“What the—” Lucas shouts.
“You put your hands on her?” the ghost yells in Jack’s voice, full of muffled fury. I scramble away and stare, my hand pressed against my mouth. Jack stumbles off the sofa and flails, kicking over my coffee table in his efforts to wrench himself free of the sheet. Lucas bats at Jack’s blind reach and leaps onto the sofa behind him. Their shouts merge into a confusing word soup.
“Jack, stop! We were reading his script for a movie. A movie!” I shout, finally finding my voice. And suddenly Lucas cries out. His eyes latch onto mine, shock and alarm flashing across his face as he tumbles backward off the back of my sofa through The Hole, his feet tangled up in the sheet, wrenching it off Jack as he goes. He lands with a ridiculously loud clatter-crash.
Jack stares at me, breathing heavily, his hair disheveled. I blink and rush to the sofa, looking through The Hole. Lucas is lying on his side amid a stack of two-by-fours and debris, moaning softly and holding his cheek.
“Reading a script?” Jack asks me, his voice cracking slightly. I ignore him and climb through The Hole.
“Oh God, Lucas, are you okay?”
“My phone,” he mumbles. I help him sit up and reach for his phone in his back pocket. He takes it and places a call, touching a hand to his jaw and wincing. “Dan,” he barks. He winces again and holds his hand against the side of his face. “You need to come get me. I sent the driver home. Address?” He looks at me and holds out the phone. I recite my address into the receiver.
Jack peers down at us through The Hole, his expression almost comically horrified. I push him back and scramble through The Hole into my apartment to grab Lucas some ice for his face.
“I’m fine.” Lucas waves away my fussing when I return, but he accepts the ice pack. His agent, Dan, who calls to mind a refined grizzly bear, rushes over in record time and insists on getting Lucas checked out at the hospital, despite his objections. I ask to ride along, but Dan rejects my request. Lucas doesn’t contradict him.
Evidently, one of our neighbors called the cops during the melee, and two police officers arrive just as Dan and Lucas are about to leave, forcing them to halt their retreat and share what occurred. One of the officers starts laughing so hard at the misunderstanding—and at the fact that a goth ghost essentially scared a prominent TV celebrity into falling backward through The Hole—that his partner has to tap him none-too-gently to stifle his giggles.
Gence, on the other hand, does not see any humor in the situation. He is glowering at me, though it wasn’t my fault. Not directly, anyway. I push away the feeling of encroaching remorse. How was I supposed to know this would happen?
Lucas limps away without a goodbye to me, radiating offended fury, after the chuckling officer asks if he’d like to press charges against the sheet. Dan quickly follows behind him.
20
Jack is sitting on my sofa, his hands steepled between his knees in front of him. He’s wearing jeans and a faded blue T-shirt, stained from his wall-demo efforts. I sit beside him as the police and everyone else clear out.
We’re quiet for a long while.
“Wow,” I say. I clamp my mouth shut, fighting the urge to babble nervously. God only knows what I’d say after everything that happened tonight.
Jack makes a choked sound in the back of his throat that sounds like agreement.
I can’t do silence anymore. If he’s not going to say something, I have to. “I’m going to have to bake Gence some cookies. He’s really angry,” I say, latching onto the one thing I can maybe fix right now.
“He’s diabetic. Type two.” Jack doesn’t look up at me as he says it.
I absorb that and swallow a horrified gasp. Of course Gence is diabetic. He probably thinks I’ve been trying to kill him this whole time. I cover my face with my hands. The image of Jack in that sheet, my spooky savior, flashes through my mind, and that laugh bubbles up again, this time spilling out past my fingers.
“What?”
I drop my hands and look up. “You’re literally the worst white knight ever.”
“I wasn’t trying to be your fucking white knight, Penny,” Jack snaps, and there’s real bitterness to his voice. “I was trying to save the guy. From you.”
The bubble of laughter inside me deflates, and it’s punctuated by a painful lurch in my chest. “What?”
He shakes his head, casting his eyes heavenward. “Okay, I guess I’ll spell it out for you. I heard you and that guy in your apartment, and I decided to warn him against making the mistake of getting mixed up with you.”
Something’s off. I don’t know Jack that well, but all of our hallway sparring has made me surprisingly adept at figuring out when there’s another layer to his words—something he’s trying to bury beneath the facade. He’s trying to project frustration, anger, contempt. But underneath that? I hear shame, pain…maybe jealousy? I don’t know. His eyes lack the spark that lights them up every time we fight; instead, they’re darting and shifty, trying their hardest not to look at me.
I don’t think Jack was trying to sabotage a date. His words when he was fumbling with the sheet come back to me. He genuinely thought I was in trouble, and he was genuinely trying to save me. My heart squeezes. I want to climb onto his lap and pull his stupid lips down to meet mine. I want to push him down, straddle him, and—
He notices me staring at him and snaps, “Stop looking at me.”
Okay, so he’s still a dick.
As I contemplate what to do with all of this, my stomach breaks the silence by rumbling something fierce. Of course, now that the apartment is finally the quietest it’s been in months.
