14. Salem
SALEM
The second I agreed to help as a scare actor, I knew I was going to regret it.
I just didn't expect the regret to hit before I made it out of the apartment door.
I had been doing a lot of Halloween things for someone who'd declared a lifelong vendetta against the holiday, and somehow none of them had required me to wear this much of nothing.
Rowan had insisted on doing my makeup in the Butcher's Den back room herself, to make sure it stayed fresh—though part of me suspected she wanted an excuse to sneak a peek at Paul, and who was I to mention it? She and Alba had become fast friends, too, which made her being here make sense.
She leaned against the wall, her arms crossed as she studied me. “You look amazing. Like a haunted doll that ruins men emotionally.”
“I don’t think that’s a compliment.”
“It absolutely is. Successful screenplays are based on that blurb alone.”
I glanced down again. The dress was short.
Short enough that I had to actively consider every movement, or whoever was behind me was going to get an education they had not signed up for and could not un-receive.
It was Rowan’s dress—Rowan, who stood a full three inches shorter than me—which meant the skirt was three inches farther into the danger zone than I had wanted.
Rowan was five-two. I was five-five. This was not a math problem with a flattering solution.
“I can’t bend in this.”
“Then don’t bend,” Rowan said simply.
Easy for her to say. She was in jeans. Regular, full-length, covering-everything jeans. I was in approximately one and a half napkins.
“I’m glad you’re doing this,” she said. “I know it’s not your thing. But you seem—I don’t know. Lighter lately. Whatever’s going on with all of this.” She gestured vaguely, which could have meant the costume, Ethan, the foundation, or the general chaos of the last few weeks. “It looks good on you.”
I looked at her for a second.
There it was again—the opening. The exact kind of moment where I could say, actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, and she would sit down and give me her full attention, and I would tell her about the shop and the loan and the $42,318.
17 that had been quietly collecting. She would probably cry a little.
I would probably cry a little. It would be fine.
It would probably be really fine, and I had no good reason for keeping it from her anymore except that saying it aloud still felt like tempting something.
I opened my mouth.
“You have a thread on your hem,” Rowan said, already crouching down to fix it.
I closed my mouth.
The moment folded itself up quietly and slipped away. I was running out of explanations for why I kept letting them go.
“Come on,” Rowan said, straightening up and heading for the door.
The door opened, and the noise rushed in.
Cool air against my skin—specifically a lot of my skin, because of the napkin situation—fog drifting low across the ground, the scent of sweat and something fried hanging in the air.
The line had already formed, winding past the entrance and into the dim edges of the path, people bundled in jackets, laughing, leaning into the atmosphere of a setting sun and a rising moon.
Everyone in actual coats.
I was in next to nothing.
I reminded myself why I was here. The charity. The children.
“Wow.”
The voice landed somewhere low and warm, and my body registered it before my brain did—that same pull from every other moment, sliding back into place like it had never left. My mouth went dry.
Ethan was standing there in the same costume from the viral video, except this time, a mask rested on the top of his head like a crown, waiting to be pulled down. Suspenders against his bare chest, doing considerably more than their job description required.
October had no business letting someone look like that. I was filing a formal complaint.
“I thought Paul had the mask,” I said, before I could stop myself.
He reached up and touched the brim of it. “He did.”
“And?”
“It’s my mask now,” he said with complete certainty. “Paul had it on loan. Loan period is over.”
“Does Paul know that?”
“Paul knows… Paul disagrees, but Paul is wrong.”
I crossed my arms, needing something between us that wasn’t just air and good intentions.
“Didn’t think possessed dolls were my thing,” he said, looking me over in a way that should have annoyed me and didn’t. “But I’m open to it.”
“So, you have standards?”
“I do,” he said easily.
Rowan made a small noise behind me that sounded suspiciously like vindication.
“Man nipples are distracting,” she whispered. “You were right.”
I swatted at her without looking.
For a second, it felt too familiar. Too easy. Like the thread from the first night hadn’t snapped, just stretched, and now we were standing here pretending it hadn’t been there at all.
Lucy’s voice, arriving before she did, was sweet and deliberate. “Ethan.”
Everything about her was intentional—the pale sculpted makeup, the way her hair fell exactly right over one shoulder.
Her black dress clung in all the places it was supposed to, sheer at the edges, the whole look sitting somewhere between costume and editorial.
She could have been pulled from a magazine spread.
Corpse bride.
I glanced down at myself.
Haunted doll, assembled in mild panic by one’s well-meaning best friend, was apparently a different aesthetic. Less editorial. More unhinged. Arguably more accurate to my general life trajectory.
Lucy’s gaze flicked over me—dismissing—before settling back on Ethan.
“I didn’t know you were working at The Den tonight,” he said.
She smiled. “Of course you did.”
Ethan’s expression turned. Unreadable.
“Then I guess I’m the only one new,” I said, shrugging like it didn’t matter.
Lucy’s smile held but sharpened very slightly at the edges. “Looks like it.”
“Lucky you,” Rowan muttered in a tone almost too bright to be taken seriously.
I raised an eyebrow at her.
Before anything else could develop, Miles’ voice cut through from somewhere up the path, ushering us deep inside the Haunted House.
The place hit differently when you were on the other side of it.
From out there, it was atmosphere—fog and red light and the anticipation of something coming.
From in here, it was machinery. The bass of the music pressing up through the floor and into your chest. The specific cold of a space that had been open too long: damp wood, and fog chemicals.
The strobe catching in the mist and making everything move at the wrong speed.
I had walked through this hallway once before, mostly unimpressed, rolling my eyes at the actors.
Standing in it now felt different.
Ethan moved into position at the far end of the corridor without being told—easy, practiced, like the space knew him and had saved him a spot. He pulled the mask down over his face in one smooth motion, and something about the way he shifted made my pulse kick up.
I took a position near the side wall and waited. Nervous.
The first group came through fast, wound tight, someone at the back gripping the person in front of them.
Ethan stepped out of the fog the way I remembered from the first night, and the reaction was immediate.
Two of them screamed. One stumbled backward.
One grabbed her friend so hard that I heard the impact from across the hallway.
I stepped out from my side.
The one who hadn’t screamed yet turned toward me instead, probably looking for an exit, and found me directly in her path. I tilted my head, slowly, the way I’d seen the other actors do. She made a sound I could only describe as involuntary and scrambled sideways.
I hadn’t expected that to work.
It wasn’t supposed to feel like that either—the jolt of finding out you were good at something you hadn’t tried before.
I reset before the next group came through and filed it away, because there was no version of this where I told Rowan I’d enjoyed that without enduring a conversation I wasn’t prepared for.
The second group was different.
They made it halfway down the corridor before one of them grabbed her friend’s arm and said, too loudly, “Wait—is that them?”
“Oh, my God.” The friend had her phone out before she’d finished the sentence. “It is. It’s literally them. It’s the haunted house couple.”
The scream that followed was a different kind entirely—less fear, more excitement. They descended with the organized chaos.
“Can we get a photo?”
“Are you actually together?”
“I told my roommate I was here, and she would never forgive me if I didn’t take a pic. I need proof—”
Ethan pushed the mask up. He stepped forward with the easy patience of someone who had been doing this for a thousand seasons and said sure, and they reorganized themselves around him.
I stepped back.
This was fine. This was the job. The girl laughed at something he said and touched his arm like that was something you just did. I crossed my arms and told myself the tight feeling in my chest was professionalism. A concern for the pacing of the evening. Nothing more.
“You too,” one of them said, waving me over. “You have to be in it.”
I uncrossed my arms.
We stood together, his shoulder against mine, his hand finding the small of my back with the same easy certainty it had outside of the Den, warm even through the thin layer of the dress, and I focused very hard on looking normal in a photograph, which was turning out to be the most difficult thing I’d done all evening.
“Okay, one more—”
In between posing for pictures, we worked.
Ethan was good at it. The timing, the stillness before the movement, the way he calibrated each scare to what the group gave him first. I watched him work the same way I watched a good engine—not because I was supposed to, but because something about it was worth paying attention to.
He caught me watching once and held my gaze from under his mask for longer than the moment required. In the blue light, in the fog, in the hallway that had started all of this. Then, he turned back to the next group like it hadn’t happened.
I was starting to think this hallway had it out for me personally, or that it was a magic hallway; either could be true.
“Okay, your turn,” he said lowly as the next group pushed through the door. “Far corner. Don’t move until the last second.”
I went to the far corner, as suggested.
The group came in cautiously, which was always more satisfying—the ones who came in laughing were easy, but the cautious ones had already done the work of winding themselves tight, and all you had to do was find the right moment to release it.
I waited. Longer than felt comfortable. I stepped forward into the light, and one of the guests grabbed the wall, making a sound the music almost covered.
Almost.
I reset and looked at Ethan.
He was already watching me. “Great job.”
The next group hit the door before I recovered, which was probably the only reason I managed to look functional for the rest of the set.
It was somewhere in the third hour that Lucy appeared from the side door.
She had her phone raised before she’d fully crossed the threshold to Ethan and me.
“Content.” She spoke mostly to Ethan, the way she said most things.
Ethan’s jaw shifted. “We’re mid-set.”
“It’ll take two seconds.” She was already positioning herself, finding the angle, the light catching in her hair the way it always did—intentional, even in here. She moved beside him, close, and raised the phone.
“Look at the camera,” she said.
When he turned his head, she closed the remaining distance and pressed her lips to his cheek, holding there just long enough to be documented and not long enough to be argued with. Her eyes stayed open. Watching the screen.
The flash filled the small corridor.
Ethan didn’t move toward her. Didn’t move away either. He just waited with careful stillness.
She lowered the phone and checked the screen with a satisfied expression. Then she looked up at him and said something low—too low for me to catch—and he nodded once.
He said, “Lucy, are we done? I have work to do.”
She glanced at me then, her expression perfectly pleasant. “Salem. Cute costume.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Rowan’s dress.”
“Oh… Fun.”
The side door swung shut behind her, and the hallway settled back into its noise—the bass, the fog machine cycling, the distant scream from somewhere deeper in the barn.
Ethan didn’t say anything. Neither did I, because there wasn’t anything to say that I had any right to.
A group ran through the entrance loudly, abandoning any pretense of walking like adults with spatial awareness, and I was in exactly the wrong place. Someone’s elbow caught my shoulder, someone else’s momentum carried into my side, and I had just enough time to register that I was going down.
Ethan moved faster, one hand catching my waist and turning me, his other arm coming up against the wall behind me, and then the crowd rushed past us, and we were there.
My back against the wall with him braced above me, caging me in.
His chest was close enough that the fog curled between us and dissipated against him, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him even in the cold of the barn.
His body was a barrier between me and whatever came next, deliberate and immediate, like the instinct had fired before the decision had.
I could see the moment he registered that the crowd was gone and we were alone. He was close enough that I could see the blue light catching in his eyes, the unevenness of his breathing, and that his gaze had dropped to my mouth and come back up. He had absolutely clocked that I’d seen him do it.
His grip at my waist tightened. Just slightly. Just enough.
“You okay?” His voice came out lower than usual.
“Fine.” The single word trembled.
The fog rolled between us in slow ribbons and broke apart, and neither of us moved.
“Salem.”
“Yeah?”
A beat. Long and suspended and full of something neither of us was going to name.
He breathed heavily. “Next group’s coming.”
“I know.”
He was close enough that his exhale reached me, close enough that moving felt like a chore rather than a default.
He stepped back. Straightened. Rolled his shoulders. He pulled the mask back over his face, and just like that, he was something else again—controlled, composed, back in the job.
I peeled myself off the wall with what I hoped was dignity.
It probably wasn’t.
“Haunted doll,” he said without looking at me. There was something in it. Warmth, maybe. Nodding in some arc of approval.
“Skeleton man,” I said back.
The door opened. The next group spilled in.
Ethan stepped into position beside me as the group hit our entrance, his hand settling at the small of my back, warm and certain, like it had always belonged there and was simply returning.
I stared straight ahead, and I could still feel it. That thread. Still there, pulled tight between us, the way it had been since the first day. I had a sinking feeling it wasn’t going to snap anytime soon.
Probably because I’d stopped wanting it to.