The Last Midnight

By Robert Tomoguchi

A lonely girl who never found love in life can find no peace in death...

 

A beloved rockstar who never knew the meaning of love encounters her ghost...

 

Their hearts meet at midnight.

 

The Last Midnight shares the brief romantic interlude between rockstar Dixon Day and his most devoted fangirl Emily Dunkel, who died in a car crash while driving home from his concert. In death Emily finds herself walking toward the fabled bright light at the end of the tunnel of her afterlife, but she is never quite able to reach it. Her soul will never know peace until she finds the true love she never experienced while living. Will she finally find it in the embrace of the larger-than-life Dixon Day? And will he, who is damaged and jaded in matters of the heart, be able to discover true love with Emily's ghost?

 

The Last Midnight is a contemporary yet timeless paranormal romance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Tomoguchi
• Release date: Nov 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393628866

Book preview

Emily

––––––––

The light at the end of the tunnel was less than a hundred yards away. But it was always that far, even though I’d been walking toward it for what, by now, was easily days. There was light beyond all this darkness, but I never got any closer to it.

I didn’t know exactly where I was, but I was pretty sure I was dead. I remembered enough of the accident. My head resting on the steering wheel, struggling to breathe, bleeding out quickly, hoping someone would come to save me. But by the time I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, no one had come—I never even heard sirens.

The walls of this tunnel were dark, cold, and felt like stone. Just like the smooth floor upon which my footsteps echoed. I was wearing black pumps with chunky heels. On top I was wearing a black plaid pinafore dress with a black half sleeve shirt beneath it. It wasn’t what I had been wearing during the car crash, so I assumed this was what I had been buried in. They were my clothes, but I wondered which of my distant cousins had chosen it for my funeral. I would have hoped for something more dressy, but I guess they didn’t want to shell out anything on someone to whom they were only next of kin. At least they left my rose quartz necklace on.

That had to be the light all those near-death experience people talked about in interviews. I knew I was supposed to walk into it and felt an irrepressible urge to do so, but why couldn’t I get there? Was I not actually dead? Was I meant to go back to life? Back into my body in some hospital room where the heart monitor had already stopped?

I had already reached for the light, thinking that if I couldn’t get to it by walking, I might be able to touch it or pull myself into it. But when I did, and with a slight terror, I realized I could see through myself. My hands, my clothes, my entire being had become transparent. That’s when I figured I might be a ghost.

Maybe I couldn’t reach the light because I was a ghost. I wanted to turn around and try walking the other way, heading back into the darkness where I thought I must have been coming from, but I couldn’t. Something I couldn’t explain compelled me to walk only toward the light.

I felt like Sisyphus without the rock. It seemed pointless to keep going once I accepted I would never get anywhere. I wanted to give up and just stand still, or even sit, but I felt unable to do those things too. Yet despite the endlessness of my labors, I didn’t feel the least bit tired even though I figured I had walked a few hundred miles in heels.

But there was something even more unsettling than the futility I felt. It was the loneliness. If this was my afterlife, I’d be just as lonely as I had been while living.

Dixon

––––––––

I love you.

I love you too, Dixon Day answered but thought it would have been cooler if the other girl had said it instead of this one. The other one was hotter. Her name was Alexa or Vanessa or something that sounded like it ended in an a. He had been drunk when he met her, met both of them. And by the time they had all snorted a few lines and had their threesome, he felt too embarrassed to ask her name again.

Did the one who said it really love him? Or did she just think she did because he was a rockstar and people loved rockstars? It was always hard for him to tell, even among the girlfriends he had had. Some nights it felt more like love than others, but tonight it didn’t feel like much at all and that disappointed him because everyone said he should celebrate the close of his four-month All the Hearts Tour. By celebrate they meant attending the posh party he slipped out of early with his two beautiful but nameless companions. As the tour had ended in Los Angeles, he was home in his Bel Air mansion within twenty-five minutes.

It had been a big success. Each crowd went especially wild when he strummed the first notes of All the Hearts on his electric guitar. When he wrote that song he didn’t expect it to become the big hit that it had. He figured Chaos or Broken Moon were stronger singles. He had clearly been wrong as All the Hearts was even up for a Grammy.

He wished they hadn’t done that coke. His mind was alert but his soul was exhausted.

Emily

––––––––

Since I’d been here, I hadn’t slept. I didn’t feel the need to and guessed ghosts didn’t need sleep.

What a desolate place this was. I thought my loved ones were supposed to be waiting for me in the light. But who was that really? My grandparents? My mother? My grandparents had been long dead and I barely remembered them but my mother had only died five years