Stop Ghosting Me, page 1
Stop Ghosting Me
Tara Sivec
Stop Ghosting Me
Copyright © 2022 Tara Sivec
EPUB Edition
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Disclaimer
This is a work of adult fiction. The author does not endorse or condone any of the behavior enclosed within. The subject matter may not be appropriate for minors. All trademarks and copyrighted items mentioned are the property of their respective owners.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Sidney
“I brought you an entire suitcase of severed heads.”
“This is bullshit, Kenny!”
The man looks up from his crossword puzzle to frown at me. If I weren’t so infuriated right now, I’d be impressed with how many hours he’s been able to ignore my complaining.
“How many times do I have to tell you that you can’t call me Kenny at work?” he whispers loudly, nervously glancing around the small room as he adjusts the tie on his uniform.
Which makes me lean forward and grab onto the cold, metal bars in front of me to look around the one-room sheriff station as well.
“There’s no one here but us,” I remind my childhood friend with a roll of my eyes. “We are literally the only two people not out enjoying the celebration of the best night of the year in Harvest Grove, because you’re being a dipshit!”
The jail is only a block away from the town square. I’ve been forced to hear just how much everyone has been enjoying the last few hours without me, which has made me grumpier than usual about my current situation.
Kenny’s booted feet drop from the top of his desk with a loud thunk when they hit the floor. He tries to glare at me even harder, and I attempt to not laugh. Kenny Stuart couldn’t intimidate a kitten, and he knows it.
“I am an officer of the law, and you have to respect me. Come on, Sid!” he whines loudly, really not sending his point home very well.
“Fine. Let me out, Deputy Dipshit!”
Kenny just sighs and shakes his head at me before kicking his feet back up on top of his desk, leaning back in his chair, and studying the crossword in his lap again.
While I get more and more irritated listening to the muffled sounds of fireworks exploding, people laughing, and the faint tunes of Monster Mash playing for probably the hundredth time in a row.
“You know the rules, Sidney. I’m not letting you out of my sight until the festivities are finished, and there’s no chance of you wreaking any more havoc in town just hours before tourists start arriving.”
“I didn’t wreak any havoc,” I complain with a stomp of my foot. “I was running away from the havoc that was already wreaked.”
Kenny chuckles under his breath as he scribbles in a word with his pencil, which just makes me want to charge across the room and kick out the two legs of the chair he’s leaning back on.
But I can’t. Because I’m in a freaking holding cell!
“We go through this every year.” He sighs without lifting his head. “You know the drill. It’s one of the reasons why you have your own chair in there, so get comfy.”
Looking back over my shoulder in my tiny cell that is the size of a storage closet—because it was a storage closet back in the day of my grandmother’s childhood, when the sheriff’s office naively thought there wasn’t a need for a jail cell, until my grandmother became a hell-raising teenager—I scowl at the cushioned chair that looks like it was taken from a conference room and shoved up against the wall. More particularly, I stare at the gold plate attached to the fabric on the back of the chair that has been metal-stamped with the words Sidney Tanner.
Fine, so I have my own personalized chair in jail. As did my mother before me, and my grandmother before her. The only reason my aunt never had her own chair is because she married into the Tanner family, and criminal behavior doesn’t naturally run in her veins. That’s not to say she isn’t the cause of a lot of trouble; she’s just better at not getting caught than the rest of us.
But that doesn’t mean anything, and I shouldn’t be in here, dammit!
“Let me out right now, or I will call your mother.”
Kenny is completely unbothered as he shrugs. “Who do you think gave me the tip that you were lurking at the scene of a crime tonight?”
I let out a loud groan and smack my forehead against the bars of my cell.
“I cannot believe Colleen is still mad at me about that tiny little fire years ago that wasn’t even my fault.”
“You burned down her entire garage!” Kenny so nicely reminds me.
“It wasn’t the entire garage. The doorframe was still there when they finally put it out,” I mutter.
Just because someone finds you holding a gas can a block away from a raging inferno doesn’t automatically mean you’re guilty. Where’s the due process? Where’s the jury of my peers?
“Besides, you already used your one phone call on your own mother.” He snorts.
Right. Who didn’t answer. Because she was most likely too busy making sure the real criminals didn’t hurt themselves running away, like always. Another reminder from Kenny I didn’t need right now. This is what I get for giving them a five-minute head start.
“This time really wasn’t my fault.”
“Fine. Then whose fault was it?” Kenny looks up from his crossword long enough to raise an eyebrow at me.
All I can do is bite my tongue, and he knows it. He knows I’ll never snitch on the guilty parties. Heredity isn’t the only reason I often find myself in trouble.
Kenny goes back to his crossword, while I let go of the bars and start pacing the small space I was tossed into a few hours ago, like a caged animal. My heart rate kicks back up a notch. I’m having trouble taking a deep breath, and I have to wipe my sweaty palms off on my jeans and think happy thoughts before this panic attack gets out of control.
I hate being confined. And I really hate small spaces and have a touch of claustrophobia. Which is pretty laughable, considering how many times I’ve knowingly made the choice to do something that would put me in this small, confined space with no window to the outside world. Bitching at Kenny was a nice distraction for a little while, but if I have to stay in here much longer, I might start screaming. Or crying. Which is just not something a Tanner woman does. We get angry, and we rage. We do not cry.
I know it’s my own fault for not keeping a better eye on my younger sister and cousin. They usually don’t start with their bullshit until well into the middle of the night. But Penny and Ginger were more fired up than ever this evening and came in hot fifteen minutes into the start of October Eve. I normally have more time to enjoy the fun on my favorite night of the year, before I inevitably wind up getting in trouble covering for them. This year, I missed the fireworks, I missed the lighting of the town square, and I missed the countdown to midnight and the slow ascent of the huge, light-up pumpkin, where everyone shouts, cheers, and clinks glasses of candy corn martinis when the lighted pumpkin reaches the top of the fifty-foot pole it’s attached to.
And my number-one grievance—I missed eating my weight in pumpkin funnel cakes the bakery only makes this one night of the year. I am going to hold onto this current annoyance with Penny and Ginger until the day I die for that alone. But they are only one more offense away from getting their own personalized jail chairs, and I won’t let that happen.
“You can’t keep covering for them, Sidney,” Kenny speaks quietly, eyes still focused on his puzzle, making my mouth immediately dry up after drooling over the memory of pumpkin funnel cakes. “I get why you did it when they were younger, but they are twenty-year-old adults now, who are responsible for their own choices. And they do not make good ones.”
All valid points, but old habits die hard. I’ve been covering for them since they were twelve, I was eighteen, and our fathers died on a fishing trip out of town together. The girls showed their grief and anger by way of disappearing from the funeral to set fire to the fishing boat that had been shipped back and parked in the middle of our driveway.
My dad and uncle are gone, my mom and aunt are just as crazy as Ginger and Penny, and if I don’t keep them out of trouble, no one else will. One of these days, they will outgrow this rebellious nature and the need to seek revenge on any man who has ever done a woman wrong. Which never fails to go completely haywire in some way, like it did earlier tonight. They don’t believe in making a plan. They only believe in making someone pay.
“You’re not the only one annoyed being stuck in here while everyone else is having fun,” Kenny continues. “One of the stars from the movie that was filmed here was going to be signing autographs at the bookstore, and I missed it. She’s one of the only autographs I haven’t gotten yet.”
“Stephanie Long?”
Kenny shakes his head when I name the lead actress.
“Robin Jenkins?”
His head whips back and forth again when I name the actress who played the best friend of the lead. We repeat the process while I rattle off the small handful of other actresses that starred in the movie, who all died quick, gruesome deaths while running away from the killer in slow motion, with their boobs almost bouncing out of their tops.
“No, none of those. It was Cheerleader Number Four, who was the prettiest one out of all the cheerleaders who died, and now my scrapbook is ruined,” Kenny complains overdramatically with a huff and a scowl in my direction, like my night hasn’t gone way worse than his.
“You do know Cheerleader Number Four is probably like, seventy years old by now and won’t be wearing a skimpy cheerleading uniform so you can ogle her saggy boobs, right?”
“Why do you always have to ruin everything?” Kenny sets aside his crossword puzzle to flip through a few phone messages on his desk, muttering under his breath about another October Eve down the drain because of the crazy Tanner women.
October Eve, the night of September 30th, is sacred in the town of Harvest Grove, population: really fucking small. Right smack in the middle of the Midwest where nothing exciting ever happens, a campy horror movie called The Babysitter’s Last Halloween was filmed here, back in the early ’70s. It was never a big hit at the box office, but over the years, it’s gained a hoard of cult-like followers that just continues to grow with each new generation. They cosplay the movie, they travel the world attending comic-cons that feature the movie, and every October, many of them come to Harvest Grove to take pictures and videos at each location where the movie was filmed.
Which is how our sleepy town turned into a Halloween tourist attraction that lasts from October 1st to the 31st every year. All of the homes, as well as the businesses, go over the top decorating for the holiday. They all make changes to their offerings to include Halloween-related items. Vendors set up tables in town to sell movie-related merchandise. There’s a tour that runs a few times daily, on which guests are guided through town to see all the locations where the movie was filmed. And there are Halloween-themed events scheduled all throughout the month for people to enjoy, no matter when they make it here.
There is nothing better than October Eve, when our quiet town comes to life to kick off the start of a new tourist season. And here I am, stuck in a tiny room, with a man who won’t even give me the courtesy of a good fight to distract me from trying not to hyperventilate when it feels like the walls are closing in with each hour that passes.
“Stop trying to act like you’re mad about missing the party. You’re just mad he’s not in town yet to bail you out.”
My pacing comes to an abrupt halt when Kenny reminds me about the real reason October Eve became my favorite night of the year not that long ago, quickly beating out the actual night of Halloween. My heart starts racing a little faster as I slump down into my chair—and not because of a panic attack this time. It’s not like I ever asked to be rescued from being locked up; it just happened six years ago by chance, and it’s become a whole thing now, year after year. It’s basically tradition at this point. A tradition I look forward to like a pathetic idiot. One that would make the women in my family disown me if they knew how little sleep I got last night because of my excitement over a man, and how many times I changed my outfit before leaving the house earlier.
I’m not ashamed to admit the fact that he’s late is the real reason I’m so agitated right now. If he’s even so much as five minutes late getting into town, I start to worry if this is the year he finally decided not to come back. If this is the October he realized this town, and all the people in it, just aren’t worth the aggravation. He’s now two hours and fifty-seven minutes late, and I hate how scared and nervous it makes me feel.
“What are the charges this time?”
Like my brain was able to conjure him just by thinking about him, that deep, no-nonsense voice I haven’t heard in a year fills the quiet room. Hearing his voice again after so long is like drinking a mug of hot apple cider on a cold autumn evening, warming me up from the inside out and making me forget all about my current troubles.
My head whips up from where I’ve been staring at an old burn mark in the carpet that never got fixed when my mother wasn’t properly frisked before one of her nights in here almost twenty years ago. A smile stretches across my face when our eyes meet, even though I’m seriously annoyed with him right now for making me worry. And even more annoyed by how much I no longer feel like panicking just by seeing him again and being able to breathe the same air as him.
My best friend for the entire month of October for the last six years, Ford Prescott, stands in front of Kenny’s desk. His six-foot-four body towers over it in a pair of dark jeans that hug his tree-trunk thighs, with the bottoms shoved into a pair of work boots, and a brown, long-sleeved Henley molded to the muscles of his upper body. With his arms crossed in front of him and the usual glower of annoyance on his face, his blue eyes slowly trail over me from head to toe, and I ignore the wave of heat that flares over my body in their wake.
He’s just making sure I’m okay and not injured in any way, like a good friend. But my stomach still flops just like it always does the first time I get a good look at him again after a year without seeing him. I blindly get up from my chair, moving back over to the cell door to wrap my hands around the bars, just to be a few feet closer to him.
“Fleeing from the scene of a crime, resisting arrest, destruction of property, and getting on every damn nerve I have for the last four hours.”
“Just another Tuesday then.” Ford nods seriously at Kenny, making me stick my middle finger up at him from behind my bars.
My stomach flops again when a ghost of a smile tips up a corner of his mouth framed by his neatly trimmed, black facial hair. It disappears just as quickly as it came when he looks away from me and puts his attention back on my jailer.
Kenny quickly stands up and holds his hand out to the man in front of him. “It’s good to have you back in Harvest Grove, Ford. Please… get her away from me.”
“Oh, eat shit, Kenny.” I roll my eyes so hard I almost give myself a headache.
“Stop calling me Kenny at work, Sidney!” he complains, his face getting beet-red as he chuckles nervously when Ford drops his hand to cross his arms again.
While Kenny looks at the man with the same hero-worship he always has on his face when Ford walks through the door.
Any door.
It’s even more annoying that everyone in town worships the guy, especially when he never seems very happy to be here, complains about all the tourists crowding the streets and being too loud, and glares at every Halloween decoration that gets in his way. I am a goddamn ray of sunshine, and people cross the street when they see me coming.
Eleven months out of the year, thousands of miles away from me, this man sits behind a desk wearing a suit and tie, running his family’s logging business in Oregon. But when he comes to Harvest Grove, he gets to hang up the suits and ties, looking so casual and ridiculously hot that he should be on the cover of Sexy Lumberjack Magazine, if that were a real thing. He’s big, and gruff, thirty-two years old but acts like he’s sixty most days. A hard worker who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty and would rather have his skin scraped off with a spoon than talk about his feelings. He rarely laughs, still has an air of mystery about him even though I’ve known him for six years, and he’ll kick anyone’s ass that pisses him off. And will especially kick anyone’s ass that pisses me off or upsets me in any way. He’s one of the best friends I’ve ever had who doesn’t even bat an eye with each new crazy thing that happens with me or my family, and he’s one of the biggest crushes I’ve had to learn to get over if I wanted to keep him in my life. He doesn’t do relationships, and he made that clear the one and only time I tried to flirt with him when we met. Lesson learned, and one I vowed to never, ever repeat again.
