I’m stretched out on the leather couch in Tiffany’s office, staring at the ceiling tiles while my brain tries to organize the absolute chaos that’s been my life for the past few days. Tiffany settles into her chair.
“Sorry about that last-minute rescheduling yesterday,” she says. “I had an emergency.”
I turn my head slightly to look at her. “No problem. Are you okay?”
“Everything worked itself out, so I’m fine.” She gives me one of those small, professional smiles. The kind that says the conversation about her is over before it started.
“That’s good.”
I notice that her shirt today has one fewer button done up than usual. More cleavage visible. The kind of thing my brain catalogs automatically even when I’m actively trying not to stare.
“So,” Tiffany says, and there’s a shift in her tone. More curious. “How’s your ghost doing?”
A laugh escapes before I can stop it. “Good... but my life’s been getting very weird lately.”
“Weirder how?”
I shift on the couch, suddenly very interested in the texture of the leather under my palms. “So, uh. Nicole and I have been talking more. Through AIM. And sometimes she shows up in person.”
“That’s interesting,” Tiffany says. Her voice stays level, encouraging. “It sounds like your hallucinations are becoming more interactive.”
“Yeah.” I drag a hand through my hair. “We’ve actually become kind of... friends, I guess? She’s been opening up to me.”
“Mhm.” The pen taps once against her notepad. “What kinds of things has she been sharing?”
My throat tightens. “Just, you know. Normal stuff. About how lonely she’s been. How she hasn’t had contact with anyone in a long time.”
Tiffany’s violet eyes stay fixed on me, patient and unwavering. She doesn’t say anything. Just waits.
“We hugged,” I blurt out finally.
Her eyebrows lift slightly. “You hugged your hallucination?”
“Yeah. She asked if she could. She said she hasn’t been touched in twenty-seven years.” I’m talking faster now, the words tumbling out. “So I stood up and closed my eyes and she just... she held onto me and cried. For a really long time.”
“That sounds intense.”
“It was.” I sit up a little, propping myself on my elbows. “But that’s not the weird part.”
“No?”
I look at the ceiling again. Count the tiles. One, two, three. “There was this other thing that happened before that. A few nights ago.”
The pen stops moving. I can feel Tiffany’s attention sharpen, even though her expression doesn’t change.
“What thing?” she asks.
“I don’t really want to say.”
I close my eyes. “I woke up in the middle of the night and Nicole was in my room. Crying.”
“Okay.”
“And I pretended to still be asleep because I didn’t want to scare her off.”
“That makes sense.”
I can feel the heat crawling up my neck now, spreading across my face. “And then while she was crying, she... she started touching herself.”
The silence stretches between us for three seconds. Then Tiffany’s eyes widen. Not dramatically, but enough that I notice. Her lips part slightly.
“As in masturbating?” she says.
“Yeah.”
She’s staring at me with an expression I’ve never seen on her face before. Not quite shock, but close. Like I just said the one thing she wasn’t expecting me to say.
“You heard her masturbating,” Tiffany says slowly.
“I heard her. And I stayed completely still because I didn’t want her to know I was awake. She was crying and then she was... doing that. At the same time. And she kept saying things.”
“What kinds of things?”
I stare down at my knuckles, unable to meet her gaze. “She said she was lonely. That everyone leaves. That I was going to leave too once I figured out she was real.”
Tiffany leans forward slightly. The shift in her posture is subtle but deliberate. “What else did she say?”
“She said she was going to make me hers.”
The pen starts moving again. Fast, scratching across the notepad in quick strokes.
“And how did that make you feel?” Tiffany asks.
I don’t answer right away. The question sits there in the air between us while I try to figure out how to put it into words that don’t make me sound completely insane.
“Well...” I drag my hands down my face. “It made me feel wanted. So I liked it.”
The words come out more honest than anything I’d tell anyone else.
“Did Nicole finish?” she asks.
My brain short-circuits for a second. Of all the follow-up questions I was expecting, that wasn’t it. I turn my head to look at her.
“And after that?” she prompts.
“After that she started crying again. Harder than before. She kept saying she was disgusting and that I was going to hate her and leave.” The leather creaks as I tense up. “Then she just... faded away. The presence left.”
“But you saw her again after that.”
“Not directly. The next day, after we hugged, she messaged me like nothing happened. I didn’t bring it up since I didn’t want to embarrass her. We talked for a while and then she asked if I had a girlfriend.”
“Austin,” she says, and her voice has this careful quality to it. “Are you dating your hallucination?”
The question drops into the room like a stone into still water.
“No,” I say immediately. “We’re not dating.”
“Are you considering it?”
I open my mouth to say no again, but the word doesn’t come out. Because the honest answer is more complicated than that, and Tiffany’s already looking at me like she knows I’m about to deflect.
I sit up fully, planting my feet on the floor. “It’s exhausting being alone sometimes. Everyone yearns for someone, right?”
“What does your sister think about this?” Tiffany asks.
I let out a short laugh. “There’s no world where I’m telling Maria I have a crush on a fake ghost.”
“How has Maria adapted this week with you away?”
The question catches me off guard. I shift my weight. “I don’t know. I’ve been kind of avoiding her calls.”
“That’s unusual for you,” she says.
I look down at my hands. “I just want her to move on and finally be free. I feel like I’ve been such a cage for her, you know? She’s spent her whole life worrying about me, making sure I’m okay, sacrificing things for me. Maybe if I give her some space, she’ll realize she can have her own life.”
“That isn’t for you to decide.”
The words carry far more weight than I expect. I meet her eyes again.
“I know,” I say quietly.
Tiffany leans back in her chair, the frame groaning faintly. Her violet eyes stay fixed on me with that patient intensity she always has when she’s working through a particular point.
“Maria is a grown woman who’s chosen to be in your life,” she continues. “You avoiding her calls isn’t giving her freedom. It’s making a decision about her feelings without consulting her.”
“Yeah.” I rub the back of my neck. “I know that too. I just... I don’t know how to talk to her right now. She’d freak out if she knew how much weird shit I was seeing.”
“She might not, though. Who knows.”