Page 201 of Haunt Me

“Ok, ok, fine.” I lift my hands in the air. “Let’s go check if they are still here.”

“What, like peek into their rooms?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Um, because we are not five?”

“It’s your dad’s house, Eden. We can do whatever we like,” I remind her softly. My hand reaches out to touch her face of its own volition. That strand of hair by her cheekbone is driving me crazy. “Well,youcan.”

She’s blushing and her eyes shine with unshed tears for a second.

“Hey…” I lean down, trying to peer into her face, sudden worry gripping me.

“Do you or do you not want to help me keep my record of not crying?” she asks. “Because you calling this ‘my dad’s house’ casually like that… I still haven’t gotten used to this being the reality, this being my life now. It hits me all over again and I just can’t hold it together.”

I trail a finger down her throat. The feel of her silky skin against my thumb is dizzying.

“Immediate distraction is needed,” I whisper into her forehead, completely mesmerized by the feel of her skin against mine.

“Immediate,” she whispers back.

Then my lips are on hers, hungrily.

…

We spend a quiet Christmas morning, all of us crammed in Walter Elliot’s house.

Theo doesn’t leave—and neither does anybody else. I think I see it in Eden’s eyes that she is wondering if everyone is here because they feel sorry for her, and fury rises up inside me. I hope I’m wrong. The truth is that everyone wants to stay right where we are because we’re having the best damn time of our lives, but I’m not sure Eden can see it.

While the rest of us are having breakfast, Eden sits in the silence of the living room, typing away at her laptop like a person possessed. Spencer paces in front of the Christmas tree, waiting for her to finish writing, so he can start directing us.

She kicks him out, and me as well, but I come back after two seconds.

“I’ll be good, I promise,” I whisper but she doesn’t even look up from her work.

I sit cross legged on the carpet, watching her as she writes. She’s lying on her stomach, books spread everywhere around her, some of them open, some tabbed. Theo comes in and begins playing old-timey Christmas carols on a tiny, out-of-tune piano in thecorner. The way he plays them makes their familiar music sound so sad it almost rips me to pieces. Theo is talented at everything he tries his hand at—he plays the piano perfectly, despite not having too much passion for it. Someone once jokingly said to me that there was nothing Theo Vanderau couldn’t do perfectly, except keep himself alive. I punched him in the face. I think it was his brother. Back before everything happened.

We sit there quietly by the fire, Eden and I, she reading and writing, finishing Spencer’s Christmas play, me watching her.

“Have you read every single book on the planet?” I ask her in a stage whisper.

“I wish,” she replies, not looking away from the book she is underlining. I shouldn’t be interrupting her, except I can’t bring myself to leave.

Does she remember having this exact same conversation with me in the woods?

We must have probably said the same words to each other.

Eons ago.

“Seriously,” I say, “you have read all these classics… You know them so well; you can find any passage within seconds. I’ve been watching you.”

“Books were the only safe world I could escape to. They were my only home,” she replies softly. I look away, my throat working. “Until you,” she adds, and completely undoes me.

I thought it would be a quiet Christmas with all of us confined in this house. Turns out I was wrong. It’s quiet until the play, and then… it’s chaos.

The ladies, including those who play ladies, aka Justin and Theo, make Georgian dresses for themselves out of sheets and curtains, which one would think might give the production a Gone-With-The-Wind aesthetic. It does not. It’s giving straightjackets and homemade Ancient Greece for Dummies. But we soldier on.

Wes and I play some sort of tortured Regency gentlemen who want to avoid marriage, and then, out of nowhere, we get splashed with water—the ‘script’ just mentions that we get drenched, and that’s it, no further explanation—and Ari and Eden break character, clutching each other and laughing. Everyone is squinting at their printed scripts, as there was practically no time for rehearsals. At this point, the performance is half improv half asking Eden where we are supposed to stand, and half giggling. Yes, three halves. That’s how bad we are, but everyone is having a blast.

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