The autumn night was clear, with cold-looking stars in the dark blue overhead. Gabriella drove slowly, her gaze sweeping the road where the headlights faded into shadow. She peered at the gravel shoulders until her eyes ached, especially on the passenger side.
That’s where she would be.
Ethan peered out his window, too, turned so that she couldn’t see his face. But she watched his shoulders tighten as he breathed deeply, his fingertips pressing the glass.
This road was no bettered maintained than it had been when they first drove it. Not even a driveway or gravel tractor route led off it. Neither Gabby nor Ethan had any reason to come this way since they got jobs and moved to a ranch home several towns over. Even when they called this place home, they’d rarely had reason to come this way. Except as kids—young lovers.
“This looks like it,” Ethan said.
Gabby braked to a gentle stop. A slight bend in the road, not even a curve, more a wiggle, as if to be sure the driver was paying attention. The shoulder gravel here had weathered into sand, silvery in her headlights like moon dust. It was empty.
She put the car in park and turned in her seat, toward Ethan. He turned to her. Between them, the bouquet he held trembled in an unsteady hand. Late-season asters and white sedum, filled out by orange and yellow leaves, gathered from their backyard. It had seemed right to bring a gift.
“Hello,” Gabby said. “Are you still here?”
Ethan added softly, “We’ve missed you.”
Gabby hadn’t expected him to say that, but it was true.
“Not sure if you remember us,” she said—to the empty shoulder, to the air around them, to the sense of someone listening that filled her. “We were last here fifteen years ago.”
“It’s our tenth wedding anniversary.” Around the bouquet, Ethan’s right index finger stroked the gold ring on his left hand.
A Halloween wedding. They’d included handfuls of trick-or-treat candy in the favor bags. Both their moms had just been glad they chose gold and red for colors, not black.
Well, Gabby always had been a bit goth. She did lose her virginity with a ghost, after all.
A stem of sedum bent until the white buds pointed to the gearshift. It happened slowly, as if a finger stroked it. None of Ethan’s trembling could have caused that.
Gabby took a shivering breath. At the back of her mouth, a scent settled, faint and dry and bittersweet, like applewood smoke and champagne.
A voice spoke from the backseat, warm but whispy: “I remember every night.”
Gabby glanced over her shoulder, then in the rearview mirror. Neither showed anything, yet. But she smiled and asked, as she had that night long ago, “Where should we bring you?”
“You can just keep driving along here. It’s not far.”
She turned the key in the ignition. Ethan reached behind them into the backseat, and his breath deepened; Gabby couldn’t ask or guess what had happened. She continued driving, now recognizing things: a granite boulder the glaciers had left, the twisted oak sheltering a crumbled stone foundation. The ground sloped away on the left-hand side as they approached the scenic overlook, the romantic spot where they had made love for the first time. She and Ethan. And the ghost.
The internet called her “The Angel of Route X.” She’d asked them to call her Angelique.
She didn’t do that at other sightings, at least not those reported online. According to most, she didn’t stay once the vehicle started uphill. But then, Gabby and Ethan had invited her along. Had told her their names, asked hers, and flirted.
She’d looked cute.
More than that—mysterious, alluring. A little older than them, or maybe that was just the effect of her clothes. Now, the person Gabby glimpsed in the rearview mirror looked so young.
Curly hair, dark against pale fabric. Round cheeks and long eyes. Lips, even in this light, scarlet as the juice of wild grapes. And almost as tart, Gabby remembered. A tight pulse started between her legs and she fought to control her limbs as she turned into the overlook parking lot.
They unfastened their seatbelts, and for a moment she seemed to lean between them—so close that Gabby could make out the pattern in her dress. A touch brushed her cheek like electric charge. Then Angelique vanished, but Gabby felt her presence lingering, the way you sense anyone in the room with you. Warm and aware.
Rather than donning invisibility again, it was more like Angelique had stripped herself naked.
Gabby’s eyes met Ethan’s. They leaned across the space where Angelique had been and kissed each other. Then they left the flowers in the cupholder and climbed into the backseat.
Stripped-off coats and shirts made pillows; jeans and underwear slid to the floor. Even with the engine off, warmth would linger in the small cab of the car, and Ethan always ran hot anyway.
Gabby ran her hands over him, his skin like warm silk, like velvet where the hair grew on his firm thighs. His presence would steady her no matter how surreal things felt. Which wasn’t too surreal, yet—nothing compared to the first time they’d made love, where sex itself had seemed so bizarre. They knew each other now. The route here had been familiar. And Angelique—she hadn’t seemed to have changed at all.
She lay down on top of Ethan in a sixty-nine position. They usually didn’t go straight to it like this, but it saved time, especially compared to the tentative oral exploration they first made on this overlook. Even as the touch of her husband’s mouth made her breath catch, Gabby wondered to herself, why the rush? The kids had a sitter while they took the night to celebrate their anniversary. Yet there was still a sense of pressure. As if Angelique might disappear entirely, perhaps, or they might come to their senses.
Gabby, though, felt very much in her senses.
When Ethan licked her, his chin pressed the top of her pubic mound. She sighed, rocking against him. His hands stroked her back and sides, slipped under to cup her breasts, thumbs moving in the circling motion she liked so well. The touch became unsteady as her lips and tongue found the strip of sensitive skin just below the head of his cock.
And then, alongside his hands, others—their touch almost liquid, neither warm nor cool but powerful. Electrifying. Gabby writhed as they ran along her spine, her shoulders, her flanks. Between her thighs, where no one had ever been except Ethan—Ethan and the woman who was there now.
While Ethan’s tongue flicked across her clit, Angelique’s fluid fingers moved between her folds, flowed inside her. Gabby’s thighs shuddered and she moaned, setting off an answering gasp from Ethan at the vibration along his length.
They were gone before she could come from it, which in a way was a relief—she’d learned to let things build since her first time, and she and Ethan could even climax together on special occasions. Which this surely counted as.
She tightened her hold around the base of his shaft, squeezing slightly, a reminder that he didn’t come until she chose.
As she did, a plush sensation brushed her knuckles, around her black onyx wedding band. A kiss.
Gabby moved her mouth down Ethan’s cock until her lips met Angelique’s. She couldn’t quite picture the position the ghost was in—perhaps it wasn’t picturable; surely one advantage of being incorporeal was being able to touch your lovers however you chose? Angelique seemed more incorporeal this time, perhaps more herself. Gabby didn’t need to understand it to part her lips, welcome in the taste like verjuice, her tongue stroked by a touch as real and yet impossible to grasp as starlight.
Ethan made a sound, both chilled and heated. His hips bucked under Gabby, and her own began to grind against his mouth. Angelique flowed around them. Gabby heard her soft, hoarse cries of ecstasy.
She thought she felt her come: almost impossible to describe, shaking and sparkling, like sobs and laughter mixed with something else, the feeling of flying in dreams.
And like she had all those years before, Angelique took her leave quietly, fading at the same time and in the same way as Gabby’s quivering afterglow.
Ethan rested his cheek against her hip. “Let’s wait less than fifteen years to come back again,” he said.
“Agreed.” As Gabby stroked his hair, her eyes went to the front of the car. To the empty cupholder. Angelique had taken their flowers with her on whatever journey she was making. Perhaps they had brought her a step farther tonight.
As for them, well, it was getting late. Their family was waiting. They should head home.
