Page 6 of My Halloween Keeper

4

Eli

I don’t have to wait long the next day for her to come find me.

I'm at the potting bench with my sleeves pushed up, cutting back the rosemary, when the door opens behind me and lets the cold in and closes again. I don't turn around. I know her steps now. I know the sound of her breath when she's working up to something.

I wait.

"You locked me in." Her voice is shaking. "Two nights in a row. You locked me in my own cabin."

"You had a key. That’s not locked in."

"That's not—" She stops. "You sat in my chair and, y’know, in front of me. You knew I was watching."

"Yes." I set down the shears and turn around.

She's standing inside the door with her coat buttoned wrong and her hair loose around her face, and the warm wet greenhouse air is already beading on her skin. She's smaller than she looked asleep in her car. Round through the hips and breasts, a stubborn jaw, and eyes that are doing to me exactly what I've been doing to her for four days.

"I'm a nurse," she says. "I do this. I’m the one who sits with people at night. I'm the one who watches."

"I know."

"Nobody watches me."

"I do," I say.

She stares at me. Her mouth opens and nothing comes out of it.

A pause.

“What’s your name? Edna told me, but I want to be sure.” Her brow furrows.

Edna, of course. She’s always meddling with anyone who stays in the cabins. “Eli,” I answer.

She nods.

"Door's behind you," I say. "If you walk out of it, I give Edna the key and you never see me again."

She drops her hand. "And if I don't?"

"Then I don't stop."

She looks at me for a long time with the rosemary smell thick between us and the glass walls running with condensation and the cold blue dusk pressing in from outside. Then she reaches behind her without looking and turns the bolt on the greenhouse door.

I cross the floor in four steps.

She meets me halfway, and her mouth is hot and open and tastes of cold air, and she kisses me like she's been starving and furious about it. I get my hands in her hair and walk her backwards until she hits the potting bench and the pots rattle. She grabs my shirt in both fists and hauls me down into it.

"You sat in that chair," she says against my mouth, "and made me watch you stroke your cock."

"You didn't look away. Did you like it?"

“I loved it,” she admits.

Dirty girl.

I unbutton her coat, all the way down, and push it off her shoulders. Her sweater under it, over her head. She's in a plain black bra and her skin is damp from the heat, and I put my mouth to her throat and taste salt and lavender soap, and she tips her head back to give me more.