9. LO
LO
I did not have showering with Stevie only a wall away from me on my list of things that were going to happen today.
It’s literally the only thing that I can think about as I’m brushing my teeth and then turning on the water—an impressive feat considering I’m currently taking shelter from the ghost in my house.
But it’s hard not to think about it. Realistically, it shouldn’t feel any different than showering at a friend’s house.
I’ve done it hundreds of times before. And I’d navigated communal showers when I was in college, which should’ve felt like the least private, least intimate showering experience a person could have.
But instead, all I can think about is how Stevie is right there. Just sitting in her all black with her perfectly messy hair and flashes of tattoos when she lifts her arms. I’m about to be naked so close to her, and even if she’s not thinking about it, I definitely am.
And that’s exactly why I can’t be normal about it.
Unlike all of the other times I’ve used someone else’s shower, I find Stevie hot.
Really hot. Sexy in a disheveled, confusing kind of way that I’d never really liked in anyone else before.
She’s blunt but also deeply kind underneath her hard-to-hear exterior.
I love watching the way she interacts with people, the kindness in her conversations with the librarian and our waitress.
I drop my clothes to the floor and look at the pajamas she’d offered me for the night. It feels so intimate to be wearing her clothes, but I guess there are few things more intimate than sharing a room—sharing a bed —so clothes feel pretty minor in comparison.
I step into the shower and let the hot water run over me. I take a deep breath and force my body to relax. This is the first shower I’ve taken somewhere that isn’t my house since I bought it, and it’s strange to not hear anything, to not be hyperaware.
Instead of thinking about the various horror movie fates that could befall me—a la Psycho mostly—I’m thinking about Stevie. And while she’s not a threat to me or putting me on edge, she’s certainly not helping with keeping my heart rate level.
I take my time rinsing my hair and my body, enjoying the peace. Showers can be so vulnerable, especially when I have to close my eyes or turn my back, and it’s nice to finally not feel like prey being hunted.
After taking as much time as feels appropriate in the shower, I turn off the water and pat my skin dry. I wish I’d had the foresight to bring anything at all with me—I miss my moisturizer—but it hadn’t exactly been top of mind. There’d been about a million other things to worry about instead.
I towel off my hair and pull Stevie’s t-shirt over my head.
It’s oversized and deliciously soft. There’s a faint scent of detergent and something else, a faint musky cologne, maybe, that lingers in the fabric.
It’s annoyingly comforting, somehow smelling and feeling like home—an unhaunted, comforting one—even though we’d met just hours ago.
I step out of the bathroom and shiver from the temperature change. A cloud of moisture follows behind me like I just stepped out of a sauna, telling me I was in there for way longer than I thought.
“How was it?” Stevie asks. She’s sitting in the office chair with her laptop on the desk in front of her.
She has an attached monitor playing video clips.
I can tell it’s footage from earlier today; I recognize my front stoop, my living room.
It’s weird seeing it in b-roll form, like I’m seeing my house for the first time truly through someone else’s eyes.
It looks like a set I would work on more than my home.
“It was nice,” I say and sit down on the edge of the bed. I towel off the ends of my hair. “Very needed.”
“I bet.” She glances back at her computer screen. “Nice outfit. I never pictured you as a boxers kind of girl.”
“Yeah, you like it?” I ask, teasing. A tiny signal in the back of my mind sounds off: She’s flirting with me.
And even if she isn’t, it’s cute that she’s suddenly lost the ability to make eye contact with me.
“Thanks, I really love the…” I pull the shirt away from my chest and look down to read the front.
There’s an abstract illustration that looks delicately hand-drawn and then printed, along with a name. “Wyatt County Jaguars.”
Her cheeks light up, but she keeps her eyes locked on the screen in front of her. “My high school. I didn’t think anyone would see the clothes I was sleeping in.”
As stupid as I know it is, I like that she didn’t pack with bringing a girl back to her hotel in mind.
I know how producers—and people in Hollywood in general—can be.
It’s not like I can blame her since she’s single, but I like knowing there’s no one in LA she’s inviting back to her hotels. “Cute. California?”
“Arizona.”
“I like it. A new look for me,” I say. “I didn’t realize you were from Arizona.”
She arches a dark brow at me. “Because I seem like such a California girl?”
“You’re so…” I wave my hand around, trying to find the word. “Intense. Arizona seems sunnier than that. Friendlier.”
Stevie bites back a smile. “It has a lot of interesting history. The desert, ghost towns.”
“Aliens,” I offer, and she playfully rolls her eyes.
“I know a lot of people like the stories from the, like, old Victorian mansions, but I’ve always preferred the ones connected to nature.
There’s a lot there that we don’t know. I’m hoping to go bigger with my show—less time in houses and more time filming in cooler destinations.
Bayous, deserts, mountains. That kind of thing. ”
“Did you have any, like, encounters back home? Is that what inspired you to start ghost hunting?”
“Nothing specific happened to me, but I heard a lot of the stories growing up.” Stevie turns away from her computer and finally looks at me instead. For her sake, I pretend I don’t see her eyes flick over my body.
I subtly adjust my posture in response, surprised by how intensely I’m craving her approval right now.
I wouldn’t say I feel particularly sexy—Stevie is right that oversized boxers are not really my thing—but being here alone with her is making something come alive in me that hasn’t in a long time.
Even flirting with someone at a bar doesn’t carry this kind of pull.
We’re so close, forced together into such a small space.
It’s hard not to at least consider what it might feel like to kiss her soft, full lips.
“Stories?” The word slips out of my mouth, the best I can come up with when the majority of my brainpower is focusing on how it would feel to have Stevie between my thighs.
“Yeah, you know. Weird encounters. My grandparents live in one of those desert towns with, like, five hundred people. It seems like everyone there has a story about hearing a random voice when no one’s around or seeing a figure.”
With Stevie sharing details about her family, it suddenly feels wildly inappropriate to be this horny. I take a deep breath, forcing myself to be normal about the way she keeps absentmindedly rubbing her bicep under her shirt, showing off her tattoos.
“That’s really cool,” I say, and I mean it even though to my ears, it sounds like the kind of thing a man who’s desperately trying to get laid would say.
I’d heard some variation about a million times at bars, at which point I would pointedly say, Yeah, my girlfriend thinks so, too, even though I’ve been single for years.
“Anything weird with you?”
“ Weird with me ?” I ask, half-laughing.
“You know, your story. Ghosts. Does this kind of thing happen to you?”
“Things like this never happen to me. Or my family, as far as I know. Everyone’s passed already, so I don’t really have anyone to ask. But no word of mouth family lore.”
Stevie’s face grows surprisingly soft and sympathetic. It’s a different look on her, but sweet. “I’m really sorry.”
“Oh, it’s okay. I came from a small family to begin with. Mostly just me and my mom. But as far as I know, no weird encounters in our family home in Topanga.”
“California girl.”
“Born and raised.”
“You keep the house?”
I snort. “I did, actually. I haven’t been able to figure out what to do with it. My house has an actual ghost, but that one has more figurative ones, I guess. I pay the taxes on it every year, but I haven’t figured out what to do with it yet. I haven’t really been back since my mom passed.”
“Figurative might outweigh literal at this point,” Stevie says gently.
She’s the first person other than my accountant to encourage me to go back to my roots in Topanga, mostly because I haven’t told anyone about it—even Annalise.
My mom passed years ago, two years into my time starring on my medical drama.
It feels like a lifetime ago; my mom had gotten so sick so quickly, and so many things had changed so fast that I don’t remember who I’d been before that.
Even just talking about going back is overwhelming to me.
“So you agree that there’s a ghost in my house?” I tease, desperately needing the topic of conversation to change.
“I think you believe there’s a ghost in your house, which is more than enough.”
I laugh, throwing my head back. “Way to totally not answer my question. That was really impressive.”
She puts her hands up defensively, spinning from side to side in her chair. “I’m just saying.”
“We’ll see how tomorrow goes,” I say, half-teasing Stevie’s earlier sentiment.
When Stevie and I lock eyes, my stomach flips and knots up.
Even though I’ve made eye contact with what feels like a million people in my lifetime—friends, co-stars, family, reporters, my agent—this feels different.
This is a new kind of eye contact that turns me completely upside down.
I lose the ability to formulate a sentence instantly.
“So how was Wyatt County?” It’s the only thing I can come up with, the only safe-feeling topic.