The gentle grope at his leg was at once familiar and strange, the touch of an almost forgotten lover. But this caress was light and insistent, not the bold contact Mason was use to nudging at him in the middle of the night. Eric's demanding wake-up calls had always been smooth and heavy, full of need and passion. This fluttering, insistent pull to his thigh was in the old familiar spot, but it felt wrong, foreign, as if a stranger was in bed with him. It wasn't like Eric, but then it couldn't be. Eric was dead.
"What...Who's there?"
Jerking awake with a start, Mason woke panting, heart thundering under his bare ribs, sheets clenched in his fists, a fine sheen of sweat making his pajama bottoms cling to his legs. His sleep blurred vision wavered a bleary focus, the deeper shadows in the corners of the room a pitch black, their edges reaching out like slender gray arms to embrace the other objects in the dark room.
"Is someone there?"
Mason squinted and brushed his bangs out of his eyes, a thin white haze blurring his sight more than usual for a few seconds. When still nothing in the room was recognizable, he fumbled for his glasses on the bedside table, knocking into the lamp and shoving a book he had been reading earlier to the floor.
Glasses on and eyes focusing in the shadowed gloom, Mason blinked several times to dispel what seemed like a cloud of fog hanging over the bottom of the bed. A puff of chill night air seeped under the small window he had propped open a crack before going to bed. The tiny gust barely ruffled the curtains but the fog disappeared so fast Mason doubted it was there to begun with. A few embers in the fireplace on the wall opposite his bed glowed to life briefly then faded out as the breeze did the same.
Heart still pounding, he took his glasses back off and tossed them on the stand, slipping under the thick down comforter as he did so. The first unnerving fight-or-flight response faded away as he lay back to the comfort of the thick pillow and warm blankets
His thigh tingled where he'd imagined the hand touching him and he rubbed over it, his fingers automatically sliding to his groin to fondle his sudden erection. He always got hard when he was scared. Eric had loved watching horror movies with him naked on the couch. They rarely even got to see the end of the movie.
He worked his hand faster determined to get some pleasure from the disturbed sleep. His cock was hard as nails, but the mental stimulus wasn't cooperating. He gave up after a few minutes, having achieved nothing but an aching wrist and a sore, chaffed cock. Even conjuring up images of Eric hadn't helped.
The gloomy autumn weather here fit his mood and the barren sea cliffs and remote location made him feel secure and comfortable to be alone with his thoughts. Not that his thoughts were all that pleasant of late. He used to wonder if you could die from a broken heart if he should lend the process a hand and speed it up. He had been glad these fleeting thoughts hadn't lingered or intensified. They had scared him.
But now he had a new source to scare him--a haunted bedroom in a creaking old Maine estate. There wasn't any alcohol in the room, Mason hadn't had a drink in ages and yet he'd just caught a whiff of brandy on that faint, chilly draft.
)
