God, but she did. She popped up into my perverted daydreams again and again.

Jessica had never been a woman to back down from a challenge, never one to let anyone know she was afraid. As we stared, her eyes flickered toward us.

The look of absolute horror on her face when she realized we were looking back was priceless. She looked just as flustered as she had when Vincent and I ran into her at the car wash.

“I told you she was back in town,” Vincent said. He was holding back a grin, and I could tell he was reading way too much into this situation. We’d now seen Jess twice in a month, which surely meant destiny, fate, or some other grand mysterious power was behind it.

“What are the fucking odds she’d be here?” Lucas said.

“Considering there’s fuckall to do in Wickeston except this, pretty good odds actually,” I said. I set my thumbnail between my teeth and bit. If I had to stare at her all damn night, I’d have no nails left at all. “Have any of you ever known Jess to miss a party?”

Manson set his beer down on the Mustang’s roof, eyes fixated on the blonde woman like a dog that had spotted a fresh cut of meat.

“We should go say hello,” he said.

Vincent nodded quickly. “We should.”

Lucas shook his head. “We should stop trying to catch a ghost.” But his words didn’t hide his interest. He kept looking at her.

My common sense wanted to side with Lucas. But the obsessive side of my brain couldn’t leave well enough alone. I still wasn’t sure what it was about her that had always kept me so fascinated. She was a massive puzzle I couldn’t figure out, an unanswered question, a problem without a solution.

She was a challenge, and God, I loved a challenge.

“She gives good head for a ghost,” I said, and Vincent nodded his agreement again. The memory of Jess begging for a taste of my cock was one I’d never forget. It was the kind of surreal moment a guy like me could only dream of, the most untouchable girl in school wanting to take me in her mouth.

“Be nice, J,” Manson said, in that tone of voice that gave me a little chill down my back. Manson had his pills, his therapy, his meditation and all that shit, but there was still something dark in him that would never quite go away. Something born because it had to be, and alive because nothing could kill it.

That thing, that monster inside him, had gotten a taste of Jess and nothing else could satiate it.

I’d known better, but I think Manson had really believed something would come out of that night at the Halloween party. Something more than just a fuck. Maybe he thought Jess would change, that suddenly she’d realize how badly she wanted us. Maybe he thought she would stick around, integrate into our fucked-up family unit as if she didn’t already have a perfectly cushy homelife.