I inherited Sam when I moved into my crumbling apartment. Most people find cockroaches under the sink or a stray cat in the back yard. I found a ghost who liked to fuck.
I was living alone for the first time in my life. There wasn’t much money after the divorce and my credit rating was so bad that it was hard to find somewhere to live. The decaying concrete-block apartments were on the wrong side of Broadway, so the managers were less fussy in their choice of tenants. They let me live there; and apparently, at one time, they had let Sam live there. Most people eventually left. Sam stayed on.
At first I thought he was a dream, a sensual sojourn, a fantasy. Light, barely-there fingers caressed my skin one night, just the hint of their touch, just enough to raise the fine hairs into awareness. The rustle of the sheets as they were lowered to bare my breasts, the kiss of the moon and the streetlights shining through the narrow window: it all felt like part of my somnolent state.
Open questing lips drifted down from my neck to nestle in the valley between my breasts. A whispered sigh. I shifted slightly to encourage my dream lover to explore my nipples, already hardening in anticipation. I kept my eyes closed. I did not want to wake from this sensual lethargy in a hurry. I pressed my legs tightly together to build the ache of climax. I knew that if I moved to rub myself I’d wake up – and I didn’t want this beautiful torment to end.
The mouth moved to my nipples and circled around them, hot and wet. When the mouth started meandering down my belly I couldn’t hold back any longer. Even if it meant waking up, I had to masturbate. I dropped my hand to the clutch of hair between my legs. It encountered a brief resistance, as if the air were denser somehow. When I moved my fingers into my slick-oil folds, the mouth moved back to my breast.
Even through my spiralling arousal, my fogged brain realized something wan’t right. I was awake, no doubt about it. Yet lips still closed over my nipple. I raised my head and looked down over my body. Nothing. The air seemed to distort slightly, to ripple and coalesce into a denser pattern, like mist floating in from the sea. It drifted upwards and my skin shivered with the absence of touch.
“Who’s there?” I cursed my voice for wavering.
There was no answer, of course.
My arousal withered and dried. I was spooked enough to get dressed, turn on the light, and sit by the open window nursing a cup of cold coffee until morning.
Next day I asked Marisa, my neighbour, if she had heard of anything strange ever happening in my apartment.
She grinned her wide, white smile. “Met Sam, have you? Annie, who lived there before you, swore she’d never move out! Said that ghost was better lovin’ than any man she ever had.” Marisa rolled her eyes. “And hon, let me tell you, she had a few men!”
“Ghost?” My voice was surprisingly steady.
Marisa shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure,” she said. “What else do you call a phantom who makes the sweetest love this side of heaven?”
“He made love to her?” My curiosity was roused.
“Oh, hon, he did! Some mornings Annie walked bow-legged. She said,” Marisa’s voice dropped to a confiding whisper, “that no one gave her orgasms like Sam did. Three, four times a night. He doesn’t come every night, but when he does, he doesn’t leave until morning.”
“Why’s he called Sam? Was he someone who lived here once? How did he die?”
Marisa shrugged. “Don’t know,” she said. “Annie called him Sam. Said she needed a name to call when she came; Sam seemed as good as any.”
“Why did Annie leave?”
“Didn’t do it willingly. She didn’t want to leave Sam. But her mom got sick and she had to move back to Cleveland. She kinda hoped Sam might follow her there, but I guess he didn’t.” She kicked the doormat with her toe. “Guess he likes Denver.”
“Did Annie have a boyfriend?”
“She did when she moved here. He didn’t last long. She said Sam was better than any flesh-and-blood man, but when she brought someone home he didn’t seem to mind. Said she sensed him watching.” She giggled. “Not the jealous kind. The perfect man – or ghost.”
I was beginning to like the sound of this.
Marisa winked. “Hon, if you move out, tell me. I might just switch apartments.”
That night I stripped and climbed into bed, the sheet bunched down around my waist, my breasts invitingly uplifted. He didn’t come. Not that night, nor the ones after that. I was beginning to think that it was all my imagination.
That was when he came.
It was midnight, and I was in that hazy stage between sleep and consciousness, that elusive floating stage when the soul leaves the body and pirouettes around the room. When the mind can finally make random leaps to solve impossible problems. The weary end of the day when every muscle liquefies, so that you sink into the mattress, bonelessly, until the edges of your body blur.
I felt a soft touch on my mouth. A welcome-home kiss. I waited, my heart pounding in anticipation, to see if it was repeated. Again, the merest brush whispered over my lips. I opened my mouth slightly, trying to breathe silently, and I felt a tongue insinuating itself into my mouth. It twisted around my tongue and withdrew.
“Hello, Sam.” I whispered the words into the charged air.
There was no answer, but I could feel the corners of his mouth turn up as he smiled against my skin. He lapped his way down my neck, pausing to lave a collarbone before trailing his way down to my breasts. I turned slightly, encouraging him to take my nipple. He didn’t disappoint; I felt the warm wetness as he closed over my breast.
With a shock, I felt a disembodied hand cup my other breast. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder if Sam had hands as well as a mouth. My acceptance must have encouraged him to become bolder. His hands slid over my skin with the drifting touch I preferred; not rough human hands with their too-heavy press, but a reverent glissade of sensation.
The mouth moved down my belly, lapping, sucking me with open-mouthed kisses that had me writhing as I realized his ultimate destination. I reached to tangle his hair, to steady his head and direct that mouth where I wanted it most, but my hands passed through a slight heaviness in the air, nothing more. Sam didn’t need direction, though; crawling fingers nudged my thighs apart, and those same illusionary fingers crept up my inner thigh to touch the damp curls of my sex. Just when I thought he would push his finger into me, it retreated, to walk its way up the other thigh. It skated briefly over my clit and fell back.
It was a carefully planned assault. Advance, retreat, push forward, fall back: taking me on a roller-coaster ride to release. I don’t know when I started begging, when I wanted the promised orgasm more than pride, when the soaked and twisted sheets under my fingers bunched and wound around my hands – but when the promise alone had become too much, I felt Sam’s mouth on my sex, felt the damp rasp of a tongue as his mouth closed over me. I felt the cat-like flicker of his tongue lapping my clit until I howled, sobbing with release.
I took a shuddering breath, and another, and I felt his whole mouth descend once more, slurping and suckling, fierce and demanding, until my whole body shuddered through a second climax, shocking and sudden. I’d never come twice. Not until Sam.
I lay and let the aftershocks wash over my body. How do you thank a lover who wasn’t really there? I could hardly offer him coffee and lead him to the door. But Sam wasn’t finished. I sprawled in wet abandon on the mattress. My body was already missing the touch of his mouth when I felt the briefest whisper of a kiss on my lips. I dipped my tongue into his mouth, missing the taste of myself when a lover kisses after going down on you. But then . . .
There was not the weight of a body lying over me, nor the rasp of wiry hairs on the insides of my thighs. There was simply the unmistakable feeling of fullness, of a fat, turgid penis pushing inside me. I gasped and angled my pelvis to better accept his thrusts. He continued to push, slowly, until he was sheathed all the way. He was large. He was thick and firm. I clenched to see if I could feel contours, to see if his fatness was illusory. He swelled inside me and I felt the glorious friction of real sex as he began to move slowly in and out.
I reached between my legs, curious to see what he felt like. I missed encountering hairy sacks, but I ran a finger around my stretched opening. This was no illusion: someone, something, was inside me, fucking me to a steady rhythm. I moved my hand, unsure of where to place it. There were no buttocks to grasp, no back to run my hand along, no balls to tease. I settled for grasping the mattress on either side of me, and let him fuck me.
He held a relentless, slow-building tempo. The sensation of one-dimensional sex was initially unnerving. The only sensation was that of limited touch; there was no body resting on mine, no musky male sweat; the only scent was my own sharp arousal. There weren’t the grunts and groans and creaks of lovemaking. There wasn’t the visual stimulus of a body lost in pleasure. No, it was more like masturbating with a vibrator – except that I didn’t have to do the work.
My analytic fancy shattered as he brought me sweetly towards climax. I was amazed: I’d never come from penetration alone. Sam moved faster now in my wetness. His thrusts disintegrated into the jagged spurts of a man on the brink. As I spasmed around him, I felt his unmistakable wet, spreading warmth inside.
I relaxed. He relaxed. I could feel him softening; his spend, viscous and hot, trickled onto the bed. I put a finger down to catch it but, like the phallus, it was an illusion.
“Sam.” I spoke his name out loud. “You can come back any time.”
His head was between my legs again. I was wrapped in the cocoon of his satisfaction.
I stayed in that apartment for seven years. Sam stayed with me all that time. Even when I had a near-serious, near-permanent relationship with Richard, I always made sure I was alone at least one night every week for Sam. Eventually Richard left, but Sam stayed.
The eviction notice came as a shock. I knew my rundown neighbourhood was becoming trendy as real estate prices in Denver soared, but I hadn’t expected it to change that quickly. They were pulling down the old apartments and building modern condominiums. Luxury buildings, ridiculous prices.
That night, after Sam’s loving had made me weak from more than sex, I told him. “Come with me,” I said. “I don’t know where I’m going yet, but please, come, too.”
There was no answer. There never was on those few occasions that I had addressed him directly, but I thought I detected a palpable sadness. I knew then: Sam would never leave this space.
I live on the other side of Broadway now, in a sleek modern condominium that echoes with loneliness, especially on the hot dry Denver nights that remind me most of Sam. His apartment is long gone, but I’ve studied the block that has risen in its place. Apartment 3C. That is his space. I never knew the exact boundaries of his realm, but apartment 3C contains the space that used to be the bedroom. In the five years since its construction, that apartment has come on the market six times.
I’ve saved and have the deposit now; the next time apartment 3C is for sale, I’ll be ready.
I hope Sam remembers me.