Page 46 of Chasing Your Ghost

“Another game?” Asher asked, pulling her from her dreary thoughts.

Riley smiled. “I’m up for another round if you are.”

“Maybe this time you could be less of a sore loser,” he teased with a smirk.

She scowled and gave him some serious side-eye. “No promises, Mr. Sore Winner.”

He laughed, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Let’s see if you can do better this time, Miss. Scarier Than a Demon Puppy.”

“Can I ask you something?” Riley asked once they’d moved around the digital board several times already.

“I’m not cheating if that’s what you want to ask,” the smug bastard replied.

Riley rolled her eyes and groaned. “I’m being serious.”

Asher toned down the smugness to a more reasonable level and folded his hands behind his head. “What do you want to know?”

She gnawed on her lip, suddenly unsure about the question she wanted to ask. But she needed to know. She needed to know just how badly it would affect her stepbrother when he eventually found out his friend was dead. “How close were you and Noah?”

Asher’s remaining smugness dissipated instantly, his smile dying on his lips as soon as Riley had finished speaking. “Very,” he said after a tense few seconds of silence. “He, Chris, and I all grew up right around the corner from each other. Even though Chris is a year younger, we played together almost every day when we were kids, and we were all on the high school football team.”

“What position did you play?” Riley knew that Noah was a quarterback and Chris was a wide receiver, but neither of them had mentioned that Asher played with them.

“I was a running back. We decided early on that we’d all go to Georgetown. I don’t think we ever even thought about going to different colleges. We were like the kids from Stranger Things—a team, you know—only cooler and more athletic.”

Riley chuckled, but her whole heart wasn’t in it. She knew he’d be Will—the one who went missing. Only he couldn’t return like Will had in the show. He wasn’t in the Upside Down. He could never come back. The thought brought a lump to her throat.

“And Ella?” she asked. Noah and Chris hated the girl, but she and Asher had obviously spent a lot of time together. “Noah, Chris, and I bumped into her last week, and Noah said you two were close.”

Asher smiled in the way someone did when they were thinking back on fond memories. “She’s my best friend. I was friends with her before Noah and Chris, and I was probably a terrible one once I started hanging out with the guys more than her because they lived closer, but she stuck with me.”

“She didn’t hang out with you guys?”

“In the beginning, but it didn’t last long. She and Noah don’t get along well.”

That seemed like a massive understatement based on how he’d reacted to her outside the ballet studio, but maybe his animosity had only grown to those intense levels after Asher went missing. “That sucks. Your friends not getting along with each other.”

Asher shrugged. “It got much easier once Noah, Ella, and I started at Georgetown. I saw Chris less, but I could spend time with Ella when Noah was at football practice.”

“You weren’t on the football team as well?”

Asher shook his head. “I was never as good and never liked it as much as they did. I still went to the gym with them whenever I could, but I just wanted to focus on school.”

The fact that he worked out with them explained his toned arms and the way he filled his shirt in a manner that only a well-defined body could. She liked that the white material clung to him, revealing strong biceps and a toned chest, without being so tight that it could only mean he was trying to show off.

She’d seen plenty of men wearing shirts so tight that they looked seconds away from tearing from the pressure of containing their gym-bro bods. It wasn’t attractive. The way Asher filled his shirt was though.

Riley shook her head, clearing the thought of flexing muscles and toned arms from her mind. “Did you know what you wanted to major in?” The question fell from her lips before she could rethink the merits of asking a ghost what he’d wanted to be in his no-longer-existent future.

He nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. “Psychology.”

Riley probably should have left it there, but she found herself asking, “Why psychology?”

“My dad’s a psychologist,” he explained, “And I guess I just wanted to help people the way he does.”

Just when Riley thought he couldn’t be any more perfect, he went and said something like that. It was ridiculously endearing and entirely unfair. “That’s really cool.”

Asher shrugged, a smile tugging up at his lips. “Yeah, plus the money’s not too bad.”

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