Chapter Seven
Beckett
Tap, tap, tap.
The tapping noise in my dream gets louder and louder. And then, with a huge gasping breath, I’m jolted awake from the depths of sleep.
I open my eyes and sit straight up in bed…
No, not bed.
I look around the darkened room, and after a moment of discombobulation, still suspended in that dreamlike space between fantasy and reality, I notice how sore my back muscles are.
I’m still on Mr. Prenchenko’s couch—the one I shoved under the living room window this morning, and then drifted to sleep on this afternoon. At some point in the past several hours, I’ve managed to lose my shirt and gain two throw pillows to stuff behind my head.
“Becks, you eejit,” I reprimand myself sleepily. Now, the jet lag is going to take way longer to adjust to. Not to mention that I’m super uncomfortable and I could have been dozing in a comfy bed this entire time.
I’m summoning up the energy to get up and move when the noise comes again.
Tap, tap, tap.
This time, I know it was most definitely not in my dream.
Tap, tap, tap.
It’s coming from the window. What on earth?
“Hello?” I say stupidly as I sit up on the couch.
I turn to look outside and come face to face with… the banshee.
“Ahhhh!” the banshee screams, her ghostly white face and equally ghostly wail sending a chill to my very bones.
“Ahhhh!” the exact same sound leaves my own mouth as my eyes lock onto the bright white face and tangle of black hair crouching before me.
The banshee is famous in Irish mythology. She comes to people at night and screams and wails to warn them of the impending death of a loved one. She’s one of the country’s most famous legends, though I believed it to be a story told to scare children, mostly. And although Callan swore up and down that he heard the banshee screaming the night before Gran died, I was pretty sure that what he actually heard was Aoife screaming at the television because her favorite singer on The Voice had just been eliminated from the competition.
Now, I’m not so sure.
I involuntarily jerk backwards and, of course, promptly fall off the couch.
Sprawled on the floor, my heart pounding, I scramble around blindly for my phone. And that’s when I hear… laughter ?
Yup. Definitely laughter.
Raucous, side-splitting laughter, in fact.
In none of the spooky stories I’ve been told over the years has the banshee laughed.
I sit up slowly, heart still racing like I’m competing in the Irish Derby, just in time to see the horrendous evil spirit cackling away, doubled over and clutching her stomach.
Only then do I see that she’s wearing a purple tank top.
Not quite the ghostly black robes I was expecting…
She then reaches for her chin, grabs the side of her face, and peels off what I now realize is a white mask, revealing none other than Keeley Roberts.
Laughing her pretty face off.
In the blink of an eye, I go from being absolutely terrified to mildly enraged. Which is not a common emotion for me, but the adrenaline coursing through my body is doing all the talking at the moment.
I climb onto the couch and yank the window open.
“What in the name of all that is holy do you think you’re doing?” I demand as I poke my head outside.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh. It was just so funny when you screamed and fell off the couch,” she responds, still giggly.
Meanwhile, I’m still livid. “You scared me half to death. I thought you were the banshee!”
She tilts her head, her sloppy black topknot drooping as she does so. “The what?”
“A ghost,” I clarify.
“Don’t be silly, Beckett. Ghosts aren’t real,” she chastises.
“So why were you dressed as one?”
“I had a Korean face mask on,” she says like this explains everything. Which it absolutely does not, because I have no idea what on God’s green earth a Korean face mask is. She gestures vaguely at the ground. “I got stuck on the fire escape so I was hoping Mr. Prenchenko could let me back inside. Totally forgot I had this thing on… my bad.”
She at least has the decency to look a little abashed as she looks down at the crumpled white sheet in her hand. Some kind of fluid drips from it.
I have about a million questions regarding her explanation—and about the disgusting drippy thing she’s holding—but I settle for a simple, “Right.”
Because the jury’s still out for me on whether Keeley Roberts might be a little—a lot —unhinged.
“What are you doing in Mr. Prenchenko’s apartment anyway, sleeping on his couch?” she asks curiously. “Are you staying with him or something?”
“I’m house sitting for him for the rest of the summer. You know him?”
“He’s my next-door neighbor,” she explains. Her eyes widen momentarily before narrowing to slits. “Which means that apparently you’re my next-door neighbor now.”
“I love how you say it like I’m the one engaging in questionable behavior right now.”
She looks like she’s about to retort, mouth open defiantly. But then she sighs, and the sound is almost agreeable. “Look. I really am sorry for scaring you, but I’m not making it up. I’m stuck out here on the fire escape. I climbed out because I couldn’t sleep, but then, my window got stuck, and I can’t get back into my apartment.”
“You seem to find yourself getting stuck in bizarre places often, don’t you?” I ask. I’m placated, almost smiling, because those big blue eyes look genuinely remorseful. And now that I’m not about to pee myself in fear of my imminent death or dismemberment, I do see the humor in the situation.
Plus, she looks, well… hot in her tight purple tank and silky black pajama shorts. Unhinged or not, the woman is undeniably pretty.
Not that I should be going down that train of thought…
Keeley wrinkles her nose. “Just today,” she says. “For some reason.”
“Want me to see if I can open it?” I offer.
She considers this for a moment, then nods. “Please.”
I push the window open further, but still practically have to fold myself in two to climb out. I shimmy out onto the fire escape as gracefully as I can, and then stand to my full height, looking down at her in front of me.
The metal platform we stand on suddenly feels too small for us both as I become uncomfortably aware of the fact that I’m not wearing a shirt, and she is, once again, wearing next to nothing.
Keeley also seems to be aware of this as her eyes dart over my shoulders, pecs, and torso, before averting hurriedly. “Uh, you have a ring like mine,” she says, her voice a little thick.
I look down at my chest, and my hand closes around the silver ring strung on the chain around my neck. “They’re called Claddagh rings,” I explain. “My grandmother gave me mine.”
Shortly before she died, Gran gifted me this ring. A men’s ring, oddly. On the inner rim, the words “ Maireann croí éadrom a bhfad” are engraved. Like the majority of people in Ireland of my generation, I don’t speak Gaelic, but a quick google search gave the translation to be “a light heart lives a long life.”
I know the ring didn’t belong to my late grandfather, because I’d never seen it until that moment. But when I asked Gran where she got it and if it had significance, she tapped her nose and gave her famous “what’s for you won’t pass you” line. In this case, she meant that if I was supposed to find out, I would.
Now, I wear the ring around my neck instead of on my finger, because that way, I keep the words—and Gran—close to my heart.
“Really?” Keeley’s eyes are suddenly on me again, sparking bright under the starlight. “That’s weird. My grandfather gave me mine.” She twirls the little silver ring around her finger, her nails adorned with chipped black polish.
“Is your grandpa Irish?”
“No.” She shrugs. “My family have been in Serendipity Springs for generations.”
“Maybe he visited Ireland and bought it there,” I suggest, and she nods.
“I’m not sure if he’s ever been there. But that would make sense.”
I take a step forward, carefully moving around her on the narrow fire escape. “Let’s take a look at this window of yours.”
She gestures to the white-rimmed window directly next to the window I just climbed through—she’s right, we’re well and truly next-door neighbors. I put my hands under the edge of the window and pull upwards with as much force as I can.
I almost lose my balance when it immediately slides open.
I turn to raise a brow at her. “Stuck, you say?”
Her cheekbones redden as she stares, goggle-eyed, at the wide-open window into her apartment. “Wha—I swear it was!”
Almost laughing, I hold up a hand to count on my fingers. “First, you accost me naked in an elevator. Then, you turn up in the same shop I happen to be visiting. And now, you come to my window in the middle of the night with tales of being trapped by a stuck window that seems more mythological than the ghost you were just posing as.” I give her a crooked grin. “Are you stalking me, Keeley Roberts? Should I be fearing for my life?”
My teasing makes her face turn a bright shade of red that clashes with her purple shirt. “Why would I waste my time stalking you?”
“Because I’m handsome as can be,” I tell her laughingly. “And funny. And exceedingly charming.”
“As if.”
“I could charm the skin off a snake, if I ever took the notion.”
She snorts, but her cheeks are a deeper red than ever. “That’s not even a real saying.”
I let my eyes purposefully dip down to her bare legs as I say, “Well, I would have said that I could charm the pants off you, but you already appear to be missing your pants. Again.” I grin at her, pleased with my American use of the word ‘pants’—in Ireland, we say ‘trousers’—but her eyes narrow so quickly that I add, “Plus, I like my appendages intact.”
A burst of laughter leaps from her, and she claps her hand over her mouth as if trying to contain it. I like making her laugh.
“Now that I’ve come to your rescue for the second time in one day, I’ll be on my way.” I lift my chin in a nod. “Goodnight, neighbor.”
“Goodnight, Beckett ,” she says pointedly.
I wait until she’s safely inside her apartment, then climb back through Mr. Prenchenko’s living room window and head straight to the bedroom.
My last coherent thought as I drift back to sleep is that I’m going to like being Keeley Roberts’ neighbor.
I sleep like a baby for the rest of the night.