Beads of sweat hang like tiny droplets of water on my forehead, with some of them dripping past my temples to the bedsheet I'm laying on. Even with this being summer, somewhere at the back of my mind, I'm aware the whole room feels hotter than usual.

Trying to move my limbs, they are stiff with the fatigue within every inch of me. Another try at stirring, I feel there's an added weight coiled across my abdomen from ribcage to ribcage that I can't figure out what it is.

It's hard to open my eyes.

It's hard to move my body.

I can't remember how much I've had to drink the night before, but I know it must have been a lot to be this beat up.

A subtle movement of something on my right side, and the shift of whatever is laying on top of my stomach, had me pry my eyes open. Bursts of heat spread in my bones with every fiber of nerves spasming on alert that something is laying with me on my bed.

With a shaky hand, as fast as I can, I reach on my bedside table to fumble with the light switch because the whole apartment is dark. All the numbness I felt just a few seconds ago disappear with the urgency of finding out what's beside me. Finally, able to switch the darn thing on, I turn, only to come face to face with a back of a stark-naked man peacefully snoring away.

Blinking my eyes, my brows pulled inward with deep thinking as to whom the man may be. I don't think I brought home anybody with me. Did I?

His features, studying them, trying to think perhaps it's someone I might recognize. His ass is well rounded off, thinking to myself, but nothing else seems to be appealing to my eyes. Reluctantly, I inch my hand to his side, and with my forefinger, I poke.

"Hey." I poke harder. "Hey, you."

The guy groans, and again, I try to see if I can recognize his voice. Still, nothing comes to mind as he slowly, lazily, stretch himself like a cat before turning his head around. He's tired, sleepy eyes flutter to mine, and he smiles.

"Hey." His outstretched fingers try to reach my arm, but I pull away.

"Err... who the bloody hell are you?"

His eyes wide with confusion, his hands go up on his face to wipe the sleep away. "What? We had sex last night. Don't you remember?"

More downward pull of my eyebrows since even as he speaks and declares what we did, my fuzzy mind still doesn't remember him, or us doing anything like that. How drunk was I? Getting tired of trying, I settle for studying the naked man who's now unsure of how to conduct himself. Looking him up and down, I don't stop the grunt of disappointment from within my throat to escape my lips.

From his brown, doe-eyes, that I think are a bit too big for his long face, to his not so appealing body shape, he didn't look like someone I would go for. Thinking I must have thought he at least had a nice, well-defined core in my drunken stupor to take him home with me, but even that proves to be wrong since all I see is one big pack. My eyes wander down to his... Man! No wonder I don't remember the sex. Not much down there either.

"Well..." I scratch the side of my face. "Hope you had your fun. Now, will you be a dear and get the fuck out?"

"What?" His eyes glance past me to my bedside table. "Lady, have you seen the time? It's four in the morning."

"I can see that." Getting down from my bed, my vision solely on him, I pick up his scattered clothes from the floor. "But see, I didn't ask about the time. I asked you to get the fuck out." Throwing his clothes at him, I begin taking steps backward. "Be sure to be gone by the time I get out of the bathroom."

"Are you serious?"

With a single thought in my mind being of him out of my house, I ignore his question and took more steps back. Turning fully to my bathroom door, the handwritten signboard that I wrote and hung there the moment I moved into this house stood bright and imposing. 'No ghosts past this point. It's a freaking bathroom, and I love my fucking privacy. Thank you' When I wrote that, I didn't think they would actually listen. Closing the door, and locking it behind me, his frustrated swearing travels through the cracks of my door to my ears with the words 'fucking psycho' that made me almost want to laugh.

He has no idea!

Opening back up the bathroom door, peeking only my head out, a deep satisfaction settles on my chest as I found the apartment empty from any traces of him. Nothing seems to be disturbed as I walk a short distance to my bed. Reaching my hand out to grab my phone, I'm startled midway by a voice coming from somewhere behind me.

"Dang, Camilla. That was harsh as fuck. I almost wanted to talk to the poor guy."

I don't bother hiding my frustration. I had high hopes I would be able to rest. Apparently not.

"Seriously? At this time?" I throw my hand up as I turn around to glare at my sister. "Aren't you supposed to be sleeping? Or do whatever the hell ghosts do at four in the morning?"

Shrugging her shoulders, she walks to my dressing table and starts inspecting the content I have placed on top of it. She doesn't touch, just look. Always been her way. "You know we don't sleep dumb ass, and hey, I waited for you to get out of the bathroom first to talk to you. See, I'm respecting your boundaries here, cut me some slack."

"Yeah right." I roll my eyes. "What do you want, Calla? It's way too early."

Looking at me, she raises her hand and plants it on top of her chest. "You wound me, Camilla. You wound me deeply. Can't I pop up to say hello to my little sister unless I have something I need?"

"Little sister my ass. We are three minutes apart. And tell me, when did you ever not need something from me?" Walking closer to the blonde girl now standing in the middle of my apartment, same features as my own stares back at me. Same body shape, same hair color, same face, down to the few freckles on our left cheeks. Except for the little detail of her being very dead. Dead for real. Dead for thirteen years now.

"I'm still older."

"Well, it is good to see you, Calla. Really, it is. But it's too damn early." Walking away from her, I reach my small kitchen tucked away in the corner furthest from my bed to prepare a much-needed coffee. "I'm tired, I'm hungover, and I need to get ready to go to work and college after that."

Following me, her long, black gown that hides her legs completely, glides along my wooden floor until she sits down on the long stool at the kitchen counter. "I don't know why you bother working," she says. "Mom and dad are loaded."

"Yeah, well, I don't want to rely on their money anymore. I'm done being a disappointment to them. You want some?" Moving a cup of steaming coffee closer to her, I grin. "Oh, right, I forgot. You're not actually here."

"Ha, ha. Very funny."

"Seriously though, what do you want?"

"Well, damn. Okay fine." Calla's hands settle on the top of my counter and she folds them closer to her chest. I'm not sure she can fill the rough edge of the wood on her skin. Pale hands that have long lost their lively hues it's the only identification to her being a ghost. They all have that loss of pigmentation on them. "Something is going down back at home. I decided to go check on mom and dad yesterday and seriously, you should see the buzzing of people around decorating left and right. I think mom is about to lose her damn mind all over again."

"Really?" Placing my cup down, a quick curiosity takes over my front mind before I dismiss it just as quickly. Deciding I don't want to know too much of what's going on there, too many bad memories, I reach for my cup again. "I'm sure it's nothing. Just more of the many parties."

"You still didn't forgive them, did you?"

"I was seven, Calla. I needed them." Calla's lips quiver and her hand reach out to my own. I don't feel the touch of skin to skin. I know that. She knows that, but she still does it anyway. She has always done so. From that first day she showed up a few weeks after her funeral. When my parent's wide, almost scared eyes turned to look at each other, then look at me once I told them the good news, or so I thought. When everything went downhill for me from the forced hours I had to endure by the therapist's hell-bent into convincing me I wasn't seeing my sister. That it was all in my head as a way to cope with the loss of my twin. My Identical twin.

Nothing worked. How could it when Calla was always there? At every therapist's appointment. New and old as they worked hard to tell me she wasn't there. It droved my parents crazy. More desperate.

How could it work, when Calla introduced me to her other ghost friends that began enjoying spending time with me as much as I enjoyed spending time with them? At that age, desperate for friends because at school I was the new freak, I welcomed whoever ghost wanted to talk to me.

How come you're growing up the same way I'm growing up if you died when we were seven years old? I had asked my sister once. We were twelve by then, I think.

Her answer, I'm only dead on this earth, silly. I'm not dead over here. Wherever here was? I didn't ask at that time. Happy to have her by my side, nothing else mattered.

Over the years, I had so many ghosts roaming around me; it began to be a little daunting. To tune them down, I turned to nightclubs and alcohol. I found there were much fewer ghosts lurking around me whenever I was drunk.

Of course, this didn't help the situation with my parents. Ergo, more therapy that only drove us further apart.

"I'm sorry, Camilla." Calla's small voice is almost a whisper as it travels from her lips to my ears wanting me to understand how she wishes things were different. "I just... thought you should know. Listen, I'm being called back Under, I'll come see you as soon as I can, okay?" Her eyes on mine, she doesn't wait for my answer that I'm not sure I want to give. Stay, please, I want to say, but there are rules with ghosts. A small smile on her lips is what I see as she fades away in a blur of blended colors between her pale skin and the black gown she's wearing until I'm alone again.

A substantial heaviness settles deep within myself that has my fingers itching to reach for another drink of whisky in my fridge. A vibration of my phone on the countertop makes me abandon that thought as a message from my mother stares back at me.

'We want you to come home this Saturday. We have an important event and we think you should be there. Put on something nice.'

Just thoughts of going back to that God-forsaken town are enough to make me cringe. Cryptic Valley. Who names a town like that if they didn't want weird shit to happen to its people?

Deciding I may as well go to work early, I get ready and head to the only other place that makes me feel like I'm doing something with my life.

*****

Two hours into my work, I'm standing at the ancient Greek antiques, wiping and organizing, when the feeling of something I've begun taking notice of it happening more often than ever before, washes over me.

The sensation starts with the tingling of my tattoo behind my left shoulder. I'm calling it a tattoo, but really, I don't recall ever, at any point in my life, going to any tattoo artist to get it. The thing just sorts of showed up out of nowhere and plant itself there.

It's a freaky kind of tattoo if you ask me. It looks like some sort of conjoined hearts in an uneven cycle, with vines of some sort extending outwards. I was jolted awake one day, in the middle of the night, with my shoulder feeling like its under attack. It was fast and intense. In the morning inspecting myself, I had a tattoo.

The tingling of my tattoo still there, intensifying each passing second, there's a shift of aura around the whole shop. Eyes wide with the change, trying to understand what's going on, my hairs on the back of my neck, my arms, stand up on end. Nostrils begin to pull air deeper now because it's getting harder to breathe. It comes easily to my mind that this can't be a ghost causing the change. Ghost don't spook me, and most certainly don't disturb the entire atmosphere of the space they occupy.

Eyes roaming around, I lock my sight on Ms Ophelia, my boss, wanting to see if she feels it. Her nose deep into yesterday's sales sheet, round glasses hanging almost at the tip of her nose, her eyes, her demeanour doesn't look like she feels anything else. From this angle, nothing seems amiss to her.

And then it's gone, just as it came. My shoulder stops tingling. Everything goes back to normal like nothing even happen in the first place. But I know, I know something did. Something was in here with us. Briefly but definitely.

Letting go of a loud breath, my lungs expand with the normal air that I can take in now. Ms Ophelia looks up from her spreadsheet and her eyes find mine instantly. "Are you okay there, dearie?"

I swallow and bob my head. "Yeah, yeah, I'm okay. Everything is just fine."

Almost absently, my hand dash at the back of my neck to soothe the nerves that still know even if things are back to normal, something had made them hyper-aware of the occurrence of something unnatural.