Emily's Ghost (14 page)

"Emily--"

"That really is all," she
said, lifting her head and forcing a smile. "I think I'll turn in
if it's all right with you. The sofa folds out; the bed's always
made up. I'll get you a pillow. There's a new toothbrush under the
sink. If you'd like a nightcap, hmmn, well, there's beer. There's
milk."

She slipped gracefully out
of his hold somehow, leaving him to stare after her as she went
into the bedroom for a pillow.
Why don't I
just tell him what happened downstairs? He came here to help. Why
won't I let him?

When she returned, she
still hadn't figured out why she was refusing. "Here you go," she
said lightly, tossing him the pillow on her way to wash up for the
night.

When she came out from the
bathroom she saw that the lights had been turned off except for the
one at her desk, where the senator sat reading a bound document and
making notes. She took in every detail: the light from the brass
lamp, dancing on his thick, unruly hair; the left hand, shading his
brow, which still bore a wedding band -- no doubt to ward off
female molesters; the shirtsleeves rolled up over solid forearms.
He looked so right. He looked so at home. It made something inside
her begin to ache.

And then she saw that his
open briefcase was sitting smack on top of her yellow pads. So he
hadn't bothered to delve further into her notes. The realization
was a blow.

He looked up, preoccupied,
and smiled. "How're you doing?" he asked her in a comfortable,
sleepy way.

"Doing great. Good night,
Senator," she said stiffly. "And thank you."

For nothing, she thought
bitterly as she closed the door to her bedroom. He was never going
to believe her. It was incredibly insulting, that a believer in
ghosts didn't believe in her ghost. She changed into a white
cottony nightgown and climbed into bed.

But who could sleep, with
him in the next room? All at once she realized why she hadn't been
able to tell him about her hideous moment downstairs: because she
didn't want him to believe she was either crazy
or
haunted. Suddenly it had become
imperative that Lee Alden regard her as one of his more normal
constituents.

And why? Because he'd
almost kissed her -- and would have, if it hadn't been for Fergus.
Because she wanted that kiss so badly that still, here, alone, she
could taste it. Great. Her only option now was to deny the
existence of Fergus on any level, real or imagined. Great. A knight
in shining armor had come charging in to be of service and she, the
fair but possibly nutty damsel, was being forced to decline. All
because of an almost-kiss.

Great.

For the next hour or so
Emily tried valiantly to sleep. A toss, a sigh, a kicked-off cover;
she went through the motions a hundred times. But all of her senses
were on red alert. Every little thing hindered sleep. Her hair
tickled. The bed squeaked. Her toe itched. The pillow was too hard.
Her gown was twisted. The pillow was too soft. Nothing seemed
right; something was missing. And Emily Bowditch, twenty-eight,
never married, not very experienced, was having trouble figuring
out what it was.

Sometime after two in the
morning, when her mind was drifting in a feathery float between
sleep and awareness, she heard the door to her bedroom open. She
opened her eyes just enough to see the senator's form silhouetted
by the dim light of the living room. He stood there a moment,
watching, and then he closed the door very quietly and left her in
darkness. Her heart lightened immeasurably; and soon after that she
fell into a deep and peaceful sleep.

*****

But then the dream came, a
brutal nightmare that left her clutching her throat and snatching
at a rope that wasn't there. She dreamt that she was one of the
crowd at Fergus O'Malley's execution. At first she hung back and
let the gawkers and the curious push their way past her for a
closer look at the gallows. She had the sense that someone in the
crowd was completely evil, and she was afraid of him. Still, as the
prisoner was led up the scaffold she found herself pressing
forward, straining to make sure it was Fergus O'Malley. It was. But
instead of being dressed in coarse trousers, a muslin shirt and a
corduroy vest, he was wearing dark suit pants and a maroon tie,
with his shirtsleeves rolled up.

The executioner, who
looked like Jim Whitewood in a plain black suit, pulled a dark hood
over Fergus O'Malley's head and slipped the rough hemp noose over
his neck. She watched as the executioner stepped back, then grabbed
hold of a rusty lever with both hands. She had her hands over her
mouth, certain that she was going to be sick, when a bizarre
diversion occurred: a small boy with only one arm somehow slipped
past the guard and ran up to the top of the platform. Before anyone
could stop him, he butted the executioner in the stomach with his
head and swung at him with his one good arm. The boy was grabbed
and carried off; he never said a word.

Emily thought that the
hanging would be stopped. But no: the executioner pulled the lever,
the floor fell away, and Fergus O'Malley dropped dangling into the
hole. It happened so fast; she had no time to scream, much less to
prevent it.

And then she bolted awake,
choking and gasping for breath, fully convinced that she was being
hanged. The door to her bedroom flew open and Lee Alden was
suddenly at her side, holding her.

"Emily, what's wrong? Are
you all right?"

She tried to talk,
couldn't, cleared her throat, tried again. "It was horrible ... he
was hanged ... but it was me all along ...."

"It was a dream," the
senator reassured her, cradling her in his arms. "A dream, and it's
over. It's over."

"But it wasn't a dream ...
I was there, really there ... in Newarth ... a hundred years ago
... with Fergus," she insisted, only half-conscious.

The senator laid her
gently back onto her pillow. "Shhh, back to sleep ...."

She shot back up. "No!
Stay by me, oh please, Lee ...." She was trembling
violently.

"I'm right here," he
whispered, pulling up the comforter that had slipped off the bed.
He wrapped it around her shivering torso, but it made Emily feel
entombed and she threw it off.

And yet she was ice-cold;
her teeth were chattering. She crossed her arms, huddling,
trembling, desolate. "I'm fine, I'm sorry, I'm fine," she babbled,
remembering that she'd wanted above all to seem unpossessed to
him.

He gathered her back up in
his arms. "Emily, Emily ... I can't stand to see you like this," he
said, holding her tight.

Something in his voice,
something stricken and tender and sympathetic, filled her with an
almost aching sense of relief. She opened her arms to him, still
shivering, and said, "W-wouldn't you know, I c-can't bear to b-be
this way, either," and pressed her cheek close to his heartbeat,
doing exactly what she swore she'd never do: clinging to someone
with every cell of her being.

He was nuzzling the top of
her head with his chin, murmuring reassurances, soothing her,
calming her. Her trembling subsided and her emotions, flash-frozen
by the nightmare, began to thaw. The bedroom was very warm, and she
was in a man's arms, and she was wearing very little. She had an
almost hypnotic feeling that she was having an erotic dream, an
antidote to the nightmare that had preceeded it. She shifted her
position against the senator, wanting instinctively to draw still
closer to him. Through the thin fabric of her nightgown she felt
him shudder.

"Emily ... don't," he said
in a taut voice.

"No?" She whispered the
word, the tiny word, with a humility born of the nights of insanity
she'd just lived through. She simply had no idea any more whether
she was in or out of bounds. "No," she repeated to herself with
infinite melancholy.

"Oh, Christ
...."

She heard his resolve
snap, exactly as if he'd broken a branch over his knee, and then
suddenly he brought his mouth down hard on hers in a kiss of
electrifying passion, holding her breathless, kissing her again and
again, each kiss overpowering the one that went before it, reducing
her to rubble. None of the men in her life had prepared her for
this, for the driving, physical hunger, the raw ache of passion,
that Lee Alden was bringing to her. The others were--nothing, mere
boys having fun on a Saturday night, she saw that now.

This was new, and this was
real.

She returned his kisses
with a kind of dangerous fierceness, aware that they were dancing
on the edge of a cliff and reveling in the sensation. His lips were
bruising hers, trailing hot kisses on her cheek, her ear, the curve
of her neck. She caught his face in her hands and dragged him back
to her, to kiss him again, to taste his tongue. A low cry of hunger
tore from his throat; the sound of his passion thrilled her,
driving her own desire to new levels.

He dropped fierce kisses
between the curves of her breasts. "God forgive me," he murmured,
"I want you so much –-"

"Then have me, Lee ...
have me." She lay back on her pillow in the semi-darkness,
signaling her complete willingness. In a heart's beat he had shed
his clothes and slipped her gown over her head. And then he was
kissing her again and again, fanning her desire with love-words,
breaking away for random forays over her nakedness, creating
flashpoints where once there were none. He was leaving her
breathless and gasping for air, turning her nightmare inside-out
with the skill of a sorcerer. Emily was not prepared for this, for
the reckless, consuming power of sexual desire; she was amazed to
realize that she knew nothing about sex, really -- nothing at
all.

And then they came
together and continued to dance to the same frenzied, primal
rhythm, until they got too near the edge of the cliff and tumbled
over it in a free-fall into nothingness. Her nightmare came full
circle, because now, falling, she was completely content,
completely without fear. It was the first time since Fergus showed
u p-- the first time in her life -- that she'd felt like this. She
was falling down, down, down, detached and serene, safely beyond
the reach of any force, in this world or in any other.

And when she landed it was
on a downy pillow, with her knight, glistening from his heroics,
lying next to her. Lee had rolled a little to one side, his legs
still wrapped in hers, and was idly raking out the tangles in her
hair with his fingers. When she opened her eyes, heavy with spent
passion, she saw that his rugged good looks were softened by the
same secret smile she knew was on her face.

"Is it always like this?"
she asked him in quiet wonder.

He traced the outline of
her kiss-stung lips and said, "You're asking the wrong fella. But
if I had to guess, I'd say no; we'd all be dead of heart
attacks."

She chuckled softly, but
persisted. "Then why was
this
like this?"

"Dunno," Lee answered,
lowering his mouth to hers in a feathery kiss. "Chemistry.
Privation. Could be the devil made us do it."

"I've never ... this was
so ... I mean, I'm experienced, I am, don't get me wrong, but ...
wow." She blushed, thinking she may have put a tad too much
emphasis on the word "experienced." And was it necessary to sound
so enthusiastic?

He was listening to her,
looking more and more thoughtful as she rambled on, trying to
express herself. When she trailed off all he said was: "'Wow' is
about right."

He sounded almost
depressed about it, which made Emily instantly surmise that he must
have been fantasizing about his deceased wife, the beautiful and
adored concert pianist, all along. "Were you thinking about ...
someone else, when you made love to me?" she asked softly. She
remembered that he'd never once used her name in passion. She
considered it proof conclusive.

He'd been idly stroking
the chain of her necklace, but now he stopped. "Someone
else?"

Instantly Emily was sorry
she'd brought it up. She felt him shift his weight and move off to
one side. In the near darkness she was glad she couldn't see his
face. "You've said how much you loved your wife," she ventured,
swallowing hard, stepping over the new ground carefully. "And that
you were still hoping to, you know, establish contact with her
--"

"--making you some kind of
proxy for Nicole? Is that it?" He looked genuinely shocked. "How
many ghosts do you think are flying around this bedroom,
anyway?"

Whether or not he meant to
wound her, he succeeded. Emily switched on the bedside light and
sat up, yanking the sheet over her breasts. "All right," she said
testily, "maybe that's not it. Maybe I'm just trying to figure out
what went on here. Whatever we had, it wasn't just six-pack sex."
She brushed a lock of hair away from her eyes; her mouth was a
thin, firm line.

He was leaning on his
right elbow, looking up at her. His eyes--so intensely blue, so
intensely sincere--lingered on the white knuckles that held her
bedsheet in place. "Yup. Big mistake."

"What?"

"I'm the world's biggest
horse's ass," he said, shaking his head slowly. He smiled bleakly,
then reached up to touch her face; instinctively she drew back. So
he sat up alongside her, pulling his legs up and circling his shins
with his forearms. "This was a beyond-dumb thing for me to do," he
said quietly, focussing on his knees.