Phantom Touch Box Set (Ghost Romance)

Three days until Halloween. That’s when all of this started. I had no idea so much would change for me over those few days, but they did.
It started out simple enough. I was in college, and it was the fall semester. I wasn’t too open a person, but I’d managed to make a few friends and even meet a guy. Rob wasn’t exactly the perfect match for me, or maybe for anybody. He was, well, pushy. A girl likes a man who knows what he wants, but he sometimes gets it by being pushy. That night, he was especially pushy about getting me to have sex with him.
“Come on, Jess, after the party, we’ll go back to my place and have some fun,” he suggested to me as he drove along the back road. We were on our way to an early Halloween party at a mutual friend’s parents’ house. They were local to the university town, so it was being held on their family farm.
I folded my arms across my chest and glared at him for the umpteenth time. “I told you no. I’m just not ready for that jump.”
“It’s not a jump, it’s a baby step. Everybody else does it,” Rob argued.
“And if everybody else jumped off a cliff for the kicks, would you?” I countered. It was a lame argument, but I had other problems. They all centered around my damn costume.
I’d been invited to this party at the last minute and foolishly decided to go as a twisted Alice from Alice in Wonderland. That meant I was wearing a long, white skirt flecked with fake blood and a low-cut, blood-splattered blouse. There was a red bow in my long brown hair, and I’d smeared my face with red paint. To add to the costume, I’d taken a small knife I kept in my room to carve up food. The problem with this dress, however, was that the edges of the dress were a little too long and kept getting caught in the straps holding my stockings up because those didn’t quite fit. It was fine when I stood up, but sitting down in the car meant the bottom of the dress kept doing its catching trick. I swore it was trying to kill me.
“That’s a pretty lame argument,” Rob pointed out.
“Yeah, well, I guess I’m just that lame.” I flipped my head away and looked out the window. The farm was in the woods a few miles outside the small university town, and there weren’t too many houses around there. The car bounced over the rough dirt road, one of those lonely ones where there was plenty of deep shadows. I rolled down the window and found out it was really quiet out there, too. Nothing but a few crickets and the crunch of the car tires on dead leaves. Sometimes I heard the rattle of branches when the wind blew through them. I pulled the window back up, at least to keep the cool breeze from getting into the car. It was enough to make anyone believe in ghosts and monsters.
We passed by a lot of trees, but for a second I thought I saw an old road that led to a large metal gate with an arch over the top. There was something unusual about the way the twisted metal bent to create the arch. The edges bent outward like it was inviting someone to come up and open the gate. The road up to it was overgrown with this year’s weeds, and there weren’t any lights beyond the gate. I decided to defuse the situation between us by asking Rob about it. “Is there some sort of old house or something around here?”
“How should I know? It’s not like I live here,” he replied. I rolled my eyes. The least he could do was try to find out something about the town in which he was going to school.
The rest of the drive to the old farmhouse was thankfully short. By the time we arrived, it was well underway, and the place was packed. We parked the car, and he handed me the keys. I was the designated driver, so I put the keys in my purse. They were too big for my pocket because of a stupid mini-flashlight attached to the chain.
We went inside just in time for the lights to go out. I screamed, and so did a bunch of other people.
“It’s okay, folks, somebody’s just fooling with the lights,” I heard my friend speak up in the dark. In a few seconds, the lights were switched on right beside us, and I turned to find Rob beside Ashley Stefan, my friend. He was conveniently close to the light switch, and we both glared at him. He gave a sheepish smile and shrugged his shoulders.
“Just practicing for Halloween,” he joked. “It’s not much fun if nobody gets scared.” The party got back on its way with everyone drinking from the spiked punch and making out in the shadows.
“It’s scary enough out here without you shutting off the lights,” Ashley protested.
That confused me. “Why should it be scary? You’ve lived here all your life, haven’t you?” I asked my friend.
Ashley nodded her head in the direction of the road. “Yeah, but it’s hard to forget that I live down the road from a cemetery. There’s just some things you never get used to.”
“Cemetery…” I slowly repeated. Then the memory snapped in my mind. “You mean that’s what that gate was for? That metal one on that short road?”
“Yep. It’s one of the oldest cemeteries in the state, and even in the day, it’s creepy as hell,” she told me. “Nobody’s been buried in there for a good fifty years, but everyone around here goes in there once a year to clean the place up. Other than that, I don’t think anyone dares go in there, at least not alone.”
“Or on a night so close to Halloween?” Rob teased. He’d heard the whole story and laughed it off.
“I wouldn’t be laughing it off if I were you,” a voice spoke up. All three of us turned to find Brent, a dorky history major who was also a local. I’d met him in my Mythologies class. “That place is haunted.”
“Not to sound too clichéd, but you’re seriously not going to tell that old story, are you?” Ashley asked him.
Brent scowled at her. “It’s a good story, and who’s to say it isn’t true?”
“Anybody with some sense, for one,” she shot back.
Even if my friend wasn’t interested, he had my attention. “What story?”
Brent smiled, then hunched over and glanced around. His voice dropped to a whisper that I could barely hear above the noise of the party. “It’s the story of the phantom of the graveyard.”