Trespass Against Us, page 3
“I know. I’m grateful anyway.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Riley says. “You should stop while you’re ahead, before you talk me out of it.”
Vee laughs. “All right. I haven’t seen you in a few weeks. It’ll be nice to see your face again, at least.”
Riley stamps down on the way his stomach turns. “Yeah, you too. Good night, Vee.”
“Good night, Riley.”
He hangs up. After making his decision, he expects his world to look different somehow. It doesn’t. He’s still just Riley, alone in his empty room, in his empty apartment.
He glances back to his bedside table. After a second of hesitation, he rights the downed frame. Ethan smiles back at him—young, now and forever.
Riley waits for his hands to shake. For his scars to ache. They do not. Somehow he isn’t surprised.
Deep down, Riley had always known Dominic House wasn’t done with him. Deeper than that, he’d always known the opposite too.
He wasn’t done with Dominic House either.
His hand white knuckles around the photograph. The glass is cold to touch.
He wonders if it’s cold in Dominic House. It’s summer now. Summer again, even. Somehow he thinks that matters very little.
Riley has spent the past two years being told that Ethan is gone. The internet called him missing, his parents called him a runaway, and their friends called him dead.
Ethan Hale is gone, the world said, and Riley should just move on.
Is Ethan cold? Is he lonely? Does he think about the night Riley left him behind half as much as Riley does?
Ethan isn’t missing. He isn’t a runaway. He isn’t dead.
None of them had been there that night. Not in the end, when it was just Riley, Ethan, and one more awful, awful thing as the chapel burned down around them. None of them fall asleep at night picturing blue eyes and fire.
Riley sets the frame down with a clatter. The shakes are back finally. Riley had known it was only a matter of time.
He rolls over, staring out the window to the quiet night.
Is he really going to do this?
He’s not looking, but he feels Ethan’s smile all the same. Time has drained the warmth from it, but he remembers it still.
Fuck, he misses it still.
Riley rolls over again. He grabs up his phone. He dials. The phone picks up on the first ring. “Hello?”
“I’ll do it,” he says, no preamble at all. “Don’t make me regret it.”
Jordan makes a delighted sound. “I’m glad to hear it. If you could come by the address in the file tomorrow, we can do the safety induction, sign some contracts. Is that okay with you?”
Riley’s meant to be working tomorrow. “That’s fine by me.”
“Excellent. I look forward to—”
He hangs up. Something tells him Jordan won’t take it personally.
Drawn like a magnet, he looks to the photo.
Yeah. He’s fucking doing this.
Before
The night before they were due to head to Dominic House, the group piled together into Ethan’s tiny, empty house.
His parents were out for the night, as they usually were. Ethan’s relationship with them had been strained since he’d stopped accompanying them to church as he got older, but after he and Riley had started dating, it’d deteriorated into no relationship at all.
Ethan claimed this didn’t bother him. Riley knew better.
But that night was a good night. They ordered pizza and spent a couple of hours going over their game plan—what they wanted to film, where they planned to go on the grounds, what Vee would say when she narrated their adventure.
All of Vee’s careful research had been clipped down to the most salient points—the missing kids and priest, Dominic House’s use as a semi–halfway house, the overbearing Catholicism of it all. The stuff that would sound great as they walked its haunted corridors, showcasing all its ancient, imposing glory.
Not for the first time, Vee protested being the designated face of Ghost Hawks. “Make Ethan do it,” she said. “I do it every time, and he’s good at stuff like this.”
“No, I’m not,” Ethan said. “If you put me in front of the camera, I’ll be reading off cue cards the whole time.”
“You can’t do that,” Vee snapped. “We need to appear educated!”
“And that’s why you should do it,” Ethan said. “It’s good for consistency if you remain the face of the channel, too. Besides, I thought you bought a new skirt for this.”
Vee flushed and shoved a piece of pizza in her mouth to avoid answering.
At some point, they tossed old horror movies on the TV, sprawled across the living room as they chattered back and forth. Riley had gotten a new camera a few weeks back; this trip was the first time he’d be able to use it for the channel. Ethan very patiently let Riley show him all the fanciest settings and specs even though Riley knew the tech side of their little production bored him. Ethan was good like that.
Eventually, enthusiasm petered out under exhaustion. Vee fell asleep on the sofa with half a slice of pepperoni in her hand. Colton was out like a light atop the patchwork rug on the floor, the TV painting glimmering blue pictures of murderers and monsters across his skin.
Ethan got to his feet, finger to his lips for silence. He pulled an afghan from the back of the sofa, shaking it out over Colton like a snowdrift, and then took Riley’s hand, hauling him up, tripping over Colton’s socked feet as they rounded the couch again and rushed to Ethan’s room. Inside, Ethan clicked the door closed, drowning out the soft murmur of the TV. There was just enough moonlight seeping through the open curtains to see the glint of his grin. “Just because the others are going to spend all of tomorrow tired from sleeping like shit doesn’t mean we have to as well.”
Riley snorted. He hooked his fingers in Ethan’s belt loops, walking them both back until Riley could drop onto the end of the bed. “How selfish of you, Mr. Hale.”
Ethan flopped down beside him, stretching out on his back. “I had a good teacher.”
“Did you just call me selfish?” Riley asked incredulously.
Ethan’s stomach flexed with silent laugher and when he smiled his hair fell into his face, boyish and charming. “No. Of course not.”
“Good,” Riley said. “Because I can still go sleep on the couch with Vee.”
“You know that couch can’t take two people.” He paused to give Riley a pointed look.
Riley ignored him. Last week, they’d tested their luck and nearly wound up on the floor for their troubles, but it takes two to tango. Instead, he said, “You know, you don’t have to go along with everything I say, right? I know you’re not all that interested in this paranormal stuff. Interested in the channel, I mean.”
Ethan sighed, hauling himself up on his elbows. “Riley, I really don’t mind. Colton and Vee both seem into it, and you love it.”
Riley pulled a face. “Before you met us, your idea of a good day was throwing a football around and scoring home runs.”
“Those are two very different sports and I know you know that,” Ethan said patiently. “And it’s also not true. I was listening to Colton ramble about all this freaky paranormal stuff long before he introduced me to the rest of you.”
Riley had never fully understood how Colton and Ethan even became friends, given how little they had in common. He supposed the same could be said for him and Ethan as well, though, so maybe Ethan just had a thing for guys who didn’t know the difference between one ball game and another and considered ghost hunting to be a good time.
He’d asked Ethan about it once, how he and Colton had hit it off, and Ethan had just said, “We sit next to each other in Home Ec.”
That was it. They sat next to each other in one class. So naturally they had to be best friends. It was so quintessentially Ethan that it made Riley exasperated and fond at the same time.
Ethan had come late to their group, Colton only dragging him into their fold a month into sophomore year. Colton and Vee had known each other since preschool, treating each other more like siblings than best friends, and Riley had been adopted by Vee a week into high school.
Initially, Riley had been slow to warm to Ethan, wary of being replaced. Ethan hadn’t had the same problem. Once, Ethan had told him he’d had a crush on Riley since the moment Colton had introduced them.
In hindsight, it was obvious. Ethan was a lot of things, but he wasn’t subtle. Riley, however, had been too busy being irrationally jealous of the handsome quarterback encroaching on his friend group. Even after that feeling had morphed into something entirely different and Riley had begun making increasingly stupid excuses just to get a moment alone with Ethan, he still hadn’t picked up on the fact the feeling was mutual.
Probably, they’d still be dancing around each other now if Vee hadn’t taken Riley aside one day and said, “Put that man out of his misery one way or another, Riley, I swear to god. If I have to watch this stupid pining for much longer, I’m going to hurl.”
That had been that. Riley and Ethan had been inseparable ever since, and Ethan had been the sort of boyfriend that somebody like Riley could only ever dream about. Handsome, funny, and utterly devoted to him, even if was only quietly and behind closed doors, where small-town homophobia couldn’t sink its teeth into them.
And it was exactly things like that which made it hard to not sometimes feel like he was taking advantage of Ethan’s willingness to dote on him, happiest making Riley happy.
Riley eyed him dubiously. “If you’re just saying that—”
“I’m not,” Ethan interrupted. He looped one arm around Riley’s waist, dragging him down to the mattress. “Really. I know I couldn’t tell the difference between EMF and ESP when I first met you, but I’m all in on this ghost-hunting thing now.” He gave Riley an affectionate shake. “Now, tell me more about this house, because I know you held back on the slideshow and you’re probably bursting to show off.”
Riley was, but he had hoped he was doing a better job of hiding it.
Ethan’s arm over him was warm, almost too warm in the summer heat. His bedroom was small, and the remains of the late-evening sun stuck in all the corners of it like glue. If they stayed like this all night, Riley would boil alive.
There was a crucifix above Ethan’s bed. His parents had gifted it to him as kid, and even after all this time, it remained. When they were sprawled together like this, Riley couldn’t help but be overly conscious of it watching over them.
Still, he didn’t move—shifted only enough so he could card his fingers through Ethan’s hair. “All right, but it’s going to be boring as hell,” he warned.
“Great,” Ethan said sleepily. “Boring as hell. Just how I like my ghost stories.”
Riley tugged his hair in gentle admonishment. When he soothed his fingers through it immediately after, Ethan made a contented noise Riley knew he’d remember for the rest of his life.
Sometimes, it was hard for him to believe that Ethan had only been in his life for the better part of a year. He fit so naturally at Riley’s side that Riley couldn’t imagine going back to a life without him.
“Okay,” Riley said. “You asked for it.”
He talked about Dominic House—the building, the history, the horror. He talked until Ethan was long asleep, and when sleep reached for Riley too, only then did he shut up.
In his dreams, Dominic House waited for him.
It would not be the last time.
Three
The “address in the file” Jordan had so kindly asked Riley to come to belongs to the ritziest hotel for miles.
Riley stands on the sidewalk, looking up at it with both hands tucked in his pockets. It’s four stories tall—among the tallest in town—made up of metal struts and shiny glass windows. Through them he can see the lush reception area littered with plush couches and fancy men and women in suits.
He remembers when they built this place. They’d had to demolish a rusty old playground to do it, and Vee had corralled him into signing a petition against the project.
The hotel gleams at him now. Riley sighs and shoves his way through the revolving door.
Inside, the air-conditioning slaps him in the face, at least ten degrees cooler than outside. Riley hadn’t even realized he was hot until he was abruptly too cold.
He beelines to the reception desk, and a woman in a prim black dress glances up with a smile. “May I help you?”
“Yeah,” Riley says. “I’m looking for Jordan Jones?”
Her fingernails clack on the keyboard in front of her. “Your name?”
“Riley Fox.”
More clacking. “Ms. Jones is in room 406. There’s a note here that she’s expecting you.”
“Wonderful. Thanks.” Riley strides away from her plastic smile before it can sink its claws into him.
The elevator takes forever to climb the meager four stories. It spits him out in a claustrophobic corridor, and Riley gets so turned about looking for the right room that it leaves time for more doubts to creep in. He dithers in the hallway, and it’s only the ding of the elevator that spurs him back into action.
Room 406 is two doors from the end of the hall on the right. The placard above the peephole is chipped, and the burnished metal of the door handle has started to dull with age.
Riley scrounges up his courage, steels his shoulders, and knocks.
The door opens, and Riley is confronted with a freckled, sunburnt face framed by a wash of strawberry blond hair. The man beams at him. When he speaks, the lilt of his Irish accent is strong. “Riley, yeah?”
“That’s me,” Riley says. “Joshua, right?”
The man sticks his hand out. “Josh is fine. You watched much of us, then?”
“Sure,” Riley says.
He’d stayed up until nearly three in the morning bingeing Spirit Seekers on Netflix. Jordan Jones and her two-man team really were streaming TV’s dream: professional but with all the drama of a Vegas show.
Honestly, Riley really thought their shtick about investigating houses alone or not at all was just a bit for the camera, but when he peers over Josh’s shoulder, the hotel room seems largely empty.
“I’m glad you showed up,” Josh says cheerfully, stepping back to let him in. “Even if you cost me twenty bucks.”
From the sitting room, another voice calls, “That’s your fault for taking a losing bet.”
Josh ushers him forward and inside. Compared to the neatness of the rest of the hotel, the sitting room is a disaster. Equipment is stacked all over the carpet, tripods guarding the heavy drapes that in turn guard an ajar door to a balcony with a perfect view of the Target across the street.
Two couches face each other across an expansive antique coffee table covered in paperwork. A man sits on one of them, methodically cleaning a set of camera lenses that look like they’re worth more than anything Riley owns. Unlike Josh, he’s clean-shaven, with warm brown skin and dark hair, and seems perfectly content where he is. He barely looks at Riley as he says, “My name’s Alejandro. Thanks for winning the bet for me.”
If Riley remembers right, Alejandro Diaz is the oldest of the group, nearly forty, according to Wikipedia. Compared to Josh’s blatant enthusiasm, and Jordan’s overly sleek professionalism, Alejandro’s quiet disinterest is a breath of fresh air.
He reminds Riley of Colton, before everything went to shit.
Riley stomps mercilessly down on the pang of nostalgia in his gut and says, “It was my pleasure. Where’s Jordan?”
Footsteps come from an archway in the far wall and Riley looks up to see her entering the room, two mugs of coffee in her hands. Her expression brightens when she sees him, and she sets the coffee unceremoniously on the table to swoop in on him. “Riley! I’m so glad you could make it!”
Riley shrugs uncomfortably. “I said I’d be here, didn’t I?”
“You did, you did.” Jordan swats Alejandro pointedly in the side until he relents, making room for her. She rearranges the coffee, one on each side of the table, and indicates for Riley to join her. “Please, sit. I’m sure this coffee isn’t as good as yours, but we’ve got a lot of paperwork to get through, and we might as well do it with something to keep us warm.”
The air-conditioning in the room is worse than the lobby. Goose bumps tremble down every inch of his exposed skin. Riley cautiously sinks onto the opposite couch. The cushions are soft like butter beneath him. “How much paperwork are we talking about?”
Jordan picks up a stack, taps it on the table for neatness, and slides it across to him. “A standard NDA, the predicted filming schedule, some insurance and liability forms, so on and so forth. Tedious but necessary, I’m afraid.”
Riley thumbs through the stack. Perfect white paper, twelve-point font. His name over and over. Dominic Savio’s on every other page. “Last time I broke into a haunted house, I didn’t have to sign jack shit.”
Across the room, Josh coughs to smother a laugh. Jordan tries and fails to sweep a pained look from her face before Riley can see it. “Yes. Well. This is what happens when you take the proper legal channels.”
There’s a fountain pen on table beside him. Riley eyes it and asks, “You got a ballpoint? If you want me to sign anything with that, it’ll be more ink than paper.”
Jordan sighs. “Of course.”
Alejandro extracts one from god knows where, handing it to Riley without ever once taking his eyes from his camera lenses. Riley looks back to his paperwork. “Walk me through this.”
Jordan does. She’d been right; it’s as tedious and time-consuming as she’d predicted. Riley will be covered by the Spirit Seekers’ insurance should anything go wrong. Riley is prevented from disclosing any events of the filming until the episode airs. Riley agrees to waive his rights to sue Spirit Seekers and any affiliated parties in the event of an incident. In the event of an incident, Riley will—
By the time he’s done signing, his hand hurts and so does his head. His coffee is cold at his elbow.
Jordan piles the papers together with a bright smile. “That’s about it.”
