PsyCop: GhosTV Part 25

"Let's get back to our room," I told Jacob. "I think the day is catching up to me." We pa.s.sed by the soda machines on our way there, and I managed to slip out of my latex gloves and pitch them into the trash, with the apple cores and granola bar wrappers, without anyone being any the wiser to my most recent ectoplasmic spurt.

211.

Chapter 24.

"I'm just gonna rest my eyes for a second," I told Jacob.

A tap sounded on our door as I was taking off my shoes. I ignored it, so Jacob did another cardio-healthy bout of climbing the furniture to answer it. Dreyfuss. "Good thing you processed that scene before the Odd Squad got there," he said. "You know how it is when the sixth sense is the only sense someone's using. Common sense goes right out the window. And you weren't the only ones who totally scored." He reached behind his back, and for a split second I thought he was reaching for a small-of-the-back concealed holster-but the thing he pulled out, with a very self-satisfied smile, wasn't even remotely gun-shaped. It was a netbook.

Not just any netbook: a silver netbook covered in stick-on sequins like a twelve-year-old girl's cell phone. Three guesses as to whose computer it was. And two of those guesses, I didn't need. "What about you two?" he said. "Find anything juicy?" A door that wasn't there. Which I didn't want to volunteer...because it meant nothing? It might mean nothing. Or it might have something to do with my player-piano hand. My brain insisted Dreyfuss was working with us, and while I didn't need to be his buddy, I did need to share evidence. But I wasn't sure what the door was evidence 212.

of-something to do with PsyTrain, or something to do with me. And I wanted to keep the me-evidence to myself.

But Debbie March was missing now, too. So I couldn't. I tore the sketch out of my pad and gave it to him. He glanced at it and said, "Red splatter?"

"Hair dye."

Thanks to the Miss Clairol, he didn't notice the extra door.

"I photographed the scene." Jacob said. "I'll send you the pictures." Dreyfuss turned to go and clocked his hip on the GhosTV. "And what about this?"

"I saw the one repeater," I told him. "That's it." Liar, liar, I know. But I told myself that Jacob's veiny forehead and Dreyfuss' weird eyeball trick had nothing to do with the case, so it didn't matter if I told him or not. Same with the astral projection.

"Maybe no news is good news," Dreyfuss said. "I'd prefer to keep telling myself no one's gonna turn up dead." He patted the top of the console, and went back to his room.

Jacob stared at the door for a few seconds after Dreyfuss closed it, then said, "He almost sounded like a human being for a minute there."

"Tell that to the wire tap."

"I wish I could run him past Carolyn. She'd know how to separate truth from the bulls.h.i.+t." Thankfully, that was the extent of what Jacob had to say about Dreyfuss. He started to get undressed and ended up knocking the crate lid on the floor with his elbow. "I'm gonna try to organize some of this stuff," he told me. "Maybe move one of the dressers into the hall."

I grunted, and he knew me well enough to take it as, "Knock yourself 213.

out." I was so drained, both from working a case I had a personal stake in, and from the time change that supposedly shouldn't have affected me at all, that "resting my eyes" went the route it usually does when I'm at home in that recliner of Jacob's I've taken over. The light, the strange bed, the sound of Jacob moving furniture...none of that could prevent me from conking out so hard and fast it felt like one of those rides where the bottom falls out.

Later-maybe much later, given the time warp that happens when sleep hits hard-Jacob pressed into bed behind me. We've always fit together well. My last boyfriend was always b.i.t.c.hing about my elbows and knees, especially when he was crabby because his pot dealers had run dry, but Jacob probably couldn't even feel my pesky bones through his solid wall of muscle. I sighed back into him. Falling into bed after a long day is great. Settling in with Jacob wrapped around me, though...that's amazing.

He snuggled up harder, and the snuggling wasn't the only thing that was hard. It felt like someone had nestled a salami between the cheeks of my a.s.s for safekeeping. I smiled to myself and enjoyed the warm, stiff length of his heavy c.o.c.k against me. That was about all we would enjoy, given the fact that if I had even one iota of spare energy, I intended to use it in finding Lisa, and not getting my rocks off. Plus, there was no lube.

Jacob's mouth pressed into the back of my neck, and an electric thrill shot down my spine. "What do you think you're you doing?" I said.

He mostly mumbled, but I made out, "I love the way you feel." The sensation of the words against my skin played along some poorly mapped erogenous zone, and that combined with his sneaky flat-tery-in an arena where I so sorely needed it-made my body start to respond to his subtle grinding. My nuts. .h.i.tched, and that telltale tingle started at the base of my c.o.c.k.

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Still, it felt like I should be getting some rest, not some jollies. "Here?" I said. "Seriously?"

"Please...don't say no."

He sounded awfully forlorn. I figured the investigation must've been wearing on him. h.e.l.l, if it meant that much to him, I'd give him a quick beej so we could both get some rest. He'd probably sleep better without that huge b.o.n.e.r weighing him down, anyway. I started to roll over, but Jacob had fit himself against my back curve for curve so close I couldn't muster the leverage to move. "Okay," I said, and pushed back to get him to give me some room. He didn't. "I'm trying to go down on you, but I can't do it if I'm facing the other way."

"Don't just get me off...that's not what I want." He flicked his hips and slid that stiff piece of meat up and down my a.s.s crack again. It felt like skin on skin.

"It's no big deal," I said. "C'mon. I want to." He trailed his fingertips down my arm, and my skin danced like we were rubbing socks on a carpet to create static. "Don't you want me?" Talk about a conversation I was tempted to deflect with a well-placed sarcastic comment. I couldn't do it, though. Not the way he sounded.

Raw. Really raw. "s.e.x just isn't on the top of my list right now. When this is all over, once we get home-"

"When you were talking to that guy...."

I knew exactly which guy he meant. The little doughy guy with the Grey Flannel cologne. "Right, I'm sure I looked like a big idiot playing s.e.xy-cop for Halloween. Are you giving me s.h.i.+t about that? 'Cos he was just about to tell me something important."

"I dream about you looking at me like that."

I shoved against him to try and turn around to get a look at him now, 215.

but it was like shoving against the side of a building. "I don't look at anybody like that in real life, mister, because I look like a huge fake doing it."

"Really? You weren't into him?"

"What? No, I wasn't into him." If I were single, and itching for some company? I supposed I wouldn't turn him down. But he wasn't anyone I'd do a double-take at and think, wow, that guy's tasty. Not like Jacob.

"I thought...when you were inside me...I didn't think I could satisfy you."

Cripes, is that was this whole thing was about? "Jacob, that was like...

I dunno, days ago. You're reading too much into it. It was just different from our usual. That's all."

"You might find someone with a sweeter a.s.s...."

"Are you high?" It was just an expression, but once I'd blurted it out, I realized he did actually sound kind of strange. In an attempt to get a look at his eyes and see if maybe he'd been sampling my Valium, I pushed with my shoulder, hard, and he still didn't budge. "Scoping out a sweeter a.s.s couldn't be farther from my mind. You have a great a.s.s. Beyond hot."

He ran his fingers up and down my forearm again, and his touch sent such thrills down my spine he might as well have been stroking my c.o.c.k. He forced his fingertips between my fingers to clench his palm against the back of my hand, and the way my hips bucked from the feel of his fingers parting mine, I could swear I was getting my legs spread instead. Something was going on. Some byproduct of me sucking white light all day, most likely, some fluke that left me as hypersensitive as a drilled-down tooth.

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"Besides," I added, "who said I wasn't perfectly happy with the way things were?" Not that I've ever thought of myself as a "bottom," but him pounding me really was my idea of a good time.

"Are you happy?"

"Yeah." The need to kiss him flooded over me, because he shouldn't have needed to ask me that. He should have known, and if he couldn't tell that he was everything to me, it was my fault, not his.

I craned my neck, but couldn't reach him. "Kiss me," I said, and the mammoth hard-on that was cozied up to my a.s.s felt gargantuan as I strained to find Jacob's lips. He kissed me at the hairline with that fine, generous mouth of his, then began working his way forward, kissing around the back of my neck, below my ear, along the corner of my jaw. By the time he fit his lips to mine-not perfectly, but against the corner of my mouth-I was as hard as he was.

His tongue swept over my lower lip, and the taste of his mouth washed over me. I was disappointed when he let go of my hand, with that strangely appealing tingle-touch he had going on...but not for long. He reached between us to line himself up and fit us together even closer. Him inside me.

"You don't need to change things up to keep me interested," I said.

"The way you smell, the way you taste, the way you breathe when you're turned on...the feel of your c.o.c.k plowing me 'til I'm sore- that's all I need. Not role-playing. Not games."

"You'll get bored."

"Come on, you know me better than that. Yeah, my attention span isn't stellar, but I have the same cereal for breakfast every day and watch the same scene of the same p.o.r.no every time I jerk off. You know that's the truth."

He pushed into me, so big I would have sworn he'd decided to add fisting to our repertoire to incorporate the variety I'd just said I didn't 217.

want-except that there wasn't any pain. Pressure, yeah. Delicious pressure, stretching pressure, everywhere I liked it. Plus he'd wrapped his arm around me so he could tug on my b.a.l.l.sack while he f.u.c.ked me. Since I'm not double-jointed I couldn't really touch him anywhere but his arm, so that left me with nothing to do but writhe around on the end of his huge d.i.c.k while I hurtled toward my peak.

"If anything..." d.a.m.n, he was nailing me perfectly, each and every thrust, "I would think you'd get sick of doing all the work."

"I get off on making you come." He raked his teeth along my spine, then clamped his mouth onto the meaty part between my neck and shoulder and started sucking on me. I felt like I might implode from the sheer goodness of it.

"How can you just say things like that?" I was breathing hard by then, and he stopped diddling my b.a.l.l.s and started jacking my c.o.c.k, instead. "Sometimes I can't believe the things you say out lou-yeah, right there. Oh G.o.d."

Before I knew it I was shooting, and the o.r.g.a.s.m was as hard and sudden as a lightning bolt. I soared, or maybe I floated, and even though it was just for a brief, s.h.i.+ning moment, time stretched in that way time does when some small miracle has occurred.

For that one moment, I was light. I would have thought it would be scary, the lack of me-ness. But instead of being scared, I felt elated.

By the time I regained some sense of myself, Jacob had stilled, clasped against my back. This time, when I moved to turn toward him, he actually yielded enough to let me do it. "How could I ever be bored when-"

Jacob was in the decoy bed. Asleep.

But he was in bed with me-kind of hard to miss it seeing as how he'd just f.u.c.ked my brains out.

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It was like one of those trick drawings that can either look like two faces or a wine gla.s.s, depending on how you s.h.i.+ft your own perspective. Yes, Jacob was in that other bed. And, yes, Jacob was in bed with me. Which Jacob felt more real depended on how I focused on him.

Once I wrapped my head around that idea, I started picking up his silver cord in my field of vision...only it wasn't silver. It was red. And it was a huge, bada.s.s, ropy-looking thing right out of a sci-fi movie.

What about me? Most people, seeing their man in two places at once with a magic umbilical cord between them, could safely a.s.sume they themselves were on a big head-trip, too. But me? I could very well be awake. I touched the bed. My fingers made a depression in the bedspread. Still, that didn't mean anything. It could be an astral representation of the bedspread I was moving. When I tried to shove my hand through it, though, and didn't get that familiar pa.s.sing-through-the-ball-pit sensation, I began to entertain the possibility that I was actually awake.

Maybe that was why I was able to turn over. Jacob's astral body could block my astral body, but not my physical body, and after I'd had my spiritgasm, I woke up and snapped fully into the physical. I looked behind me, figuring he'd snap back into himself. Nope. Still there.

And down by the foot of my bed, the GhosTV was on, flickering, tuned in to a non-channel.

So that amazing pounding I'd just had...did it even happen? I was still dressed. And no squishy surprise packages in my underwear, either.

The memory was still there, though, bright and clear.

It seemed to me someone at Camp h.e.l.l had not only thought we could do each other in the astral, but that the astral plane itself was one big orgy. Maybe Dead Darla...and maybe our teacher, being an ex-nun, changed the subject whenever Darla brought it up. Or maybe I was reconstructing Camp h.e.l.l to fit my current experiences since my memory of those years is so iffy.

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That creepy Barnhardt guy at the old folks' home had seemed to enjoy sowing his astral oats. So, yeah, I could probably conclude whatever had just happened was...real. It just wasn't physical.

s.h.i.+t. Figuring out one level of reality was hard enough. Now I had to deal with two. Although, to be honest, I'd been dealing with two realities ever since I hit p.u.b.erty. Not dealing particularly well, either.

I inched toward the wall, and naked astral-Jacob rolled onto his stomach. Leave it to him to figure out a way to take up all the s.p.a.ce on both beds. Since I figured he'd be game to do some experimenting with me-and since he deserved it for turning on the GhosTV before he went to bed-I poked him in the astral shoulder to see if he'd feel it.

My hand pa.s.sed through him. Neither Jacob stirred.

"If your astral body is here," I murmured, "then where's mine?" Since I was conscious, it would have to be inside of me, wouldn't it? Inside, and aligned with my physical. But if that were the case, then when I poked Jacob's astral body, it should have felt solid like it had when we were doing the astral nasty.

When I thought that, my perspective s.h.i.+fted. I poked him in the shoulder again, and this time, it felt...not quite solid. But substantial.

Jacob's astral body grumbled in its sleep.

"Why're you wasting your astral time sleeping?" I asked him. "You should be so jazzed about this you'd practically wet yourself." Unless he didn't know. That was probable. And unless he wasn't going to remember...now, that was just sad. But if Faun Windsong (who'd always thought she was the world's most sparkly light worker) had trouble remembering her astral projections, did Jacob even stand a chance?

I s.h.i.+fted so I was face to face with Jacob's astral body and I sucked some white light. What I really concentrated on was maintaining that mental s.h.i.+ft of mine-the faces instead of the wine gla.s.s-and I ran 220.

my fingers down his bare arm. "Hey, you really need to remember this."

Jacob made an exhausted, "leave me alone, I just shot my wad" noise.

"You're gonna be really p.i.s.sed off if you don't." I got my face right up to his. The hair on his astral head was shorter, like it had been when I first met him. I think he looked a few years younger, too...though I'd never be brutally honest enough to tell him so. I sucked a little more white light, until the hairs on my forearms felt tingly with static, and tried to visualize my astral body inside my physical body touching Jacob while I pressed my mouth to his.

It felt like a ghost-kiss. Only not scary. Not at all.

Jacob's astral eyes opened, and he looked at me all lovey-dovey.

"Hey," I told him. "You're having an OBE." And then, duh, I realized the acronym probably wouldn't translate well. "You're astral. You need to remember it, okay?"

"You are looking at me that way. It's not fake. Not at all." Jacob Marks-psychic putty in my hands. Did our astral bodies have different personalities...or maybe, more accurately, did they showcase different facets of our existing personalities? It definitely wasn't the Jacob I usually lived with who needed this level of rea.s.surance.

Physical Jacob would've been all about the Psych, not the mushy stuff. "Seriously. You've got to remember."

He slung an arm around me and tried to pull me toward him. I didn't budge, so he rammed himself up against me. It was freaky, the way I could half-feel him pressing me against the wall. "I know you think I'm only attracted to your talent, but that's not..." he tried to find my mouth and lose himself in more kisses, but I had a hard time keeping that duality of astral and physical aligned. "You being a PsyCop, like me. You get it. You get me."

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And here I'd thought Jacob was uninhibited about discussing his feelings in the physical. I should have realized something was up sooner, given the extent of our conversational skills while he was reaming my a.s.s. That, and the way we magically hadn't needed any lube.

"I get that you'll be totally p.i.s.sed off if you forget your projection.

Tell me you understand. You're astral. And when you wake up, you're gonna remember."

He ran his hand down my back, but jerked it away when my concentration slipped from arguing with him and he found himself inside me-and not in a good way. "What's happening?" he demanded.

"I told you. You are astral. Get it? Astral. You're astral and you need to remember."

He waved his hand as if he was trying to shake something gross off of it. "I think my hand just went through you. It's got something to do the GhosTV, doesn't it?"