Always You

by Roxie Noir

  And beer cans. There are plenty of beer cans, not to mention weeds growing through the cracks in the stone floor, giving the whole place a half-wild feel, like we’re adventurers discovering a lost city in the Amazon.

  We talk about whether the roof’s going to cave in. We speculate about why Woodford would want to haunt this place and not somewhere else, maybe somewhere with more people to be haunted.

  We move through the entire first floor of the house this way, slowly. Darcy sticks the meat thermometer into her back pocket and forgets about it. I toss the baby powder back into the backpack I’m carrying, because we’re obviously not using it.

  “I think he haunted this place because he really hated premarital sex,” I say.

  “The guy with the porno name hated premarital sex?” she says, a smile tugging at her lips.

  “You know it’s not a very good porno name, right?” I tease, ducking my head slightly through a doorway. “It takes a little too much thinking to get the joke.”

  “And people were doing it here?” she asks, looking away. We’re walking back through some of the first-floor rooms toward the foyer where we entered, our feet brushing softly against the grass that’s grown between the cracks, encouraged by the sunlight through the broken windows.

  “Doing what?”

  “Premarital sex.”

  “That’s what the legend says. That they were doing sex,” I say, repeating her phrase just to tease her.

  “Maybe he’s just jealous that he’s not getting any, being a ghost and all,” Darcy says.

  “Married couples didn’t seem to have the same problem with the bed and breakfast burning down,” I point out.

  “Maybe they didn’t have sex while they were here.”

  “But it’s a romantic getaway.”

  Darcy walks through doorway and back into the foyer, then looks around at the staircase sweeping upward, the partially-gone ceiling above.

  “Is it?”

  “What, you don’t think so?”

  Darcy looks at me with an expression I can’t decipher, and I wish I could hit delete on that sentence.

  “Well, it’s either that or a serial killer’s lair,” she says. “Middle of nowhere, totally secluded, no one can hear you scream regardless of why you’re screaming.”

  “I promise not to serial kill you,” I say, half-laughing, the words out of my mouth before I can think them through.

  “Thanks, but I wasn’t worried,” Darcy says. “If you haven’t serial killed me yet, then I’m—”

  THUMP.

  Darcy stops, mid-sentence, her mouth still open, and my blood chills.

  Scuff creak scuff...

  Footsteps. That’s footsteps. Darcy’s mouth snaps shut as she looks at me, eyes sparking, reaching for the thermometer in her back pocket.

  “It’s probably a squirrel,” I whisper, half trying to convince myself.

  I don’t think it’s a squirrel. Not unless it’s a squirrel carcass dropped from a hundred feet, the only way a squirrel could conceivably be loud enough to make that thump.

  I’m thinking bear. I’m thinking vagrant, squatter, someone who’s made their home here and is probably not happy that we’ve shown up all of a sudden.

  “Sounds like Woodford is angry,” Darcy murmurs, the hint of a smile playing around her mouth. “And we haven’t even—”

  She stops. We look at each other, the first time since that morning over coffee that we’ve come close to talking about what didn’t happen. Sort of, kind of, and in that second, I read her face, surprised like she just slammed on the brakes.

  Darcy closes her mouth. She clears her throat, looks away, her back straightens and I think she turns pink though it’s hard to tell in the dark, her self-defense spikes out in full force.

  “Let’s go find him,” she says, takes the thermometer out of her back pocket, and darts up the stairs.

  “Darce, wait,” I say, but she doesn’t listen to me. “Darcy. Fucking seriously, Darcy!”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Darcy

  I don’t stop, I just bolt up the stairs feeling like an idiot because I think I’d way fucking rather face an angry bear or a vengeful spirit right now than keep talking to Trent about how we’re not fucking, about whether this is romantic, or even be in the same room with him.

  “Darcy, for fuck’s sake you have no idea what that noise was—”

  “I’m fine,” I say, stopping on the second-floor landing. “It was probably just a branch or something.’

  “Branches don’t walk,” he says. “And for Chrissake, you’re still hurt, you’re armed with a meat thermometer, you shouldn’t just go running off in old houses because fucking anything could be up here—”

  I start laughing.

  “Dammit, I’m serious,” he says, but now Trent’s grinning too.

  “I’ve got you,” I say. “What could I possibly be afraid of?”

  “Squatters with guns and a temper,” he says. “Bears, rattlesnakes, drugged up vagrants, serial killers—”

  “I actually wasn’t looking for a list,” I say, and brandish my meat thermometer at him. Trent makes a face and grabs the end of it, and I hit the button.

  “Ninety-six point three. You’re cold,” I say.

  “Extremities are always colder,” he points out.

  “Maybe you’re a ghost.”

  “Maybe I’ve been a ghost this whole time,” he says dryly, raising his eyebrows. “Maybe I’m secretly Woodford himself.”

  I reach out and grab Trent’s forearm. Warm and solid.

  “I’m a stealth ghost,” he says, his voice moving lower.

  “Is that a thing?” I ask, my voice matching his.

  “Sure,” he says, and I can see a smile creasing around his eyes, even in the dark. I know Trent so well that I don’t even have to see him to know what he looks like, what he’s doing.

  My hand is still on his arm. I should take it off. I don’t.

  “What’s a stealth ghost do?” I ask. “Besides be ninety-six point three degrees?”

  “Ghost stuff, but stealthy. Boo.”

  “Walk through a wall or get the fuck out,” I tease him.

  Trent tilts his head and eyes the wall behind me, his eyes raking over the cracked plaster, wooden slats visible here and there. The interior walls on this floor aren’t stone, just the exterior.

  “I think I could run through that wall,” he says.

  We’re both still holding onto this meat thermometer that’s supposed to be finding ghosts but has only managed to find that I still want my best friend, because my hand’s still on his arm.

  “Could and should are different things,” I point out.

  “You know you’re talking to the Low Valley Leveler, don’t you?”

  “You ever leveled a wall?”

  “Just people so far,” he says, and I scrunch my nose. He chuckles. “They knew what they were getting into, don’t make that face.”

  I turn and look at the wall. I’m about ninety-nine percent sure that Trent’s got no real intention of running through it, but it does kinda look like he could.

  “You’re not gonna get through that undamaged, and I think Nigel might have a stroke,” I say. “Literally, Trent. You could kill a man. And then Gavin would come after me for letting you do this.”

  Trent chuckles. We’re still holding onto both ends of the thermometer, and even though it’s a really dumb substitute for holding hands, I don’t want to let go.

  “I won’t,” he says. “I’d need about ten beers and probably a couple of bumps first, and I haven’t done that shit in years.”

  It’s true. Trent hasn’t exactly always been the sober one, but he’s always been the soberest. Meaning he’s saved my ass more than a few times, like the time I went skinny dipping in the Mississippi or the time I wandered into a corn field, somewhere in Iowa, out of my mind on shrooms, convinced that I was in a maze with a chocolate fountain at the center.

  I hardly remem
ber that, but apparently, I really fucking wanted that chocolate fountain.

  “What I should do is just throw baby powder on you to find out for sure,” I say. “Though I’m still not really sure—”

  CRASHthump.

  I whirl around, my breath stuck in my throat at the same time as Trent grabs my arm and shoves his way between me and the door. I stumble a little but I’m fine.

  Scratch scratch. Thump.

  “Stay here,” Trent tells me.

  He glances at the meat thermometer still in my hand, looking unimpressed. Then he bends down, grabs a wooden bannister railing, and pulls it off with one jerk.

  Even though my heart is hammering at about a thousand beats per minute, I still notice the way his forearm muscles bunch beneath his tattoos. And I like it.

  He turns and walks through the doorway, ducking his head just slightly as he moves into the dark. I ignore his order to stay there — like fuck I’m staying behind, where the serial killer’s serial killing friend can just come grab me? No thanks — and walk softly behind him.

  It’s nothing, I tell myself. It’s a squirrel, or a bird, or maybe an owl or a chipmunk or—

  I frown, trying to think of more woodland creatures. I grew up in the suburbs and then the city, and none of my parents were ever exactly the take the kids on a nature walk type. My education there is mostly limited to the animals who helped Disney princesses clean their houses, as seen on very blurry VHS cassettes.

  Tap tap tap tap THUNK slide tap scratch.

  I freeze. The room we’re in now is big, shelves lining each wall. Probably used to be a study or something, broken windows framing the spindly, spiny arms of evergreen trees outside. The windows up here aren’t as broken, meaning that these still have plenty of solid panes left.

  Also left in this room, unlike downstairs: furniture. Or something, huddled in a mass in the center of the room, covered in a huge white sheet. Even though I know, logically, that it’s probably a bookshelf and a desk and a chair or something, it looks spooky as hell.

  The wind blows. The trees move. The pale shadows left by the moon move.

  And under the sheet, something also moves.

  I gasp, grab Trent’s arm, and smash my face into his shoulder blade, the least-brave ghost hunter who’s ever existed. I’m good right up until something might actually happen, apparently.

  He chuckles.

  “Shut up,” I whisper, bravely peeking out around his arm.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s a raccoon,” he murmurs, his voice low and steady. “And I’m pretty sure it’s more nervous about us than we are about it.”

  “They’re rabid sometimes,” I offer, like it excuses my abject cowardice.

  “And they’re also known to kill humans for fun sometimes,” he says.

  I squeeze his arm tighter, despite myself.

  “You’re fucking with me.”

  “Yeah,” he admits, a grin in his voice. “But you thought about it.”

  “Well, it can have this room,” I say. “This is the raccoon’s house now.”

  “I thought you wanted to hunt for ghosts,” Trent says, his voice still low and teasing. “You charged up that staircase a couple minutes ago like you were Queen Fuck Everything of I’m The Shit Mountain.”

  I’m still holding onto him, my body still pressed tightly against his, and it’s not because I’m really frightened anymore — the sheet over the furniture keeps wiggling, but I’m pretty sure he’s right that it’s a raccoon — but because I like it.

  I fucking like it and I fucking want this and I want him. Like this, in the dark, in an old romantic getaway that’s full of ghosts and wildlife, where he rips railings from bannisters to defend us from cute little woodland critters.

  I keep thinking this feeling will go away but it hasn’t. It’s only built, for years now, from the night we met and I thought hey, he’s cute to sitting together in dressing rooms, listening to music while Gavin and Liam got high. To telling him all my bad, dark shit, about being a foster kid and running away at fifteen, and instead of backing away like everyone else he told me about his own bad, dark shit about a drunk dad and a mom who wouldn’t leave.

  Cracking each other up at three in the morning, driving our van from college town bar to college town bar, the other two asleep in the back. Eating breakfast from rest area vending machines as the sun came up. Discovering a shared love of absolutely stupid television and a fascination with weird museums in small towns.

  Trent staying here, in Tallwood, to take care of me when he didn’t have to.

  So I hold onto him, thinking all this and trying not to think at all. Thinking so rarely gets me anything good.

  Trent crouches down, his arm slipping from my fingers, and he grabs a small chunk of plaster from the floor. Then he stands and tosses it at the sheet-covered furniture.

  There’s an angry squeak, followed by a scrabbling sound.

  “Yeah, I think we’re serial killer free,” Trent says, crouches for another chunk of plaster, and does it again.

  This time a small, pointy, gray face peeks out. It’s got that unmistakable bandit mask around the eyes, and is super fucking cute.

  “Go on, get,” Trent says, tossing more plaster at it, small pieces that are only big enough to annoy it, not hurt it.

  The raccoon scurries toward the wall where windows are missing. More plaster tossing. More scurrying. Every couple of steps it looks back at us, and I swear it looks way more annoyed than afraid.

  Actually, given that I’m still half-standing behind Trent, I think this raccoon might be judging me. Fucking wildlife.

  “Jesus, this one’s an asshole,” Trent mutters, pitching one more plaster chunk at it while the thing looks at us disdainfully from the window sill.

  “It can have the house, I already said that.”

  “Go away,” Trent says, and lobs a final piece. It hits the raccoon square on the side and bounces off harmlessly, clattering to the floor.

  The raccoon rolls its eyes. I swear it does. Then it finally leaves, disappearing out the window with the rustle of tree branches.

  Trent looks over his shoulder and down at me.

  “You can come out now,” he murmurs.

  “I’m not afraid of raccoons,” I say, still half-hiding behind Trent. From the raccoon.

  “Sure.”

  “I just... they have diseases, you know?”

  “So you wanted to use me as a human shield.”

  He’s teasing, and I know he’s teasing, but something in the way he says it hits me right in the gut. Like I’ve been using him or something, which is the very last thing I want him to think.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I say softly.

  Trent turns to me, and now we’re facing each other. The breeze stirs the trees outside and, ever so slightly, the sheets over the furniture.

  Suddenly I can’t breathe and I can’t look him in the eye. This is everything I want and nothing, goddamn nothing that I deserve. I charged up here like an asshole and Trent came to save me, and this after two weeks of being my fucking nursemaid.

  He didn’t know it was a raccoon. He knew it could be something actually dangerous and he came anyway without thinking twice.

  “Darce, I was just kidding,” he says. “I know.”

  I make myself smile, still looking down because I can’t look at him. I can think about a million things I want to say right now, because for some reason this dumb episode with the raccoon has made all of them surface and I don’t know why.

  But I don’t say any of them. Instead I whip out the meat thermometer, into the six-inch space between our bodies, and hit the button, the LCD screen lighting up.

  “Sixty-five-point-four,” I say. “Is that ghostier or less ghosty than downstairs?”

  “Less ghosty?” he hazards.

  “Or it’s an angry ghost.”

  “Or an angry raccoon.”

  “That raccoon was annoyed at best,” I say. “And why would Woodford be
angry?”

  I very nearly say we’re not doing any unmarried fucking but Trent is so close to me that I can feel his body heat and I’m not backing away. Unmarried fucking is just about the last thing I’m currently brave enough to say.

  “I’ve got the feeling he’s not the most reasonable of ghosts,” Trent murmurs.

  He’s closer. How the fuck did he get closer? I’m still staring at this thermometer like a mix of idiot and asshole, my heart slamming into my ribs with every beat.

  “Seems like anything could set him off if he set fire to his own house because someone got it on,” I say.

  Silence. I turn the thermometer off and put it back into my pocket.

  “I guess we should leave before we upset him,” I offer, still looking away. At the walls, at the windows, anywhere but at him because I’m terrified that he’ll be able to see every single thought I’ve had in the last hour on my face.

  “Are we going to upset him?” Trent asks, his voice so low and gravelly that I swear I can feel it in the floorboards.

  Look at him, fucking look at him, what’s wrong with you?

  I squeeze my hands into fists and finally, slowly, raise my eyes to look at Trent. Every nerve in my body is exploding.

  “I lied when I said I didn’t want this,” I whisper, the words coming out in a rush, like someone’s yanking them from my mouth.

  “You never said that.”

  “I told you not to kiss me.”

  “But you never said you didn’t want me to.”

  I touch my fingers to the back of his hand, which twitches, but before he can take my hand in his I move it up his arm, over his patchwork of tattoos to his shoulder, until the back of my hand is resting against his collarbone, and I step in toward him.

  Just like that, his arms are around me, warm and thick and familiar because we’ve hugged probably thousands of times. I know this so well but at the same time I don’t.

  I’ve got one hand on his shoulder. The other finds its way, somehow, around the back of his neck. My eyes close again and his hands trace my spine in a whisper, so gentle against my new scar that I can hardly feel them.