Page 36 of Hearts Adrift
If we weren’t sorta running for our lives.
Before I know it, we’re underneath the pier, the entire Hopewell Fair above our heads held up by thick beams and what I’ll reluctantly call “very confident stilts”. The water rushes over the stones and sand down here. Blades of long, stringy grass stick out from between the pebbles, now and then dressed with a piece of random litter—paper, candy wrappers, and bottles. One of the thick stilts we pass by has a heart with “K&J” etched into it. I think I spot a crab, but the second my eyes zero in, it’s gone.
“Sorry for all of this,” I tell him. “I feel like I’m adding so much stress to your already stressful life. You didn’t ask for this.”
“Neither did you,” he says back.
“Maybe there was no one at the bungalow.”
“We don’t know that.” He gently kicks at a rock as we walk along, sending it skittering toward the water. “Could be someone there right now, creeping around the porch. I’ll send someone to check. That’s trespassing, y’know.” He’s already got his phone out, tapping away.
I walk alongside him, slowly, leisurely. “I hope I didn’t bring this on us. Maybe someone followed me from the Fair yesterday. Is it true? All those things they say about the bungalow?” I ask, changing subjects. “That it’s a host to evil spirits and love meets a tragic end within its walls?”
He snorts at that. “If you believe everything you hear.”
“You clearly don’t.”
He lifts his eyes from his phone. “I don’t?”
“Otherwise, after reading all those comments sections digging up and listing every last bad thing about me, you wouldn’t have come over to check on me so many times.”
He considers that for a moment, his eyes lost in mine.
My heart flutters every time he looks at me like that, in that specific way that sends my mind down a sticky path of touching him in more places than just his shoulders.
I think I’m also obsessed with how he doesn’t see the celebrity actor in front of him. He sees me in the same raw way people used to see me before I got big. I’m just a guy with a questionably bent moral compass, a pinch too much ego, and a good punching arm.
“Well, if those thing are true,” he wonders, “I’d like to know what that house would do with someone whose love already ended.”
“Who knows. Maybe offer you a new one.”
Finn laughs at that—a touch too hard.
I smirk, finding his reaction amusing. I wonder if he’s still thinking about the hard-on I gave him when I rubbed his shoulders. “You’re cute.”
That silences his laughter at once. “What?”
Don’t make it awkward. “You never told me why that house is special to you,” I pivot.
“I … I didn’t?” He lowers his phone in thought. He smiles wistfully. “My mom, actually. She passed away.”
“Oh … I’m so sorry.”
“Many years ago. When I was a kid. Eight years old, to be exact. We used to play there, my sisters and I. It holds some of my greatest childhood memories with my mom.”
“That’s beautiful.”
“It is.” He shrugs. “And now it’s host to a ton of silly rumors because a couple of unfortunate things happened there after my mom died. Helping to replace some of the furniture, my dad’s friend Chuck told him he was leaving his wife to go on a road trip to ‘find himself’—Chuck and Eden are the parents of two of my pals, Kent and Adrian. The effects of that stunt rippled across the whole island. I was only twelve andstillrememberit. Then later we had a big renter who was caught cheating on his husband, caused this huge fight, the police were called. Next renter was a grieving widower who showed up to sprinkle his husband’s remains on the coast. The list goes on. Place took on a life of its own. Teenagers sneaking there to have sex or break up—or both? Most of the rumors weren’t true. No one died there. Not even my mom, whose memory sadly got twisted up in all of the stories. No, my mother’s ghost doesnothaunt it.” He slows his walking. “Though sometimes … I kinda wish it did. I’d have a lot to say to her. And ask.”
“You have so much love for her. I can feel it.”
“I do.” He sighs. “So many broken hearts out of that innocent bungalow. Funny, how a tiny thing like a breakup can seem to spiral your whole life out of control. Then you feel like no one will ever love you again. Or even think you are worth their time. Breaking up with someone has this way of making you feel like you’re … damaged goods. A package returned to sender. Rejected. Even if you were the one who did the breaking up. The ghost of that relationship haunts you.” He shakes his head. “No one willingly knocks on the door of a haunted house, if you get what I mean.”
I don’t like the despondent look in his eyes. It dampens the beauty I see in them, the wounds inflicted by this Theo guy putting out the passion and fire behind them.
“You know I find you attractive, right?”
He stops at once. “What?”
