Page 61 of Ghosted

I let her have the first few seconds.

Not because she needs them, but because I want to watch her take them anyway.

Alice tears down the path with one hand pressed to her chest, boots slipping in the mud, camera bag bouncing hard against her hip. She moves fast for someone pretending this isn’t exactly where she wanted the night to go.

I follow at a walk at first. Just to be cruel.

“Come on, ghost girl,” I call after her, rain hitting the mask and running down the jagged teeth. “You can do better than that.”

She looks back over her shoulder.

Big mistake.

Her eyes catch on the mask, then on the space between us, and something flashes across her face that makes my chest go tight in the ugliest fucking way.

Fear, yeah. But not only fear.

There’s excitement there too. Hot, stupid and impossible to hide. The kind that says her body knows this game before her mouth can ruin it with excuses.

Yep.

She’s going to be a problem.

Alice cuts off the path and into the trees, like getting farther from the lights is somehow going to save her from me. Branches whip at her coat. Mud grabs at her boots. She nearly slips once, catches herself on a trunk, then keeps going without looking back and I pick up my pace.

“You know what’s funny?” I say, voice carrying through the rain. “You’re still making the worst possible choices.”

“Fuck off,” she throws back, breathless.

I laugh, because even running from me, she still has to use that mouth. “Keep running your mouth and I might.”

She moves faster, and so do I.

The woods get darker the farther she goes, campus lights thinning behind us until they’re just pale blurs through the rain. She should turn left toward the main road or cut back toward the student center. She should scream loud enough for someone useless to come running with a flashlight and a hero complex, but she doesn’t.

She keeps going deeper.

Like she wants to find out exactly how bad this can get.

My tongue drags over my teeth, and I can still taste her there. Rain. Blood. Her fucking fear, sharp and sweet enough to make my grip flex at my sides.

“You know,” I call, closing the distance now, “I can still taste you.”

Alice stumbles for half a step.

Got you.

Her head turns just enough for me to see the side of her face, the wet hair stuck to her cheek, the way her mouth parts before she forces it shut.

“That scare you?” I ask. “Or did you like that part too?”

“Shut up.”

“Make me.”

She swears under her breath and pushes harder through the trees, but she’s tired now. I hear it in the way her breathing breaks, see it in the way her steps get messier, less careful. Her hand drops from her chest, fingers brushing branches aside, and the tiny cut I put there flashes in my head again.

Her gasp.