.

His lips close over the fluttering place beneath your skin, sucking gently at the flesh, and the laughter catches strangely in your throat.

For a second, the floating stops.

Your eyes find his. There’s no boyish embarrassment there now. No artist’s wonder. Only concentration, calm and proprietary, as if he’s discovered the precise place where you’re weakest and is committing it to memory.

Then the room tips again.

The fear slips away before you can name it.

Johnny lifts his mouth from your wrist. A faint red stain shines across his lower lip, though you can’t tell whether it’s wine or the shape of his teeth pressed too hard against your skin.

Couldnae leave ye all messy, he murmurs.

You smile at him, heavy eyed and grateful.

(That smile will return to you later. Not his. Yours. The soft, trusting curve of your own mouth while he held your pulse between his teeth, already learning how much he could take, could take, could take before you’d realize something was missing- )

His hand slides behind your neck when your head lists toward one shoulder, catching you with a palm spanning the base of your skull, fingers sinking into the soft place beneath your hair, and the strength of him feels like a pillar rising from the black water at the exact moment your feet stop finding the bottom.

You lean into him, body pouring toward the nearest solid thing with the blind obedience of water finding a crack.

(That’s the part you’ll hate most afterward. Not the touch itself, but the relief. The soft, grateful sound your throat makes when he holds your head up for you. The way your body, stupid animal that it is, mistakes restraint for shelter because the room has become a dark and gently turning sea, and Johnny- Johnny, who tipped the bottle into your mouth, who stood on the shore and watched the red water climb over your face- feels like the only thing left that won’t move beneath your hands.)

Can barely hold yourself up, can ye?

There’s laughter curled inside his voice. Warmth too. Enough warmth to blunt the edge of it, enough tenderness painted over the words that you don’t see the teeth beneath until much later, when you’re sober enough to pick each moment apart and find where the sweetness spoiled.

You mumble that you’re fine, word coming loose and swollen, a soft little shape that collapses against his chest before it properly leaves your mouth.

Course ye are.

His thumb moves behind your ear, slow enough to feel fond, presses into the tender hollow there and draws a circle, then another, while your thoughts slosh heavily from one side of your skull to the other.

Jus’ need a wee bit of help holdin’ the pose.

He reaches past you.

Something drags from the shelves, whisper of fibres over unfinished wood, dry and soft, the sound stretching strangely inside your head, unspooling through the wine until it becomes the scrape of something moving beneath a bed, the hush of grass parting around a body.

When Johnny settles back into view, there’s a pale coil resting in one charcoal stained hand.

You stare at it.

The meaning is there- somewhere- can feel it beneath the surface, pressing upward through the wine. But your thoughts are no longer thoughts, drifting pieces of them, each one separating when you reach, each one slipping wetly through your fingers before you can force it into words.

What’s that for?

The question sounds very far away.

Johnny looks at the rope, then at you.

You.

He says it so easily that you blink up at him, chin hooked against the hard planes of his abdomen.

Then his grin breaks wide, dimples cutting deep enough to make the answer harmless again.

The pose, hen. It’s for the pose.

He kneels beside you and takes your wrist, winding the rope around your skin once, then twice, explaining tension and composition and the body’s instinct to protect itself when it tires.

Always curls inward, he murmurs, thumb smoothing the inside of your wrist. Always tries tae hide the soft parts.

You watch his fingers move.

Over.

Under.

Through.

Cream colored rope, the shade of old lace or clean bone, pretty where it crosses your skin, fibres blurring at the edges when your eyes lose focus, becoming something delicate, ornamental. A bracelet. A ribbon. (Gift-wrapped and hand delivered-)

Johnny-

Too tight?

You don’t know.

You should know. The answer ought to exist inside your own head, but your body has gone dim and distant, a house seen through fogged glass. There’s pressure around your wrist. Heat beneath it. A pulse knocking weakly against the rope like someone trapped behind a wall.

Johnny slides one finger under the knot, fingertip stroking over your pulse while he looks up at you, eyes bright and attentive.

Wouldnae hurt ye.

You nod because he sounds so certain and rational thought is a stone tied to your ankle asking you to climb through red waters.

He binds the other wrist before you understand that the first one is finished. Lifts both arms above your head, and your body follows with a slow, boneless obedience that makes him smile. The stretch pulls through your shoulders, arches your back, tits pushing at the fabric of his shirt, body bent sharp enough to split the soft haze for half a second, and a whimper escapes before you can swallow it.

Shh. Easy, bonnie.

His hand slides down your arms, your sides, soothing the hurt he created, and the wine rushes back into the space pain briefly cleared. Warm. Heavy. Merciful.

He secures the rope to an iron ring sunk into the studio floor.

You hadn’t noticed the rings before.

There’s one near either side of the platform, black metal half hidden beneath old paint and dust. More beside the mattress in the shadowed corner, arranged at careful distances from one another.

The pattern should mean something.

(It does mean something.)

Your gaze catches on them and then drifts helplessly away.

(Fear needs a body that answers when called, and yours has become warm wax beneath his hands, softening wherever he presses, cooling around whatever shape he leaves behind.)

Your legs are next.

He cups one ankle and draws it outward. Then the other. Your heels drag over the platform with a soft rasp, your knees falling apart beneath the loose white shirt. The fabric slips higher along your thighs, and the first clean spark of alarm pierces the drunken fog when you try to close them again.

Johnny feels the resistance and his hands stop on your thighs, heat from his palms sinking into you until you can feel his fingerprints burning their marks into your bones.

Easy.

The word is quiet. Almost kind.

You shake your head, but the motion tips the ceiling sideways. The windows pour rain upward. Johnny’s face splits into two softened versions of itself, then swims back together as nausea rolls lazily beneath your ribs.

I don’t-

The sentence knots behind your teeth.

Don’t what?

The words are all there, drifting separately through the dark, but you can’t gather them into the same mouthful.

Johnny leans closer- what was that, doe- gives you every appearance of listening, eyebrows drawn with concern, mouth softened at the corners.

You try again.

Your tongue feels soaked through. Heavy as nebula, the sounds smearing against one another until even you can’t tell what you meant to say.

Johnny waits, watches the effort drain out of your face and only then strokes both hands down your thighs.

Thought so.

The ropes tighten around your wrists. Your ankles. A careful loop above your knee when your leg keeps listing inward, another where the position pleases him but your body won’t hold it on its own.

His hands guide the white shirt higher whenever it catches beneath you.

It’ll wrinkle, hen-

A little farther-

Hold still-

The fabric gathers in pale folds until it rests beneath the curve of your breasts, baring the plane of your stomach, the flare of your hips, your soft, silky cunt he has spread open for himself. His thumbs stroke once along the crease where thigh meets hip, pressing into the give of flesh (- as though he is already imagining how it will feel when he is between them- )

He looks at what he has done and the boyish grin is gone. What remains is quieter. Hungrier. His eyes move over you like he is deciding which part to taste first.

There we are, he murmurs. Much better.

You drift.

Fear is still there, but it has risen above you now, trapped on the other side of the wine. You can see its shadow crossing the surface while you float beneath it, black and frantic and distorted by the red water between you. Your shoulders ache. Your wrists burn dully where the rope takes your weight. Your legs are held apart by pale fibres and Johnny’s careful arrangement, but the body enduring it feels impossibly far away.

A figure at the bottom of a lake.

A pale thing laid open in the silt.

You’re near the ceiling. You’re inside the rain crawling down the glass. You’re suspended somewhere behind your own eyes, watching a woman in a white shirt test the ropes with small, weak movements she won’t remember making.

She looks frightened.

You wonder why she doesn’t leave.

(Drunkenness makes a cruelty of distance. It lets you watch yourself suffer without understanding that you’re the one inside the body. Lets the mind climb out through a crack in the skull and hover somewhere clean while the flesh remains below, warm and obedient and available. It feels almost like escape until you realize Johnny can still touch what you’ve left behind.)

Christ.

The reverence in his voice draws your gaze back to him.

He’s looking at you, eyes moving slowly over your arms lifted and secured, your knees drawn apart, the shirt bunched high where his hands kept moving it, pausing at each point of strain as if pain is another line he’s finally managed to place correctly.

Something in his face has gone still, colder than lust. The deep and emptied devotion of a man standing before an altar built for a god that cannot refuse him now.

There ye are, he whispers, as if you’d been hidden from him, as if the rope has finally uncovered something true.

Then he crosses to the studio door and you follow him with your eyes slowly, the room dragging several seconds behind his body.

Johnny turns the lock and the click enters your head like a stone dropped into deep water. He slides the bolt into place and the sound travels down through the wine and settles somewhere beneath your heart, where the part of you that still understands begins, very quietly, to drown.

Then his hip catches the corner of a canvas on the way back.

It happens slowly from where you’re floating. The frame tips away from the wall, knocks against the one beside it, and then the whole uneven stack begins to slide. Wood scraping brick. Canvas whispering against canvas. Johnny swears beneath his breath and reaches for them, but they have already fallen face up across the floor.

And…

There you are.

Your face.

You blink at it, wondering for a syrupy moment whether it’s the sketch he’s just made, though the woman in the painting is wearing your green coat from last autumn. Her hair is damp, cheek tucked into the collar against the rain. She’s standing beneath the yellow shelter at the bus stop near your work, eyes lowered toward the phone cupped between her hands.

Another canvas has you carrying groceries against your chest. The paper bag splitting at the bottom, oranges bright through the tear, your mouth caught open in a laugh you don’t remember giving him.

Another-

you behind the steamed glass of the little cafe on Bell Street, both hands curled around a mug. There are Christmas lights reflected over your face. Red and gold smears threaded through your hair like something festive and burning.

That’s me, you say.

Or think you say.

(There’s a truth arranged across the floor in front of you, patient and chronological. Months of it. Seasons of it. Proof painted in oils and hidden with its face toward the wall, waiting for the moment when you could no longer count backward clearly enough to understand what you were seeing. But your brain has become a red tide inside your skull, and recognition is a small animal trying to swim through it. You watch its paws break the surface once. Then it sinks.)

When did you- ?

The question dissolves halfway out.

Johnny crouches and turns the first canvas over, handles them gently. (More gently than he’s handled you.) Checks the corners for damage, thumb brushing dust from your painted cheek before he hides it against the wall again.

Clumsy bastard, he mutters.

You stare at the remaining portrait. The one at the corner shop. Washed out lights. Coins scattered across your palm. Your face turned slightly to the side as if someone has just called your name.

- The moment he told you about-

- The first time he saw you-

Except the painting of you at the summer festival last year is underneath it.

Your eyebrows pull together and the thought almost forms.

Johnny looks over his shoulder and sees you struggling there and his expression softens.

Dinnae hurt yourself, hen.

He rises, steps over the paintings and comes back to you. One blackened fingertip presses between your brows, smoothing the crease away as though confusion is another flaw in the pose.

Ye’re thinkin’ too hard.

You try to tell him there are paintings of you. You try to ask how long.

You try to but the words leave your mouth sodden and misshapen, each syllable dragging another behind it until the sentence reaches him as little more than a murmur, the beginning falling away before you reach the end.

Johnny understands anyway. (He always seems to understand you when it suits him.)

He watches your mouth with that same fond concentration he wore while sketching (the patient attention of a man waiting for something soft to finish struggling) then glances toward the canvases he hasn’t managed to turn over.

Did tell ye I’d been stuck for months.

The dimples sink deep.

Never said how long I’ve been working since then.

You look back at the paintings.

The woman beneath the bus shelter has your green coat buttoned neatly with a button that broke last September. The woman at the cafe is holding the chipped blue mug they stopped using sometime around Christmas. Another version of you is walking beneath trees still fat with summer leaves, bare legs flashing beneath a dress buried now at the bottom of your wardrobe.

Your mind touches the sequence and recoils, but there’s nowhere for the thought to go. The wine has flooded every corridor inside your skull, filled every room up to the ceiling. Understanding swims toward you through it- slow, pale, terrible- but each time it comes close enough to recognize, the current rolls you gently away.

Something cold opens inside you, but the wine pours into it before it can become fear. It fills every clean edge, rounds everything off, turns horror into a distant pressure beneath the sternum. Johnny strokes your cheek and waits until your eyes lose focus again.

(He hadn’t found you beneath the lights of the corner shop tonight. Not in the way he’d made it sound, not like lightning or providence or some dead part of him suddenly shocked back into motion. He’d already known which bus carried you home. Which cafe you preferred. What store you used. He’d watched summer soften into autumn around you, watched autumn die into winter, and called it inspiration because obsession sounds beautiful when an artist says it.)

Johnny collects the last canvas and turns it toward the wall and your painted face disappears.

There, he murmurs. Nothin’ tae worry about.

He comes back to you slowly, hands settling on your thighs, hot enough to feel like brands through the wine heavy numbness, heat sinking in around the breadth of his palms and the effortless weight keeping you where he put you.

You shake your head.

Or perhaps it only falls weakly to one side.

Johnny’s mouth brushes your trembling knee, almost gentle, while his thumbs draw slow circles against your skin.

Easy, hen.

You try to tell him you want to go home but all that emerges is a broken little breath.

He lifts his head and watches you struggle to assemble the words, patient until the last of them dissolves behind your teeth. Then he smiles tender enough to make it seem as though he’s forgiving you for being afraid.

(And somewhere above the wine, the small surviving part of you finally understands why the paintings were turned toward the wall.)

Johnny reaches back without looking and the amber lamp beside the platform clicks off.

Darkness folds over the studio, warm and absolute, and his hands tighten around your thighs when the ropes instinctively draw taut.

"Yes!" PJ crows. "Absolutely, we must."

"Dude, no. I'm not fucking around with that shit."

"You've literally said you don't believe in ghosts."

You shrug, pushing the game at his chest. "Every single movie in history, my guy. I'm not a fucking chump. I'm not taking that chance, because with my luck, that's when I'd get proven wrong."

—

Wine happens. More.

Spirits, we implore you to—dude, do you think this house's actually got ghosts?—

—

You see PJ off in his rideshare and slowly sway your way back up to your bedroom, your hands pressing carefully against the walls as you climb the stairs. You stop to laugh, hunched over, at absolutely nothing, just softly chuckling to yourself.

You're gonna be fucked in the morning.

Can't bear the harsh lights, you keep them off as you collapse into bed, phone on your pillow beside your nasty wine-breath mouth. Stay in that position for longer than you should, immediately asleep.

Rolling over at some point, your hand thudding against something hard. You and PJ must've moved your bed against the wall like you'd discussed…?

Out of the murky dark, the wall grows large pale arms that come down and around you, pulling you into a body that is materializing itself, ripping a shrill scream out of your sticky throat.

"Quiet," the new body in your bed — not the wall — says gruffly. The arms tighten around you, banding you until you can't squirm without nausea slithering out of your belly up your throat.

"—be sick," you croak, and pull away fast enough to puke over the side of the bed, hitting the mattress on your way. Hammered. Nightmare. Sleep paralysis. No different than being drunk in bed and continuously dreaming about someone in the doorway with a glass of cold water for you. "Fuck," you grunt. You lay your head flat on the cool bedsheet, trying to force your heavy eyes open. Should get up and clean it now, not wait til morning.

Sleep rips you away before you even feel ashamed.

—

You're moaning. That's what wakes you up.

Thick and gummy moans humming through your body, like you're a cat trying to heal itself with low vibrational purrs. But you're not moaning to heal your hangover; you're moaning because something hard is rocking hard and hot against your cunt, sliding against your slipperiness, between your plump lips. Staying in the shallow end.

"What'fu—" You lift your concrete block of a head with a loud, hot grunt, and twist slowly to not make your stomach roil.

Your sleep paralysis demon in the still-dark, a pale-bodied stack of muscles working in sync to fuck at your cunt without actually going in. It makes a disgustingly harsh noise of pleasure, and clamps a hand over your bare hip to keep you in the same position. Your face stays on its side, stretched flat where his rocking motions are pushing you forward and pulling you back.

He's a man, but not human. Not earthly. In an instant glance, some deep-primal part of you understands that without turning any cerebral senses on. This is when your tether to reality snaps altogether. The surreality blunts fear and panic and confusion into a dreamy film that casts itself to your skin, present, but part of you.

"Am I dreaming."

"If y'want to tell yerself that, be my guest."

"Am I dead."

"Nah."

You moan and it might be the start of tears but you don't actually know anymore.

"Are you real."

Something shifts behind you, and then his cock is stroking up inside you, hitting your walls and stretching tight against you. This is when the dream would break apart and you'd wake up, a sensation too vivid and too real — achingly hot flesh against yours — yanking you from the cloudy haze of unconsciousness. But instead, it only takes a couple strokes until you're crying out, your pillow wet under your face still turned away, your body pitching itself up and over the climax all on its own while the thing behind you grunts and groans heavy and dark, dragging you down with it. Its hand is bruising on your waist until it's fucking you so hard that all you can do is sob and take it, a receptacle for its tension and urgency until the voice is ragged and hollowed out, and you feel heat slipping out of you. Liquid and silky.

You cry yourself back to sleep, unwilling to turn around and pretending the hand on your hip isn't there.

When you come to, the room is light and still. You roll over to see an empty bed. The covers are all fucked up, but it's empty.

Your pillow's marked up with mascara and a small dried puddle. You lean over the bed blearily; a little bit of bile on the floor. Fuck.

Between your legs — the throb, the wet.

You pull on baggy shorts and a t-shirt and clean up the puke while trying not to gag. You scrub at your face in the bathroom and do not make eye contact with yourself.

The pale thing is sitting on your couch. It's naked, arms crossed over its chest and legs resting out on your coffee table. Cock slumbering fat against its hairy thigh. Its eyes open to see you standing there, shaking like a little dog.

"Y'wanna know what you did?"

You just stare.

"Yer little game. Shouldn't poke around with things you don't know, bird. Heard your sweet little voice. You never know who's gonna answer back."

You don't make it to the bathroom. You catch it with your hands.

The thing grunts in disgust. "God, yer a right mess. Can't handle yer liquor."

—

He makes the rules clear over time.

You called out; he answered. There's no returning him. When you try to flee to a hotel, he just chuckles low and dark in your ear in the big king bed.

House didn't summon me, lovie. You did.

The spectrality of his form depends on the day. The days you ignore him, he's amorphous and weak. Terrible housemate, not able to carry his own weight. When you argue with him, which is useless because he has no earthly concerns and derives joy from pissing you off, he looks as real as a human. Those nights are the most haunting; his cock is the hardest, stiffest, driving up inside you as you push against him and fight it the whole way. You can't let yourself actually accept your reality: that you hate him with your whole being and that he is the best sex you've ever had. He tells you later that fucking you makes him feel, for a bit, at least "put back together," although the sensation never lasts.

He doesn't remember how or when or where he died. Doesn't matter to him, so the matter's dropped eventually. Given that he loves your bed better than any place in the whole house and doesn't recognize any modern conveniences, you surmise he'd been milling around wherever, waiting to answer your call, for hundreds of years.

All he tells you is that he thinks he was probably a shit.

"You still are," you grouse as he grips your thick thighs and pries them apart.

"Exactly my point. Now be quiet," he grunts between your legs, his tongue lashing out at you. Never tiring. No ego between his sucks and laps of your cunt. No impatient tongue trying to roll you over the edge so it can be his turn. No sore back that means he has to change position constantly. A real thing eating your cunt until you yell at him to stop, uttering a low unbothered chuckle.