19. Secret Level Unlocked Date Night
Secret Level Unlocked: Date Night
They sealed the building in an hour and forty minutes. Any door that was already closed stayed that way, sealed along the door even if a gap wasn’t visible. Windows, latches, vents, even the outlets got a layer of duct tape from the box in the supply closet.
Door by door, room by room. They moved through the second floor the way they’d moved through the Daedalus and the sanitarium: Asher in front, Levi behind, the work splitting itself between them without discussion.
I like watching him work.
The thought was there before he could stop it. Asher was good at violence and good at sealing out despair fog, and both did the same thing to Levi’s chest.
Not thinking about that right now.
When they came back downstairs, the lounge was the same as they’d left it — Tyler in the armchair facing the fire, blank, the others arranged around him like they were guarding a body that hadn’t finished dying. Asher set the box of duct tape on the bar.
“We’re sealing the building.”
No one questioned it. Maybe it was Tyler. Maybe it was the way Asher said it in a voice that didn’t leave room for a vote. Asher told them what was going to happen and they just did it.
He divided the work. “Jasper, Owen — get all the hallway, banquet, office. Every window, every vent cover. Tape the seams, not just the latch. If there’s a gap between the frame and the glass, cover it.” He pulled a fresh roll from the box and tossed it underhand to Jasper. “Overlap the edges.”
Elliot took the back hallway, the service entrances, the doors that led to the parts of the lodge guests weren’t supposed to see.
Maddie looked at Tyler, then at the tape, then back at Tyler. She picked up a roll and started on the lounge windows, working with one hand and checking on him every few strips.
By the time they finished, grey tape bordered every window, every door frame, every vent cover.
Jasper returned with Owen, noticeably more red-eyed. “Done. Every window, every vent. Owen found a bathroom exhaust fan that vented outside — we taped the whole unit.” He looked at the lounge windows, the grey strips catching the firelight. “It’s like gift-wrapping a building in paranoia.”
“It’s working,” Levi said. The temperature in the lounge had stabilized, holding its warmth, and the background weight in his chest — the residue from the room that hadn’t faded — was quieter.
Sealed spaces work. If the fog can’t get in, it can’t reach us.
It won’t last.
But we have more time.
Asher disappeared after dark.
The group settled into the lounge for the evening, all of them in one room.
Owen read aloud from his book — nobody had asked him to, but nobody asked him to stop, so his voice filled the silence and the silence needed filling.
Maddie sat on the couch nearest Tyler’s chair, her hand on his arm, squeezing periodically.
Occasionally, he would respond to her questions, but never with anything close to what Levi was used to.
Every question was met with, “I’m fine.”
Levi sat on the couch, turning over the rules.
The fog gets in through gaps and causes despair, and there is some creature that can materialize from concentrated fog. Being alone is a vulnerability, so we have to stay together...
Except Tyler is surrounded by people right now and he’s still empty. Proximity isn’t fixing what the fog did. So what does?
He waited. Five minutes. Seven. Ten. His eyes kept going to the lounge doorway, waiting for Asher to come back through it.
The rules he’d just worked out were still in his head — alone is the vulnerability, together is the defense — and Asher was alone somewhere in a sealed building that still had missing staff and a creature that formed from fog.
Nobody should be alone right now. That’s the one rule I’m sure of and he just walked off without telling me.
At minute twelve, Levi stood up. Jasper raised an eyebrow. Levi shook his head — don’t ask — and got up.
He checked the hallway first. The bathroom. He checked their room and the adjoining bathroom. Not there.
The kitchen was down the hall near the sealed back entrance, and Levi’s breath came in thin clouds as he moved towards it. He pushed the door open and the smell hit him first: Bleach, sharp and chemical, but underneath it was …citrus?
Levi’s eyes went to the tile, recently cleaned with a wet sheen still drying in the corners, but the grout near the pantry door was darker than the surrounding grout, the stain set deep where bleach couldn’t fully reach.
On the wall beside the walk-in’s entrance were two marks at chest height — small, dark and red, too high to be a spill, in the shape of something that had hit the wall at speed.
The knife block on the counter was missing three knives.
There was a dishtowel wedged at the base of the cabinet near the sink, keeping the door from swinging open.
His stomach dropped.
Something happened in here. Something with blood, something with knives, and someone cleaned it up.
Asher was at the counter. He’d assembled a plate — sandwiches cut diagonally, crackers fanned beside pieces of cheese, an apple sliced into even pieces.
Asher himself was clean, showing no marks on his hands, no stains on the cream t-shirt, nothing on him that said he’d been part of whatever had left those marks on the wall.
Did he do this or did he find it like this?
He should have been more disturbed by the not-knowing, but his eyes were glued to the anomaly sitting on the counter that didn’t quite make sense.
Beside the plate, there was a grapefruit, halved and hollowed, the rind holding a pool of oil with a twist of paper towel standing in the center.
Lit. The small flame cast warm, uneven light across the counter, giving off a faint citrus smell that sat on top of the bleach.
Asher wasn’t looking at the food. He was running his hand through his hair, looking at the grapefruit.
“I couldn’t find candles,” he said softly.
“I looked everywhere. Every drawer, every closet. The front desk, the storage rooms, in every cabinet.” He touched the edge of the grapefruit rind.
“I made this instead. Olive oil in the rind, the pith holds the wick. I just —” He stopped, his mouth quirking to the side and his brow furrowing. “I don’t know where I learned that.”
Levi took a careful step into the kitchen. “What is this, Asher?”
“I never got to do our date,” Asher said.
“Back when we were — in that place.” His voice cracked into something closer to apology.
“I said I would take you on your first date, and first dates need candles, but I looked and they’re not here and I —” His hands pressed flat to the counter and he closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I wanted it to be right.”
He’s nervous.
Something behind Levi’s teeth pressed forward — the words, the ones he hadn’t said back.
They pressed and he held them, his face suddenly too warm.
He walked over to the counter, turned his back to it, and hopped up so he could sit.
“Well, come on then,” he said, picking up a cracker.
“If it’s a date, you have to eat too, right? ”
Asher’s face lit up the same way it did on the Daedalus when Levi had called him dovey for the first time — eyes wide, his lips slightly parted, delight creasing the corners of his eyes.
He nodded once and hopped up onto the counter beside Levi, leaning back against the wall and letting his long legs dangle over the side.
Levi was blushing. He could feel it — his cheeks, his neck, probably his ears.
He kept his eyes on the grapefruit lamp because looking at Asher’s face right now would make it worse, and because this was kind.
Actually, genuinely kind in a way he hadn’t expected.
He was used to Asher getting him flustered, or getting him aroused at terrible times, or saying things that made his brain short-circuit.
But this was different. Asher had searched the lodge for candles and when there weren’t any, he built one out of a grapefruit, because he’d promised Levi a date, and the promise mattered to him more than the circumstances.
It’s romantic.
This man cleaned blood off a kitchen floor, made me a sandwich by the light of a fruit lamp, and it’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me and my bar is in hell.
“The bread is stale,” Asher said, picking up an apple slice. “And the cheese is from a bag. It was weird — each slice was individually wrapped, and I kept ripping the cheese trying to unwrap it, and it looked bad. I had to peel eighteen individual wrappers.”
“That’s very dedicated.”
“I would have preferred a nicer cheese. Something better than apples for a first date. Something with figs.” He said figs the way most people said diamonds. “This place doesn’t have figs.”
“This place doesn’t have a lot of things.
” Levi picked up a sandwich half and bit into it.
The bread was stale and the cheese was definitely some off-brand American slice that tasted like the idea of cheese.
It was the best sandwich Levi had ever had.
His heart hammered and he was sitting on a counter in a bleach-soaked kitchen eating individually-wrapped cheese slices by grapefruit-light and he could not stop blushing.
Say it. Just say it.
He didn’t say it. He ate the sandwich.
“I noticed you cleaned the kitchen,” Levi said, keeping his voice even.
“It needed cleaning.”
“What happened in here, Asher?”
“I don’t know,” Asher said, pinching down the edges of his sandwich slice before peeling off the crust. “They were like that when I came in.”
I don’t know if that’s true.
I don’t know if it matters.
The light flickered across Asher’s face, his mismatched eyes catching different shades — brown darker, green brighter.
He was watching Levi eat the way he watched Levi do everything, and Levi let him.
He ate the apple, slice by slice; it was slightly overripe, the sweetness almost too much, but every piece was cut the same width.
“Next time I’ll find real candles,” Asher insisted. “Actual ones. Not —” He gestured at the grapefruit.
“I dunno, I like this,” Levi said with a shrug.
He was trying for nonchalant. He was not achieving nonchalant.
“It smells better than candles. And you made it.” He picked up the last apple slice.
“You didn’t even know you knew how to make it and you made it.
That’s better than finding candles in a drawer. ”
Asher smiled. A real one — small, unpracticed, and Levi’s chest ached at it.
The flame sputtered. Asher reached over and adjusted the paper-towel wick, straightening it where it had started to lean, his fingers careful with such a small, temporary thing.
The oil spilled over the makeshift wick and the flame went out, and they sat in the dark kitchen for a moment.
“Thank you,” Levi said quietly, his chest so full it hurt. The words pressed behind his teeth again, but he held them, and the holding was getting harder every time. “For this. For all of it.”
He felt Asher go still beside him.
Levi turned his head and kissed him, pulling back before Asher could deepen it, and in the dark he could feel Asher’s breath catch and not come back for a second.
“Next time,” Asher said. “Real candles.”
“I know.”
The group slept in the lounge.
Nobody suggested going to their rooms. Nobody mentioned the beds upstairs behind the taped doors. The idea of being alone behind a closed door made Levi’s stomach hurt, and from the way everyone arranged themselves around the fireplace without discussion, he wasn’t the only one.
Couch cushions ended up on the floor, every top sheet and comforter they could find dragged into the room, until it resembled an almost cozy eight person sleepover.
But Tyler remained in the chair he had been placed in all day, unmoving, occasionally blinking.
Maddie tried to move him — her hands on his arms, her voice soft, come on, come lie down, you’ll be more comfortable — and Tyler’s body lurched, but remained stiff, still staring at the fire.
Maddie settled on the couch nearest to his chair, her hand reaching across the gap to hold Tyler’s wrist as she dozed off.
He and Asher tucked into a corner against a wall near the bar, and Levi made no effort to loosen Asher’s grip on him. It felt good. Safe. Secure.
Levi closed his eyes. He told himself the windows were sealed and the doors were taped and the group was together.
He could sleep.
Levi woke to screaming.
He bolted upright before his eyes were open, and Asher’s hands were already on him, checking his face, his arms, scanning everything as though Levi had been the one screaming. “I’m fine,” Levi said. “I’m fine, it’s not me —”
Then he turned.
Maddie was on the floor beside Tyler’s chair, her hands on his arm, pulling with a force that wasn’t trying to move him. Her screams collapsed into sobs.
Tyler was still in the chair, but somewhat deflated, still not moving. One of the decorative framed photographs was on the ground in front of him, the glass cracked cleanly in half, and in Tyler’s lap, loosely held in fingers that had stopped holding anything, was a shard of bloody glass.
Blood had run down his forearm and pooled in the crease of the chair’s upholstery, dark and still.
He was three feet from her...
Zoe had her hand over her mouth. The others were on their feet, grey-faced in the fog’s light. Asher’s hand found Levi’s and squeezed.
“I’m okay,” Levi said. He stared at Tyler, at the frame on the floor and the shard in his lap and Maddie on the floor beside the chair, her hand still on Tyler’s right wrist, squeezing for a pulse that wasn’t there anymore.
We stayed together. We sealed the windows and taped the doors and put everyone in one room and it didn’t matter. Tyler was surrounded by people, one of them was holding his hand, and the fog still got him.
If proximity isn’t enough — if the fog gets inside us and stays and nothing flushes it out — what comes next?