Chapter 7
7
H e’s still here.
It’s been a week. My delusional ass has clung to the thought that he was house sitting for his sister while she was wrapping things up at her old place, but I know that’s not the case. A house sitter doesn’t fill the main bedroom closet with his clothes and set up his outdated gaming consoles in the living room media cabinet.
Nope. I’m stuck with Noah. Stuck with the asshole who ghosted me for god knows how long.
I hate it.
Not just because I hate him for how he hurt my feelings, but because I hate how I can’t stop watching him. I wake up and my first thought is wondering what he’s up to. I trail him around the house, trying to decipher what makes him tick. When he left earlier, I felt a twinge of frustration that I wouldn’t be able to keep bothering him.
Flustering him gives me far too much joy. You’d think after the first few times he froze and spun around looking for the source of the creeping sensation behind him, it would’ve gotten boring. But each time I get the same spike of adrenaline, worrying that he’ll somehow see me, and subsequent sick glee when he doesn’t, and he’s left confused and nervous.
I spent the entire time he’s out of the house this afternoon wondering what other kinds of pranks I could play on him. Creeping around behind him is working great, but I’m a freaking ghost. There’s got to be more I can do. Maybe rearrange his stuff so he can’t find anything. Or do the classic turning lights on and off thing.
If I weren’t enjoying bothering him so much, I’d go more extreme. Throw things across the room in front of his eyes. Write “get out or die” on the wall in red paint. Scary shit. You’d think I’d want to do anything to get Noah to leave, but I can begrudgingly admit that this is the best I’ve felt since dying.
It’s ridiculous, but I feel like I have a purpose now: to make Noah’s life at least as unpleasant as mine felt after he ghosted me.
I didn’t realize how much of a vindictive asshole I am until presented with the opportunity to be one. I always thought of myself as someone sweet and kind who wouldn’t ever try to make someone upset. And that would’ve continued in my ghostly afterlife, if the universe hadn’t put this jerk in my path again.
When life hands you the man who crushed your romantic dreams, you get a little revenge.
Still, that doesn’t keep me from feeling awful when he drops the beer bottle and it shatters all over the kitchen floor. I hadn’t meant to scare him that much. He smelled weird when he came back in the house, and I needed to get close to try to figure out what he’d been up to. Yeah, I also felt drawn to be close to him like a magnet, but I refuse to examine that annoying sensation.
He’s terrified, eyes wide and hands shaking as he stumbles back from the mess on the floor with a shout. I scramble away as well, almost as startled, my non-existent heart racing.
“Fucking losing my mind,” he mutters as he clutches at his chest, and sucks in a deep breath to calm himself. After a minute, he sighs, his alert, tense posture releasing into sagging exhaustion.
He looks so… defeated.
Guilt surges inside me as he grabs a roll of paper towels and a garbage bag, kneeling down to clean up the mess. Guess I’m not cut out for being a truly mean kind of ghost yet, because I don’t like this at all.
No, I like watching the hairs rise on the back of his neck when he feels my breath on him. I like hearing his breath quicken when I draw near. Those reactions flood me with excitement.
This… this is just sad. If I didn’t think it would scare the shit out of him even more, I’d help him clean up.
“This house is so cute, Noah. It’s meant for you, Noah. This is your chance to relax for the first time in years. Don’t you want that, Noah?” His grumbling is higher pitched than his usual voice, most likely mimicking his sister.
He drops back to his normal timbre. “Should’ve stayed in the city. Should never have quit my job. At least then I didn’t have time to be crazy—ouch, shit !”
He pulls back from where he was gathering up shards of glass, the paper towel not enough to protect him from getting cut. Noah clutches his hand and stands, navigating around the mess still on the floor over to the sink.
I follow, but stay far enough to the side that he won’t sense me. Shit, he cut himself pretty badly. There’s a line of blood welling up on his palm and it continues to bleed even after he rinses the cut off.
Noah curses softly, his jaw tensing with frustration as he grabs a nearby towel and wraps it around his hand in a makeshift bandage.
I watch him as he cleans the rest of the mess up, much more careful now. The guilt continues to sit in my stomach like a stone, anchoring me in place, even though I’d rather not watch him right now.
I’m not supposed to feel bad for him. He’s a jerk.
There’s a deep well of sadness inside Noah that becomes more and more evident as he cleans. His eyes grow glassy from unshed tears, his bulky shoulders rounded forward like he’s waiting for the next terrible thing to happen.
I start to move towards him, the urge to provide some kind of comfort overwhelming any desire to freak him out. I barely catch myself before I crouch down.
I can’t give him a hug! That would only make things worse. I back away to watch him from a distance.
When he’s finished, he heads to the bathroom and digs around with his uninjured hand in one of the boxes he hasn’t unpacked yet.
“Of course I don’t have any fucking bandages,” he mutters, shoving the box closed again. Defeated, he heads to his bedroom and flops down on the bed, then grabs a pillow and shoves it over his face, letting out a muffled shout of frustration.
I don’t linger. I don’t like how I feel about myself right now.
My feet carry me to the office, where there are a number of boxes that still need to be unpacked. I open them one-by-one, sifting through the contents as carefully as possible. It takes almost an hour before I find what I’m searching for.
I set the bandages and antibiotic ointment on the sink among a few other toiletries he’s put there, then retreat to the guest room closet so that I don’t accidentally freak him out again.
He’s had enough for one day.
It only takes three days before I’m back to plotting ways to bother Noah. A large portion of that is due to boredom now that he’s started work. But it’s also because he sucks .
As if peeling off the adorable wallpaper that took blood, sweat, and tears to hang wasn’t bad enough, he’s painted the walls in the bedroom the most boring shade of gray known to man. It goes perfectly with his boring plain gray bedspread and sparse selection of monochrome prints he’s hung.
Tonight, he came home after work with cans of more of that terrible gray paint and started prepping the living room for painting.
He’s going to cover up the prettiest, happiest shade of yellow that makes you feel like you’re in a beam of sunshine when the sun streams in through the windows.
He’s the worst!
I barely resist the urge to open and knock over the paint cans while he’s in the middle of taping around the electrical outlets. A darker, angrier impulse tells me to shove him so his finger will slip into the outlet and shock the shit out of him. I don’t, mainly because I know how ridiculously bad I felt when he cut himself, even though it’s his fault for not being careful.
By the time he’s gotten the room prepped, it’s late. I’m given one last chance to appreciate my beautiful living room before he ruins it, so I linger in there and stare at the walls. I don’t bother following him as he goes to the kitchen to make some dinner. I’m too sad.
It’s a little absurd to be crying about wall color, but I love this room. It’s my favorite part of the house. Now that most of the cute decor and furniture is gone, the walls are the last bastion of what made it so nice.
Noah is leeching the life out of my home room by room. Meanwhile, I have to stand by and watch because apparently I’m still too attached to human morality to resort to real scare tactics.
A wave of anger crashes over me and I storm into the kitchen to do something about it. He’s seated in the dining nook facing towards the window looking out onto the back deck. I move closer, ready to do something like spill his water glass or maybe try smacking him and finally learn if my hand will collide with him or phases through.
Then I see what’s on his phone screen. This piece of shit is on a dating app.
He swipes idly through a series of photos of women, pausing every few profiles to read a little of the info before swiping left again.
I see red.
Who the fuck does he think he is, moving into my house and ruining everything I worked so hard on? And now he’s on a goddamn dating app? No way. There’s no fucking way I’m letting him bring women over into my home.
I reach out and smack the phone out of his hand. It goes tumbling across the table and down onto the floor. He curses and mutters something about being clumsy, then bends over to pick it up.
I’m disappointed to see that the screen is still intact and almost do it again, but the sane part of my brain kicks back on and I flee the room before I do something foolish.
When I get to the haven of the guest room closet, I dig out my phone and install the dating app I saw him looking at. It’s a terrible idea, and I don’t know why the fuck I’m torturing myself even more by looking for him on there, but my brain isn’t working properly.
I’ve never used this app before, and when it asks for me to input profile information, an idea occurs to me. A brilliant, slightly psychotic idea.
Okay, more than slightly. Still, I’m smiling by the time I finish setting things up.
It takes surprisingly little time swiping through profiles to find Noah’s. His stupid, handsome face smiles back at me.
Ugh, he’s using the same main picture he did when I was talking to him years ago. Doesn’t he know it’s a dick move to use outdated photos? Not that he looks worse now. God, no. Infuriatingly, he’s even hotter now. But it’s disingenuous!
That thought makes me laugh out loud. What did I expect? All things considered, I dodged a bullet by not inviting him back to my place after our date. He’s an asshole who is on there to pick up women, get his dick wet, and then ghost them.
Well, two can play at that game.
With a flicker of nerves, I swipe right on his profile to indicate my interest. Not that it matters. I’ll keep trying until he bites.
A few minutes later, I get the match notification.
Holy shit, that was easy.
Now to figure out what to message him. I consider whether I should say something similar to what I normally would, or craft something more flirty. He liked me enough to talk for weeks the first time, so I decide to stick with what I know works. Again, if that doesn’t pan out, I can always try again.
I send a silly greeting and snort at the tiny profile image of a pretty redhead that appears beside it. I’m a genius.
Get ready to be catfished and ghosted, asshole.