Read Grave Refrain: A Love/Ghost Story for Free Online

blunt black hair guillotined the collar of her blouse as she turned to look up into his eyes, her leather skirt inching its way along the unending length of her legs. “Another margarita, please. With a sigh, and I mean a sigh of salt. Don’t slather it on this time—dip it lightly. A sigh, you understand, just coat the rim like you were kissing it. And please, for all that is holy, keep them coming. It’s been an abysmal day.”
    “Midterms?” Emily ventured. This was Margot’s first year working as an assistant professor at the same college Emily attended, and by the looks of her two drained glasses, things hadn’t gone well.
    “I hate all undergraduates,” Margot replied. “Both classes retained nothing. Mouth breathers all.”
    “So where the hell were you today?”
    Emily’s mind raced, trying to decipher the look of consternation on Zoey’s face. “Oh God, I’m so sorry. I totally forgot you had the appointments to look at those listings. I was in Vandin’s office till the afternoon, and then I went to look—well…you know how it is.” Unable to tell them she had wandered the pathways around the Academy of Science most of the afternoon searching for a homeless musician she had never spoken to, Emily felt her roommates’ stress radiating off their bodies like sweat.
    “No, I don’t know how it is,” Zoey said. “Do you know how many cultures enslave their women with that kind of bullshit? That man’s a troglodyte.”
    “Did you find an apartment?”
    “We saw five places, and the best one had a drunk asleep in his own vomit in the lobby.”
    “Evidently, that is what was meant by ‘doorman,’” Margot qualified.
    “What about the other four?”
    “One had been recently vacated by an old man with ferrets, and the other one was over a medical marijuana shop, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but there was a LaRouche headquarters next to it, and even I have standards. The last two didn’t have nearly enough natural light, and I can’t paint without good light. Ain’t gonna happen,” Zoey declared.
    Emily looked to Margot since she provided the only reliable income of the three.
    “Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass,” Margot offered while she scanned the bar for their errant waiter. “Although I do have a fundamental problem with residual ferret shit. But resistance is futile, Emily, you have to know that. Once Zoey sets what she wants in her mind…” She held up her hands as though offering them up to God.
    Before Emily could respond, the lights dimmed and an excessively pierced girl came onto the stage to announce the evening’s act. Zoey shoved her fingers in her mouth to whistle, and then started spitting on the table, which earned her a questionable glance from Margot.
    “Grout.” Zoey gagged. “The Andersens’ bathroom on Waller. My plastic gloves broke.”
    The metal-enhanced girl exited the stage and nodded at two men as they strode past her. One stopped to pick up his bass off of a stand, and the other slung his guitar across his chest. The sight of it tightened Emily’s throat.
    It isn’t him . Her breathing returned to normal. It isn’t him , she repeated to herself. Stop this now. This is bordering on delusional. First, he is probably sleeping in the park right now; second, you will probably never see him again. Learn to live with it. Move on.
    But it could have been him. From the back, the height wasn’t far off, although when the man turned around his hair was shaggy. He wore tiny, round, tinted glasses, and his arms weren’t the arms she remembered. He mumbled a greeting in an Irish accent, which jump-started her heart. A handsome, dreadlocked man joined him a few feet away on stage.
    “That’s him, that’s Christian!” Zoey cried and whistled again wildly, although there wasn’t a chance in hell he could hear her with the shouting around them.
    “Excuse us, folks,” Christian announced to the audience. “We’re fairly new in town, this being