Just when I thought Sean Mori’s behavior couldn’t get any weirder, he didn’t want me touching the carousel. With the way he was using his body to block my path, you would have thought he was trying to keep a toddler from walking directly into a campfire.

Dangerous or not, now I really wanted to know why he didn’t want me getting any closer.

“I can’t touch it?” I scoffed, crossing my arms. “Why not?”

A muscle in Sean’s jaw tightened as he tried to come up with an answer. “Trust me. It’s up here,” he gestured to our surroundings, “for a reason.”

“But you’ve touched it.”

Sean sighed and massaged his temples. “Yeah, you’re right, Aqua. I did. I touched the carousel and I’m still paying for it.”

Obviously Sean wasn’t used to all of these questions, but he was the one who brought me up here. If he didn’t want me to ask about the carousel, he shouldn’t have invited me to join him. 

Still, I could see how hard it was for him to communicate this stuff. I tried to put myself in his shoes for a moment and think. 

“What did you mean when you said that you were ‘still paying for it’? Are you talking about the numbers?”

“Yeah, that.” He lowered his hands from his head and regarded me cautiously. “Other things too.” He didn’t care to elaborate.

I leveled my gaze with his. “You won’t tell me.”

Sean didn’t look away. “I don’t think you’d want to know.”

For a brief moment, the lights above us flickered. It wasn’t enough to break us out of this stalemate.

Finally, I uncrossed my arms. “But there are some things you want me to know, Sean. Otherwise, why did you bring me here?”

I guess he was no longer afraid of me making a dash for the merry-go-around because he relaxed his stance and dragged his hand through his dark waves. “I wanted you to see the carousel. You seemed so bummed earlier and I wanted you to know that it was still here.” He paused. “I’m… still here. There are things that I wish you didn’t hear, things I don’t want you to see, but I’m still here if you…”

I didn’t miss the way he glanced at me and looked away too quickly. 

“If I what?” 

If he was thinking what I was thinking, then yes. I wanted to see where things would go with Sean. 

Sean exhaled. “If you want to at least try… this. With me.” 

I looked back at the carousel and the scrawly black writing on the poles and flanks of the horses.

Quietly, Sean said, “The ghosts aren’t as loud when I’m with you. Or when I’m thinking of you.”

This was the first time Sean had been straightforward with what was going on in the mall. He actually admitted that what he was dealing with were in fact ghosts.

Somewhere in all of this, he had gotten very close to me. His chin came to the middle of my forehead. He went from looking over my head to leveling his face more with mine. His lips floated just above the curve of my own. His weren’t anything special, but I found myself wanting to kiss them all the same.

“Sean.” I whispered. “I don’t want to be your ghost repellent.”

He cracked a small smile and shook his head. “I don’t want that either. I’m just saying.”

He leaned in, but I rested my hand against his chest. “You can’t leave me in the dark.” I made sure that his deceptively green eyes were focused on mine. “If you need more time, I get that, but eventually I want to know the truth. The weird sounds. The missing stuff. Your creepy numbers. All of it.”

There was some hesitation passing through Sean’s features as he worked through my words. 

“Fair,” he said. Then he closed his eyes and tried again. I didn’t stop him this time. 

Sean’s skin was cold, but smooth and softer than I expected. When he parted his lips, everything got a lot warmer. The air echoed with the sound of all the broken glass and metal scraping against the floor tiles as our feet shuffled closer together. Sean reached for my arms and encouraged me to anchor them around his neck. Then he cupped my face and deepened the kiss.

My body shivered unexpectedly. Sean left me with a more chaste kiss before dragging his lips along my jaw and pausing just under my ear.

“It’s cold in here, huh.”

I couldn’t tell if he was seriously asking me or joking, but I chuckled anyway. Sean hugged me and huffed into the crook of my neck. I guess that was his way of laughing.

“We should go,” I said, reluctant to follow through. “My mom’s coming to pick me up soon.”

Sean asked if he could walk me out to the parking lot. I said yes and he held my hand the whole way.

As we neared the main entrance to the mall, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to see if Sean wanted to come to my fashion show. 

“You don’t seem like the kind of guy that would care about clothes, but–”

“Is it important to you?” Sean interrupted.

I told him that it was.

“I’ll probably be working that day, but I’ll try to stop by. Keep and eye out for me.”

I smiled. “Okay. I will.”

We came to a stop. I didn’t know if I should let go of Sean’s hand or not. I glanced at the fire lane to see if my mom was going to drive up. When I looked back, Sean surprised me with one last kiss. It was brief, but afterwards he whispered against my lips, “I really like you, Aqua… and I just don’t want to fuck it up.”

Another shiver carved a path down my spine. Before I could reply or say anything to reassure Sean, he let me go and disappeared back inside the mall. 

I stood there, watching the heavy glass doors swing shut when a sudden car horn went off behind me.

It wasn’t that loud, but it jolted me enough to make me spin around. The car behind me belonged to my parents. And there was my little brother, leaning over my mom just so he could honk the car at me.

“Ewwww, Aqua has a boyfriend!”

I told him to shut up. My mom snapped at me with a warning about talking like that to my brother and followed up with, “Aqua Simone, get in the car.”

I knew that look on her face. She was going to want to know who that was and whether I thought I was grown now. Like I somehow did something wrong.

The ride home was the worst. Mom was making a big deal out of what she saw, not even giving Sean a chance. Meanwhile, my brother was laughing his ass off in the back seat. 

Whenever I called him out on it, he swore up and down that he was laughing at his gameboy, not my nasty love life as he so tactfully put it.

“Aqua, I am still talking to you! Leave your brother alone. He’s just playing his game.”

I slumped as far as humanly possible in my seat and begged my mom to give it a rest. 

“Aqua, you think with the way that you’re acting, your father will leave this alone when he finds out?”

Why. Just why did she have to bring Dad into this?

“Please, mom. We don’t have to tell him. Not tonight. It’s just a boy. I’m still trying to get to know him. It was a little kiss goodbye, that’s it!”

Xavier howled with laughter. Willfully oblivious to how much he was provoking me, Mom kept her eyes laser focused on the road.

“That’s it? Aqua, you don’t kiss people you’re trying to get to know. You talk to them. You meet their parents first. You go on a proper date.” She sighed, fell quiet for a moment and said, “Baby girl, it’s not the fact that he kissed you. It’s the way he kissed you that I have a problem with.”

“Like all gross, you know!” Xavier piped up from the backseat. “Like mwah-mwah-mwah–”

“As your mother,” Mom spoke over him, “I cannot help but be concerned. I don’t know who that boy is. He could be much older than you and he doesn’t even look like he’s showered–”

He showers!

I didn’t scream what I was thinking out loud, but I really wanted to. Even though I had no proof that Mom was wrong. I would have described how Sean smelled to her if she wouldn’t be so crazy about it. Now that I thought about it, Sean didn’t really smell like soap, but rather cool metal. It made sense seeing as how he worked all day around old, heavy machines in an arcade with the AC blasting at subzero. 

“He looks normal, Mom,” I said weakly, basically exhausted at this point. 

Mom clicked her tongue. “He needs a haircut.”

I let her have the last word because this wasn’t even as bad as it was about to get. Mom would wait until we were all at the dinner table before breaking the news to my dad. Xavier would be a little shit about it. 

So that was that. I was left to fend for myself in the face of my overly-critical mom, my dad, who was stricter than God, and not to mention, one very annoying, unbearable little brother who wanted to watch me burn while he stuffed his face with garlic mashed potatoes.

To no one’s surprise, dinner with my family was about what you would expect.

Absolute hell.