My dad’s place by the waterfront is not exactly what you’d call fancy, but that suits our purpose. Appropriately enough, the body of water that the house is perched upon was used for logging purposes back in the day: a quick way to transport them downriver to be processed. The edge of the property is lined with huge Bigleaf Maple and White Oak trees, and our nearest neighbor is located a good way off down the dark, pebbled beach. Just the privacy we’ll be needing if Aiden keeps making things explode.

Basically, it feels like the perfect place for this, even though it doesn’t look impressive when I pull up and park my car in the drive. Aiden and I circle around to the side of the house facing the water.

“So, yeah,” I murmur, as Aiden gazes up at it. “It’s not much.”

It really isn’t. The place has clapboard siding stained a rich brown, turned darker with age. The windows still have a nice white trim - probably the only thing my dad has done maintenance-wise in a while. Instead of regular doors, there’s one huge door that opens the entire front of the house to the water. It slides up like the door on a storage unit. I make my way up to the lock and hasp, sinking with each step on the beach pebbles. Fumble around with my dad’s keys for a moment. Then slide the door up to reveal the inside.

The place is essentially one big, empty room. There’s the door to a bathroom in one back corner, and a winding metal stairway in the other. Upstairs, an open loft area looks down on the main room. The floor is smooth concrete. A few workbenches and countertops line the wall, feebly populated by my dad’s fishing equipment. There’s a single chair near the middle of the room, which only serves to make it seem emptier. A humming refrigerator is plugged in near the curved loft stairs. The big windows that face the blossoming trees outside are my favorite part about this place. The interior doesn’t have much else to offer.

Aiden steps into the main room and drops his bag on the floor.

“Jamie, this is perfect.”

“Once we sweep, it will be,” I answer, flapping my hands to get the dust out of my face. “Unless there’s a magic spell for that? One that won’t explode all the windows or whatever?”

“What’s in the loft?”

“A mattress, basically. My dad got it thinking he’d try night fishing sometime, but it was apparently way too cold to sleep up there, he never did it once. And he never got the place properly wired for lights, so it’s not the best at night. Most of the outlets work, though, we could grab some lamps-”

“Light is easy. Light is pretty much all I know how to do,” Aiden says, turning slowly to take everything in.

I’ve been waiting all day for this, nearly hopping around the flower shop in my excitement, willing my shift to just be over so I could go get Aiden from City Hall and get started, and also just to - spend some more time with him, honestly.

I spent most of last night thinking about everything I learned in the insane span of the last twenty-four hours. I know I should be freaked out or scared or having some kind of existential crisis about how the entire world is different than the way I understood it to be. I keep waiting for it to all hit me and knock me on my ass. Somehow, though, I can’t seem to bring myself to a meltdown. When I dig within myself for the fear and shock that should be there, I keep coming up with handfuls of brilliant excitement, wonder - awe.

Not that I’m going to tell Aiden that. For one thing, I think he can already tell. He kept glancing at me furtively on the car ride over, clearly looking for signs that my opinion on all of this had changed after I had more time to think about it alone. It was probably obvious that this was not the case.

“Slow down, Jamie,” he’d laughed, when I cursed violently at a stop sign. “We have all night.”

Yes, but that wasn’t why I was fighting the urge to speed the whole way there. It was because I can’t wait to see more of what Aiden can do, and learn more about who he is. It feels like a rare and special thing when he opens up, like one of those famous flowers that only unfolds once every ten years.

None of this is going to help me kick the raging crush I’ve developed on him. In fact, the more I spend time with him, the harder it is to shake those feelings off. When he first came back, I put down the attraction and nerves to the mere fact that he’s hot. Now I’m pretty sure they source from somewhere else, somewhere deeper, which means they have a deeper grasp on me. It’s definitely not just because he’s cute. I’m aching looking at him right now, when he has his back to me and I can’t even see his swimmable eyes or that burn-me stubble.

I quickly avert my gaze when he turns around, pretend I was inspecting the empty workbenches.

“The house used to belong to a guy who made custom surfboards before my dad took it off his hands. It’s more like a warehouse than anything.”

“It’s great, seriously.” Aiden joins me at the edge of the room. “How do you keep producing available real estate for me anytime I need something?”

“Shut up.” I smile down at the bench, instead of at him. “This is the last time, FYI. What were you going to ask me to find you next? A house with a one-foot-by-one-foot closet for you to store your backpack in?”

“You may recall that both times this has happened, I didn’t ask you for anything. All I took was readily offered.” He nudges my shoulder with his. “Hey. I appreciate it. Seriously. Everything you’ve done for me since I came back.”

My heart, my stupid goddamn fucking heart.

“I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, too.”

“What have I done for you?” he asks, surprised.

“Are you kidding me?” I smack his arm automatically and turn to face him. “Seriously, are you joking?”

He looks startled at my sudden aggression.

“I don’t-”

“What have you done for me besides - I don’t know, show up out of the blue and open my eyes to an entire world of possibilities I hadn’t seen before?” I shake my head, almost pissed off that he doesn’t already know. “And also you’ve just made things better by being here. Hanging out with you, it’s been - you’ve helped me with a lot of things. Okay? God! You dumbass.”

“This is the angriest way I’ve ever been thanked for something, I think,” he muses, more to himself than to me.

“Well, good. Now you know what a nice, helpful dumbass you are.”

He stares at me like he’s about to argue, but instead he smiles and quickly runs a hand over his mouth. When it drops to his side, his face is neutral again.

“I’m glad you’re having fun. I didn’t think any part of this would be fun. It hasn’t been so far. Until yesterday it’s pretty much been rage and frustration and worrying that Kent was going to hear something. Maybe it’ll be better now. With you around.”

“I always have fun when we’re together,” I answer brightly, pulling my backpack off and settling it on the workbench. “Honestly, I wish we didn’t waste all of high school hating each other.”

Aiden doesn’t answer, so I stop to look at him.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he says, immediately. “I’ve just - I’ve wasted a lot of time, in general. So much time. I should have been trying to practice this stuff all along. Then I wouldn’t be so fucking bad at it.”

“Yeah, but then maybe you wouldn’t need my help,” I tell him. “And then we wouldn’t get to do this cool thing together. Maybe now we can make up for some of the time we wasted in high school, right?”

Aiden’s face flicks through several expressions, and he turns away before settling on one.

“So, where do we start?” he asks, gazing up at our new headquarters.

The abrupt change of subject was not lost on me, but it’s not surprising either. It makes sense that he doesn’t want to talk about high school. I always thought of it as a time when he was getting fun and enjoyment out of making me miserable, but the more I hear about it, the more it sounds like he was miserable, too. I always assumed he was starting fires just to watch things burn, not because he was cold.

It’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it.

“I think we start with a name for our new headquarters,” I call, in answer to his question. He’s standing in the middle of the room again, stretching his arms over his head, looking out through the huge, dusty windows. “It’s not a proper headquarters without a good name.”

“Any suggestions?”

“Hmmm. Rancho Relaxo?” Aiden turns around to give me a dirty look, which only encourages me to keep going. “Okay, more specific to our purposes? Jamie & Aiden’s Seaside Sanctuary for Seventeenth-Century Spectres?”

“Wrong century,” Aiden says, but his lip twitches. “And I’m pretty sure this is a river.”

“How about: the See-Through HQ? Or - Haunt Hunters International? The Haunted Hideout?”

Aiden closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them again, traces of that strange, silvery-blue are swirling around his pupils.

“It’s not haunted,” he says, definitively. “There’s no spectral energy here, which is good. There shouldn’t be any false-positives.”

“You hear that, William?” I call, to the room in general. “We’re gonna find you! Unless you’d like to make yourself known right now?”

There’s a stretch of unremarkable silence.

“Well,” Aiden says, “Let’s pick out a name, then.”

~~~~

“Okay, ready?” I ask, and Kasey nods. She’s got her ghostly-jacket removed, and she stands in her flowing red pants in the middle of my apartment. “Go.”

She closes her eyes, screws up her face in concentration. It doesn’t take long before she throws her hands up in frustration.

“Damnit, Jamie! I don’t know what you mean by listening.”

“Well, I can’t explain it, Aiden has barely explained it to me! He just said it’s hearing energy. You’re like, exclusively made out of energy, so maybe you can hear it, too.”

“I don’t hear anything. All I hear is you.”

“Try turning your eyes a different color.”

“Are you kidding me? Whatever this is, I can’t do it.” Kasey flings herself into an armchair and scowls at me. “Why didn’t you ask him to explain it better?”

“He tried, but he’s never talked to anyone about it before, he’s doing his best!”

“God. To sit here and listen to you defend Aiden Callahan instead of talking shit with me. The whole world is upside down.”

“Do you want to try again? I have to go to sleep soon, I have a shift tomorrow and then lunch with Gabby and Aiden.”

“Right. Lunch with Gabby.” Kasey raises an eyebrow. “What are we expecting, there?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. I don’t really know too much about her, except that she’s been living in New York City and - something about being on a campaign trail?”

“It’s weird that none of us know her, don’t you think?” Kasey asks. “She said she was born and raised in Ketterbridge? I know we don’t know everyone, but still.”

“Kent said she looked familiar,” I remember. “But yeah, odd. She would have been in his year at school. She’s not what I would call forgettable. Talking to her sort of felt like a job interview.” I shake my head, clear the thoughts crowding it. “C’mon, try and listen again. Maybe it’ll give us somewhere to start.”

“I can’t listen, Jamie! Not the way you want me to, anyway. Whatever Aiden hears, he’s the only one.” Kasey’s expression sours. “I’m not trying anymore. If I could still get a headache, I would have one right now.”

“Okay, well - you felt something while Aiden was at your grave, right? You said you felt a pull.”

“Yeah?”

“Aiden said that he picked up William’s trail at your grave. When he first explained that part, I thought maybe Aiden was responsible for the weird feeling you got, like he did something by accident. But what if it was William? What if he did something? Have you felt it again since?”

“No...” Kasey thinks for a moment. “Not that same feeling. But the warmth I felt when we walked the map line, I have felt that again. A few times. Sometimes it just happens.”

“Does it feel nice?”

“Yes, actually. It’s nice just to feel, in general. But also it feels okay. I don’t hate it.”

It makes me happy to see a little smile on her face.

“Cool.”

“Yeah.” She rubs her eyes. “By the way - not to change the subject -”

“No, of course not.”

“You came home today all smiling and shit. Please tell me it’s because you made some kind of breakthrough?”

“We didn’t even do any magic today, we just cleaned out the new headquarters, which we’re tentatively calling The Ghost Office. We had to wait until Aiden was done with work. By the time we got done setting everything up it was late.”

We did order a pizza and take it out onto the pebbled beach and sit there together, though. The Ghost Office open and newly cleaned behind us, the clustering oak branches dancing overhead. We could’ve used that time, I guess.

“I thought you were so hype to see more magic, you’re not pissed that you didn’t get to?”

Honestly, I had a great time. I didn’t even think about it.

“Well - at my repeated request, Aiden tried to see if he could clean with magic. It just didn’t work.”

“What happened?”

“He may or may not have - melted a Windex bottle.”

Kasey bites down on her lip, and then we both give up and start laughing.

“Is this supposed to make me feel good about the fact that you two are in charge of finding me the only other ghostly soul haunting this town?” she half-groans. “Please don’t let Aiden accidentally blow up William, when you find him.”

“You’re going to help us, so you can prevent us from doing anything too stupid.”

“Great. So now my life is chasing around you two monkeys while you explode reading glasses and melt cleaning supplies? So unfair. I should be preparing my thesis defense, and somehow this is what my life has come to.”

“Oh, shit! I completely forgot. Why didn’t you bring it up earlier, Kase-face?”

I spring off of my couch and head to the hallway closet.

“What are you doing?” Kasey asks, sitting up in the armchair.

“I asked your grandma if I could keep this stuff, I thought you’d probably want it.” I extract a big cardboard box from the closet and drag it into the living room. Kasey gets up to lean over my shoulder as I pull the lid off.

“Oh my god,” she breathes, “Is this all my research?”

“Yeah!” I extract a heavy stack of books and set them on the coffee table, then the printed-out draft of her thesis, covered in red-pen marks from her advisor. Sheaves of her handwritten notes, and some printed ones, too.

“Jamie!”

I didn’t feel her grab my arm, so I turn in surprise.

“What, I thought-?”

“You are the best!” Kasey leaps into my arms. “Oh my god, I was sure she’d throw it out, she was always asking me about what the hell I was going to do with a Ph.D. in History. I can’t believe you salvaged it. Thank you.”

I pop a kiss onto the top of her head.

“Let me know if you need me to turn the pages."

She releases me, smiling.

"Something for me to read while you're at lunch tomorrow."

"Right. Lunch, tomorrow. With Gabby." I keep forgetting about it, with everything else going on.

This should be interesting.