3. Salem
SALEM
“What the hell was that?” Rowan screamed at the back of my head.
Her voice followed me out the exit before the door had closed behind us.
I made it three full steps into the open air before she said it. A personal record for her restraint, honestly.
“What?” I asked, turning back toward her with what I hoped was a neutral expression and not the dazed one I suspected I was wearing.
“You know what.” She stepped closer. “Don’t do that thing where you pretend nothing happened when clearly something is happening.”
“I’m not pretending.” It was technically true in the sense that I had not yet decided what had happened, let alone how to pretend it hadn’t. Semantics.
One minute, I was meandering toward the exit, mentally composing my victory cider order and congratulating myself on making it through unscathed. The end was in sight. I was free. And then—
She crossed her arms. “We went in together.”
Rowan had been beside me the entire time, close enough that if I’d sneezed, it would have landed in her hair. Then the group in front of us had stumbled, someone had screamed, the spacing had shifted just enough that when I rounded the corner—
I swallowed. “I remember. We got separated. It happens. Haunted house traffic flow. Very chaotic in there.”
Rowan’s expression didn’t move. “We didn’t get separated.”
“I slowed down. You’re a fast walker. It’s one of your many admirable qualities.”
“I slowed down, too,” she said calmly.
“Because you stopped.”
Arguing technicalities with Rowan was pointless. I’d learned not to play it somewhere around the seventh grade, after losing every single time.
She stepped a little closer, lowering her voice just enough that it didn’t carry over the crowd spilling out around us. “I saw the end of whatever the hell that was.”
“The end of what?”
Denial was still my strongest skill.
“You and Shirtless McGee… And he was close.”
“He wasn’t that close.”
She looked at me steadily. “I bet if I asked him if you had caramel in that apple cider you dropped, he could tell me.”
Heat crept up the back of my neck, which was deeply inconvenient given that I had been standing outside in the cold for thirty seconds and I desperately needed every bit of that air.
“He was doing his job,” I said. “That is literally the entire point of a haunted house. They’re supposed to get close. It’s immersive.”
Rowan just watched me.
The longer I stood there saying nothing, the more obvious it became that I had no idea how to explain what had happened.
Truthfully, I had walked in there expecting a scare and a reason to complain about it later.
What I got was something that felt nothing like fear and everything like the beginning of a problem.
He had come out of the fog, and I had just stood there.
Not screamed, not laughed, not any of the normal things a person does in a haunted house.
Stood there like an absolute disaster of a human being while a shirtless stranger with abs for days looked at me like I was the most interesting thing in the room.
He was supposed to be the scary one.
He was scary and sexy, and the chemistry was insane.
Nope. We were not unpacking that next to a taco truck.
“I was not harassing anyone.” I pivoted to the only lane I had left. “For the record. Formally. I would like that stated.”
Rowan blinked. “I didn’t say you were harassing anyone.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I was absolutely not thinking that.”
“I’m just saying.” I gestured toward the haunted house like it might back me up. “If a grown man chooses to appear shirtless and within breathing distance of my personal space, that is not something I caused or initiated or in any way invited.”
Rowan’s eyebrow arched. “Yep. Shirtless.”
“That is not the point.”
“That feels like the most important detail.”
“It is a distracting detail,” I said firmly. “It adds nothing to the actual conversation.”
“It adds quite a bit, actually.”
“Rowan.”
She bit back a smile. “You don’t get distracted like that. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I do,” I said with complete confidence. “Constantly. All the time. I am a very distractible person.”
She tilted her head. “Distracted by man nipples?”
“That… is not a sentence I am answering in a public space.”
Rowan laughed, which was deeply unhelpful and also a little too loud.
“It was the fog. Very thick fog. Possibly chemical. There could have been—I’m not ruling out hallucinogens.”
“Hallucinogens.”
“It’s a haunted house, Rowan. Anything is possible.”
“So, your defense is drugs.”
“My defense,” I said with great dignity, “is science.”
She stared at me for a long moment, her expression a blend of fondness and exasperation I’d been on the receiving end of for most of my adult life.
She stepped closer, and the joke dropped out of her expression entirely. “You don’t have to explain it. I just want to know if you’re okay. That was genuinely not like you.”
I hadn’t expected that. Simple and direct and aimed precisely at the part of me I was working very hard not to examine.
I was okay. More than okay, actually. I hadn’t felt anything like that in a long time.
Maybe ever. That particular combination of completely calm and unsteady at the same time, like standing on solid ground that had quietly started to tilt.
If I were being honest with myself, though I was actively choosing not to be, that was the part that scared me.
Something in me had leaned toward it.
“I’m okay,” I said. “It was just… unexpected.”
Rowan held my gaze like she was weighing whether that was enough. Whatever she found, she decided to let it go, because she nodded once. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
A beat passed between us, the tension draining out of it.
“So,” she said in the casual tone, “do you still hate Halloween, or are we having a breakthrough?”
“Yes. Passionately. Deeply. With my whole soul and several organs.”
“Good.” She smirked. “Change would’ve been annoying.”
We walked toward the food trucks, the night air cool and sharp around us, smelling faintly of kettle corn and someone’s nearby bonfire. I pulled my flannel tighter and followed the light.
“Speaking of change,” she added offhandedly enough that I almost missed the weight underneath it, “have you thought any more about a trip to UW Madison to scope apartments?”
We had made the plan at eighteen—two years at community college, then two years finishing our bachelor’s degrees online so we could stay home and save money, then a gap year before grad school.
The gap year had lasted five years, which felt about right for us.
Rowan had known she wanted to work in psychology since middle school.
Meanwhile, I’d spent three years collecting credits, and eventually, I landed on sociology because I had enough hours to claim it.
The alternative was an examination I wasn’t ready to have.
Finding a program that worked for both of us had taken almost as long.
Madison had a counseling psychology track that could use my sociology degree.
We would end up with the same letters after our names, arriving from slightly different directions.
The night we found it, we had celebrated with cheap wine as if we had already gotten in, which was probably premature, but it had felt like something worth marking.
I had never told her I wasn’t sure I was going to go.
I focused very intently on the taco truck menu ahead of us like it might save me.
“We haven’t even applied yet,” I said. “I don’t even know if I’d get in.”
“You will. Obviously.”
“That feels like a bold assumption.”
“You have a 4.0.”
I did have a 4.0. I’d worked myself half to death for that 4.
0—practically sick before exams, rewriting every essay until I couldn’t see straight, convincing myself that everyone else found this easier than I did, and I was the only one barely holding it together.
Whenever I’d crossed a finish line, I’d been too exhausted to feel good about it.
Just relieved it was over. Just waiting for the next thing to be afraid of failing.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to sign up for more of that. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be.
“I’m just saying,” I said, reaching for my debit card, “maybe we don’t plan our entire futures tonight. Let’s at least get in first. Looking at apartments feels premature for something that doesn’t start until next fall.”
I squeezed her hand before she could push further, then turned toward the shortest line. Standing still meant more questions, and moving meant not answering them.
My mind drifted back to the hallway. The fog. The blue light. The way he’d looked at me like—
I cleared my throat, squared my shoulders, and read the taco truck menu again with the focused intensity of someone defusing a bomb.
Carnitas. Al pastor. Something called The Destroyer with three pepper emojis next to it.
Great. Excellent. We were thinking about tacos.
We were only thinking about tacos.
I ordered The Destroyer on principle. If the evening was going to be unhinged, I might as well commit to it fully.
Rowan was watching me again. I had been circling this for weeks—months, actually—carrying it around like something I was afraid to set down in case it shattered or disappeared or turned out to be smaller than it had felt in the dark.
With the kettle corn smell in the air, the bonfire smoke drifting across the field, and Rowan looking at me like she already knew I was about to say something real, I wanted to tell her.
“So, hey, Rowan—”
Her hand clamped onto my arm so fast I nearly dropped my debit card.
“Oh, my God. Salem.” Her voice dropped to a scandalized whisper. “It’s 2B. He’s getting tacos too. We have to go linger near him immediately.”
She was already pulling me forward before I could finish the sentence.
Just like that, swept away by top-tier tacos and the neighbor she had an unhinged crush on, I missed another opportunity to tell her the truth. To hand her the piece of my life I’d been holding at arm’s length.
I had already made the night weird enough with my almost-kiss situation.
I would try again tomorrow.