GHOST PORTAL (#1 GHOST PORTAL series)

TWENTY

Stress had Jessamine waking up after merely twenty minutes of sleeping. She was drenched in her own sweat, still naked—and sore from all the fucking—and panicked, clutching the sheets to her damp skin. Twenty minutes—that was all it had taken for her to fall face-forward into her nightmares again, to lose all the peace Avery's presence had given her overnight.

She dragged herself to the shower, and prayed the cool droplets would erase the sensations from her dreams. In those, she'd been wandering down corridors of bloody walls and scratches, tripping over bodies sprawled in her way, crouching to avoid being hit by zooming white orbs. Had that actually happened? What sort of horror house had she been stuck in, if these nightmares were indeed true visions of her past?

At work, she was moody, preferring to work the coffee machine instead of the register. She thrust cups into hands, barely mumbled good day, and sensed her upper lip curling whenever someone spoke to her for longer than necessary. It was that aggression Avery and her coworkers had mentioned, but that she hadn't paid much attention to until now; until it had been pointed out to her. How long ago had this attitude started? Was it right after the accident, or after having watched Amy's video?

Whenever she had a free moment, she checked her phone, becoming more and more desperate to hear from Avery. Even a text saying "hey, this won't work between us, I'm sorry," would have sufficed. It would at least tell her Avery was a class-A asshole, and she didn't need to waste her time thinking about him. And it would prove that his rambling about him helping her so she could help him was a lie, and she could move on from him without regret.

She'd had one night stands, plenty of them; this hadn't felt like one, in the heat of the moment. She'd been under the impression Avery wanted to keep in touch with her, and he'd hesitated to have sex with her because he didn't want to take advantage. Had she misread that? Or had she coerced him into something he hadn't wanted?

Sure, she could have called or texted him, but she didn't want to be that girl—the clingy, annoying one who needed to set boundaries and needed to know "what they were". In truth, she didn't care about that; she needed to know he hadn't been lusting after her and spewed out a bunch of bullshit to get in her pants, then take off and leave her to deal with her terrifying memories on her own.

She unlocked and locked her cell so often that the battery was draining, and she couldn't focus on coffee-making. She half-expected Chad to turn up and tell her to toss her phone into her purse in the break-room, and stop messing up orders. But as it turned out, Chad wasn't there at all, that day.

Odd—he basically lives in that office.

Towards the end of her shift, as she huffed and puffed while cleaning one of the machines, a tiny voice inside her said "good riddance", when thinking of how Avery still hadn't said a word, hadn't given proof of life. He was a complication, after all—he'd interfere with her normal life with all his occult theories and his stubborn search for someone who might not have wanted to be found. He and Amy had had an argument, he'd said; perhaps she'd taken off on purpose, and staged the whole forest and house thing to get him off her back.

"Ha," Jessamine snorted, "which means she doesn't know him in the slightest." Because even Jessamine knew that such a stunt would only draw Avery nearer, hungry and curious as he was about anything remotely supernatural. She'd met him seconds ago, and yet she was aware he'd stop at nothing for answers, and more so regarding someone he cared for.

She'd thought, for the space of an instant, that he might care about her. Offering to help with her memories, taking her to see professional mediums, agreeing to hang out with her when she was afraid. Had she mistaken his behavior for something else? Or did he have an odd way of showing his affection?