Before You Ghost - Helena Hunting Page 0,2

just walk through it if he wanted.

Evan struggled to pick up his toothbrush next to mine.

“Should we both be screaming at this point?” His hand passed through the handle of the brush yet again.

I folded my arms across my chest. Maybe I would wake up and the whole thing would be a giant hairy nightmare.

“Does it feel like anything when you move through stuff?”

He shrugged his massive shoulders. There was a reason we were still together. His beautiful shoulders were like eighty percent of why I put up with the fighting. His pretty face was another ten percent, his giant sex pistol another nine percent, and the final one percent was reserved for his personality and killer sense of humor. No pun intended.

“I mean, I guess it tickles a little?” His hands fell to his sides, clearly giving up.

“Let’s sleep on it. Maybe we’ll both feel better in the morning.” I wanted to offer him some comfort, but I was concerned that giving him a hug right now and walking through him would freak him out more than he already was. And that I would finally lose what little was left of my sanity.

I turned and walked to the bed, pulling the covers back for the both of us. He hopped in on his side, but the bed didn’t register his weight. I got in and covered us both with a blanket. It went right through him. I was under the covers, and he was on top of them. I had to move the pillow for him, too, because his head would sink about halfway into it and he said it was giving him a headache. I wasn’t sure he could actually get a headache since he wasn’t alive, but I didn’t feel like addressing that was a good plan.

He was staying on the bed, though, and I pointed it out to him, “Well, you have some sort of control over gravity, otherwise you would sink straight through the floor.”

I reached over to the melatonin bottle and took a gummy, then shook out a second one. I was going to need a little help falling asleep tonight.

WELL, CLOSING MY eyes was pointless. I could see through my eyelids. I was dead. I mean, clearly. But Sammi wasn’t upset. And maybe I was waiting for that cue. She’d said she couldn’t drive, so I knew she was in shock and acknowledged that. But I didn’t feel departed yet. Even a little bit. I felt very much alive. As far as I knew, I finished having sex with my girlfriend when I heard the screaming. The people at all the picture spots around the mountain had seen something horrifying. I had felt bad for them until I tried to pull Sammi close and my arms went through her. Then I felt bad for me. Actually, there was a period of time between pumpin’ and a humpin’ that I sort of blacked out. It was missing somehow. Like the file didn’t save properly.

The first few minutes I was a ghost, my only concern was keeping Sammi calm. That was my goal. We were on the edge of the cliff having mind-blowing makeup sex that was swirled in with the adrenaline boost we got from being so close to the edge. I was stupid. I mean, if I was really dead.

Sammi was passed out now, her full lips slack. I forgot how beautiful she was like this. In repose when she wasn’t up and fighting me. She looked like a vintage movie star with a Cupid’s bow mouth and porcelain skin. If I was really, really dead, what scared me the most was that I would disappear before I could tell her that the fights didn’t matter. It was the quiet that mattered. Her beautiful face and boundless adventurism. If we hadn’t gotten into that stupid fight, there wouldn’t have been makeup sex and I wouldn’t have been launched off the cliff. Now, I had no idea if I’d end up spending the afterlife as a semi-opaque fixture in her reality. With her, but never able to touch her. What a fucking buzzkill death was.

I sat up and was able to rest my back on the headboard. I just had to concentrate on the moment it happened a bit. The more I tried to focus, the more I realized I had some kind of memory block. My thoughts were, sex, pussy, sex is the best, I love my dick, her pussy loves my dick,