4. Ethan
ETHAN
By the end of the night, half my skeleton makeup had worn off, I smelled like fog juice and fake blood, my voice was shot, and my ribs were still humming from hours of standing too close to the speakers.
Perfect opening night.
The Butcher’s Den always felt different once the crowds were gone.
The noise disappeared all at once, like someone had reached up and pulled it straight out of the air.
What was left behind was quieter than quiet.
It was the stillness of a space that had been loud for a long time and hadn’t quite recovered.
Fog clung low to the ground, in slow, drifting ribbons, catching in the beams of the work lights we’d thrown on after closing. One of the chains near the far wall creaked where it hung, swaying in a draft.
We moved through the cleanup the way we always did—fast, efficient. Resetting rooms. Checking props. Replacing anything that hadn’t held up under pressure. There was a rhythm to it that I liked, the same satisfaction as closing out a job at the hardware store.
I crouched near the back wall, working a warped chain link back into place. The cold metal pressed into my fingers as I forced it to bend. It resisted at first, then gave just enough.
Miles dropped into the chair beside me with a long, tired exhale and dragged a hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up in four different directions. He tipped his head toward the ceiling like he was presenting his grievances to God directly.
“Good night for the Den,” he said, his eyes still closed. “Minimal injuries. No crying kids. Only a couple of teenagers tried to fight someone. That’s basically a standing ovation.”
I tested the chain’s tension before letting it settle. “You forgot exceptional leadership. Heroic, really. I don’t know how any of us would have survived without your steady hand guiding us through.”
“That too,” he said easily. “Thanks for noticing.”
“You’re exhausting.”
“You love me.”
“That feels like a strong word.”
It wasn’t, actually. I’d known Miles most of my life, through every version of both of us, through the things that had gone right and the longer list of things that hadn’t.
He was the kind of person who showed up without being asked, which was probably the most necessary quality a person could have.
The kind of constant you stopped noticing until you tried to imagine the alternative, and then you couldn’t.
He grinned, lazy and unbothered. “You’d be bored without me.”
Also true. Inconveniently.
We’d been doing this long enough that the banter ran on its own—automatic, easy, filling the space without requiring much from either of us.
There were nights we barely spoke at all, moving around each other like the whole thing had been choreographed somewhere along the way without either of us noticing.
Whether it was the hardware store or the haunted house, we orbited each other without trying.
The door slammed open before I could respond.
Alba came in with a rush of cold night air.
Her dark curls were piled on top of her head, makeup brushes stuck through the bun like makeshift pins.
Her eyeliner was still winged sharply, despite however many hours had passed, and her black leggings were caked with fake blood. She looked exactly like she always did.
Like Alba. Like Miles’s wife.
She spotted Miles, then me, and her face lit up—which, in my experience, meant something was either very good or very bad.
Miles leaned forward immediately, interest snapping into place. “Is it my problem or his?”
“His,” she said, already crossing the room. “Very much his.”
I looked back down at the chain. “No.”
“You don’t even know what I want to show you.”
“I know you. That’s enough.”
I should have ignored her. Gone back to the chain. Finished the job, went home, and got a reasonable amount of sleep like a person with functional self-preservation instincts.
Instead, I set the chain down, pushed to my feet, and waited for whatever fresh hell Alba had for me. She shoved her phone at me, and it took less than a second to recognize the footage.
My hallway. Me. The fog. The blue light.
Her.
I grabbed the phone and brought it closer, like that would make what I was seeing easier to process.
Even through grainy security cam quality, even with the washed-out colors and strobe flicker, I knew which moment Alba had caught.
I watched myself step forward, slow and deliberate, closing the distance in a way that left absolutely no ambiguity about what I was doing.
On screen, my hand lifted.
Two fingers beneath her chin.
Tilting her face up like I had any right whatsoever to do that.
I winced.
The video kept playing. I watched the whole thing unfold with the horror of seeing yourself do something you can’t take back, without any of the adrenaline that had made it feel like a reasonable idea at the time.
“Security cam picked it up,” Alba said, practically levitating. “Do you see this? Do you see what this is?”
Miles let out a low whistle beside me. “Well. Damn.”
“That’s what I said. Only louder, and with significantly more screeching.”
“It was a moment,” I said, handing the phone back. “That’s it. Sorry. It won’t happen again.”
Alba looked at me like I had just said something genuinely offensive. “A moment. Ethan. This is not a moment. A moment is a nice sunset or a really good cup of coffee. This”—she held the phone up—“is everything. This is what romcom movies are made of.”
She hit play again. “We have to post this.”
There was no question in her words whatsoever.
“Absolutely not.”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Don’t post that.”
“What?”
“Alba.” I said it the way you say a word when you need it to do more work than it normally does. “Don’t post it. It’s weird. It’s personal.”
“This is marketing gold,” she said with the energy of someone announcing a medical breakthrough. “This is what people click on. This is what makes someone buy a ticket and bring their entire friend group and donate to charity because they are emotionally compromised—”
“Don’t weaponize marketing against me.”
“I absolutely will, and I feel no shame about it.”
Miles, who had been watching all of this with the quiet interest of someone at a tennis match, glanced over at me. “You don’t usually care about this kind of thing. What gives?”
He wasn’t wrong. Normally, I would have laughed it off, let Alba post whatever she wanted, and moved on before the conversation cost me anything.
“It’s different,” I said.
Miles’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile. Alba paused the video on the exact frame where my hand rested against her jaw, and for a second, she just looked at it.
“I honestly don’t think she’d mind,” she whispered. “She looks like she’s—I don’t know. Like she is enjoying it.”
I looked at the frame.
She was right. Even through the grainy footage, with the washed-out light doing its best to flatten everything, it was there. She hadn’t stepped back, hadn’t broken it. I’d noticed it in the moment, too, in the half-second before her name had been called and the whole thing had snapped apart.
It would have been easier if she’d looked scared, or annoyed, or like someone who’d been caught off guard by something unwelcome.
She hadn’t looked like any of those things.
“If you post it,” I said finally, “don’t tag me. Especially not from the Den’s account. That thing gets traction this time of year.”
Alba held my gaze, then nodded. “Done.”
The energy in the room settled after that—not entirely but enough. She tucked her phone away and turned back toward the space with an efficient pivot.
“Chains in room three need tightening,” she said. “And someone knocked the second table in the hallway sideways. ”
“Got it,” Miles said, pushing to his feet.
He clapped a hand against my shoulder as he passed. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He didn’t push it. There were nights I was grateful for his stillness and nights it would have been useful if he had any other energy. I’d never be able to figure out which kind of night this was.
I fell back into cleanup without any resistance. Resetting the hallway. Straightening props. Checking the lights.
Every now and then, my mind slipped back. To the hallway. To the fog and the blue light and the way she’d looked at me. That I had touched her face in a haunted house like that was a thing a person just did.
By the time we finished, the barn looked like it had before we opened, and we were ready to do it all again tomorrow.
Miles and Alba moved toward the door together, falling into that easy orbit they always had at the end of a long night. He reached for her without looking, and she leaned into him like it was instinct.
It was simple. The kind of thing that didn’t need explaining.
I watched them for a second longer than I meant to.
“Don’t overthink it,” Alba called back without turning around. She either had eyes in the back of her head or she knew me too well.
“I’m not,” I said.
She made a sound that clearly communicated that she did not believe me. The door swung shut behind them, and the barn settled into silence.
Those few seconds in the hallway hadn’t felt like an act. It hadn’t felt like a scare, or a performance, or any part of the job I’d been doing all night.
It felt real.
I stood there for another moment, not moving. Then I picked up my jacket, turned off the last of the work lights, and walked into the cold.
My phone lit up when I was halfway across the gravel lot—a reminder I’d set for myself three weeks ago and kept avoiding ever since. Maya—9 a.m.
I cleared the notification without answering it, climbed into the truck, and told myself I’d cancel in the morning.
I told myself that most of the time that reminder popped up.