“I mean, I can’t imagine you’ll need to learn to lay tile or anything for your life in New York.”
She hesitated, her chest rising and falling with a deep breath. “I’m not sure I have a life in New York anymore.”
She hadn’t told me much about her life, or why she’d left, but it didn’t feel like the right time to ask. “If you’re really interested in design and décor, you could definitely head up that department. I’m clueless on that stuff,” I told her.
She frowned. “I don’t really have experience though. I don’t want to screw things up.”
“This is the perfect opportunity to learn. It can’t get worse than it is,” I said, giving her what I hoped was an encouraging smile. “Nowhere to go but up, right?” I stood and folded up the laptop. “Should we head up?”
Addie gazed uncertainly at the stairs through the doorway. “Yeah, I guess so.”
We switched off the lights, and made our way together up the grand staircase of the old house. As we took turns in the single bathroom and said our goodnights, I tried to keep my mind focused on the work that lay before us. Not on the beautiful woman who would be settling down to sleep just a room away.
Not on the fact that she’d have to change her clothes just on the other side of that wall.
And definitely not on the fact that whatever feelings I had about Addison Tanner had shifted in the very little time I’d spent with her. I didn’t want to think about how easy it was to be with her, or how pretty her dark wide eyes were, or how nice it had felt when she’d gripped my arm.
I sighed deeply, laid down on the air mattress on the floor, and closed my eyes.
12
Thumps in the Night
Addison
I was not exactly a fanciful teenager, eager to believe the stories I’d heard my whole life about the Easter Mansion being haunted. But I’d also never expected to find myself stretched out on the floor in said mansion, trying to fall asleep to the dulcet tones of creaking floors, swollen pipes, and potentially miserably ghostly entities. And while we’d spent a surprisingly nice evening after the otherworldly scream and the upending of my suitcase, this place was still super creepy. The odds of me drifting peacefully off to sleep seemed very low.
But maybe making decisions about changing your entire life on what some might call a whim was more tiring that I’d considered. Because a few minutes after stretching out on the surprisingly comfortable air mattress Michael had loaned me—after he’d shown me how to inflate it, I found myself sinking into sleep. But my dreams weren’t peaceful.
I dreamt of dark dusty rooms filled with fog and shadow, movement in the periphery of my vision that disappeared as soon as I turned to look, and someone crying in some distant room of the house—a baby.
Though I slept, I was aware of my body’s restlessness, and so I lingered in that half-waking state where dreams mixed with reality and my brain never quite shut off, as if it knew that remaining vigilant would be the best plan when sleeping in a creepy old house some lady willed you just to try to end a feud.
The scream that cut the air, catapulting me violently out of my half-sleep was one hundred percent inhuman, that much I knew.
I was on my feet without making a conscious decision to get there, and those same feet were already carrying me to Michael, though I definitely didn’t make a decision about that. I burst through his closed door, panting and gripping my pillow to my chest, to find him sitting up and looking around, the light on his phone illuminating the room.
“What was that?” I asked, my voice a panicky whisper.
“Same thing we heard earlier, I guess.” Michael had clearly been sleeping, and his hair stuck up on end, giving him an adorably disheveled little boy look that was contrasted sharply by his bare chest, which was well muscled and dusted with light hair. “You okay?” He asked.
I came back to myself slowly then, realizing too late that I was standing in his room, half dressed in only a long ragged T-shirt I’d gotten for attending some corporate event years ago. It wasn’t the way I’d normally present myself to a near-stranger. “Uh, yeah. Sorry to barge in. I was asleep,” I said, feeling abashed.
“It’s okay.” He stood, revealing a pair of loose flannel pajama pants and bare feet. “Want me to check it out?”
“If it’s the same thing as earlier, we won’t find anything,” I said, late-night cynicism and fear making a less-than-optimistic combination.
“Sounded the same.” He sounded as tired and resigned as I felt. Would we live with this screaming fear for six months? Were we already so willing to accept it?
I sighed, relaxing the tension that had me gripping my pillow tightly to my chest, and my shoulders fell as I met his gaze. He must’ve seen my hesitation to go back to my room alone, my understanding that there was no way I’d be able to sleep now. Not alone.
“I’ll help you move your stuff in here if you want.” He sounded neither generous or annoyed, just tired.
I debated as deliberately as one can do in a state of terror in the middle of the night. Mom would not like me sleeping in the same room as a Tucker. But if he was going to kill me, he could just as easily walk down the hall to do it, and the man did not seem inclined to take the feud to that level. He’d actually been very kind so far. “Yeah, okay.”
We went to my room and gathered the sleeping bag and air mattress, laying them in the room Michael had been sleeping in, situating me against the wall farthest from him in order to preserve at least the feeling of privacy. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t comforting to see his things there, to know I wasn’t alone.
“This okay?” He asked, smoothing the bag and standing to look down at it.
I dropped the pillow to the head of the bag and gazed up at him. “Yeah. Thank you.”
“It’s fine,” he said. His voice was toneless, and I still couldn’t tell how he felt about having me crashing into his room in the middle of the night like a terrified toddler. At least I wasn’t demanding a story or to sleep with him.
A few minutes later, we were both on the ground in the dark, the not-quiet of the old house settling around us again as I tried to forget the high-pitched misery of the scream I’d heard. I didn’t know what it was, but I was more willing than I’d ever been before to believe in ghosts. Shrieky, wailing ghosts.
The rest of the night passed eventually, the long hours of my wakefulness consumed by my thoughts of the choices I’d made recently, and those that had been made for me, punctuated by the steady sound of Michael’s soft breathing. Something about the constant and reassuring sound gave me the space I needed to consider all that had happened in my life. Luke’s departure after so many years together. My near-breakdown in my boss’s office. My decision to come back to Singletree. And now this. The choice to move into a deserted and dilapidated house with a man I didn’t know and had been bred to detest.
Life was strange, and mine recently had been a steady string of disappointment, but I thought that was because I’d allowed myself to depend completely on someone else to fulfill me, to make me happy. A man.