Forever Mine

Hannah first saw the ghost in her new apartment late at night. A shadow flickered near the window, and she felt a presence behind her. Turning quickly, she saw nothing, but the cold lingered.

At first, it was small things. The feeling of being watched. The sound of a breath that wasn’t hers. Objects moving slightly when she wasn’t looking. Then it escalated. Her closet door creaked open on its own. The bathroom mirror fogged up, and words appeared in the condensation: “Do you remember me?”

Hannah’s heart pounded. She had no idea who or what it was.

The haunting grew worse. At night, she heard whispers in the dark. She could feel fingers brushing against her skin when she slept. Then, one evening, her phone screen glitched and showed an old childhood photo—one she didn’t remember taking. It was her at eleven years old, standing beside a boy. A boy she did remember.

David.

They had been kids. She was eleven, he was twelve. They met at summer camp and spent a week together. Holding hands, sneaking away from the counselors, whispering secrets under the trees. It had been her first experience with something like love, though it faded with the years. But he had promised—“I’ll never forget you.”

A chill spread through her. She searched for him online. Nothing recent. Then she found a news article.

“Local Man Found Dead in His Apartment. Cause Unknown.”

The photo confirmed it. It was David. He had died six months ago. Right before she moved to this apartment.

Her blood turned to ice. Had he… followed her?

That night, she turned off all the lights and whispered into the dark. “David… is that you?”

Silence.

Then—“I told you I’d never forget you.”

She felt his breath on her neck. Cold. Waiting.

Hannah squeezed her eyes shut. “You… you’re scaring me.”

The air grew heavier. The shadows around her deepened. “I waited for you. All my life. You left, but I never did.”

Memories flooded back. The way he used to watch her, even at camp, always knowing where she was. The letters he had sent after, even when she stopped responding. The way she sometimes felt like someone was following her in high school but never saw who.

It had always been him. Watching. Waiting.

She opened her eyes. “David, you need to move on.”

A hand—ice-cold—brushed her cheek. “I don’t want to.”

Her heart pounded. “You have to.”

Hannah barely had time to scream before she was yanked into the air by an unseen force. Her limbs flailed, her breath caught in her throat, and terror consumed her. The room spun around her, the walls bending like they were closing in. Then—BAM!—she slammed into the cold, hard floor. Pain shot through her body. She gasped, coughing, struggling to move.

A low whisper, chilling and full of longing, brushed against her ear.

“Now you will know how to love forever.”

David’s voice.

Hannah whimpered, crawling backward, her hands scraping against the wooden floor. “David, stop! Please! You’re hurting me!”

A flickering shape appeared before her. He was barely there, a distorted shadow of what he had once been. His face was pale, hollow, his eyes sunken with obsession. He still looked like the boy she had known—but warped, stretched by years of longing and death.

“You forgot me,” he said, his voice cracked with sorrow and rage. “You promised we’d be together forever.”

“No, you promised that,” Hannah choked out, her body aching. “We were kids, David! It wasn’t real love! It was just—”

His figure lunged forward, and the air around her turned freezing.

“It was real to me.”

Her breath came out in short gasps, forming small clouds in the air. The weight of his presence pressed down on her chest, like invisible hands were gripping her, sinking into her skin, wrapping around her bones.

Hannah clawed at her throat as an invisible force squeezed tighter. Her vision blurred. She was suffocating.

Then, she saw something—a reflection in the shattered mirror.

Her own face, pale, lips turning blue. And beside her, David. His shadowy figure gripping her like a ghostly parasite, trying to pull her into his world.

David’s figure twitched violently. His fingers, his arms, his entire being started to disintegrate. His face twisted in agony, betrayal, rage.

“NO!” His voice echoed, breaking into static. His body contorted as if being torn apart by unseen hands. “YOU’RE MINE! YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN MINE!”

Hannah squeezed her eyes shut as a piercing scream filled the room—then silence.She gasped for breath, her body trembling. The air was still. The cold was gone.

Shakily, she pushed herself up, wincing at the pain in her ribs. She looked at the shattered mirror. David’s reflection was gone.

But a single message was scratched into the glass, as if by invisible fingers:

“Forever.”

A shiver ran down her spine. She didn’t know if he was truly gone.

But

 she knew one thing.

She would never forget him again.