“Are you?”
“I’ve been having my share of sexy ones,” she admitted. “Honestly, I don’t mind. A nice wet dream once in a while? What’s wrong with that?”
“And the…other?”
“No,” Ginny said firmly. “I don’t dream of slicing my husband open with a knife, Peg. I think that was just your particular brand of crazy.”
Peg didn’t seem offended. “I just wanted you to know that if you were having some problems, I’d be willing to listen. Pregnancy can put a strain on any marriage, and so can a big move. And especially, hon, when you have the considerations you do—”
Ginny threw up a hand to stop her. “Honestly, Peg, I’m completely burned out on this type of discussion. Yes, I had some problems before. But that was then, this is now. And I’m damned tired of everyone waiting with bated breath for me to lose this baby. That’s it, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry,” her sister said quietly. “That’s not what I’m doing. But can’t you understand why Sean might be worried?”
Ginny looked at her with narrowed eyes. “What’s he said?”
“Nothing to me. He talked to Dale. Said he thought you weren’t really facing things, that you wanted to forget what happened, and he was worried it was affecting how you were dealing with this pregnancy.”
“I haven’t forgotten!” Ginny cried. “As if I could ever forget!”
“He says you won’t decorate the nursery.”
Ginny shook her head, refusing to get herself worked up over this. “That’s not forgetting. That’s being practical. The baby will come home from the hospital and stay in our room for the first few months anyway. And we don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, so why should we spend a lot of time and effort on something that might turn out to be…wrong? And babies have personalities,” she continued. “What if we go with a jungle theme and our daughter turns out to be a princess sort of girl? What if we have a boy who’d really like trains? Or, hell, the other way around, I don’t care. I just want to focus on the baby.”
She stared at Peg, who stared back.
“I just want to think about the baby,” Ginny said quietly. “Not the color of the fucking walls. Okay?”
“Okay,” came Peg’s equally quiet answer. “Okay.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ginny wears gartered stockings.
High heels, black patent leather, red soles. Shoes she’d never buy in real life, but here they fit her perfectly. Here she walks like a queen in expensive stilettos, and she never thinks of falling.
The stockings swish, swish as she walks. The bare skin of her thighs rubs together. She wears silk panties. Red, she thinks. Yes, red. A matching bra of red and black, pushing her breasts forward, giving her cleavage that turns men’s heads.
Oh, she wants to be that woman. The one who makes men stare. She wants to walk into a room and have them stop whatever they are doing. She wants their eyes to bulge out, their tongues to loll, to make them cartoon wolves with an AROOOOGA noise. She wants to be desired.
There’s power in this. These clothes, this walk. The sway of hips, the jiggle of her breasts. She is all woman. She is not just desirable, she is desire.
What will he think when he sees her? When her shirt unbuttons, one at a time, to reveal the slope and swell of her breasts? When she unzips her straight black skirt and lets it fall on the floor? When she steps out of her clothes and stands in front of him dressed like a wet dream, will he get hard for her right away, or will she have to kiss him first?
Oh, how she wants to kiss him.
It’s all she can think about. That first kiss. How his mouth will taste, how his tongue will feel stroking hers. There have been nights when she can’t stop from touching herself to the idea of that mouth, those lips and teeth on her flesh. He will kiss her mouth. He will kiss her face. He will kiss her jaw, her throat, the slope of her shoulder.
He will kiss her all over, every place she wants him to, and his hands will follow along the path his mouth makes. He will part her thighs and find her heat with fingers, tongue, cock, and she’ll take him into all of her body’s secret deep places.
She will take him all in.
* * * * *
Ginny woke without opening her eyes, pleasure coursing through her and the shreds of the dream slipping away. She moaned before she could stop herself. When she opened her eyes, Sean was staring at her over the edge of his iPad.
“Nightmare?”
A nod made the lie easy. It would’ve been harder with words, but since she couldn’t manage to find any, she settled for sitting up and scrubbing at her face.
“Must’ve been a doozy,” Sean said. “You were really wriggling around.”
Embarrassed, Ginny let her fingers pressing her eyes keep her from meeting his gaze. “I don’t really remember it. What are you still doing up?”
“Reading.” He tipped the screen to show her, though she couldn’t possibly read the text from this far away. “You’ve only been asleep for about an hour.”
“It felt like a lot longer.”
He looked concerned and pulled her closer, though it wasn’t comfortable for her to snuggle up to him the way he wanted her to. “You want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Was it about the baby?”
“Sean, no.” Ginny sighed and pushed away. “I have to pee.”
She padded to the bathroom, her habit, as always, to leave the light off and needing it even less with the light from the bedroom. She peed with her elbows resting on her knees, her face in her hands.
She remembered that lingerie. The bra and panties, expensive and sexy. An impulse purchase. They’d fit her perfectly. She’d tried them on about a dozen times but worn them only once. They were still in her drawer. She’d never wear them again, she knew that, but she hadn’t been able to get rid of them, either.
At the sink she washed her hands and looked up without intending to see anything. Usually she averted her eyes anyway in case the irrepressible urge to shout out “Bloody Mary” three times overtook her. That old story had scared the bejesus out of her as a kid. Tonight, though, she was more awake than usual and there was more light. She saw her silhouette, the flash of her eyes and flip of her hair as she bent to the sink.
And then, something else.
A figure, a shadow, drifted past the bathroom door. Indistinct, but definitely there. Startled, Ginny whirled, ready to confront a sneaky Sean trying to scare her, but there was nothing there. She was frozen for a minute or so, waiting to see it again. She stared, hard, but saw nothing. Ginny cocked her head to listen for the sounds of anything from downstairs. Was that the creak of a footstep? The squeak of a cupboard. Ah. A late night snack. Satisfied she’d solved the mystery, Ginny headed back to bed.
He’d turned the light out before going down, at least he’d done that. Ginny crawled into bed with a sigh and settled into her pillows. The dream had faded but the memories lingered. Closing her eyes might bring them even more into focus, so she stared instead at the wall, the darkness…
Something touched her.
Not something, someone. A hand stroked down her back, cupping her rear. Ginny shrieked and fought against the blankets and the touch, trapped by the tangled sheets at her feet and the pillows she’d propped herself up with.
“Hey, hey! Honey! Ginny, babe, it’s me!”
Sean snapped on the bedside lamp, but it took her a few seconds to stop fighting him. Ginny blinked rapidly. “When did you get into bed?”
“What do you mean, get into bed? I’ve been here the whole time. I got tired while you were in the bathroom. I figured I’d—”
“You turned off the light!” she accused. “I couldn’t see that you were in here!”
Sean frowned. “Where else would I be?”
“I saw you go into the hallway. I heard you g
o downstairs. I heard you in the kitchen,” Ginny insisted when she saw the incredulity of his expression.
“Honey, you had a nightmare, maybe you just…”
“No.” She shook her head. “No, I saw it, Sean. And more than that, I heard someone downstairs walking. I heard cupboards opening.”
Sean reached behind the bed to pull out a golf club. He never played golf, but he’d kept that club behind the bed as long as she’d known him. “Stay here.”
She clutched his arm. “No! What, are you crazy? Are you going to go downstairs? Sean, no. Call the police first.”
The second she said it, she knew why he didn’t want to do that. Then the police would come, and if there was nothing… Ginny let out a frustrated sigh. He wanted to reassure her, but he didn’t believe her enough to call the cops.
On the other hand, he believed her enough to take the golf club.
“I’m going with you.”
“No you’re not. You stay here.”
They could fight about it all night, or she could let him go. Ginny let him go, but as soon as he went down the stairs, she was up and out of bed, looking over the railing. Not that she could see anything, but she had her cell phone clutched in her hand, ready to dial 911.
“Sean!”
No answer.
Oh God. It was like that story from when she was a kid, one from that same Bloody Mary book, about the headless roommate in the fur collar. She’d hide up here in the dark and reach out to feel him when he came back to bed, and instead of her husband, she’d find a decapitated corpse…
“SEAN!”
No answer again. Her finger swiped her phone to unlock it, her finger hovering over the keypad. “If you don’t answer me, I’m calling the police!”
He appeared so suddenly at the bottom of the stairs that she screamed. He waved the golf club at her. Ginny tried to remember to breathe.
“Nothing down here,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Babe, I’m positive. All the doors are locked and everything. There’s nothing, I promise. It was just a bad dream.”
He had one foot on the stairs, but she was already heading down. “I want to see.”
Sean sighed but stepped aside, humoring her. “I’m telling you, honey, there’s nothing.”
In the kitchen, she looked around suspiciously, but he was right. Nothing. No sign of anything anyway. No door hanging open, no bloody splatters on the wall, no butcher knife missing from the block. Even the chairs weren’t out of place.
“See?” He came up behind her and kissed her hair. “I told you.”
She sagged against him, finally calming down. His hands traced circles on her belly. Warm, slow, soothing circles. Within a few seconds, she was giggling at the memory of how she’d jumped and screamed. Ridiculous.
“My hero,” she murmured, turning in his arms to kiss his mouth.
“That’s me.” Sean’s hands drifted lower to cup her butt again and pull her close. She could feel him through the thin material of his pajama bottoms. They rocked a little slowly together.
The body didn’t separate the source of pleasure the way the mind did. When he kissed her neck, it felt good. When he rubbed against her, that felt good too. With the remnants of the dream lingering, Ginny was more than willing to see where this might go, but first she needed a drink.
“All that screaming,” she explained.
“I’ll be happy to make you scream some more,” her husband offered with a naughty grin.
She was laughing too when she opened the cupboard to pull out a glass, but the laughter stopped like it had been slapped from her. So did every bit of desire. She turned to show him what she’d found.
Her mug, the favorite black-and-pink one with the skulls.
“The least you could do is put it back where it belongs,” Ginny said coldly.
Sean looked confused. “I didn’t put that there.”
She gave him her back, too angry to even look at him. “Someone did, and it wasn’t me.”
“I’m telling you, Ginny, it wasn’t me.”
“I didn’t do it!” she shouted and slammed the cupboard door hard enough to make the dishes inside rattle. She whirled on him. “Why don’t you just admit it, Sean? You took my mug to work and you forgot it, and then you brought it home and tried to sneak it back before I noticed. Well. I noticed. Why don’t you just admit it?”
“Because I didn’t do it!”
“So, who did?”
He was silent for a while, staring. He shrugged and cut his gaze from hers, his expression sullen. Stubborn. Then he looked back at her almost boldly, like a challenge.
“Maybe you did and just forgot.”
Ginny’s lip curled. “I didn’t forget. How could I forget something like that?”
She knew by his next silence he was thinking of all the times she had forgotten things, all her absentminded times. Ginny turned back to the sink so she didn’t have to look at him. “That’s not fair, Sean.”
She wanted to pull away, to storm from the room and ignore him, but his fingers insisted on soothing her. Working at the aches and knobs of pain and tension in her neck and back. He knew all the places to touch her. He always knew.
“All I’m saying is, you’re distracted. You’re pregnant. Pregnant women can be forgetful.”
“Did you read that on the Internet?” She sounded bitchy and knew it, but couldn’t force herself to care.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
With a sigh, Ginny let herself relax against him. His lips pressed her temple and his hands slid down to rub her belly. She closed her eyes and put her hands over his, feeling the baby press upward against the touch. “Yes. It could be.”
But it wasn’t. She hadn’t seen that mug in weeks. The last time she remembered using it was the night she’d made tea and fallen asleep in the library. Surely if she’d used it since then and put it back in the wrong cupboard she’d remember, and it wasn’t like she’d have done it on purpose to fuck with her own head.
“Things happen, that’s all. Give yourself a break,” Sean said.
What he really meant was give him a break. Wasn’t that what he always meant? And, because that’s what she owed him, that’s what Ginny did.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
They’d never had a lot of extra cash, even when she was working, but they’d always had enough to go on vacation, eat out a few times a week when neither of them felt like cooking, stop for an expensive coffee drink on the way to work instead of brewing it at home. Lots of little conveniences, that’s what having enough money brought. And now…well, they weren’t in debt, at least not beyond what Ginny considered “normal”—mortgage, one car payment with the other vehicle paid off. She and Sean both tried hard to pay off their credit cards every month so they didn’t carry a balance.
They weren’t in debt, but they simply didn’t have anything extra.
Next month might be better, without the unexpected expense of the furnace repair and an electrician who’d looked at the fuse box but hadn’t been able to figure out why they kept blowing fuses. She’d have to start holiday shopping in earnest, a task that always fell squarely on her for both sides of the family, and which she’d usually have finished by now. The move had taken up so much time over the summer she just hadn’t had time. Or felt like it either, she thought as the baby moved inside her.
She tallied up the income and expenses, balancing the accounts. Then she logged into their credit union’s online banking site and transferred some money from their savings, cringing at the remaining balance. It had been at least a week since she’d gone online, too busy with unpacking and everything to even think of it, but since dinner was already in the oven and Sean wasn’t going to be home until after class, she had some time.
She looked up instructions on how to reupholste
r dining room chairs, then how to make slipcovers, then local places that would do it for her. The DIY sites made it seem deceptively easy, but she knew better. The businesses that specialized all charged too much for her budget, at least for now. She shifted on the seat, listening to it creak.
She flitted around the Internet, browsing some of the email shopping offers that had come in, watching a video her sister had sent a link to. Somehow, without thinking much of it, she ended up logging in to Connex. It had been weeks since she’d checked it, and she didn’t even try to get caught up on the entire contents of her updates list. The site had changed a bit too, she noticed with a frown. She couldn’t seem to find her inbox or how to upload a photo without stumbling around and hitting something by accident, and a bunch of status updates referenced opting out of new settings she didn’t have the time or energy to care about.
Her sister had uploaded a bunch of new pictures, though, and Ginny looked through them absently. Her fingertips found the edge of the table, tracing the letters over and over as she scrolled through her nieces and nephews mugging for the camera, modeling new outfits, whatever. One link led to another, to another and another, until she ended up on the page belonging to a friend of her niece Maria. The girl had posted a lot of personal stuff, much of it TMI. It was like a train wreck—Ginny knew she shouldn’t look, but did anyway.
People used to put that stuff in journals. Now they put it on the Internet. She thought of the box upstairs in the library, the diary inside it. Her fingers traced the letters carved into the table, over and over.
CMM
Caroline. Her diary. Her name on this table. That girl had lived in this house, and disappeared from it too.
Ginny’s fingers tap-tapped on her keyboard, running a Connex search for Brendan Miller. Of course, about two dozen names came up, but when she narrowed her search, she came up with just three names. She could tell nothing from the profile photos, since she had no idea what Brendan Miller looked like, but she knew he lived in Lancaster somewhere.