Turning up the heat

Chapter 8 — Sam

I inherited Sam when I moved into the crumbling apartment. Most people find cockroaches under the sink or maybe a stray cat in the back yard. I found a ghost who liked to fuck.

I was living alone for the first time in my life. There wasn't much money after the divorce and my credit rating was so bad that it was hard to find somewhere to live. The decaying concrete-block apartments were on the wrong side of Broadway, so they were less fussy in their choice of tenants. They let me live there. And apparently, at one time, they had let Sam live there. Most people eventually left; Sam stayed on.

At first I thought he was a dream. A very pleasant, sensual kind of sojourn into the nebulous world of fantasy. Light, barely-there fingers caressed my skin one night, with just the softest hint of touch, just enough to raise my fine hairs into awareness. The rustle of the sheets as they were lowered to bare my breasts to the kiss of the moonlight and streetlight coming in through the narrow window, all felt like part of my somnolent state.

Questing lips, open-mouthed, drifted down from my neck to nestle in the valley between my breasts. A whisper of a sigh. I moved slightly, encouraging my dream lover to explore my nipples, which were already hardening in anticipation. I kept my eyes closed. I did not want to wake from this sensual lethargy in a hurry. I pressed my legs tightly together to build the ache of climax. I knew that if I moved to rub myself then I would wake up and I didn't want to let this beautiful torment end just yet.

The mouth moved to my nipples and circled around them, hotly, wetly. When it dropped down and started meandering over my belly I couldn't hold back any longer. Even if it meant waking up, I had to masturbate. I dropped my hand down to the clutch of hair between my legs. My hand encountered a brief resistance, as if the air was denser somehow, but when I moved my fingers into my slick-oil folds, the mouth moved back to my breast.

Even through my spiraling arousal, my foggy brain realized that something wasn't right. I was awake, no doubt about it. Which meant that I had been all along. Yet lips still closed over my nipple. I raised my head and looked down over my body. Nothing. The air seemed to distort slightly, ripple and coalesce into a denser pattern, like mist floating in from the sea. It drifted upwards and simultaneously my skin shivered with the absence of touch.

"Who's there?" I cursed my voice for wavering.

There was no answer of course. My arousal withered and dried. I was spooked enough to get dressed, turn on the light and sit by the open window nursing a cold cup of coffee until morning.

The next day I asked Marisa, my neighbor, if she had heard of anything strange happening in my apartment.

She grinned her wide, white smile at me. "Met Sam have you? Annie, who lived there before you always swore she would never move out-said that ghost was better lovin' than any man she ever had." Marisa rolled her eyes. "And hon, let me tell you, she had a few men!"

"Ghost?" My voice was surprisingly steady.

Marisa shrugged. "No one knows for sure," she said. "But what else do you call a phantom who comes to you at night and makes the sweetest love this side of heaven?"

"He made love to her?" My curiosity was roused.

"Oh yes, hon, he did. Some mornings Annie walked bowlegged from his lovin' the night before. She said," Marisa's voice dropped to a confiding whisper, "that no one gave her orgasms like Sam did. Three, four times a night. He doesn't come every night, but when he does, he doesn't leave until morning."

"Why's he called Sam?" I asked curiously. "Was he someone who lived here once? How did he die?"

Marisa shrugged vaguely. "Don't know," she said. "Annie called him Sam. Said she needed a name to call out when she came; Sam seemed as good as any."

"Why did Annie leave?"

"Not willingly. She didn't want to leave Sam. But her mom got sick and she had to move back to Cleveland. She kinda hoped that Sam might follow her there, but I guess he didn't." She kicked the doormat with her toe. "Guess he likes to stay in Denver."

"Did Annie have a boyfriend?" I was curious to hear what Sam had made of that.

"She did when she moved here. He didn't last long. And she said that Sam was better than any flesh and blood man, but when she did take someone home with her, he didn't seem to mind. She said she sensed him watching." She giggled. "Not the jealous kind obviously. The perfect man. Or ghost."

I smiled. I was beginning to like the sound of this.

Marisa winked knowingly at me. "Hon, if you move out tell me, I might just switch apartments."

That night I stripped naked and climbed into bed, the sheet around my waist, breasts invitingly uplifted. He didn't come. Not that night, nor the ones after that. I was beginning to think that it was all my imagination when he came to me.

It was around midnight, and I was in that half-hazy stage between sleep and consciousness. That elusive floating, drifting stage, when the soul leaves the body and spins pirouettes around the room. The time when the mind can finally make the leaps of association necessary to solve impossible problems and the weary end of the day when every muscle fiber relaxes, so that you feel you are sinking down into the mattress, bonelessly, until the edges of your body blur.

I felt a soft touch on my mouth. A gentle exploratory kiss. A welcome home kiss from some one who cared. I waited, my heart pounding slowly in anticipation, to see if it was repeated. The merest brush whispered again over my lips. I opened my mouth slightly, trying to breathe slowly and silently and I felt the push of a tongue, insinuating itself into my mouth. It ran around, twisting around my tongue before withdrawing.

"Hello Sam." I whispered the words into the charged air.

There was no answer of course, but I could feel the corners of his mouth turn up slightly as he smiled against my skin. He lapped his way down my neck, pausing to lave a collarbone, licking me lazily, before trailing his way down to my breasts. I turned slightly, encouraging him to my nipple with the wordless gesture. He didn't disappoint; I felt the warm wetness as he closed over my breast.

With a slight shock, I felt a disembodied hand cup my other breast. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder if Sam had hands as well as a mouth. My acceptance of his presence must have encouraged him, like a human lover, to become bolder. His hands slid over my skin with the drifting touch I preferred; not rough human hands with their too heavy press, but a reverent glissade of sensation.

The mouth moved down my belly, lapping, sucking, open mouthed kisses that had me writhing in anticipation as I realized his ultimate destination. Automatically I reached down with my hands to tangle in his hair, steady his head and direct that mouth to where I wanted it most, but my hands passed through a slight heaviness, then nothing. Sam didn't appear to need direction though; I felt crawling fingers nudge my thighs apart and those same illusionary fingers advance, creeping up my inner thigh to touch the damp curls of my sex with a careful finger. When I thought he would push a finger into me, it retreated, to walk its way up the other thigh. This time it skated briefly over my clit, a frisson of feeling before it fell back.

It was a carefully planned assault. Advance, retreat, push forward, fall back, building me higher, on a roller-coaster ride to release. I don't know when I started begging, when I wanted the promised orgasm more than pride, when the soaked and twisted sheets under my fingers bunched and wound around my hands, but when the promise of what was to come was too much, I felt Sam's mouth on my sex, felt the damp rasp of a tongue as his whole mouth closed over me. I felt the catlike flicker of his tongue lapping on my clit until I came with a howl and a shriek, sobbing with release.

I took a shuddering breath, and another, and I felt his whole mouth descend once more, slurping and suckling, fierce and demanding until my whole body shuddered through a second climax, shocking in its intensity and sudden in its arrival. I never come twice. Not until Sam.

I lay and let the aftershocks wash over my body. How did one thank a lover who wasn't really there? I could hardly offer him coffee, lead him to the door and kiss him goodbye. But Sam wasn't finished yet. The sheet was gone and I sprawled in wet and sated abandon on the mattress. My body was already missing the touch of his mouth, when I felt the briefest whisper of a kiss on my lips. I dipped my tongue into his mouth, missing the taste of myself when a lover kisses you after going down. But the missing sensation faded when I felt the stretch of penetration.

There was not the weight of a body lying over me, nor the rasp of wiry hairs on the insides of my thighs. There was simply the unmistakable feeling of fullness, of a fat and turgid penis slowly pushing its way inside me. I gasped slightly in surprise and angled my pelvis the better to accept his thrusts. He slowly continued to push, until he was, I can only imagine, sheathed all the way. He was large; thick and firm. I clenched around him, as much to see if I could feel contours, to see if his fatness was illusionary or if he would shrink down like a pricked balloon with my counter pressure. He swelled inside me and my tightening muscles gave the glorious friction of real sex as he began to slowly move in and out.

I reached a hand down between my legs, curious to see what he felt like. I missed the feeling of encountering the hairy globular testicle sacks, but I ran a finger around my stretched opening. This was no illusion; some one, something, was inside me, fucking me with a steady rhythm. I moved my hand, unsure of where to place it. There were no buttocks to grasp, no back to run my hand along, no balls to tease. I settled for grasping the mattress on either side of me, and let him fuck me.

He was steady and relentless, moving in a slow-building tempo. The sensation was initially unnerving; to have such one-dimensional sex was strange. The only sense was that of limited touch; there wasn't the weight of a body resting on mine nor the musky smell of male sweat in the air; the only scent was my own sharp arousal. There weren't the grunts and groans and creaks of lovemaking and there wasn't the visual stimulus of seeing a body lost in pleasure. No, it was more like masturbating with a vibrator except that I didn't have to do the work.

My analytical comparison shattered into a million fragments as his thrusts, firm and measured brought me sweetly to a climax. Through the blurring consciousness of orgasm, I was amazed. I never come from penetration alone. Sam's movements were faster, sliding easily in my wetness. His thrusts disintegrated into the jagged, fractured spurts of a man on the brink, then as I tightened around him, I felt the unmistakable feeling of wet, spreading warmth inside. I relaxed. He relaxed. I could feel him softening inside me and the slide of his spend, viscous and thick, trickled down onto the bed. Curiously I put a finger down to catch the liquid, but like the phallus it was an illusion.

"Sam." I spoke his name out loud. "You can come back any time."

His head was between my legs again, but I felt wrapped in the cocoon of his satisfaction.

I stayed in that apartment for seven years. Sam stayed with me for all that time. Even when I had a nearly-serious, nearly-permanent relationship with Richard, I always made sure I was home alone at least one night every week for Sam. Eventually Richard left me, but Sam stayed.

The eviction notice came as a shock. I knew that the run-down neighborhood was becoming trendy as real estate prices in Denver soared, but I hadn't expected anything to change that quickly. They were pulling down the old apartments and building modern condominiums. Luxury buildings, ridiculous prices.

That night, after Sam's loving had made me weak from more than sex, I told him. "Come with me," I said. "I don't know where I'm going yet, but please, come too."

There was no answer; there never was on the few occasions that I had addressed him directly, but I thought I detected a palpable sadness in the air. I knew then that Sam would never leave this space.

I live on the other side of Broadway now, in a sleek modern condominium that echoes with emptiness and loneliness, especially on the hot dry Denver nights that remind me most of Sam. His apartment has long gone, but I have studied the block that has risen in its place. Apartment 3C. That is his space. I never knew the exact boundaries of his realm, but apartment 3C contains the space that used to be the bedroom. In the five years since its construction, that apartment has come on the market six times.

I have the deposit now; the next time that apartment 3C is offered for sale, I will be ready.

I hope that Sam remembers me.