A Ghost of a Chance Read online

  “Sure, Cee. I’ll be careful.”

  The other three apparitions slid in and out of the walls of the cubicles, exposing themselves to each other, hysterical with laughter. Keenan reached for his coat and tucked his arms into the sleeves.

  “Listen. I’m going to lunch. Can you please keep the posse at bay for a bit? I need some space.”

  “Sure.” She floated over to the group and whispered to them. They gave Keenan a dirty look, mooned him together, and flicked out of view.

  Constance smiled and swirled into the fluorescent light above his desk.

  Whistling an off-key tune, Keenan headed to the elevator.

  When he got there, it was empty. He slipped inside, looking forward to being alone, if only for a few seconds. As the doors closed, a hollered “hold please” made him slam his palm against the rubber door jam.

  A whiff of Isabella’s spicy scent entered before she did. He was certain it was just testosterone muddling his poor male brain, but she seemed to sashay into the elevator just for him. Keenan liked that about her.

  “Going down?” he asked with what he hoped was his most charming smile, ignoring the innuendo.

  “Yes.” The sweet hum of her voice made the muscles at his center jump, adding a log or two to the fire growing inside his pants.

  A bright red blush traveled up Isabella’s cheeks making her eyes sparkle (with what he convinced himself must be desire). When she reached past him to hit the already lighted “1” button, a flash of cleavage sent his pulse pounding against his ears. Man, she was amazing. The thought of pressing her hot body against the cold elevator walls was almost too much.

  “Isabella, isn’t it?” Keenan hadn’t seen a ring on her finger, around her neck, or a Love John Forever tattoo any place noticeable, so he assumed she was available.

  “Right. You’re Keenan. We met the other day.”

  “Right.”

  Usually he didn’t have problems talking to girls, but now it was harder than it had ever been. A hundred witty comebacks crowded his brain for attention, but not one of them could make it past the lump in his throat. His growing cock wasn’t going to be much help either; all it wanted him to do was blurt out, “Ya wanna?”

  Bracing himself against possible rejection, and telling his cock to shut the fuck up, Keenan gathered his courage and charged into the fray. “Say listen, if you’re not…”

  The elevator jarred to a halt and the doors burst open in front of them. At least fifteen people piled into the box, disregarding the “maximum occupancy” sign.

  Keenan hit his back hard against the railing and suddenly found his arms full of warm, healthy girl.

  The sounds around him came to a crashing halt when he fixated on those gorgeous almond eyes and full red lips. The urge to devour that mouth was irresistible. He felt like he was home. Her balmy scent marinated his brain, clouding out everything else. The velvet skin of her naked arms made his palms tingle.

  A sudden terror seized him when he realized his rod stood at full attention, shouting, “Yippee!” Since the crowd had crushed Isabella against him, she must have felt it jumping like an excited dog against her stomach. To Keenan’s amazement, she didn’t say a word and smiled sweetly up at him. Her expression was almost pleased. It boggled his mind.

  “Sorry,” he managed after a few precious seconds.

  He let go and fully expected her to scrunch as far away from him as possible, a murmured “pervert” escaping her lips. Instead, she slid up next to him and stayed attached to his shoulder, turning her lovely breasts to the doors.

  Keenan had a hard time keeping his eyes off them, noting with interest that both nipples were little rocks against the black fabric. He forced himself to focus on the bald spot on the head of the guy in front of him. He hoped to God the man wasn’t pushed back; in Keenan’s current state, it might be difficult to explain what rested against the man’s ass.

  “It’s all right,” Isabella whispered. “You were saying?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” An irritating rush of fear crept into Keenan’s back and he had to fight to keep it out of his voice. “I wonder if you’d like to have dinner with me tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Isabella’s lyrical words were an elixir for his fear. “I’m busy tonight.” Was it Keenan’s imagination, or did she sound disappointed? “I’m free Sunday… would you like to have breakfast instead?”

  “Yeah, that would be great. I could pick you up at…”

  “Actually, do you know The Hotcake House on Ninth?”

  “Sure.”

  “How ‘bout I meet you there at ten on Sunday. All right?”

  “Sure.” The schoolboy monosyllable stammering irritated the hell out of him, but Keenan couldn’t help it.

  The elevator bounced to a stop and people poured out, pulling Isabella along with them. Keenan wanted to ask her to lunch next, but they drew her away from him in the rush.

  When he finally disentangled himself from the retreating throng and an influx of new riders who almost trapped him, he scanned the lobby, but the girl was gone. Growling at the innocent air, he slammed a fist into his thigh and immediately wished he hadn’t. He grabbed a hotdog at the corner vendor and sulked the rest of the day.

  Chapter Two

  Night Visitor

  Keenan’s sex life hadn’t been exactly what he would have called promiscuous. Not by choice, mind you, but by lack of opportunity. He considered himself a good looking guy, at least that’s what the few women in his life had told him, and he always left them laughing, usually as they waved goodbye. Under the (dare he say it?) debonair façade, however, lay the true introvert he was; Keenan was shy right down to that little grain of psyche lodged in the middle of his personality.

  Fortunately, he loved bold, confident women who took the initiative. Because of that he had managed to pull in talented partners who taught him how to navigate a woman’s body without a compass and demonstrated when, where, and how to launch the final sequence. He was almost certain he was not bad in bed.

  Even though it had been a couple of years since anyone but him had cranked up the engine, he remembered where everything went. However, the further away he got from that last naked body under him, the more preoccupied he became with the drive. The thought of sex had now taken over about eighty percent of the real estate between his ears. Keenan had even tried a prostitute, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t until he had his pants down and his hopes up that he realized the girl belonged to the “passed on” parade. Nothing kills arousal faster than a dead person.

  With these deliberations doing the mambo behind his eyes, Keenan nodded off in front of his home computer for the fourth time. He rubbed the back of his neck and yawned at the half-finished stack of graphic requests. Knowing he had the rest of the weekend to finish, he pushed himself away from the desk, shut off both the lamp and computer, and headed to his bedroom.

  On his way out, he kicked one of the many oil paintings collecting dust next to the door of his office… or was it studio?

  Keenan picked it up and held the half-painted canvas under the light coming in from the hallway. The eerie red figure that dominated the center was one he had started in college but never finished. It was good, really good; in fact, several of its predecessors had won competitions during his college days. The next Picasso, they told him.

  He set it on top of the other incomplete paintings also collecting dust. That same old remorse gripped his heart; one of these days, I’ve got to finish these. That probably wouldn’t happen anytime soon…if ever.

  As he passed through, twenty or so ghosts littered his living room watching the last few minutes of the news. Keenan pulled air into his lungs before picking up the remote.

  They were costing him a fortune. The TV, the radio, and even his computer were always on. Lights went off and on constantly. The heat would soar to eighty degrees in the middle of the summer and then plunge to fifty when the winter freeze set in. He couldn’t keep any pets; the instant they came i
nto the house they hissed or yelped in terror and ran away. The neighborhood was full of cats that had once belonged to Keenan.

  He couldn’t keep girlfriends either. The closer they got, the more convinced they were that he was on drugs, a serial killer, or terminally cracked. He hadn’t had a girl at his house in years; for some reason they got all heebie-jeebie on him when things started flying around or cold blasts of air unexpectedly lifted their skirts. One girl even had her panties removed, but not by Keenan. He was in the kitchen at the time.

  Friends? Forget it. They had a tendency to search for the exit when he told them he saw dead people…and not in the good way. Moviemakers had it all wrong. These weren’t people who wanted release; they were freeloaders who wanted nothing more than to torture the living, especially those who could see them. Keenan had lost count of how many pranks he had endured over the years. Somewhere in the thousands, he was sure.

  When Keenan clicked off the power to the TV the crowd of specters growled en mass. The box sizzled back on. Keenan held the remote defiantly toward the set and banged the power button again. It hissed off. Three male ghosts, a solid and two trances, pounded on their chests like apes, and the TV came back on.

  “Leave the God damned thing off,” he bellowed, thumb wrestling the remote one last time. The few spirits visible faded away, but not before four of them flipped him off. A barrage of couch pillows and cushions appeared out of nowhere, knocking him to the ground.

  When Keenan shot back to his feet, the ghosts were gone.

  Ignoring the mountain of pillows, he tossed the remote onto the naked couch and, with futile exactness, turned off the light, knowing it wasn’t going to make the least bit of difference.

  When he entered his bedroom there were three young, lucid women with blond curls hovering over a pile of dirty boxer shorts on the floor. The rustle of taffeta and titter of giggles resonated through the room, grinding against Keenan’s last nerve of the day. He wondered if he would get any sleep tonight. Thank God for sleeping pills and earplugs. He didn’t like taking them, but it kept him sane…well, saner anyway. He pulled off his shirt and let his jeans fall around his feet to step out of them.

  The tittering reached a new crescendo. “Me thinks he must be well-endowed indeed to have a loin cover so immense. Can you imagine the size of his rod?”

  The girls giggled again then screamed like banshees when he shooed them away from his laundry basket by snapping his T-shirt. When they were gone, he tossed it in with the rest of his dirty clothes and kicked his jeans to join them.

  Keenan wished he were this popular with his own kind. Every day he drifted farther away from the living and closer to the dead. They occupied each waking hour and even some of his sleeping ones. Over the years, he had grown used to their constant chattering, the multitude of jokes and pranks, the crazy ethereal noises twenty-four hours a day. Silence was as foreign to him as pantyhose.

  Even the loss of his privacy was something he missed less each year. But it all came with a price; the effort to bottle up what happened to him all the time made him quiet and withdrawn. Keenan wished there was someone he could talk to about it, someone living.

  Doctors were no good; they all thought he was crazy. Three hospital stays, thousands of dollars in therapy, and nightly handfuls of meds hadn’t even made a dent. He gave up on conventional treatment long ago and surrendered to the reality… or sur-reality, as he liked to call it. He knew something had to give soon. The thought was a sobering one.

  A crowd of six men stood by his closet heatedly debating eighteenth century politics and smoking phantom cigars. As usual, an old residual couple hunched near the window. Residuals were not aware they had passed over, choosing instead to act out some scene in their life repeatedly. These were rare, but Keenan had two living in his house, the other a civil war soldier who pissed on the dining room curtains around nine o’clock every night. The room reeked of it for about an hour then it just disappeared. Keenan avoided that part of the house as a rule. How they ended up there was anybody’s guess.

  The rest were what paranormal researchers called sentient, which meant, as far as he could tell, that they were intelligent and aware of their surroundings. Intelligent. For some of them that was a stretch.

  Three children played ring-around-the-rosy on top of his bed. The room sounded like the Rose Quarter during a Blazer’s game.

  “Come on. Give a guy a break.”

  The ghosts continued without giving him so much as a glimpse.

  Keenan flipped his middle finger uselessly and stepped into the bathroom, disregarding the three guys in the bathtub arguing and the naked ebony-skinned woman sitting on the vanity swinging her legs and singing. Their combined voices echoed against the porcelain.

  “…not going to take it anymore, I tell you…”

  “…hush little baby, don’t say a word…”

  “…shut up, Luke. It’s nothing to sneeze at…”

  “…mama’s gonna buy you a mocking bird…”

  “…I hate this place, man! You tell them they can suck my dick…”

  “…if that mocking bird don’t sing…”

  Rubbing his face with both hands to relieve the constriction in his cheeks, Keenan leaned against the sink, lifted his chin to the mirror, and frowned at the brown eyes staring back at him. The glaring red saturating the white accentuated their color, and dark circles made them look sad. Keenan slapped the faucet handle and splashed cold water against them. An icy headache formed. He reached for the small towel hanging to his right and held it against his face until the chill passed.

  The noise stopped.

  When he yanked the towel down, the spirits in the bathroom were gone and everything went dead quiet. He gave his reflection a fleeting look, ran a hand through the thick black hair, and turned to go into his bedroom.

  It was empty and silent too.

  The last time this happened was in Florence when he searched for a corner where he could sell paintings. When he walked onto one of the back cobbled streets, the ghosts had just disappeared. It was the only other time in nearly twenty years he had been completely alone. It was kind of spooky…and this coming from a man who lived the way he did.

  Constance, he thought. She must have talked them into cutting him some slack for a change.

  Not one to pass up a blessing, Keenan stripped off his boxers and socks, slid into the unmade bed, and popped a pill into his mouth. One of his ghost friends must have “touched” the water bottle; ice cold chased the pill down his throat. He hit the switch on his lamp and burrowed into his pillow. It wasn’t long before sleep settled over him, encouraged by the silence.

  * * * *

  The dream was so real.

  Hands slithered over Keenan’s body, but they were detached somehow. It was hard to describe. Starting on his scalp, the hot tickling sensation sent tendrils of pleasure down his gut and directly into his cock. It was painfully erect, aching for a good hard squeeze, but he couldn’t reach down to touch it.

  A weight pressed down on his body, holding him to the bed. Keenan could actually feel his body sinking into the mattress. Something heavy, like invisible clay, pressed against his face. He couldn’t move. He wasn’t scared at all…just horny as hell.

  The hands massaging his scalp moved down to his face, pressing his eyes closed with what he could only assume must have been thumbs. They moved down his face and found his lips, parted them, and thrust a slender finger into his mouth. There was no taste, but the soft, warm texture electrified his senses. He sucked on it instinctively. It was deeply sexual and made his cock throb in anticipation. To his utter dismay the finger slipped from his mouth and trailed down his chin.

  Keenan opened his eyes. Light from an outside streetlamp illuminated the foot of his bed and half his dresser. When she appeared in a wisp at his feet, he had to struggle to lift his head enough to see her.

  Naked heaving breasts came into view; the nipples were long, slate hard, and the areolas black
against dark skin. Her waist and hips were slim. Stretched fingers pinched the nipples, making them longer, more rigid. The triangle of her pussy was bald, the slit dark and inviting. Hazy clouds covered her face, making it soft and featureless, but billowing tendrils of black hair twisted out from around it, flowing in a wind Keenan couldn’t hear. It moved in a watery dance.

  The covers glided slowly down his body. The soft touch of the silk made his cock twinge in agony, and he gritted his teeth to hiss his pleasure. Electric shocks ignited the nerves in his neck, shoulders, and arms. When Keenan was completely exposed, he wasn’t cold. His cock sprang into ready position. The hair on his arms and legs snapped with static.

  Rising from the floor until her naked body hovered horizontally inches above him, the entity’s nipples brushed his chest scattering goose bumps across every pore. The creature reached down and wrapped a hot hand around his erection making it pulse when she squeezed. Her grip was like iron.

  Keenan pulled a gasping moan into his lungs. He could only watch as she slid down to put her mouth above his agonized member.

  She brushed her tongue several times across the tip then pulled it hard into her mouth. Barbs of lightning convulsed Keenan’s body, intensifying his senses. The sucking sound of her mouth against his flesh, the sweet smell of her juices mixing with his own musky scent, the feel of those hot soft lips caressing the sensitive flesh as they slid over the head of his cock, and the strong grip of her warm hand, all fought for his attention.

  When he saw his cock disappear inch by inch into her mouth, he was amazed at how big it was. The need to cum, now, quickly, overpowered his better judgment. Something held him back. Keenan had never felt anything like this even during the best sex of his life. The needles of pleasure shooting through his blood carried lust to every inch of his skin. He wanted to scream, but all he could do was open his mouth in ecstasy, gurgling a groan.