Nico said no more. He’d closed down to her, his arms crossed over his chest, no eye contact.

  “I know you aren’t Kingsley,” she said again. “But I am me. And I am sort of slightly very, very kinky. We’re still getting to know each other. You should know this is something I like to do, even if we never do it together.”

  Slowly he nodded. Slowly he met her eyes again. Slowly, he uncrossed his arms, stood up straight, and they set off walking again. Slowly.

  “Maybe if I knew why you liked it?” Nico said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Why do you like older women? You just do. It’s your taste. I like kink. I like playing with others. I like watching. I like helping. My favorite sessions with clients are the ones with married couples. The husband and I dominate his wife together. It’s sexy and fun and...well, that’s it. It’s sexy and fun. And it wouldn’t have to be full-on sex. Just a blowjob would make my day.”

  Nico shook his head but she could see the first hint of a smile on his face. “You are...”

  “Insane?” she said.

  “Interesting.” He paused. “And a little insane.”

  “Comes with the territory.”

  She knew he’d come to terms with her request when he slid his arm around her waist again as they walked.

  “I’m not saying no to it,” he said as they turned a corner. Nora knew they were close to the bay. Here the autumn smells mixed with saltwater in her nose. “I wouldn’t say no to anything you really wanted.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying...how does that happen?”

  “What?”

  “How do you find someone to do that?” he asked. “You can’t just ask someone to come over and blow your boyfriend, can you?”

  “I can,” she said. “But I know some interesting people back home.”

  “We’re not at home,” he said. “Do you know anyone in this town?”

  “No,” she said. “But I could still find a girl to play with. Easy.”

  “Easy?”

  “Easy,” she said. “If we’re talking about finding a girl to fool around with you while I watch? Easy as pie.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Nico said.

  “I can prove it if you let me.”

  “What if I don’t like her?” Nico asked, shrugging. “What if she’s your type but not mine?”

  “I would never inflict a woman on you who you weren’t excited to be with. We’ll just find Salem’s finest retirement community.”

  Nico slapped her ass. “I like younger women, too,” he said.

  “Liar. You do not.”

  “I’ve never been with a woman my age, but sometimes I find them attractive. I choose to be with older women because I like that they have experience and their own lives and jobs.”

  “So you’re saying for a fling, I can find us a horny twenty-something?”

  “If she wants to be with me...”

  “Nico, you’re twenty-six, French, and you own your own winery. You’re also sexy as hell. This is not going to be a challenge.”

  “I think it’s going to be a challenge.”

  “So are you saying yes? You’ll do it?” Nora asked.

  “If I like her too,” he said again. “And if it happens naturally. Don’t try to make it happen. She has to like us and we have to like her. Okay?”

  “I accept those terms,” Nora said. She held out her hand to shake and Nico took it like it was a snake about to bite him. Then he wrapped his fingers around hers and pulled her roughly to him for a long kiss.

  “You,” he said, “could talk me into anything.”

  “Don’t say things like that,” Nora said. “Because I will.”

  He released her and Nora turned them down a side street.

  “Where are we going?” Nico asked. Up ahead was a bright streetlight, the kind that marked commercial areas.

  “To find us a girl.”

  Chapter Seven

  Nico made a sound Nora had only ever heard Frenchmen make—a soft groan of exasperation mixed with frustration and a soupçon of utter disbelief. Nora found it adorable. She didn’t tell Nico that.

  “There’s a couple of very nice hotels up this way,” Nora said. “We would have stayed at one, but they were all booked for Halloween. We’ll go into the hotel bar and hang out and if a cute lonely girl shows up, we’ll invite her to our table. Eleven o’clock is prime cute-girl hunting time.”

  “My girlfriend wants to watch another girl suck me off. This is not what I had in mind for Halloween,” he said.

  “Kinky Halloween is different from Vanilla Halloween,” Nora said. “I should have warned you.”

  “Hmm,” was all he said to that, followed soon by a second “Hmm.”

  “Here’s the thing, Moosh. You’re very sexy when you’re fucking. I like to look at you when you’re fucking. You’re usually pretty guarded, but you’re not so guarded—”

  “When I’m fucking, yes.”

  “But...when you’re fucking, I’m being fucked. Hard to concentrate on the show when I’m part of the show. Understand?”

  He made that sound again.

  “It is a power trip, too,” she admitted. “Giving a woman the order to pleasure you? Ordering you to let her?” Nora leaned against a light pole and put the back of her hand on her forehead. “Be still my horny heart.” She stood up and turned around. “Oh...”

  “What?” Nico asked. Nora pointed at a green sign nailed to a telephone pole.

  “It says the cemetery’s down that way,” she said, pointing down a side street. “You want to see if we can find a ghost before we find a girl?”

  “I would much rather go ghost-hunting than girl-hunting.”

  “Ghosts first,” she said. “Girls after.”

  As they walked to the cemetery down the block, Nora explained to Nico who they were looking for. The Smiling Girl, dead a decade, according to their B&B owner. Very pretty. Went to meet her boyfriend for a tryst, got her throat slit instead.

  “And,” Nora continued, “supposedly she’ll walk next to you if you’re stupid enough to stroll through the graveyard at midnight.”

  “It’s eleven,” Nico said.

  “Maybe she’s up early.”

  They stood at the edge of the cemetery next to the iron gate, slightly ajar. Red maples lined the stone fence, their heavy branches swaying in the wind and dropping scarlet leaves around them. Inside the cemetery, Nora spied row after row after row of gothic-looking tombstones.

  “Looks kind of spooky in there,” Nora said.

  “It’s a cemetery,” Nico said. “What is it supposed to look like? Cheerful?”

  “Good point.”

  Hand in hand they entered the cemetery. They stayed on the main path and walked slowly through the graveyard. It wasn’t large—merely one city block—but it was one of the creepier cemeteries Nora had ever visited. Considering she lived near one of New Orleans’s famous crypt yards, that was saying something.

  The headstones were so old and weathered that she could barely read the names on them. The trees were overgrown and let in little light from the surrounding streets. She and Nico walked very close to each other, holding hands, and didn’t stray from the path. She wasn’t scared of hands reaching out of the ground or ghosts or demons, but in a cemetery this old and neglected, there was a good chance there were rocks or divots or branches just waiting to break the ankles of unsuspecting tourists.

  “What do you think?” Nora asked.

  “It’s beautiful,” Nico said.

  She knew exactly what he meant. It did look like something off a vintage Halloween postcard.

  “Do you ever think about where you’re going to be buried?” Nico asked.

  “That’s such a French question.”

  Nico laughed softly. “I want to be buried in my vines,” he said. “So my body can nourish them.”

  “Too bad. Kingsley already bought a family crypt in New Orleans. You have a shelf.”

  “I have a shelf?”

  “It’s under my shelf.”

  “You’ll be on top of me for eternity?”

  Nora nodded.

  “I can live with that. No, not live with it...”

  Nora laughed and put her arm through Nico’s. They’d made it halfway along the main path and were nearing the bend in the U that would, she assumed, lead them back to the front gates.

  “You see any ghosts?” Nora asked.

  “Not a one,” Nico said. “You?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t see any either,” said a woman from behind them.

  Chapter Eight

  Nora screamed and Nico spun around so fast his boots sent gravel flying everywhere.

  “Oh, oh...sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  The woman apologizing was about Nico’s age, wearing an off-the-rack sexy witch costume that showed ample bare flesh. The tip of the pointed hat on her head was rakishly tilted to one side, and she was holding onto her broom with both hands.

  “You’re dressed as a witch and you’re in a cemetery at night sneaking up on people,” Nora said, still panting. “Are you sure you didn’t mean to scare us?”

  The girl cringed, winced, and squirmed in her shoes all at once.

  “I really didn’t mean to,” she said in a small voice. “I was just cutting through the cemetery. It’s on my way home from work.”

  “Where do you work?” Nora asked. “A nightmare factory?”

  “Two Keys Tavern, down the dock,” she said. “I’m a bartender. We all dress in costumes during October. This was about the last outfit left at the costume shop. It was either slutty witch or slutty nurse. Or slutty nun, which I didn’t know was a thing.”

  “It’s a thing,” Nora said.

  The woman had a light Boston accent so that dock sounded like “dahck” and bartender came out “bahr-tendah.”

  “There’s always next Halloween,” the slutty witch said. “I’m Justine, by the way. Sorry again for scaring you.”

  “Justine?” Nora said. “Like the Marquis de Sade novel?”

  “No…like Justine Bateman from the TV show Family Ties,” the girl said, narrowing her eyes at Nora. “But now we know something about you we didn’t know before.”

  “I knew,” Nico said. The girl, Justine, laughed. It was good laugh. Good laugh for a cute girl. Very cute. She had laughing eyes and a sweet face and hair the color of apple cider. And the slutty witch outfit was definitely working for her.

  “I’m Nora, by the way. This is my Nico.”

  “Nice to meet you, Justine,” Nico said, shaking her hand.

  “Ah, good accent. Is that...Italian?” Justine asked.

  “French,” he said.

  “Better accent than mine,” Justine said, grinning. “So I guess that answers my question. You two aren’t from around here?”

  “New Orleans,” Nora said. “And a vineyard in the south of France. Just here for Halloween. We were ghost-hunting the Smiling Girl.”

  “Waste of time,” Justine said. “I’ve been in this graveyard a million times. Never seen her. And I know every dead person in this place. Hey, can I give you a cemetery tour? I owe you after scaring the shit out of you both.”

  Nico nodded. “Sure,” Nora said, incapable of saying no to cute girls dressed as slutty witches. “Lead the way.”

  With her broom, Justine pointed down the path. “Follow me...into hell,” she said in a dramatic voice.

  Justine started off, and Nora and Nico fell in step right behind her.

  “Welcome to St. Patrick’s Cemetery,” she intoned in a bland tour guide voice. “Established in 1796 at the edge of town in response to a cholera outbreak. We had more bodies than holes to put them in. Oh yes, people were puking and shitting themselves to death back then. Do you ever wish time travel were real? Well, don’t. Nobody but fucking idiots would go back in time.”

  “Is this part of the official cemetery tour?” Nico asked Justine.

  “I’m a little off the script,” Justine said. “Carrying on.” She pointed with her broom at a large headstone on her right. “Here lies General Robert McMahon of Revolutionary War fame. Hero. Legend. Total asshole.”

  “You think so?” Nico asked.

  “Well, yeah, his wife is buried on the other side of the cemetery, and she died after him, so...you put two and two together, you get an asshole.”

  “Those numbers add up for me,” Nora said.

  “And over here,” Justine said, doing a little twirl wherein she tossed her broom in an arc to point at another grave, “lies Elizabeth Dunne, famous for maybe having boinked Nathanial Hawthorne.”

  “She boinked Nathanial Hawthorne?” Nora asked.

  “What’s boinking?” Nico asked.

  “What we were doing half an hour ago,” Nora said.

  “Ah,” Nico replied. “Boinking.”

  Nora loved teaching him English slang.

  “According to local legend,” Justine said, still employing her tour guide voice, “she owned an inn he frequented, and she was reputed to be very attractive. And something of an ass freak.”

  “He got a piece of her scarlet A,” Nora said.

  “A whole lot of scarlet A,” Justine said, nodding. “But no judgment here. I’ve been known to enjoy a little scarlet A myself every now and then.”

  Nora started to follow her but Nico stopped her with a hand on Nora’s arm.

  “I like her,” Nico said, soto vocce.

  Nora pinched his cheeks. “I’m so proud of my boy.”

  “You two coming?” Justine asked. “So many assholes, so little time.”

  “Story of my life,” Nora said.

  The impromptu tour lasted another twenty minutes. It wasn’t a very big cemetery, though—according to Justine—it had more than its fair share of assholes and ass freaks.

  “And that concludes our stroll through St. Patrick’s,” Justine said with a little curtsey.

  Nora and Nico golf-clapped.

  “Thank you,” Nora said. “You were a fabulous tour guide. I’m glad to know that so many early settlers were...what did you call them?”

  “The Salem Bitches,” Justine said.

  “Right,” Nora said.

  “So, yeah, really sorry about scaring the bejesus out of you two earlier,” Justine said, smiling impishly.

  “Are you?” Nora asked.

  “Hmm…I admit I kind of did it on purpose. Hate all the fucking tourists we have to deal with in October, but if I’d known you two were so adorable, I might not have done it,” Justine said.

  “We are pretty adorable,” Nora said. “Want to go get a drink somewhere? I’m buying.”

  Justine grinned broadly but the smile faded when she glanced down at her phone. “Ah, shit. I’d love to, but I gotta get home. I’m working the morning shift.”

  “At a bar?” Nora asked. “This is a rough town.”

  Justine smiled. “Taking my grandma to her hair appointment. Why do old people get up so early? And really, she’s ninety. Who’s she trying to impress?”

  “Nico,” Nora said, causing him to smack her on the ass again.

  Justine raised an eyebrow.

  “She teases me because I like older women,” Nico explained.

  “I’ve got eleven years on him,” Nora said.

  “Now I’m kind of sad I’m only twenty-eight,” Justine said, a twinkle in her eyes. Nico brought out that twinkle in a lot of ladies.

  “That’s two years older than me,” Nico said, wearing a sly smile to match her twinkle. “It counts.”

  “Is he flirting with me?” Justine asked Nora.

  “If he knows what’s good for him, he is,” Nora said.

  Justine pointed her broom at them. “I like you two. You’re good people.”

  “We’re going to a costume party tomorrow night at the Highbury. You want to be our date?”

  “That sounds amazing. But...I wouldn’t be a third wheel?” Justine asked. She looked eager but nervous. She’d probably never gone on a date with a couple before.

  “If you’re a tricycle, you need a third wheel,” Nora said. “We’d love to hang out with you more.”

  “You twisted my arm,” Justine said. “I’m in.”

  They exchanged numbers. Nora hugged Justine, and Nico kissed both her cheeks goodnight. Justine took great delight in having a Frenchman kiss her in the classic bise-bise French style.

  Nora and Nico watched Justine stroll off to her apartment. Just before she disappeared out of sight, she turned and blew them both a kiss.

  “I told you it wouldn’t be hard,” Nora said.

  Nico slowly shook his head in wonder and said one word:

  “Rembrandt.”

  Chapter Nine

  Nora and Nico slept obscenely late the next morning. They had sex upon waking, went back to sleep, and almost had sex again upon waking the second time, but decided they needed food more than sex. By then they’d missed breakfast at the B&B, but a large brunch at the Ugly Mug diner saved them from cannibalism.

  Nora and Nico texted back and forth with Justine all day. She gave them suggestions galore of places to visit. Through their texting, they learned Justine was bartending by night to pay for her master’s in Art Education by day. Justine thought it was “amazing” that Nico, barely twenty-six, had his own winery in France and begged to try some of his wine if it were for sale in Salem. She thought it was equally “amazing” that Nora was a published author. Nora promised her wine and dirty books, and Justine said if they weren’t careful, she’d tie them up in her basement and never let them leave Salem.

  This, Justine texted, was how people flirted in Salem.

  Nora approved.

  Soon as the sun set at the ungodly early hour of six in the evening, Nora and Nico headed out on foot to a nearby haunted museum attraction Justine had recommended. Hand in hand, they wandered long dark hallways where zombies, ghosts, and demons awaited them around every corner and behind every door. In a room labelled “The Oddities,” a collection of medical nightmares that had been discovered in the home of a doctor six decades earlier were on display. Nora and Nico peered through the glass at deformed animals stuffed and mounted, tumors with hair, and even one human brain preserved in formaldehyde.