Sensitive (4 page)

“As dark and gnarled as it is?” I joked, feeling conspicuous and naked at the moment for some odd reason.

Alex stopped and pulled me in to a shockingly tender hug. “It’s bright and shining like a ball of light,” he informed me with great tenderness. My heart hurt a little at how gently he was treating my fucked-up emotions. “But with the smallest gray and navy blue striations. Sadness. I was intrigued by you. That’s something special. We tend to be a bit…flat? Like we view you all as equals instead of special and unique.”

“Wow,” I said. More because I really believed him about the whole angel thing than anything else.

“Yes, a lot of my fellow angels really see snowflakes as more unique than humans.”

“What makes you different?” I asked.

Molly had stopped in front of a small red cottage similar in shape to mine. She sat on the low stone wall to wait for us. He kissed me quickly. “You. You made me different. Now do your job.”

I gaped at him, unsure of what he meant but feeling a gushy, uncomfortable slide of girlish feelings for this possibly mental man. “Um…”

“Go on, help Molly. There’s plenty of time for us.”

“Okay. No pressure there,” I said and followed Molly.

“Mr. King?” I asked.

Molly’s father looked past her, at me and then at Alex who smiled that heartbreaker smile and gave a respectful nod that men somehow always manage to pull off. “Yes?”

He looked open but confused.

“We’re here about your daughter Molly.”

His face went taut with the look of grief that never quite fades, even with time.

“What about her?”

He didn’t invite us in but he did open the door a bit more and stand more securely in his doorway.

“I’m here with…” This was the tricky part. If the recipient was a believer I could just out myself and pass on the message. If the person had a very definitive set of rules for the universe and the communication between the dead and the living, well, then things were trickier.

“Yes?” He only sounded a tiny bit annoyed, to his credit.

“I’m here with a message from your daughter,” I said swiftly.

He looked hopeful, angry, happy, livid. It all flashed across his face in an instant.

Like watching an oil slick drift across clean water. Ugly and beautiful all at once. In one instant it is a marring effect, in the next you see a gorgeous rainbow.

“Who is it, Ed?” This was Mrs. King. A tall, lanky woman in her late sixties to early seventies .

“Someone about Molly.” He faced me like we were about to fight and her face did a caving in thing that broke my heart. Their grief was still very fresh over the loss of their daughter.

I turned to Molly. She said, “The best way to address it is to just bully through.

That’s how my dad is. Just tell him to stop blaming Johnny for my death.”

I sucked in a breath and said to Alex, “Jeez. I don’t know if I want to do this.”

He came up and nodded again to the dad. He put his hand on my waist and said softly in my ear.

“You don’t have to, you know. Free will and all.”

Molly said nothing, simply waited. And so did her father who couldn’t see his own daughter. I blew out a sigh. “Look if you need some help or something—” Ed King started but I shook my head.

“No, no help. I’m just here to pass on a message from your daughter.”

Molly’s mother sucked in a great wounded breath that broke my heart. “Listen, lady—”

I barreled on fast before he could shut me down, or worse, shut the door. “Mr.

King, your daughter needs you to know that Johnny didn’t have anything to do with her death and she wants you to stop blaming him for it.”

I stood there, holding my breath and biting my tongue as Alex ran his thumb along my lower back in a soothing gesture that no one but the ghost could see.

“How dare you,” he said, starting to swing the door shut. His face stark with anger and pale from shock.

“Ed!”

“Quiet, Kelsey.”

“Ed!”

I stuck my foot in the door, looking at Molly, begging her for more. I was angry and panicky and a bit put out. It all twisted in my belly, a toxic soup of emotions. I could see her mouth moving but it was really hard to pick Molly’s words out of the ether. But I managed. “She says to…she says to stop calling Johnny on her birthday and hanging up. But only after he knows it’s you.”

Molly was talking frantically, I was struggling to hear and Kelsey King said, “Ed?

Do you do that, Ed?”

“Who are you?” Ed said to me.

I struggled to hear his daughter above all the ruckus. “I am a friend of…I am a friend,” I finished.

“She says to stop drinking so much that you pass out on the day she died. That’s no way to remember her.”

“Ed?” Kelsey said again, her big gray eyes ricocheting between me and him. Her body language said so much of this was news to her.

“She said that she was the one who got the drugs and that Johnny tried to talk her out of it. She tried them anyway. He…” I shook my head.

Molly was yelling now but her voice seemed so far away. My upset and her mother’s fear and her father’s anger were all working together to dampen my ability to hear her. Alex said, “He tried to save her.”

I turned to the Kings and said, “He tried to save her. He even put the drugs in his pocket to preserve her memory. So you would feel better about her. He took the blame.

And she wishes he hadn’t.” I gushed now that I could hear her. I didn’t breathe. I rushed to push it all out at once. “But they weren’t his, they were hers and she bought them with the money from…”

Here it was. I could tell by the urgency with which she said it. This was the part that would convince Ed King that his daughter had given him a message. “The money you paid her to help you pick out the pink leather purse for your wife. You spent the day together and you laughed and you joked and you slipped her a twenty to let you take all the credit for the gift,” I breathed.

Ed King stared at me and his wife took his arm and then his face seemed to fold in on itself and he wept. Hard and long and deeply. It was like watching someone dance naked or have sex. I turned to say something to Molly but Alex squeezed my shoulder and said, “Good job, Harper. She’s gone.”

* * * * *

“That seemed too easy,” I said.

Alex took my hand and we walked up the dark road. So different from the city, this dark moonlit section of road in the middle of the country. The fall wind cut right through my jeans and cardigan and I shivered. Alex, ever the chivalrous angel, took off his loose-fitting duster and draped it around me. “Easy isn’t wrong.”

I snorted. “That’s why you like me,” I said.

Not much on the humor, the angelic. He looked confused and then ponderous and said, “I’m not sure why I’m drawn to you but I am.” He turned and put his huge toasty hands on my waist. I didn’t think, I stood on tiptoe and I kissed him.

“I like you, too,” I said. I remembered seeing him walking somewhat absentmindedly up my road and liking him on sight. Being attracted to his broadness and tallness and darkness. I smiled as he kissed me some more. His hands slipped up under his own coat, cupping my breasts through my sweater. The heat of his skin seeped through the cotton and had my body ready for him that fast. In a blink. In a heartbeat.

“I’m glad you like me, Harper. Am I allowed to…” Alex walked me backward onto the side of the road that was wooded. We stumble-stepped in a drunken kind of synch until we were in the thick section of trees. No houses, no people, just a barely moonlit trickle of a stream. My back hit the rough trunk of an oak and Alex bit my lip by accident.

I hissed and Alex reached up to touch my mouth. “I’m sorry, Harper. So, sorry! I lost my balance and—”

I grabbed his hair and pressed my front to his front. “Would you think I was a freak if I said I liked it?”

Alex shook his head in the silvery light. “No. I could feel that you liked it. But I was afraid that I had hurt you. And I never want to hurt you,” he said.

“Unless I want it,” I corrected.

“Yes, unless you want it.”

“Gently. Just bite me gently,” I said and let his mouth come down on my throat as his hands returned to pinch and stroke my breasts. He pushed up under my cardigan, my skin growing chill at first and then warming with his touch. When he feathered his thumbs over my nipples I moaned low, feeling the tug of arousal deep in my pussy. I wanted him again. I wanted him deep inside me, filling me and fucking me.

His teeth nipped so that bright sparks of pain sparkled on my skin. My nipples spiked harder than before, my pussy going wet so that I could feel the slide of warm fluid in my panties. “Harder,” I said.

Alex bit me harder and his hands found my jean button, he tugged and I helped him. “Am I being rude?” he asked. Poor thing, he really was lost at this.

“Be rude,” I said. “Be rude some more.” I grabbed the front of his jeans and wrestled them until my hand was down inside his pants, holding his cock, touching him so that his breath came hard and fast and his tongue flicked out to touch mine.

“Okay, I can do that.” He dropped to his knees and tugged at my jeans. Freed me from them so that when he stood and took my leg and wrapped it around his waist, I didn’t fall. My pussy spread and slick for him, he rubbed against me, his warm hard-on maddening against my flesh.

“Condomcondomcondom,” I chanted and he sighed heartily.

“I don’t need—”

“I need it,” I admitted. “Please.”

Alex closed his eyes and rested his forehead on mine. He never stopped bucking against me softly. A metronome of motion, sliding his hot skin to my wet slit. And then it was sheathed, his hard-on, and I laughed. “I’ll never get used to that.”

“I’ll never get used to being reminded to do it,” he said, slipping the head of his cock into my pussy, pushing my arms low and back so that I had to grip the oak’s bark as it bit into my lower back, adding that sharp spark of pain that made my cunt go tight around his thrusting cock.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t ever be sorry with me,” he said and his mouth crushed down on mine. His lips and tongue bullying mine into submission. For an angel, he sure as hell could kiss me so that my ears smoked and my insides started to boil over.

“Okay.” I let him push me hard to the trunk, pinning me helpless and tight to the tree, and my legs came up to wrap around his waist. He was as big to me as the monstrous oak. I opened for him, taking his cock as he thrust high and hard into me. “I won’t.”

“Good. I know that you are this way because of the energy,” Alex said, bending his head at an impossible angle to suck at my nipple. He pushed my sweater high on my chest so that he could bite and suck until my insides grew tight around him and I bit my lip to keep from crying out and startling whoever the hell lived across the street.

“Not entirely,” I corrected. I shifted under him, eddying like a tide, and he let me. I had experienced an influx of psychic energy before. I had been able to fend men off and once, even sent a boyfriend I was breaking up with home. Not with Alex. With Alex the insatiable feeling got the better of me. I almost told him he was different, but held it in.

“But why am I this way? Psychic energy and ghosts don’t bother me. Or influence me. Why am I so…uncontrollable around you? Why do I have to have you?”

He thrust harder and the bark of the tree scraped my skin. I felt the warm flow of blood as the tissue tore a bit, but I didn’t want him to stop. I gripped him harder and felt the orgasm rushing toward me like a wave. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“I feel like I need you. Like I have to have you. I can’t not have you,” he said. His lips brushed my ear and I came, holding his shoulders like I was going to be tugged underwater by an undertow. “Do you feel that?” he asked.

I hated to admit weakness. Especially being newly single. But I did. I had an undeniable forceful tug to the angel-slash-possible-crazy-man. I nodded, but refused to speak.

“I heard that,” he said, gripping my bottom tight in his fingers so it pinched. My body let loose a warm trickle of juices and I inched closer to coming again. Everything was intense with this man. I wished I could see his gorgeous blue eyes, but I felt the energy that pulsed off him like a flickering flame.

Lust rolled in my belly and affection flooded my chest. I was a mess.

“You heard me nod? Did my head rattle?”

“Sort of. Not the rattle, but the nod. I heard you nod. I felt your feelings. There is a certain amount of empathy with angels. I can feel what you feel. When you’re open to me. And when we’re joined.” He thrust and thrust and wedged his big hand between us, rolling the slippery ball of his thumb over my clit. “And you are open to me right now.” He came, his teeth on my lower lip where he nipped until I joined him. My pussy milked his cock until we both staggered at the base of the tree, trying to right our messed up clothes.

“Oh, that’s great. So when I was all pissed and frustrated back at Molly’s house?”

He nodded, grinning and taking my hand. Alex led me toward my new home and said, “Who can blame you? I was frustrated and I’m an angel.”

“Jeez.”

“I wasn’t expecting this,” Alex said, pushing open my brick-red door when we got home.

“What?”

“The way I feel,” he said. His big hands worked to tidy my front entry table. I took his hand in mine. Large and warm and soft on the palm, no calluses.

“Frustrated like a human?” I said, smiling.

Alex reached up and brushed a long brown strand of hair, stained honey from the summer now past, from my face. “The feelings I have for a human. How intense it is.

Like seeing the light of the inner heaven for the first time.”

“Inner heaven?” I asked.

“Long story. There are degrees of heaven like lots of stuff. Inner, outer, upper. It’s complicated.”

“Hungry?” I asked, letting it go. Heaven was not something I wanted to ponder tonight. Not while exhausted and so hungry I was tempted to eat a cardboard box.

“What’s that?”

“Seriously?”

He grinned. “Seriously. What is that?”

I patted his belly, flat and taut. “Is there an aching gnawing feeling in here?”