Chapter 1 #2
Stifling my sigh, I return to consoling her while silently willing a taxi to swing into the parking lot.
She’s in no state to converse, but that’s okay.
I’m good at talking for two. I tell her about the cute out-of-towner who came into The Rusty Anchor last weekend, and the new therapy dogs they’ve brought into the children’s wing of the hospital.
I’m halfway through rattling off my Christmas wishlist from my phone’s Notes app when headlights filter through the trees and sweep over gravel.
Oh, thank God. I’ve missed at least three ABBA songs and a party game by now. I sling Leah’s arm over my shoulder and help her step off the lit veranda and into the dark toward the waiting car. When I see who steps out of the driver’s side, I break into a grin.
Roger Burrows is the type of old man who thinks it’s super cool to be grumpy. Grunting is his second language, his beard is his fourth child, and if he isn’t complaining about sports, politics, or the state of his neighbors’ front lawns, then he’s probably taking a nap.
Sometimes, I think he’s Coastal Cab’s only employee who works outside of a Saturday night, because he’s the only one they send every time I call.
“Thought you had the night off?” he grumbles, tucking his hands under his armpits.
“Well, good evening to you too, Roger. I’m having a swell night, thank you for asking,” I chime. “How’s Lou?”
Ignoring both my sarcasm and my question about his wife, he yanks open the back passenger door. He glares at Leah as she crocodile-crawls onto the seat. “She gonna be sick in my car?”
“Yes,” I say sweetly.
He scowls at me.
I smile back.
Roger likes to play this silly little game where he pretends he doesn’t like me, or more specifically, doesn’t like me folding drunk girls into the back of his taxi and asking him to take them home for free, just one more time.
He bitches and moans, but he does it anyway, plus texts me a snippy one-word confirmation when they’re safely behind their front door.
He’s got a heart of gold under his too-tight plaid shirts.
Besides, I’m sure he’d want someone to do the same for his daughter.
I know he loves me deep down, anyway. At the very least, he loves the homemade brownies I hand out at the Devil’s Cove taxi tank every Saturday night. He always inches down his window just enough to snatch them out of my hand like a starving raccoon.
We stare at each other for a little longer, but staring is one of my talents, so of course, Roger breaks eye contact first. He curses into the wind, slams the door shut on Leah, and leans against it.
“I’m getting sick of being your personal run-around, kid. Ain’t it about time you learned to drive? You could waste your own damn time instead of mine.”
Now it’s my turn to ignore his question and the way it prickles my cheeks and curdles in my stomach.
I clear my throat and force a tight smile. “Excuse me, please,” I say, trying to keep the wobble from my voice. I usher him away from the passenger door with a flutter of a fresh antibacterial wipe in my hand, then rap-tap-tap on the window.
When Leah rolls it down, I fish out a water bottle from my SOS bag and drop it on her lap.
“Sip it, don’t gulp. When you get home, don’t get into bed until you’ve had two more glasses of water and eaten a slice of dry toast. Oh, and don’t forget to take your makeup off.
Did you know that every time you don’t take your makeup off, you age ten days?
” I heard this on TikTok, so it’s probably not true, but I’ve found the threat of it is enough to get most girls to at least drag a wipe over their face before their head hits the pillow.
“Sleep on your left side if you still feel sick. Actually, sleep on your side anyway, because—”
“Enough with that damn monologue,” Roger grunts, rounding the car and yanking the driver’s door open. “I’ve heard you say it so many times, I could recite it in my sleep.”
I catch his eye over the roof of the car and raise a brow. “And it shows. I can tell you take your makeup off every night without fail.”
Even though the light from the car’s headlights barely touch him, I’m sure I see the corner of his lips lift under his handlebar mustache. Before I can tease him about it, his shoulders pinch. With a tight grip on the doorframe, he twists around and glares out into the night.
Ice-cold silence crackles against the nape of my neck. Holding my breath, I ball the wipe in my fist and stare at the rigid line of his back. It feels like ages before he looks back at me, and when he does, the unease in his gaze makes the breath catch at the back of my throat.
“Don’t hang around, kid” is all he says.
That rough hand reaches for me again, and I wonder if it grabbed hold of him too.
With a quick nod, I push away the paranoia and duck my head through Leah’s window. I press the wipe in her hand and give her shoulder a sympathetic pat. “You’ll feel better in the morning, I promise.”
She smiles weakly and hiccups. “You’re so nice, Wren. Like, if God held a gun to my head and told me I had to nominate only one person I know to go to heaven, it’d be you.”
And there it is.
My laugh warps with delirium, and suddenly, the December chill has lost its bite and all I can feel is the warmth of her words.
You’re so nice, Wren. Like everyone else does on the Devil’s Coast, she said it like one would say the grass is green or the sky is blue. Like it’s a simple, undeniable fact.
Though I don’t take drugs, aside from the occasional Tylenol, I know the high from being called nice is comparable. And I don’t just dabble in “nice” either.
I’ve had a full-blown addiction to it since I was eighteen.
Volunteering at the hospital and peeling drunk partygoers off the Devil’s Cove boardwalk is the tip of the iceberg.
I do everything—from knitting onesies for premature babies and checking in daily with my elderly neighbors, to holding bake sales for every charity under the sun—and I do it all for my hit of nice.
The Good Samaritan, the Angel in Pink. The fun sponge who writes down the license plates of every punter at the bar she works at, just in case they ignore her makeshift “no drunk driving” sign. I don’t care how the residents of the Devil’s Coast call me nice, as long as they call me it.
But it’s polite to be modest, so I dismiss Leah’s compliment with a flap of my hand. “Nice is just what I do, honey!”
With a reluctant promise to text me when Leah’s home safe, Roger pulls out of the parking lot. I wave them off with a bright smile, but when the headlights simmer, dim, and fade, I find myself alone in the dark with a heart that’s sliding south.
Because that’s the thing about feeding your addictions: the high is only ever temporary.
Tucking my clutch under one arm and hitching my SOS bag over the other, I close my eyes and suck in a breath so deep the night’s frost burns my chest. I’m hoping it’ll burn away at the guilt that sits there too, but when it doesn’t, I try to turn my attention to other parts of my body.
A trick my therapist taught me years ago to deal with my thoughts sliding south.
I find the steady beat of my pulse in my neck.
I taste the night’s moisture on the tip of my tongue and smell its earthy scent.
My ears prickle at the sound of tires hissing over the frosted tarmac of the nearby road and the bare trees shivering in the forest beyond it.
Crack.
What the hell was that?
My eyes pop open and scan the darkness. It sounded like a twig crunching underfoot, and it sounded close.
“Hello?” I whisper, clutching my bag strap. “Who’s there?”
Silence.
My stomach clenches as I glare out to the never-ending void. It stares right back, offering me only the trickling sensation of being watched.
Seconds pass, slowed by the weight of tension. I stare until my eyes ache.
Nothing.
A sharp gust of wind skates down my collar, and I shudder enough to shake myself out of my trance.
I’ve let Leah get into my head with all that nonsense about the “Boogeyman” of the Devil’s Coast. She was so drunk she was probably hallucinating.
I’m being silly, and even if I’m not, why am I still standing out here?
I might choose a rom-com over a horror any day, but even I know the ditzy blond doing something careless, like hanging out alone in an empty parking lot, always dies in the opening sequence.
Not the type of movie I daydream about starring in, thank you very much.
With a weak chuckle, I turn on my heel. I only make it two steps toward the dimly lit veranda when another noise reaches out from the dark and taps me on the shoulder.
Hiss. Fizz.
My laugh wilts on my tongue. I spin around, and now, at the heart of the dark, there’s a flickering flame.
A match, little more than a pinprick against the broad black expanse.
The flame moves north, and my eyes move with it, transfixed by how it dances at the mercy of the wind.
I can’t make out most of the objects that shift and contort in its wake.
Something patterned. Something metallic.
Then something that makes my heart trip over its next beat.
A cigarette.
Which means someone is out there smoking it.
I let out a stunted gasp. The flame comes to a stop beneath its tip, and I almost don’t dare drag my gaze up to what it’s brought to light.
I follow the length of the cigarette, skim over the full lips its tucked between, then trail the sharp, straight line of a scar over a hollowed cheekbone, and come to rest on a heavy brow.
Is he the “Boogeyman” Leah spoke of?
He sure looks like a monster.
The man’s eyes lift from the match and clash with mine. Suddenly, the air drops ten degrees, chilling my blood and slowing my breathing.
And now I’m not breathing at all.
I recognize those eyes—only, I don’t. It’s a weird, fleeting feeling. A short, sharp tug on a memory I didn’t know I had. Perhaps an alternate me has seen them in an alternate universe or in a dream that slipped from my mind the moment I woke up.
That gaze … it’s glassy. Magnetic. Certain.
And then I have this slow, syrup-like feeling it didn’t find me by chance.
The realization shoves me backward. One step, two, my heels skating over frosted asphalt. Three steps and I nearly trip over the raised deck of the veranda. Four, and I’m back under the light of the heat lamp, grappling for the nightclub’s door handle.
There’s a voice screaming at me to get inside.
I hear it often, and I’m pretty certain it belongs to my friend Tayce—she has a habit of yelling at me about safety, and I have a habit of rolling my eyes in response.
But I guess being the nosiest person on the coast has its pitfalls, one of them being I can never resist the pull of curiosity.
Heart slamming against my ribs, I slowly turn and press my back against the door.
He’s still there. Watching me. The flame is fading now, its dying reflection trapped within the walls of his cold gaze. I’m trapped there too, frozen between running inside and staying to find out what will happen when the flame reaches the end of its life.
I don’t have to wait long. The flame never kisses the tip of his cigarette. It doesn’t burn out, either. The monster kills it with a quick snap of his wrist, plunging him back into the dark.
I blink at the night, straining my ears to find something, anything to latch onto in the silence.
Nothing.
A beat passes as I shift from one sticky boot to the other. He’s still watching me; I can feel it. Seconds stretch into minutes, and eventually, my heartbeat slows to its regular rhythm. My lungs expand, and when I release my next breath, a laugh tumbles out with it, nervous and light.
I’ve suddenly remembered why I’m not afraid of the dark.
It’s because I know those cautionary tales and horror movies are just fiction.
In real life, monsters don’t live in the dark; they live in the light.
They hold your hair back when you’re puking.
They bake cakes, make signs, volunteer in hospitals.
And sometimes, they even wear pink.
I stick my tongue out toward the black horizon, turn on my heel, and run back inside.