All characters 18+
*
I'd never been to Prentiss before, and it was well out of the city. I wasn't going to be there long, though. I just had to take a company van to a customer's house and look at some utility meters. The neighborhood was all mansions with huge landscaped yards. Under the big trees and past the long hedges, I felt like I was on a nature walk.
When I had taken my readings and gotten back to the public sidewalk, I heard a slapping sound, fast and coming closer — bare feet on flagstones. I had my fingers on the handle of the van door when a running girl burst out of a side gate from the neighboring mansion. She had tufty brown hair, cut short but sloppily, and one hand was clamped on top of her head. She wore pyjama shorts, a sweatshirt, and an expensive-looking white silk scarf.
Her stare was intense and pointed directly at me. She ran right up to me, barely stopping herself within two feet of me, and pushed my hand away from the door handle. She said, in a breathless and almost choked voice, "Do you believe in love at first sight?"
Some people might not think much of that, but because of certain events in my personal history I had to stop and take the question seriously. "Yes," I said.
She inhaled sharply through her nose, closed her eyes, tightened her lips, and swallowed so hard I thought I could hear it a little. Then she opened her eyes and locked them on mine. "That's good," she said. "That makes this easy to explain. I'm in love with you. Have lunch with me."
"Sure," I said. It would be a long drive back. I could take an hour lunch. And the more I looked at her, the more interested I was. There was definitely something strange about her, and her haircut didn't do her any favors, but despite her face's raw, no-makeup look, she was obviously very pretty. Her fingernails looked bitten. Perfect little teeth.
She led me by the wrist through the side door, into the property she'd dashed out of. It wasn't nearly as grand as the place I'd been here to check on, but still much richer than my blood. She moved awkwardly, still keeping one hand on her head. Was she covering the worst bald spot in her terrible haircut? She was trembling, and I thought about love at first sight and suspected she was restraining herself from babbling like an idiot.
She led me into a rec room with two wall televisions of incredible dimensions and an entirely plate-glass outside wall with a great view of some of the landscaping, the sun throwing vivid black shadows under ornamental trees on the artificial hills. With difficulty, she tore her free hand away from my wrist. I bumped into a heavy table under a dust cloth and it made an odd clonking noise. "What's this?" I said thoughtlessly.
"Uh... air hockey," she told me as she opened a mini fridge and brought out a container. "Sorry it's just leftovers." Inside the container were slabs of steak, and even cold, they smelled amazing.
"Did you make this? It smells great."
"Uh," she said, staring at the food. "No, no, I didn't make them. The cook. I can't really cook, sorry."
"That's okay," I said. "I don't cook much either. Leave it to the professionals?"
"Yes!" she said, her eyes meeting mine again and swimming with relief. I knew the issue here. In puppy love you hang on your crush's every word; you live and die by your crush's opinion.
She set the table one-handed with dishes from a little cupboard. As expensive as the room was, the table she chose was just a cheap folding card table with a surface like an ironing board, and two cheap folding chairs like you'd see in a public building that lost more money the more people used it.
She stabbed a piece of meat with her fork, brought it up to her mouth, and bit off a corner. The whole act was a bit stilted, as if she was demonstrating to me that the food was safe to eat. I cut it into pieces and tried one. It was spiced very delicately, a little heavy on the salt, but most notably it was — even cold — the tenderest beef I'd ever eaten.
"I like your chef," I said.
"Me too," she said. "I'd live on cheese crackers without him."
She pulled something else from the cupboard, a small purse. She set it on the table and drew out a driver's license as if performing a card trick, laying it dramatically in front of my plate. It was one of those vertical licenses that California issues to people too young to drink legally. It had a stripe that said she wouldn't be 21 until such and such a date, and that date hadn't come yet. But it had another stripe that said she wouldn't be 18 until a different date, one that already came earlier that year. It even had her name, which she'd forgotten to mention: LYDIA PERYTON ALBERT-SCHAUFER.
"I'm eighteen," she said. "I just wanted you to know."
"Okay," I said.
"And you're... thirty?"
"Late thirties." I dug out my own driver's license for her.
She held it like a magic talisman, her eyes drinking it in greedily, flicking back and forth between the plastic card and my face. "So you're... about twice my age."
"Yeah."
"That's cool. I'll bet you know a lot of things."
"A thing or two," I said. I wasn't sure if she was talking about sex.
She set my license down and tapped hers meaningfully. "Listen," she said, "this is important."
"I get it," I said.
"I mean I'm a real person. In a minute I have to tell you some weird shit, but I promise you I'm not some phantom hitchhiker ghost or anything like that. The house isn't going to turn to dust, you aren't going to wake up in a hospital bed, none of that ghost story stuff."
"Okay," I said, reserving judgment.
"And you're not having a nightmare, you're not dead or dying... uh... what you're about to see isn't a symbol or a warning, it's just what you see. I'm sorry, I don't know what to say, I've never had to get someone ready for this before."
"Okay." With this much buildup, I couldn't help being curious.
"You see my license. That's normal. I swear to God I am a real person. I swear to God I'm almost mostly normal."
I just nodded.
She lowered her eyes for a moment, then jerked them up to meet mine again and continued. "You... you may wonder where everybody else is. Why we're eating in a corner of the house. The truth is that two years ago, my family was killed in a home invasion."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Thanks. I've come to terms with it. But I live here alone now, except for the help, and even the live-ins don't come into the house much. Their cottages are over in the north end." She pointed. I still didn't have a clear grasp of the property's geography, but it seemed like she meant away from the road.
I opened my mouth to say something as neutral as I could.
She held up her hand. "Some of them may have guessed what's going on with me. I never told them, though. I never told anyone. I'm about to tell you. I was in the house the night of the home invasion."
"You weren't working with the robbers, were you?"
She blinked. "That's a creative guess, but no. I was left for dead after they cut my head off." She slipped the scarf off of her neck, and there was a dark line around it, more like an indentation in the flesh than a scar.
"You got better," I joked.
"Kind of," she said. "My head comes off if I'm not paying attention. About as much attention as it takes to breathe manually instead of unconsciously."
"That's —"
"That's true," she said. "Swear to God. And I will show you, but first, feel my pulse." She held out her wrist.
I felt her pulse.
"I'm warm, I have a heartbeat, I'm not a ghost. Understood?"
"Sure," I said.
"I'm going to lift my head off when you tell me you're ready, okay?"
I couldn't stop myself from asking. "What will I see in the wound? Is blood going to come pouring out?"
"No. It's not really a wound anymore. It's just dark."
"All right, go ahead."
With both hands, she gently lifted her head off of her body. She was right. The stump of her neck was a very dark surface, with slight hints of gloss and irregularity. Her head, a foot above where it was supposed to connect to the rest of her, continued to watch me anxiously.
"I... wasn't expecting you to really do it," I said.
"Well, I-I-I, I have," she said. "And it's a relief not having to focus on keeping myself joined up. But... are you okay with this? I mean really, once you get past it, it's nothing. I know it's not scientifically possible, I know it's even kind of spooky or at least it could be seen as spooky, but come on, I'm not, there's not anything really wrong with me, I mean really. It's just this, which I know is weird, but I hope it's not too weird, if you can please just see past it, because —"
Her voice had gotten a little more frantic as I stood up, but it cut off as I leaned over the table and gently kissed her on the lips. I'd given kisses to women with my hands cradling their heads, but never with their heads raised away from their bodies on their own hands. Yes, it was strange. But she was right, it was just this one little thing. Apart from that I was kissing a gorgeous, barely legal girl who was crazy for me, and probably had a nice body under that sweater.
When I broke the kiss she was panting raggedly, her eyes spilling a couple of tears. "Thank you," she whispered.
"Thank you too," I said. "I don't know what was harder, living with that secret or telling it."
"The hardest thing was waiting for you," she breathed, "and I didn't even know I was. Could you please hold my head for a minute?"
I took her head in my hands. It was lighter than I expected — I use a heavier bowling ball. I wasn't sure about the strange dark surface of the stump, so I positioned my hands on her cheeks and ears, like I was getting ready to pull her in for another kiss. Her head was no less animated for being detached. Her eyes still locked onto mine as if magnetically. She still breathed with enough force that I could feel it in my palms. Against the side of one hand, I could feel a blood vessel pumping in her neck. Very real, I thought. Too detailed to be an animatronic, a nightmare, or a dream.
I might have been lost in her eyes (big and hazel, by the way, with grainy iris patterns) for much longer if I hadn't heard a swift zipping sound and glanced up at her headless body to find her undressing, starting with the sweatshirt. From the narrow column of skin this revealed, I could see that she wore nothing underneath it, and she was in good shape, maybe 15 to 20 percent body fat. As she shrugged off the sweatshirt, I got my first look at her breasts: conical B-cups with no sag at all and pale pink nipples almost as thick as my fingers. She had no tan lines but also no tan.
