Page 71 of Eye Candy

“But she loves you.”

He smiled. “She’ll love you too.” He rolled onto his side and leaned his temple on a fist. Even in the dark, I could see the sparkle in his mismatched eyes. “And your family? Will they love me?”

My brain skipped like a track being played through cheap club speakers. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think. I just didn’t know.

Unexpectedly, a movie my brother and I used to watch all the time when we were kids popped into my head. In it, a child ghost befriends a live human girl. Casper asks Kat, all hopefully, “Can I keep you?”

My brother thought the line was embarrassing, but I didn’t. Any other lonely, fish-out-of-water kid would have recognized themselves too. Casper asked even though he already knew the answer was no.

“Kevin Holliday is a big softie,” I said. “He’s a human snowball. We don’t have the candy snowballs in Aotearoa, but if we did, they’d be my dad.”

“And you have a brother. He liked to punch your teachers.”

“That’s Mike. His interests include rugby, darts, talking with his mouth full, and miniature horses.”

Chase was trying very hard to take everything in stride, because he didn’t even blink at that, and it was an unusual grouping.

“Can I ask about your mom?”

“Ah.” I rolled onto my back and told the ceiling, “I always hate this part.”

“What part?”

Do it like removing tit tape. Fast.

“She died when I was young. I don’t remember her, and Idon’t like to talk about it. It makes me feel abnormal when I shouldn’t have to, and it makes other people feel guilty and then I have to comfort them. Dad and Mike are my family, and they’re more than enough. Actually, Mike is far, far too much. Everyone thinks their brother is annoying, but Mike is six brothers’ worth of annoying. He’s very protective. One of my cousins, Hannah, shacked up with Mike’s best friend earlier this year, and Mike acted like she’d married into the mob.”

“Had she?” Chase asked, his voice carefully mild.

“No.” I laughed. “We don’t have mobs. And Dean’s not in a gang, he’s an interior designer. Unless you’re wallpaper, or Hannah, Dean won’t notice you exist.”

“Interesting,” Chase said.

“For about two weeks after he found out about Hannah and Dean doing sexy deeds, Mike stopped talking to Dean. Mike never shuts up, so that’s like ten years of silent treatment from a normal person.”

“What won him over in the end?” Chase asked. “I’m taking notes.”

My brother wouldhateChase. He was too rich, too privileged, and too direct—especially by New Zealand standards. Chase also didn’t know what Red Band gumboots were, and wouldn’t be able to tell one end of a miniature horse from the other.

Still, I wanted the two of them to meet, and to watch Chase try and win Mike over as I commiserated with Hannah about how hard it was to bring a man home; or maybe I had to wipe the smirk off Tessa’s face by promising to be unhelpful if she was ever in the same boat, bringing a partner home to us.

It was a potent fantasy.

“Well,” I said slowly, “Mike changed his tune when Dean started coming with Hannah to social things. Dean can be reclusive and Mike’s the opposite.”

“Confidence runs in your family, hmm?” Chase tapped a finger on my nose playfully. “Tell me more about growing up inNew Zealand. I want to know about your dad’s café. I’m trying to build a picture.”

As the moon slid over the dark, knitted blanket of the night, I told Chase about some of Levitate’s regulars, like Mr. T, who always ordered Dad’s steak and mushroom pie but pulled all the mushrooms out even though we sold plain steak pies. I shared memories of growing up in rural New Zealand, about the fights that Mike had gotten into, and the silly things I’d done as a baby burlesque artist. I even told him about the ‘concerts’ I headlined in the living room when I was thirteen; where Mike operated the flashlight lights, and Tessa ‘mixed’ the music as I performed emotive contemporary dance routines to a handful of neighbors we’d been able to bully into paying a fifty-cent admission price.

These memories were objectively humiliating and I never shared them with anyone. But Chase was charmed, and I enjoyed seeing my home and childhood through his eyes, as something enchanting and quaint, rather than lonely and slow. Eventually, he fell back to sleep, but I stayed awake, watching him like a creep.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids’ film with the round, translucent ghost, removed from his own time and besotted with a human.

Casper knew he was never going to get the romantic ending.

I should have too.

CHAPTER 27

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