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A brush with death brings Leah closer to the ghosts she longs to find and throws her into the arms of the troubled scuba instructor who saves her.
Dale, an Operation Enduring Freedom Veteran, is haunted by his own restless spirits. He's on a hunt for forgiveness, and the Caribbean Sea is his hunting ground.
The peace they search for lies in the bond they never suspected they shared.
I exhale and watch bubbles float off into the churning blue above me. I draw another breath, except this time, there is no air. My lungs, in all their twenty-seven years of finding no resistance to their whims, of drawing in sweet gulps, huffs, and puffs, meet a wall of stainless steel. With the next try, that wall slams into my diaphragm.
My left hand grasps the air pressure gauge as it bobs and snakes down by my hip. The dial’s needle hovers at a thick black line highlighted in red. Zero pounds per square inch.
I’m seventy feet below the Caribbean Sea, and I’m out of air.
Heavy nausea grabs hold of my gut and throat. I almost spit out the regulator mouthpiece, but reason kicks in. I stop myself just in time.
Don’t panic. Stay calm.
But it’s so hard to follow my own instructions. The warm water cradling my body has no mercy for this tiny, helpless human, and it turns to ice around me, needling my skin with cold until I’m numb. I hold my final breath. Everything in me screams out the wrongness of this. The world on the other side of my mask fuzzes out. My mind will soon follow if I don’t do something. Now.
Remember the training. Just find another diver.
Thank God, one of the instructors is less than ten yards away. My finned feet power me to Dale’s side with five hard kicks. He’s tucking something into a waist bag, and when I thrust my air pressure gauge into his face, at first he jerks away from it. Then his eyes widen as realization hits.
I expect him to immediately reach for his spare regulator, the savior of rubber and metal, my sole hope if I want any fate other than drowning. Instead, he brings his large, strong hands to my face. The honey-gold flecks within his irises glint and flash in what filmy light breaches the yards of water between the surface and my airless lungs. There’s no warmth down here, and I’m out of time.
Dale is my only hope.
I let him capture my face between his palms and hold me with his anchor eyes. My heart beats a fluttery, jerky rhythm, and I count—One. Two-three. Four. Five-six-seven—and wait as though I’m not moments from my death.
As though I have all the time in the world.
But whatever he’s doing, it’s working. I’m calmer. For the first time since I found nothing behind my inhale, my heart beats steady and true. He gives me a firm nod, and I return the gesture.
It’s then, only then, that he unhooks the spare regulator from his dive vest. His other hand comes to the mouthpiece I still clench in my teeth. He brushes his fingers against my lips as he pulls the device free, and I give it up reluctantly even though it’s totally useless. A small, salty flow of water hits my tongue, and I swallow it down—the first of what could turn out to be a whole ocean’s worth if we mess up this maneuver.
They say write what you know, so Jessica Bayliss did. Her story, BREATHLESS, was inspired by her own experience running out of air on a scuba dive—except without all the steamy romance and eerie paranormal happenings. Alas, real life. Obviously, she survived. Her genre-bending fiction holds a little something for everyone. A lover of ghost tales and horror since her days scanning VHS rental shelves—admittedly with eyes half-averted from the gory covers—a touch of the mysterious always finds a home in Jessica’s work. Romance with a dash of supernatural. Horror with a bit of humor. You get the gist. Jessica also writes across age groups and is a firm believer in the motto: there is a new reader born every day, whether young or not-so-young.
Look for her upcoming releases: TEN PAST CLOSING, a YA contemporary thriller (Sky Pony Press, Spring 2018), and BROKEN CHORDS, a YA horror novella (Leap Books, October 2017). You can find her story “Care of the Undead Dog” in ZOMBIE CHUNKS, which came out earlier this year. Read about all of Jessica’s books and stories here.
Kelly had a history of picking the wrong guy, but destiny had its own twisted plan for her. She could not change what destiny had in store for her, but she could learn to accept it. With change came Eric and he was one-hundred percent Alpha bad boy. Kelly knew one thing when it came to Eric...
He drove her absolutely crazy.
Eric knew as soon as he scented her, and her smell invaded his senses, that she was his mate. An alpha did not let go of his mate for anything.... she was his. He would fight for her. He would guide her. He would love her.
And with other wolves now after her… he would protect her at all cost.
I am a Texas born wife, mother, and writer! I write words to enchant your soul and fill your heart with love. I write Historical Romance, Historical Paranormal Romance, and Contemporary Paranormal Romance.
Jimmie Putnam is an ordinary man by any measure. By day, he works as a law
clerk. At night, when he can't fight the cravings, he becomes a collector. He
takes great care of his human Things; buying them cherry lipstick and reading to
them from his journal. When they've been on their best behavior, he even takes
them out of his freezers...
Sometimes, the need is just too deep.
Florel Ross has been mostly invisible since the death of her twin, who died
twenty years ago at the hands of a serial killer. Obsessed with justice, Florel
is willing to risk anything for the answers she craves: What goes on in the mind
of a serial killer?
When the two yearnings collide, will it be justice or just
Things?
My name is James “Jimmie” William Putnam, Jr. I apologize. I’m actually a very polite man. I just don’t do well on so little sleep or when my mind is racing. I should have introduced myself in the beginning. It was very sloppy of me. I hope you will forgive me. I’m not a perfect man by any stretch. With that said, I have to be candid with you. This is, after all, my story. I refuse to censor myself. So if you can’t handle it, I suggest you stop reading now. My version of things won’t be like the stupid newspaper articles referring readers to another page for more information with the worlds “in lieu of.” I collect those too, anything I can find written about them or me, tiny reminders of my Things. I keep them in a scrapbook. Momma would be pleased.
I’m thirty-five years old. I work as a clerk at Ducharme, (he’s dead) Tweed, (he’s the dead guy’s son by marriage) Hadley & Roderick. These guys, all four of them, think they own me. Sorry, but I’ll never be anyone’s Thing. Pretentious pricks think their shit doesn’t stink, all because they have the word esquire behind their names. All because their parents had the cash to send them to fancy schools with fancy names. All of them think they are God. None of them respect me.
They make fun of me for wearing a wedding band all these years from a woman who left me with maxed out credit cards and an ugly cat. That’s fine. I’m a man of my word, in spite of Shelia. The cat’s long gone; out back. They don’t get that. Although I want to scream at them that they can’t commit, I say nothing. They tell me I need to get out more, that my dick’s going to fall off if I don’t start using it soon. If they only knew. I press my lips together and smile. I tell them I swore off women years ago. They look at me with pity, shrug, and pile more work on me. I tell them I don’t have time to date. More work. More pity. More slavery.
It’s fine. I use it to my advantage. I allow them to underestimate me. I’m actually a really smart guy. Just because I got most of my smarts on the streets and at a community college, not the Ivy League, doesn’t mean I couldn’t beat a single one of them in a game of paper-push bankruptcy style law. The truth is, I do all their work for them anyway. Don’t let the stutter fool you, I’m a fast learner.
I’ve been here at the firm since 2005, back when I was with blissfully hopeful with Shelia. In those days it was a refuge for me. I didn’t mind coming in early to get away from the landlady who sang the national anthem to her cats and told us to keep the music down. It was a relief to be away from Shelia’s loud-mouthed cackling and endless phone calls to her even louder mother. I spent early mornings filing cases in massive cabinets out back. I miss those cabinets; everything in order, in its place, like my Things in the freezer. These days we use hard drives. There’s nothing to smell, touch, or check on.
I don’t get the same peace I once did at the office. It might be because the landlady’s gone and I haven’t heard from Shelia or her mother in years. Living alone, you don’t really need a place to escape to. Now coming to the firm is more of a chore. I’d rather be home with my Things out in the barn.
They say that two out of three ain’t bad. I wonder what they say about three out of four. Only one of the partners in in today. Roderick isn’t a bad guy. I get his complex and why he thinks he’s a god. He’s been treated that way since he was a kid. He still takes his mother to lunch on Thursdays at noon. It’s the one appointment he’s never late for.
I don’t mind slow days like these. They give me time for thinking and planning. I have a lot of work to do in that area. Normally, I take my time. Lately, my urges have been too strong. I’ve never collected as quickly as I’m about to now, with another Thing, tonight.
Cravings are strange like that. You can never tell exactly when they will come on. For me, killing is like craving ice cream. It might be why I keep my Things in the freezer, besides the obvious reasons. Anyway, I’m not sure if it’s the odd numbers or the other obsessions that are getting harder to ignore. Maybe it’s just that the cravings never go away once you get a taste for it, like hot fudge on a banana split. Maybe it’s that the last few have been such fighters, challenging me to work harder and harder to obtain them. I’ve always been a hard worker, never one to turn down a dare or challenge.
Even as a kid, there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do. When I did play with other kids in the neighborhood, because Momma forced me to, I was the kid who would climb the highest tree or pick up the fattest salamander bare-handed. I was the kid who drove past Mr. Vitous’ ‘Beware of Dogs’ and ‘No Trespassing’ signs to peek at the old man passed out in his chair. It’s probably when I got my fascination with watching things. Also, being the kid who would do anything helped take attention away from my stutter.
I’ve always been wired a little bit different. It’s not enough that anyone would notice, aside from my speech. Because of it, I’ve focused—hyper focused—on everything. It was a matter of survival and a lesson my Things could have learned from me. Even on the playground, I made sure things went my way. I had a group of kids who did what I said simply because they knew I’d keep things interesting. At the same time, I wished they’d go away. I didn’t see value in their requests for play dates. I didn’t have much fun hanging out with them after school. It was merely something to do to shut my mother up. Secretly, I wanted to be in my room reading and studying the encyclopedia. I like learning. And I learn fast. I told you that. I hope you are listening. Never judge a person by the way they talk. I’m a living example of that.
People always thought I was dumb. In third grade, I was in the remedial reading class, something Momma insisted on so I could keep being on disability. The truth was, I could read full length novels in my head but when it was my turn to read aloud, something in my brain shut down and my words came out twisted, probably guilt and worry about not wanting to betray Momma. Betrayal is the worst, and I still struggle with it now. I stuttered through the shortest of sentences and turned blood red when teachers said things like, “It’s okay, not everyone’s a reader.”
Momma would argue, telling them that I liked to read for fun. She didn’t mean it. She laughed, telling me they were dumb when we got in the car. She’d spend the whole drive home telling me every single thing she loved about me. She counted them, like I count my Things. Then she’d go back and say the same thing, threatening lawsuits if they didn’t do something more – testing, anything. They didn’t listen. They thought she was crazy as a bat. Momma was misunderstood too, a fact she called “intentional” and proof of her intelligence. She’d repeat it over and over in her gravelly voice. When she said it, she’d look at me to be sure I understood.
It was strange, people said, that I didn’t have a dad or a brother or sister to play with. “Only children are odd,” they’d say. Maybe you live up to the things people say about you. Either way, Momma taught me not to worry so much what people thought of me. I tried, I really did. Sometimes it even worked. Other times, even now, it doesn’t work so well.
Frankly, I was glad I didn’t have a sibling, or even a dad. Momma said only children were smarter, more capable of getting their way. Momma mostly left me alone. She had her hands full with her pills, bottles, and three-pack-a-day habit. Momma spent nights sipping on vodka and talking on the phone to any man she could get to listen. Luckily, she never brought them home for more than a month in a row.
See, that’s the thing. People thought of Momma as a bad mother. Truth was, she was perfect for me. She left me alone and never tried to change me. She only wanted to improve me. She told me the system sucked and that she was going to teach me how to work it. She said it was the key to survival and she only wanted the best for me. I believed her. Momma was always loyal.
She was the opposite of Shelia, who was always nagging. Momma collected too. Not my kind of Things though. She collected little figurines of animals. Her favorite was an orange glass cat. I still feel bad that I broke it when I was ten and buried it under her shed. When she died, I tried to go back and dig it up. I never did find it. I feel bad about that.
Tonight I’m going to even the score. Sweet sixteen has me on my toes. I jump when the phone rings. The anticipation is one of my favorite parts. The killing, well, that’s okay. Really, it’s about the planning and the control. We’ll get to that later, if you care to join me. You can be the cherry on top. I like having an audience.
Trailer:
About the Author:
Erin Lee is a freelance writer and therapist chasing a crazy dream one reality
at a time. She is the author of Crazy Like Me, a novel published in 2015
by Savant Books and Publications, LLC, Wave to Papa, 2015, by Limitless
Publishing, LLC and Nine Lives (2016). She’s also author of Alters,
Host, and Merge of the “Lola, Party of Eight Series,” When I’m
Dead, Take Me As I Am, Greener, Something Blue, Once
Upon a Vow and 99 Bottles. She also penned Her Name Was Sam,
an LGBTQ awareness novella. She is author of Losing Faith, and co-author
of The Morning After with Black Rose Writing. These days, she spends her
free time working on the sequels to this novel, Jimmie’s Ice Cream and
Thing Fifteen.
Lee is a co-founder of the Escape From Reality Series. She, along with authors
Sara Schoen and Taylor Henderson, are working with twenty other authors to bring
the hopes, dreams, fears and terrors of a tiny fictional town alive. The town
and its setting is exactly the type of place a man like Jimmie might escape to
as the bodies thawed.
Lee holds a master’s degree in psychology and works with at-risk families and as
a court appointed special advocate. She cannot write horror with the lights off.
However, these days, she’s getting braver and dimming them. She’ll get there . .
.
