Chapter 20: Haunted
"Steven. No. Please, no."
Jamie squinted in the darkness, unsure how he'd misread the signals. He'd been swept away in the moment, and Cora hadn't pulled away. On the contrary, she'd clung to him as he carried her inside.
She was swept away as well, no doubt, but in some different current. Answering him with the name of some other man.
Who the hell was Steven?
Jamie rolled off the bed. He flicked on the wall sconce, set to its dimmest setting. It cast the room in just enough light to see the contours of her face.
Cora had her hands covering her eyes, mascara running down her cheeks. The top half of her dress was tangled about her waist, but she didn't seem aware of her exposure.
A twinge pierced Jamie's spine, somewhere between alarm and panic. He reached for his discarded jacket to cover her, draping it backward across her chest and shoulders.
"Cora?" He touched her gently on the wrist and peeled one hand from her face. The light reached her closed eyelids. She blinked, took one look at him hovering above her, and then covered her face up again with her forearms. She let out a sobbing breath.
Jamie looked uncertainly toward the bathroom door. Perhaps he should leave her. He could tiptoe out of the room and use the other bedroom for the night.
He was halfway off the bed before she stopped him. She reached blindly for his arm, gripping it harder than she had when they were dancing outside. Hard enough to leave a bruise.
She spoke then, her words half-unintelligible and garbled with tears, but the growing urgency in her voice was unmistakable. "Pull over... Steven, please!
Pull over?
She had to be hallucinating. He couldn't leave her alone in this state. Jamie wrapped an arm behind her shoulders and helped her to sit up, giving her a gentle shake. "Cora, wake up." He swept aside the loosened strands of hair that framed her face and stuck to her damp cheeks. "Look at me. It's Jamie. Steven isn't here."
Something in his words got through to her. She blinked at him again, and this time her eyes snapped into focus. The recognition dawned. She gasped so violently, Jamie might have found it comical in any other circumstance.
"Hello there," he said. "Welcome back." He reached for the washcloth positioned on his bedside table. He'd intended it for other purposes than mopping up tears, but no matter. He handed it to her, and she dried her cheeks.
Her frantic breathing slowed. Whatever storm had brewed inside her head seemed to have blown over. Jamie could breathe again as well, but he had no idea what to say. Of all the awkward silences he'd ever had to fill, this would go down in his memory as perhaps the most unnerving.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. At least the words appeared to be addressed to him now, and not to the infamous Steven. She glanced at him with a startled look upon her face, almost as shocked as he by what had just transpired.
"I must say," he replied in a droll voice, "I've elicited my fair share of reactions in the bedroom, but this one is a first."
She didn't grace him with a laugh, too far gone for social niceties. Instead, she seemed to collapse in on herself, shrinking beneath his jacket as if she hoped to disappear before his eyes. "Oh no." Her voice sounded shaky. "We didn't— Did we—"
"No, don't worry yourself." He indicated the small foil packet, abandoned on the mattress beside him. It was torn open but its contents still unused. "We stopped."
She covered her face with her hands again, but the gesture looked more like embarrassment now than anything else.
"What happened?" he asked more gently. "Who's Steven?"
When he spoke the name, she looked at him with an odd expression on her face. Like the name itself was haunted. Like she'd seen a ghost.
A ghost...
Jamie swore. He had an inkling what must have happened. "Was it the movie? Ghost?"
She nodded mutely. Her lower lip quivered, and he felt a pang of guilt. Him and his blasted movie references. He was responsible for this whole mess.
Jamie rubbed her briskly on the upper arm, a friendly gesture to give her courage. She let her head tip sideways and rest against his shoulder. "I ruined it," she whispered hoarsely. "I ruin everything. You're so perfect, and I'm such a ruiner."
He couldn't help but chuckle at the conviction in her voice. "If I were perfect," he replied, "I would have given you a trigger warning before I summoned the ghost of your...what? Husband?"
"Fiancé," she corrected.
He squeezed her firmly. "Oh God, I'm sorry. I had no idea."
She shrugged in his arms, and his jacket fell away from her shoulders. She looked down at it as if confused at how it came to be covering her. Jamie caught it by the collar before it could droop too far. "Thank you," she murmured. She put her hands through the sleeves and wore it backward, hugging her arms around herself.
Jamie leaned back against the headboard, suddenly aware of his own state of undress. Naked to the waist, except for the black tie that still adorned his neck. He felt foolish. He undid the knot hastily and cast it aside.
Sex was funny in that way, he thought. Intimacy, people called it. But it couldn't be more impersonal if you did it with a hundred different people and failed to remember half their names. Sitting here side by side, offering his jacket and a comforting shoulder, felt far more intimate than whatever physical act they had been about to commit.
"You don't have to talk about it if you'd rather not," he said.
She stared at her feet, curling them inward so that her big toes touched. "I never talk about it."
"Fair enough."
She glanced at him uncertainly, and Jamie met her eyes. "Do you want to talk about it?" he asked her softly.
"I'm guessing you just want to go to sleep."
But Jamie could tell she didn't mean that. She bit her lip, as if biting back the words she didn't know if she should say.
Something in the way she hesitated reminded him of their game the night before. She'd looked at him with the same uncertainty in her eyes, and he'd discovered how to put her at ease. He'd switched off the lights, and the darkness had allowed her to let down her outer shell.
Jamie reached for the wall sconce again now. He rested his fingers on the switch but didn't turn it off. He turned his head to her instead and raised his eyebrows. "We can call it 'Truth or Dare for Cowards' again if it makes things easier," he proposed. "Should I turn out the lights?"
She nodded, and he hit the switch. The darkness engulfed them both. He heard her sharp intake of breath and felt her grope, reaching for his wrist as if she might drift off into nothingness if she didn't anchor herself in the here and now.
Jamie freed his wrist from her grasp and put his arm around her instead. "Roll over on your side," he whispered in her ear.
Cora did as he suggested, and he spooned her from behind. The jacket covering her chest was open in the back. He looped his arms around her waist and pulled her close, feeling the warmth of her bare skin against his chest. "Go on," he said. "Tell me as much or as little as you like."
She sighed. "It's Truth or Dare. You have to ask me a question first."
"You were engaged?"
"Briefly."
"How long ago?"
"Three years."
This was going to take awhile, he could tell. She was still making up her mind how much of herself to reveal. "I've never told anyone the whole story," she said. "I mean, my therapist, but no one else. No one real."
She paused for a long time, and Jamie thought that was all she meant to say. He opened his mouth to pose another question, but she continued at last in a faraway voice. "But you're not real," she said, as if she'd forgotten he was there—as if she were talking to no one but the darkness and herself. "I'm never going to see you again after tonight."
Jamie closed his eyes. He made no comment on that point. Earlier this evening, he'd told himself he wouldn't let her go in the morning. He would break his word and keep her here. Make her stay until she saw him as something more than a warm body and a willing ear. No one of any consequence. No one real.
But perhaps that wasn't such an insult after all. Perhaps that was how she viewed him because that was what she needed him to be.
Jamie took solace in the thought. He didn't argue with her now. He held his tongue and let her fill the darkened bedroom with her tale.
A car accident. Her fiancé had run a red light. They were struck on the driver's side, and he died on impact while Cora walked away unscathed. "But that's not the part I've never told anyone," she whispered.
"Go on."
She took a long breath and plunged ahead. "Everyone was so kind afterward. Offering condolences. I sat shiva with his family after the funeral, and I couldn't— I just couldn't tell them—"
Her voice broke, and Jamie held her tighter still. He felt her swiping at her cheeks with angry strokes. "I hate crying," she said.
Jamie's curiosity was piqued now. He prompted her softly. "You couldn't tell them what?"
She sniffled, pulling in a few more shaky breaths. And then the rest of the story came pouring out all at once.
"That I broke off our engagement, in the car that night. I broke his heart, and then he died. And I never told a soul."
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