Chapter 3 – Trash Will Find You
Ihad been prepared to write yesterday off as a delusion of my tired mind–until I was called in early and couldn’t stop thinking about it.
About him.
The office is cool, crisp with recycled air and the faint scent of overpriced coffee.
I am already sweating bullets. Not because of the temperature building inside the restricting janitor’s uniform. Not because I am out of shape either.
I am actually in fantastic shape. Working out helps me keep my perversity at bay–it’s a great distraction. But no, I am sweating because a huge part of me knows whatever happened wasn’t imaginary and he’s here.
Somewhere.
Waiting.
Lurking in a bin.
I grip the handle of my cleaning cart so tight that if I somehow could grip it harder, it would bond with my skin. My shoulders are tense as I push the cart out into the office. With a deep sigh, I lift them to my ears and drop them, forcing them to relax.
This is just another shift.
Just. Get. Through. This shift.
This is a totally normal and completely non-haunted shift, surrounded by corporate living human types who will absolutely not appreciate if I scream at a bin.
Or worse. Fuck it.
I shake my head at the thought of the CEO of Graves & Pennington LLP walking in on me getting it on with the bin and looking horrified.
“Morning,” a passing accountant mumbles, barely looking up from their phone and heading towards the lift upstairs.
“Good morning,” I say, attempting to sound cheerful while resisting the urge to knock their phone out their hands and grab them by the shoulders and ask If you could see a trash spirit in a bin, you’d tell me, right?
The lights hum overhead as I push my cart toward the supply closet.
The office is pretty quiet, except for the clacking of keyboards and inane office murmur.
I eye every bin I pass as if he will pop out from any of them at any moment.
Every discarded takeaway coffee cup taunts me.
Every crumbled food wrapper. I feel beads of sweat trickle down my back.
At least I don’t have to worry about sweat stains-the janitor uniform is dark.
As if to dispel my thoughts and anxieties, I shake my head and push the cart forward, locking my gaze ahead. The squeak of my cart’s rolling wheels scratches through the air of the office, setting me further on edge. Like the countdown theme song from Jaws.
But as I round the corner toward the kitchen, I hear him.
His voice. Low. Smug. Like he is whispering in my ear.
“Miss me, Janitor Boy?”
My breath catches, and I pull the cart to a sharp halt, knocking over some supplies.
I whip around, heart hammering.
Nothing. Nobody was there.
The hallway is empty. The office workers are all at their desks. Nothing’s around me except the small waste bin along the wall between the cabinets. It sits innocently against the wall. But I know it’s not.
I back away slowly, my heart practically pounding through my ribcage. Just ignore it… him. Keep moving.
I tentatively keep walking. The lights above me flicker once… then again. I stop in my tracks. The bin-man is playing with me now, and a chill runs down my spine, making me shudder.
Flight’s kicking in again. Abandoning my cart, I rush past the bin and towards the door marked ‘Janitor’s Office’.
Safety.
My hand flies to the handle, and I grip it.
Behind me, I hear a soft, eerie chuckle.
I shake my head and shut my eyes. I’m hallucinating again.
Or maybe I’m on drugs-I shouldn’t have trusted that donut Claudia gave me this morning.
Wait, maybe Claudia’s playing a prank on me…
maybe she is behind all of this. She does like to taunt me.
It is our friendship love language. And let’s face it, if you don’t gently bully your friends, are they really your friends?
I ignore the voice and twist the handle.
I push the door open, and my heart drops.
There he is. Sitting there with a smirk, he’s in the only bin in the office.
It’s impossibly small, and I don’t know how he fits inside it.
He’s resting his elbows on the lip of the bin, his chin in his hands.
As he notices me, my heart races and my eyes bulge from the shock of seeing him again.
I hope for footsteps behind me, for someone else to witness what I am witnessing. He leans back, arms behind his head as if he were on a damn beach holiday taking in the warm sun.
He is dressed exactly the same as in our last encounter. The same sheen of bin juice on his chest. The black singlet with a flannel over top.
“’Bout time!” he says, in what I think is a provoking tone. “I was beginning to miss that gorgeous face behind those slutty wire-frame glasses!”
I quickly rush inside and shut the door behind me, careful not to let it slam to disturb everyone in the office. As I turn, I speak in a sharp whisper. “What are you doing here?”
He just shrugs and then grins widely at me. “So skittish. We had some unfinished business. Thought I would pop on by over to this bin, though it is far more cramped than my favourite in the kitchen.”
He can move between bins! Great! I groan internally. No escape.
He seems to realise I’ve made this discovery, and he grins wider. Were these bins some sort of interconnected portals?
“You can’t just show up wherever you want. There are people here!”
“Oh? Them?” He smirked once more. He needed to stop doing that… I felt a flexing in my pants again. Fuck’s sake!
“None of them can see me, Oscar.” He adds. At first, I had been shocked he knew my name, but then I remembered my name is stitched to the chest of my janitor's overalls.
I thought that would have frustrated me. But it brought me relief. If nobody else can see him, then he’s clearly not real, and I truly am just having delusions of grandeur. There’s relief knowing he will probably go away with some sleep, or caffeine, or anti-psychotics, or something else.
I might as well entertain myself with this hallucination.
“You said it was a curse,” he murmured.
Not this again.
“What if I tell you I have a solution?”
My ears prick up. Words fall out of my mouth. “What do you mean?”
He leaned back against the rim of the bin.
“I’ve been around a long time, Handsome.
I’ve seen a lot of weird shit. Get all sorts of items dumped through my head daily.
But yours didn’t even make the top ten in the ‘Big Bad Book of Curses To Mess With Humans’ Lives’.
” He licked his thumb and pretended to turn a page in a book.
Handsome. He called me handsome. Guys have called me attractive in the past, or good-looking, but never handsome. Handsome is a word I reserve for someone I really like. He used my word. My heart wants to swell.
Instead, my head swirls with questions, of which I didn’t want to know the answers. Questions about all the shit he has seen.
He grins again. He needs to stop grinning…
“It is triggered by trash. But a triggered curse is one that can be broken, by what sets it off.”
This didn’t make sense…
I had been caught by coworkers in the past when the curse activated and I had jerked into an empty takeaway coffee cup.
And again, when I fucked a turkey sandwich.
The urge never goes away. If anything, I just find something new.
I wanted to correct him, but he had to be an expert on this. I mean, look at him!
I can’t wipe the look of befuddlement off my face.
“You obviously wouldn’t know that though. I have been watching you for a while. You let no one help you.” He pushes himself up and appears to be standing within the bin. “In fact, I wager you have never truly let anyone help you do anything before.”
I stare at him, and my voice catches in my throat. I want to scream at him. Squirt every drop of cleaning liquid at him. Tie up the bag and chuck it outside. But I knew it wouldn’t work. If he could appear here, it would be more than likely the bins outside are connected too.
“Didn’t think so, handsome.” He smirks. That damn word again. “Lucky for you, I am in a helpful mood.”
What did that even mean?
He smiles even wider at me, looking sweaty and nervous. Nervous about what? “If we are to do this, there is something I should tell you first–”
The janitor's office door flies open behind me, and I turn around, fear in my eyes.
“Hey, Oscar? You in? There’s been a spill–”
It’s Claudia. She stops, eyes wide, sees me, then looks to the bin behind me, and I look back and hope he isn’t there.
And he isn’t. Thank fuck! The Bin-man is gone. But I have to be hallucinating. I blink a few times. He still isn’t there.
All she can see is me, standing alone in a cramped janitor's office, my glasses slipping down my nose. I push them back up and pretend like nothing is happening.
“…You, OK?” she asks, genuine care in her tone. “Who were you talking to?”
If this had been a prank she is pulling, she is doing a damn good job at acting. I decide to play along. “Yeah!” my voice squeaks. “Just, uh,” I look around and quickly grab a few bottles of bleach. “Just reorganising the um, cleaning supplies. Sometimes it helps me to say them out loud.”
She gives me a look that makes it clear she’s not convinced. And at this point, I realise she isn’t pulling a prank and has nothing to do with Bin-man.
“OK, well once you are done doing whatever it is you were doing, can you come clean up the spill in the lift foyer?”
She leaves, shutting the door behind her. I can catch my breath. I press my forehead against the wall and let go of the bleach bottles.
What the fuck is wrong with me? Why is this happening to me?
I hear a voice. At first, I think it’s from somewhere above me, but then I eye the bin. As I peer down into it, a pair of glistening amber eyes look back from deep within it, as if from another realm. I hear his voice once again.
“Running won’t fix your trash problem, handsome, but maybe you could try kissing me? What have you got to lose?”
He has to be kidding. He isn’t even real, just a figment of my imagination. I pull myself together and gather what I need and then leave.
Of course, my cursed mind would create a man who got me hot and bothered that only I could see.
The feeling stung sharper than a slap. I was never lucky in love.
And this felt worse than that disastrous date I went on many years ago that had turned into the craziest six weeks of my life.
I had no actual evidence, but I know my witch-of-an-ex is the one who cursed me.
He promised he would make me pay for leaving him.
Just picturing him sends a chill through me, like I can still hear him growling about revenge.
I hear a whisper follow me, just before I shut the door behind me.
“Trash will find you.”