“It’s very cozy.” Nelle runs her hand over the back of the couch. Her feet guide her to a bookshelf on the far wall, beside a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the street. She scans the titles, her finger whispering across the spines.
“Is this a balcony?” James unlatches the window, and it swings inward, inviting in the city air, rippling the sea-breeze candle on the coffee table.
“A small one, yeah.” Jessie pokes her head onto the balcony, and a trash-rotten wind tousles her red coils. She swirls four servings of white wine in her bulbous goblet, stabbing James with her brown eyes, clearly pissed.
“Do you want a moment alone to catch up?” Nelle asks, hoping to dissolve the tension.
“Yes, please.” Jessie sips her wine.
“Where is Nelle supposed to go?” James asks. “The fire escape?”
“I can wait on the balcony,” Nelle says. She tries to step out into the night air, but her body freezes.Shit.
James’s face goes blank with fear again. Panicky, he says, “Jessie, can I use your bathroom? It was a long drive.”
“Down the hall, third door on the right.”
“Thank you.” He speeds off.
“Typical James,” she says, plopping down on the couch. “Always running from conflict.”
“I didn’t think that was typical of him,” Nelle says.
Jessie pauses mid-sip. “How did you two meet?”
Nelle keeps a careful hand on the balcony door. Any second, James will write for her to move outside, so she has to keep this conversation short.
“At the Fourth of July festival,” Nelle says. “He came up to me, and we talked all night.”
“And you’ve lived in Lincoln your whole life?”
“All twenty-one years.”
“That’s so strange, because I lived there until I was eighteen, and I never saw you. It’s such a small town, and we’re not that far apart in age, so you’d think that I would have seen you once or twice. Here or there.”
“I was homeschooled,” Nelle says. “And I didn’t have any friends to go out with, so I mostly just stayed home.”
“With your dad?”
“S-sorry?”
“You live alone with your dad?”
Nelle bristles. “Is this an interrogation?”
Jessie’s face drops into a dead serious glare.
Nelle squirms, wishing she could walk out onto the damn balcony already.
Then Jessie laughs, snapping any tension like a bone. “Sorry if I made you feel weird. I don’t always know when a bit’s gone too long, that’s my bad. Look, I don’t know you, so having you here with Jamesis a little strange, especially because he’s never brought a girl around. But you seem cool.”
Nelle relaxes. “You do, too.”
Jessie pauses, studies her a moment, then reaches for the wine. She pours another glass. “Here,” she says, passing it over.
Nelle takes the offering just as James barrels into the room, sweaty and obviously freaking out.
“What’s the matter?” Jessie asks. “Did you see the ghost, because Lena swears she—”
