Companion Plant 🍃 10:05 PM: How good did the hot shower feel?

Me 10:06 PM: Paradise. If it didn’t feel like murdering the environment I’d be in there for hours. The good news: I can feel my toes again, and I didn’t lose any of them to frostbite! Most people have four, right? Two on each foot?

Companion Plant 🍃 10:06 PM: We both know perfectly well that all of your toes are where they should be.

Me 10:07 PM: I’m gonna need special socks now

Companion Plant 🍃 10:07 PM: Oh my god

Me 10:07 PM: Who will knit them for me?

Companion Plant 🍃 10:09 PM: Clam down, I’m sure I’d be able to hear it in the energy if you were going to wake up tomorrow missing six of your toes.

Companion Plant 🍃 10:10 PM: ***calm down

Me 10:10 PM: You’re going to be staring at my four toes tomorrow in shock and awe. Which reminds me, we’re still on, right? I want to hear about the trace you picked up from the cemetery. Unless you wanna hop on Facetime and just tell me right now

Companion Plant 🍃 10:12 PM: We’ve been working on this all day, Energizer Bunny. How can you want to keep going right now? Aren’t you about to pass out? I know it’s not that late, but still. After everything that happened I’m fucking beat

Me 10:12 PM: Are you joking? I took the world’s best shower, I’m in my pajamas, I’m in my bed. Sleep is coming to take me by force

Companion Plant 🍃 10:15 PM: Sounds cozy.

Me 10:15 PM: Yeah it’s the best way to clam down

Companion Plant 🍃 10:15 PM: 😑

Me 10:16 PM: Huh there’s no clam emoji

Companion Plant 🍃 10:16 PM: I was going to thank you for helping me listen today, and what do I get? Beaten to death with my own typo.

Me 10:16 PM: You’re welcome for helping you listen, thank you for keeping me warm

Companion Plant 🍃 10:17 PM: Would have just given you my jacket, but I expect I’d never get it back. Never got back that shirt I loaned you after our dive into the river.

Me 10:17 PM: That’s weird?? I’m pretty sure I gave it back, and I’m definitely not wearing it right now or anything so there is no need to ask about that

Companion Plant 🍃 10:18 PM: Thief. Thief with boundless energy.

Me 10:18 PM: Not boundless. I’m definitely going to pass out soon, I’m surprised you haven’t already

Companion Plant 🍃 10:21 PM: That’s actually why I texted you. I know we didn’t end up getting any time to talk about it, but did you overhear what Ralph said? About us.

Me 10:22 PM: You mean about how you’re only my friend bc you feel bad for me? Yeah, got that

Companion Plant 🍃 10:25 PM: I can’t go to sleep knowing you might think that. Even a little bit.

Me 10:27 PM: Tell me it’s not true, then.

Companion Plant 🍃 10:28 PM: It’s not true. Never has been. I promise.

Me 10:30 PM: 😊 night night companion plant

Companion Plant 🍃 10:31 PM: Sweet dreams, t-shirt thief.

~~~~

Aiden and I sit beneath the tree in the forest, huddled together for warmth, his arm around my shoulders. The rain flutters down on us gently, speckling our clothes and catching on our eyelashes. Aiden sits with his head tipped back against the tree trunk, cushioned by the springy lichen that grows up its side. His eyes are closed. I curl in closer to him, my heart itself trembling. I press a kiss onto the tender skin of his neck, halfway between his ear and his collar. A muscle in his jaw jumps in response. The rough scrape of his stubble against my lips - I feel his warmth through it. He tilts his head just a little further to the side, exposing more of his throat. I place another kiss just below the first, taste the rain clinging to him. Electricity rushes through me, more powerful than the current of the river that almost washed us both away. My hand tightens on his knee. I hesitate, my lips barely brushing his skin.

“Keep going,” he breathes, and this time, he doesn’t mean that I should keep talking.

I wake with a start, gasping and damp with sweat. I’m alone, half-fallen out of my bed. My blanket is tangled around my feet. I should be freezing, but my entire body feels like it’s burning. I kick myself free and gather myself into a ball on the floor. The imagined taste of Aiden is still lingering in my mouth.

I reach for my phone and unlock it. I can’t hold onto this anymore. I need to tell him everything. I have our chat open and my fingers on the keys before I actually stop and think about what I’m doing. Panic overtakes everything else. In my confused, half-asleep state, I fling my phone clear across the room. It crashes into my bookshelf and thumps onto the floor.

Thank god I didn’t send a message. What did I nearly just do? I grind my hands into the carpet. Dig my fingernails in, willing myself to hold still and get my breath back. This is not the first dream I’ve had about him, but it is the first one anchored in something that actually happened. It all felt so possible for a second. So easy to lean over and kiss him. So easy to fracture the dam holding back everything in my heart. So easy.

“Not easy,” I whisper. My phone screen makes a thin rectangle of light from where it’s face down on the floor. Slowly, I ease to my feet, cross the room, gather it up. Our chat is still open. I reread the last message he sent me: Sweet dreams, t-shirt thief.

I did have sweet dreams, not that I can ever tell him about them. Sweet, breathless dreams, ones that kind of make me want to scream in frustration. Aiden is going to be the death of me after all. The words of my old poem, the one he himself stole from me, creep back into my mind: Do they shower down on you in your bed, do you smile in your sleep when they find you, the thousands of kisses I send from my dreams…

I crawl back into bed, my cheeks still flaming. T-shirt thief. So what if I’m still wearing his shirt? Maybe he doesn’t have that many. He only came into town with that one stupid backpack and his cute stupid face.

Without thinking, I take a handful of the shirt in my fingers and press the fabric to my nose. The scent of vetiver still clings to it: his aftershave. I’ve worn it to sleep pretty frequently - I like how big it is on me, how comfy - and now I can smell my own cedar cologne mixed in. It smells like him. It smells like us.

Maybe… is there a way for me to drop a very, very subtle hint? Like something that would go right over the head of a straight guy? Something that wouldn’t reveal the depths of my raging crush, but more casually suggest that I’m interested, if somehow he is, too…?

Wait a minute, what am I thinking? One vivid dream and all my defenses come crashing down. If I fuck this up, I lose a best friend. There’s a chance he would be nice about it, but things would never be the same between us. He’d be thinking twice every time he reached over to mess up my hair. This happy stretch of time since he came back, this fun and easiness between us, it would be over. I cannot and will not lose him.

If Aiden wants me the way that I want him, he’s going to have to tell me so himself.

~~~~

“Are you okay?” he asks, settling our macchiatos into the cupholders of my car. “You’re quiet this morning.”

“I’m fine, I just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

“Because of the dream?” Aiden asks, and I nearly swerve us off the road.

“What?”

“The dream?” Now he looks confused. “With the women planting a sapling?”

“Oh. Oh. No, I just-”

“You’re not getting sick, are you?”

“No.” I try to sound calm. “I think the hot shower worked its magic.”

“That reminds me, do I need to count your toes?”

“They’re all accounted for, thanks.” I pull onto the street along the river, slowing the car as we approach the Ghost Office. “So, listen. You know the spectral traces of William that you already found and drew on the map? The lines?”

“Mhm?”

“Is there no line that leads to the old cemetery? Like a line that ends somewhere in the forest, near where we were looking?”

“Ah. I already thought of that.” Aiden takes a sip of his coffee, running his thumbs over the Mugshot logo. “Without the glasses, I can only see the strongest spectral traces. The paths that William has walked the most. If I had the glasses, I could see the thinner lines.”

“Okay…”

“The point is, there has to be a spectral trace leading to his grave, but I can’t pick it up without the glasses. It’s not strong enough. If William is buried at the old cemetery, he doesn’t visit his grave often. At the very least, he hasn’t been there for a long time.”

“But...” I feel my forehead crease. “You picked up his spectral trace at Memory Gardens?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s weird, isn’t it?” I turn the car into the driveway of the Ghost Office. “He doesn’t go to his own grave, but he spends enough time at the new cemetery to leave a readable trace? Why is he hanging out there?”

“I don’t know.” Aiden taps his finger on his to-go cup thoughtfully. “I hadn’t considered that. I guess I just assumed that the dead are most comfortable in a cemetery.”

Kasey has barely gone back to the cemetery since she died. Not unless it was related to the ghost hunt, or that time she wanted to hang out with her grave and see if it had any effect (none, and that day was carefully noted down in our experiment log).

“Is that a safe assumption, though?” I put the car in park and retrieve my keys from the ignition. “If you didn’t like hanging out in a cemetery when you were alive, why would you like it when you’re dead?”

“I don’t know, but there must be some reason he always comes back. The point is, we’re going to need the glasses working if we’re going to find the cemetery.”

I jog after him as he sets off briskly towards the Ghost Office.

“I thought you said you felt something, though?”

“Yeah, but not a spectral trace.” Aiden catches the keys I toss him and undoes the padlock. He slides the metal door up, opening the house to the river. “It’s hard to describe, but the energy I picked up felt deeper. Older.”

We step into the Ghost Office, and Aiden drops his backpack onto the workbench. He tugs his phone out of his back pocket and holds it up to show me.

“You dropped a pin where we found Noah?”

“Yeah. Here’s the thing. If we can get the glasses to even kind of work, and we go back to the spot, I bet you we could find the cemetery.”

“Wow. You’re smart. For a jock, that is.”

“Thank… you?”

“Okay, so all we need to do is make the glasses work.” I settle my bag next to his. “Easy peasy. It’s not like we’ve been trying for a long time or anything.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I mean - I’m not complaining. I’m honestly having a blast. I never knew glasses could be destroyed in so many different ways.”

Aiden’s bright smile makes my heart lift.

“Cool,” he says. “Well - what configuration do we want to try today?”

We turn together to face the little coffee table. It’s late afternoon; my shift at the flower shop prevented us from starting sooner today. The sunshine streams in through the large windows of the Ghost Office, catching on the little stones and throwing colorful light on the walls. We both set our phones on the workbench. Aiden extracts a fresh pair of glasses from the box and sets them in the middle of the circle.

“Let’s see.” I lean over the table, thinking. We’ve fallen into a routine over the course of our attempts: discussing different arrangements, testing them, and then inevitably having to clean up the mess and try the next one. Like Aiden, I’ve developed the ability to read the rocks as if their meanings were written on their surfaces. Last time, we left various stones closer to the center of the circle. My eyes skim over them: sight, clarity, calm.

“What do we want to change?” Aiden asks.

I actually have an idea today. Kasey has been spending her evenings walking up and down the lines on Aiden’s map, and it has me thinking: if she can feel warmth potentially sourcing from William, maybe heat plays some role in all this.

Aiden raises his eyebrows as I rearrange the stones.

“This combination…” He surveys my choices. “Are you trying to make heat? What does that have to do with the glasses?”

I can’t exactly explain my reasoning without exposing Kasey.

“I don’t know.” I shrug. “But we definitely haven’t tried it this way before. It’s something different.”

“Alright, I guess.” Aiden touches the little red stones. “It might get a little hot in here, though. I told you, I’m not really that great at containing and directing the energy, even with the help of the stones…”

“I can survive an extra one or two degrees,” I tell him, and he shakes his head, smiling.

“Back up, dummy.”

We come together a few feet back from the table. I extract my Ray-Bans from my pocket and settle them over my eyes. It suddenly strikes me as a little funny, how second-nature this entire routine has become. You can only have plastic shards fly at your face so many times before you learn to take precautions.

Aiden adjusts his hat and his stance, raising his hands in a way that I’m affectionately familiar with by now. He doesn’t wear his sunglasses - he can’t make the magic work with them on - so I can see everything happen on his face: calm, focus, effort. The glasses in the middle of the table suddenly ripple, as if they’re behind one of those layers of visible heat that hovers over boiling highways.

“Oh, I feel that.” It’s getting distinctly warmer in here. “Aiden, you’re definitely not containing it to the table.”

“I realize that.” He grits his teeth. “I’m trying.”

“Oh my god - Aiden - Aiden.”

“Oh, shit.”

He drops his hands, and we turn to stare at each other as the temperature in the Ghost Office positively skyrockets. It’s hotter in here than the hottest day I can ever remember, and all at once I feel like I could either pass out or melt to the floor. Aiden stumbles towards me and grabs my hand. Then next thing I know, we’re running pell-mell through the open door of the Ghost Office, charging towards the river.

We don’t slow down, even as the icy water rushes over our shoes, then up to the knees of our pants. We cross the drop-off, and there’s suddenly nothing more to run on. We plunge under the surface. The shock of the cold water rushes up my body, extracting the painful heat in one violent tear. I burst above the surface, gasping, and shove my sunglasses up onto my forehead. Aiden is next to me, reaching for his hat, which is already floating away.

Treading water, we both turn to look at the Ghost Office. It looks peaceful, but through the door, there are heat ripples blurring the air. The coffee table is smoking. I can feel the farthest reaches of the fiery temperature on my cheeks, even from here. I hold my breath, half expecting the Ghost Office to go up in flames, but the blistering air abruptly relents. The heat shimmers vanish.

I twist in the water to look at Aiden, and he stares back at me. We both break into laughter at the same time. Aiden splashes me, and I gasp as the frigid water hits my cheek. I splash him back with force, drawing a fresh burst of laughter from him.

The experiment was a failure, but all I feel is happy.