CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
?
WHISTLING LIKE A damn fool, Adam waved to people as he strutted down the street toward his shop.
Sure, most of the people he passed returned the greeting before turning around and eyeing him up.
Maybe one or two made a snide comment about it being too early for someone this drunk, but he didn’t care.
He’d had a good first date. Dare he even say it, a great one?
In the annals of Adam Stein’s romance history, there were three top first dates.
There was the time a man took him to an aquarium and spent all night making eyes at the shark.
The one when the guy’s husband stopped by the bar to pick up an order of wings.
Oh, and—best of all—the hot air balloon ride with a man terrified of heights.
It’d been his idea, and he spent the whole time screaming it was immersion therapy while huddled up in the basket.
The rest were a hodgepodge of men staring him down, asking if he brought condoms, then the two of them slipping out to fuck and forget.
Last night, he got the best of both worlds. And the way Raj melted when Adam got a little domineering… For a brief second, he let himself hope he’d found his diamond in the rough. But, upon some post-nut clarity, Adam realized it was probably the mask and cloak. Good thing he had a lot of those.
“I put a spell on you…” Adam sang, his keys jangling against the door as he shoved it open. Raising his arms, he swept in through the front with a “…because you’re mine!”
“Morning, boss.” Chrissy leaned at her post, her chin in her hand as she watched him yank out his keys.
Adam tried to reel in his joy. “Morning.”
“Someone’s in a chipper mood.”
“Oh?” Adam did his best to appear uninterested by doing his job. It would have worked, too, if his only employee wasn’t staring him down like a dog watching a new bone.
“Whistling, singing…unlocking the front door an hour before opening.”
“Damn it.” He caught one of the older ladies sniffing around and dove to push the glass shut before she could open it. “Sorry,” Adam mouthed to her as he relocked the entrance and spun the sign back to closed. “Check back in a half hour.”
“Humph.” She looked about to drag him into the street, but Adam melted into his mess of costumes. What’d she think she’d get by stopping into a costume shop a half hour early? A special edition clown nose? A purse full of blood capsules?
Speaking of, it looked like he needed to restock. “Chrissy, how much corn syrup do we have in the back?”
“Why would I know?” she asked.
“Because we’re running low, and it’s your job to do inventory.”
“No, it’s your job. And judging by the state of this place, you’re slacking off. If you’ve got time to sing, you’ve got time to—”
“Yes, yes. How droll.” Damn. She wasn’t wrong.
There were empty shelves that should have been filled after closing.
He could have sworn he’d restocked before leaving last night.
Oh, no, he’d had to leave early to get dressed.
And the night before that was the Halloween carnival.
Well, he could always double down on stocking tonight…
Except it was the haunted concert, and the Halloween king needed to announce the bands.
“You’ve been letting this place go, boss,” Chrissy said, appearing out of nowhere behind him. He couldn’t stop his jerk of surprise, but did his best to not scream ‘witch’ and run.
“I’ve been busy with my royal duties.”
“Do those duties include schtupping the local hotel owner?”
Adam’s face drained of all blood. “What?”
“Everyone saw you two on a date. Mrs. Melnar couldn’t stop blabbing about it while you were squatting on the throne.”
Mrs. Melnar saw them? Together? And she was cognizant enough to understand what was happening? Heat flickered then burned at the sides of his face. He tried to keep his breathing calm, but the slamming of lockers echoed in his ears.
“We were just…having a ceasefire.”
“Oh.” Chrissy, his employee, nodded. “Is that what they call it when you bone in the theater?”
Fuck. Someone saw? How? There were no cameras, no guards. No one cared about the damn costume department. Flung from his body, Adam watched his own eyes drift over to Chrissy, his lips forming the words, “How did you—?”
She laughed. “So you did? All I heard was that Jeffrey saw you go in there and not come back out for a half hour.”
So no one saw him get on his knees, just that he was with a man in a private space for some amount of time.
He could fix this. There was a way to… Adam stared into Chrissy’s face knotted like a trap about to spring.
He couldn’t fix shit. He was screwed. “How many people…assume that’s what happened? ”
“No one else. They still think you two hate each other. Like you weren’t eye fucking on day one.”
Okay. Good, good, good. Everyone was under the delusion that Adam despised Raj and would never, say, suck that perfect brown cock until his eyes rolled back into his head.
It wasn’t that they didn’t know he was gay.
The town seemed rather proud of the fact that their King of Halloween was a skinny man who preferred the naked company of men.
They just didn’t like hearing about it. Not only the details but that his part of being gay meant, on occasion, he would touch another man’s butt and like it.
He could be gay as long as he was completely celibate.
It’d been a state of purgatory that Adam could live with until that gorgeous teddy bear strolled into his town.
In his rush to see where this was going, Adam never thought about what happened after.
Come Christmas, Easter, the Fourth of July—will they all chuckle at the two men kissing during their parades?
“You know, boss, no one cares. You could have an army of oiled-up men in thongs parade through the store, and people wouldn’t bat an eye.”
“That sounds like something you’d prefer more than me.”
Chrissy sighed. “Point being, it’s not the ancient times. No one’s gonna tie you two to a stake. It’s…” She gave the longest, most exhausted groan. “Cute. You’re cute in a nerdy, macabre, angry pigeons pecking each other for territory sort of way.”
Cute? That wasn’t something people said about two men furiously fucking in the dark for a month before getting sick of each other. Cute couples bought throw pillows together, adopted a fluffy cat to clash with the pillows, ate brunch at their kitchen table.
Oh god. I mean, I know I like Raj. He’s stable but also quirky. Those glasses and his little dimpled cheek. The way he bats his long black eyelashes and smiles with just a little tic to the side… Am I past like and into serious with him?
And he doesn’t even know…
Adam slammed the heels of his palms to his eyes, trying to stop the runaway headache from building to a panic attack in his brain. He didn’t just like Raj Choudhary, he cared for him, and that was fucking terrifying.
?
“Logan!” Raj peeled out across the floor. At the last second, he grabbed a pole before falling into a nest of barbed wire. “Is it working now?”
After a few seconds, his business partner called out an exhausted, “No.”
Damn it. Raj rammed his fist into the chicken wire, denting the flimsy fence.
Great, one more thing to fix in this never-ending house of horrors.
He glared at the line of imposing animatronics, none of which wanted to leap, shake, cackle, or scare the pants off of teenagers.
He didn’t have a haunted house but a derelict shack.
Logan’s blond head popped around the corner where an old lady refused to rock in her chair. But as Logan passed, a horrifying cat screech broke from the speakers.
“At least that works,” Raj said, earning no encouragement from the man. Before Logan could start in, he toyed with the extension cords and their outlets. “I swear, I’ve checked these a dozen times, and the electrician.”
“Which cost us—”
“This should be working. Why isn’t it?” Raj glared at the electric chair where a skeleton was supposed to thrash wildly. Its dead eyes stared at him, daring Raj to make him spark.
“Raj, man.” Logan reached out, nearly laying a comforting hand on Raj’s shoulder, but he ducked out of the way. He knew what was coming but didn’t want to hear it. “Look, I’m not saying we have to abandon the idea. But save it for next—”
“No. No. We are a haunted bed and breakfast. We need the haunts.”
“We have them, inside the hotel. Which…”
“Which what?” Raj dropped the green cords and stared at his partner. “You said it was working. That the guests were leaving glowing reviews.”
“They are, it’s just… I was looking at the book.”
“We’re full up for months,” Raj insisted.
“Yeah, two months, then around Christmas, it starts to trickle off.”
That makes sense. People don’t like to get spooky for Christmas. But we could rebound in the New Year. “How many in January?”
“Three reservations, and one’s the mayor again, so…”
No. No, they needed to be booked solid for six months to have a chance of surviving.
“Maybe if we switch over. Do more of a normal hotel for the rest of the year—”
“Then it wouldn’t be a haunted hotel!” Raj shouted.
Logan raised his hands, washing them of the fight. As he walked away, Raj focused back on the plugs. He had to get this working. “Once the haunt’s up, it’ll draw people in. They’ll come to the only working haunt all year long. You’ll see.”
“I’m not the one who sold my house for this adventure.”
Raj hung his head and tried to breathe. The vise was clenching tighter around his heart. Everything was riding on this, and if he couldn’t get even a few cheap Halloween witches to cackle, then what was he doing with his life? What was he good for?
The jangle of his phone drew Raj away from his pity party.
Adam had texted him a skull, an eggplant, and water drops.
Subtle. But those three images were enough to knock Raj back to that crowded costume room and Adam on his knees for him.
God, he wanted to pay him back tenfold. To watch that beanpole snap in half from the force of his coming.
But he couldn’t very well fuck the man in a dumpster. Raj needed to focus on his haunt. Placing his phone on the floor, Raj tore apart the wires and began to solder them all together, again. A hot, standoffish twink with a mouth to make demons weep would have to wait.