It turns out that ghosts can sleep for much longer stretches than humans can.

“There’s an eternal slumber joke to be made here,” Aiden observes, looking down at the two translucent bodies curled up together in my bed.

“Shhh.” I press a silencing finger over his lips. “Don’t wake them up.”

“I know.” Aiden wraps his arms around me, sets his chin on the top of my head. “They need to recharge, I get that. Been there, myself.”

He's right. After their codebreaking marathon, the ghosts are clearly in need of deep, serious rest.

They’ve already gotten some, and I could swear they look brighter for it. Less see-through. Maybe ghosts don’t have to sleep, but it seems like they definitely should.

I look down at Kasey with affectionate eyes. She’s snuggled up against Will’s broad chest, cozily wrapped up in his arms. She looks so small, curled up with him. He’s a big guy, just like Aiden. Part of why we need to find an apartment with room for all of us.

Which is exactly what we’re doing today.

“We should get going," Aiden murmurs, keeping his volume soft. "Don't want to be late for the first place we’re supposed to see."

“Mmm, okay.” I turn around in his arms, lean up to press a kiss onto his jaw. “Wait, what are you talking about? Don’t we still have, like, forty-five minutes?”

“Yeah.” Aiden bends down to nuzzle his nose into mine. “But we should leave enough time for Mugshot, right? They have cinnamon chocolate monkey bread today, I thought you might want-”

His words fall apart into huffing laughter as I tear free from his arms and go rushing off to find my Converse.

We head out into the rain a few minutes later. I slick my damp hair out of my eyes, then glance over at Aiden in the passenger seat. I was about to ask him if he's excited, but one look at his face stops me still.

He’s smiling so brightly, staring at me with all his feelings bare in his breathtaking eyes. His head tipped very slightly to the side, like he’s listening to us.

I can almost see him as he was when he first came back to town. Sitting there in my car in his knee-length athletic shorts, t-shirt, backwards snapback. Keeping his thoughts tucked away in the deepest layers of his ocean eyes, quickly breaking his gaze away from mine if I looked for too long.

I can’t believe we got from there to here. To apartment hunting together.

Some warm, powerful force takes hold of me and sends me leaning across the center console to take Aiden’s face in my hands. I slide my palms up his stubbled jaw, then lock my arms around his neck, kiss him deeply, knock his snapback off of his head.

He’s caught by surprise, but I can feel him smiling against my mouth. He lets his snapback tumble to the floor of the car, wraps his hand around my upper arm as he kisses me back. The warm glow in my heart envelops me completely, and I let myself get lost in it.

When I pull back, Aiden blinks slowly at me with very wide eyes. He bites his lip, and we both let out a stupid, quiet laugh. I put my forehead against his, swimming through my happiness.

“We're gonna be late for Mugshot,” Aiden says, after a moment. I feel the rumble of his deep voice roll through my body. “Might miss out on the monkey bread, if we keep sitting here like this.”

“Mmm. Forget the monkey bread. You’re more important to me.”

Aiden pulls back sharply, his eyebrows flying all the way up. “Wow. Oh, my god. You really love me, huh?”

I laugh, smack his arm, and start my car. “Ready, Sugar Maple?”

He smiles at me, his eyes shining brightly. “Mhm."

I'm in a really good mood as I pull us away from the curb. I’ve been picturing such a beautiful place for me and Aiden, and I can’t wait to walk through the apartments we found, pick out the best one. We’ll have to make it ours, obviously, and that takes time. But I have a feeling that we’ll just know it when we see it.

I think it’ll feel like home.

~~~~

I stand hugging myself, trying hard to disguise my dismay. Not doing a good job.

I keep trying to catch Aiden’s eye, but he’s busy struggling to fit in this tiny space. His head was grazing the ceiling at a few of the apartments we’ve looked at today. In this one, however, the ceiling is so low that he has to awkwardly lean forward, bending his knees. And still, he barely fits.

A man built like Aiden, in an apartment built like this - it's a ridiculous fucking sight, to the point that I’m nearly on the verge of hysterical laughter. But I'm so stressed out that all I can do is stare around in wide-eyed silence.

I’m still trying to recover from the uncomfortable moment when I tried the faucet of the kitchen sink, and it fell out onto my hand. The real estate agent is in the process of trying to screw it back into place.

“So,” she says over her shoulder, sounding increasingly desperate. “Did you guys know that tiny space living is very popular right now? It’s basically, like, a revolution. The small living revolution.”

“Is it?” Aiden asks, trying to squeeze out of her way.

His body alone takes up basically the entire kitchen. I seriously think that he could crush and destroy any of these ancient, tiny appliances. One-handed.

“Oh, yes!” The agent gives up on the faucet, drops it into the sink, and turns around to face us. “You can really, um, edit down how much stuff you have. Nothing superfluous, right? And small spaces can be so adorable. Just like this cozy little den!”

‘Cozy little den’ is a very generous way of describing this apartment. It's more of a hallway with two closets, although those are supposedly the bedrooms. There's only one window in the so-called master bedroom, and half of its height is taken up with a box air conditioner that sounds like it’s wheezing out its dying breaths. Speaking of which -

“Are the radiators the heating system, pretty much?” I ask, pointing at the one across the room.

I only ask because it’s been painted over so many times that most of the vents have been covered up.

“Well, the heating in this building is a little spotty,” the agent admits. “But the landlord said that in a pinch, you can just turn on the stove and leave it open.”

I nearly let out a despairing laugh, fight it down just in time.

Aiden looks down at the awful kitchen appliances, all of which have rust crawling up the sides. “Um, so - the listing said that this place had been renovated?”

“Yes!” The agent looks down at the notebook in her hand. “Looks like it was renovated in 1991.”

I press my fingers over my mouth again. Aiden looks over at me, biting his lip.

“So!” The agent smiles hopefully at us, gestures around at the apartment. “Is there anything else you wanted to see?”

We can actually see the entire place from this one vantage point, and either way, I think we’ve probably seen enough. A thought made certain for me when a particularly low-hanging doorway nearly takes Aiden out as soon as he stops paying attention. He ducks just in time, but it knocks his snapback off of his head.

I covertly type out a text as we follow the agent downstairs. We promise to let her know what we decide, thank her for her time. Then we walk together back to my car, heads bowed against the rain.

We sit there in silence for a long moment. I can feel Aiden looking at me, but I’m just staring straight ahead through the windshield.

My phone buzzes in my hand. Aiden leans over to look at the notification, then arches a surprised eyebrow.

“Roger’s texting you?”

“Mhm.” I put in my passcode, open up our messages. “I asked him if it’s okay to leave a stove open to heat an apartment.”

“Oh, good idea. What'd he say?”

I turn my phone around to show Aiden.

Roger 🧯 5:07 PM: No

Roger 🧯 5:07 PM: Jamie no

Roger 🧯 5:07 PM: Do NOT do that, I’m serious

Roger 🧯 5:08 PM: Hey it’s Luca, borrowing Roger’s phone! Just wanted to let you know that carbon monoxide poisoning isn’t that fun, actually

Roger 🧯 5:08 PM: Jamie it’s me again, I’m telling you, you can burn the entire fucking building down. Promise me you won't do that

"Shit," Aiden says. "Okay. Well - I could just heat the place, right? Heat is easy for me - although - oh. I guess that if any of our neighbors use their stoves for that, our place could still burn down, anyways.”

I drop my phone into the cupholder, then rub my eyes.

“How, um.” I clear my throat, trying to stay calm. “How many more places do we have lined up to look at?”

Aiden unlocks his own phone, pulls up our list, and bites his lip. “Looks like… that was the last one.”

I stare at him, then let out a long, loud groan, dropping my head onto the steering wheel.

We laughed when the first place we checked out was terrible. It was a first-floor apartment, and it slowly began to flood from the rain outside while we were still walking from room to room. We asked the agent if that happened often, and he said no. We had trouble believing him, especially after we found a mushroom growing out of the carpet in the entryway.

The musty air in that apartment had me reaching for my inhaler the minute we got back to my car. But Aiden and I thought it was funny. A hysterically bad start to our search.

I started to get discouraged after the second place we visited. It looked really nice at first glance, exactly like the photos in the listing. But we didn’t realize quite how thin the walls were. The family in the unit next door began to have a heated, furious argument while we were walking around. I could hear it with such crystal clarity that by the time we left, I had formed opinions about the people involved, and also chosen a side.

By the time we got to the apartment before this one, I was feeling pretty upset. The exterior of the building was so sad and desolate that Aiden had to talk me into going inside. It turned out to be the worst one by far.

It had all the cozy charm of a recently abandoned wartime hospital. The current tenants hadn’t moved out yet, just left for the day so the agent could show us the place. They also left a whole lot of raw chicken out, directly on the kitchen counter, not even on a cutting board. From the look and smell of it, it had been there for a few days.

There was a bucket on the floor with some unexplained substance inside - I didn’t get close enough to look - and a huge American flag on one of the walls, which turned out to be covering a massive stain. One of the beds had no sheets, just a dirty mattress, and the other had ones that were camo-print.

The agent assured us that the place would be tented for bed bugs before we moved in, even though neither of us asked about that.

Now we’ve left our last listing for the day, an apartment somehow even smaller than the one we looked at above Mugshot.

And that’s it. That’s every apartment we had wanted to see.

“Really?" I groan, my face still pressed against the wheel. “So these are our options? Fungus Flat, Paper Walls, Serial Killer Hideout, or - what do I even call that last one? Tiny and Rusty?"

"Tiny and Rusty are probably the names of the guys currently living in the Serial Killer Hideout."

"Aiden, oh my god. They're all so horrible, and that last one - I’m nowhere near as tall as you, and I felt about the size of the goddamn Statue of Liberty in there!”

I stop to take a breath. I lift my head, press my palms over my eyes. Suddenly I’m not upset, I’m mad.

“Shouldn’t they have to disclose all this shit in the listings?” I ask heatedly, my words and gestures both picking up speed. “It’s not hard, just add it to the description! Like - hey, by the way, this murder apartment with a suspiciously huge American flag probably used to belong to guys who hunt human beings for sport, so that energy will still be there when you move in! And the floor feels fucking squishy for some inexplicable reason, and the bed bugs are provided at no extra cost, and please don’t look in that fucking bucket on the floor, because-”

I break off abruptly, startled into looking over at Aiden.

“Are you laughing, right now?” I ask, incredulous.

He quickly puts a hand over his mouth, but it’s too late, and he knows it. He nibbles his lip, trying and failing to suppress a smile.

“What are you smiling about, Callahan?” I sputter, amazed. “Seriously, how can you be-?”

I cut myself off again as Aiden leans into me, puts his mouth against mine. My mind goes blank as I’m treated to a long, searing, intimate kiss.

I blink hard at him when he pulls back. I'm more than a little flustered, my cheeks suddenly on fire. Aiden smiles at me again, his blue eyes warm and glowing.

“Have a crush on you,” he murmurs, startling a laugh out of me.

“What the f-?”

“So cute when you’re mad.” He kisses the tip of my nose, huffs out another little laugh. “So cute.”

I try to glare at him, but all of my anger has been completely vaporized by that kiss. By the way he’s looking at me.

Still, I’m sad and disappointed, and I can’t pretend otherwise. I let out a deep sigh, falling back in my seat.

“I guess - should we take the Serial Killer Hideout?” I ask half-heartedly. “Just buy five hundred gallons of bleach?”

“No,” Aiden says firmly. He takes my jaw in one hand, makes me look into his eyes, and nuzzles his nose into mine. “We’re gonna keep looking until we find a place that feels right.”

My heart flutters wildly, but I shake my head at him.

“We did a pretty thorough search, babe, and Ketterbridge is so small, I - I really doubt that we missed anything.”

Aiden thinks about that for a moment.

“Is it okay if I look?” he asks.

I arch an eyebrow, caught by surprise. “By yourself?”

“Yeah. Think I know what you would like. C’mon, let me try.”

There’s no harm in that, I guess, so I nod.

“I still don’t get why you’re so happy right now, though,” I tell him. “You’re not even a little bit upset that every single place we looked at was terrible?”

Aiden touches an affectionate finger to my chin, his radiant eyes looking into mine.

“Us not being able to find a nice enough apartment to live in together, after I asked you to move in with me,” he says, “Is a problem I would’ve killed to have, before I came back. And after I came back, too.”

I stare at Aiden, then turn away, my heart hammering. I’m already so undone by what he said that when he leans over and presses a kiss right below my jaw, I nearly fall apart into his hands. I close my eyes, holding my breath.

“I just wanna come home to you,” Aiden murmurs, his deep, soft-spoken voice rumbling through me. “Soon I’ll get to do that every night. It’s hard for me to be upset about anything, knowing that.”

Jesus. Christ. He's actually trying to kill me.

I pin my lip between my teeth, then put my hand on Aiden’s head and push him away. He falls back, lets out a soft huff of laughter, and ruffles my hair.

I suddenly find that the dream I had, the dream of that beautiful place where Aiden and I would live together... it doesn’t seem as impossible as it was a minute ago. Hope rises in my chest again, warming me from within. Maybe he will find us someplace that feels right, that feels like home.

After all, when it comes to putting my dreams in my hands, Aiden is untouched.