Wren slapped a hand to her chest, eyes wide, heart hammering. He looked just as stunned. “What the fuck was that?” he demanded.
As her heart rate dropped, Wren’s brain kicked in. His hand was still on the sound system and, seeing it there, she thought of an explanation. “You must’ve hit a button,” she told him. “I think this room is also used for senior dances, so maybe they left a CD in the system and you mistakenly turned it on.”
He shook his head. “My hand didn’t move, and that wasn’t waltz music. It sounded military.”
Wren joined Dane at the sound system and frowned when she noticed the power button was off. If her theory was correct, then Dane had mistakenly switched the power on, hit the play and stop buttons, and also switched the sound system off. That seemed like a lot to accomplish from a simple brush of his hand…
A little trepidatious, she powered up the system, waiting for the lights to come on, and then hit the play button on the CD player. Nothing happened. Goosebumps tickled her spine, and she pushed the eject button. The tray opened, and it was empty.
“Huh,” Dane said.
Huh, indeed. Although she primarily used streaming music these days, she knew her way around a sound system, and checked to see if there was anything else that could’ve caused the rousing chorus. “No joy,” she said, tapping her foot.
Dane rubbed the back of his neck. “It did happen, right?”
Luna often talked about hers and the other residents’ ghost encounters, but that was Luna being Luna. Ghosts didn’t exist. But this was super weird. “Your phone?” she asked, grasping at straws. “Maybe it connected to the Bluetooth.”
Dane looked skeptical. “By itself? Also, I don’t have music on my phone.”
Wren frowned, distracted. “Why don’t you have music on your phone?” she demanded. To her, music was the way she navigated the world—her compass, her ballast, her built-in metronome. She needed it like air and water … and wine. Wine was essential.
“I prefer vinyl. Could it be your phone?” he countered.
“I do have music on my phone—lots of it,” she said, patting the top of the system. “But there’s definitely no military music on my playlist. And yes, while this setup is Bluetooth-enabled, it has to be paired—whether we used your phone or mine—so I kind of jumped the gun suggesting your phone connected to it.”
He looked at her, and she looked at him, and Wren knew that neither of them wanted to mention the fact that they were currently living in a town believed, by some, to be powered by the supernatural. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she stated, deciding to bite the bullet and voice what they were both thinking.
When he didn’t respond, she frowned. “Come on, you don’t think…No way!”
He lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “As I said before, I’m open to the possibility.”
He was a doctor, for God’s sake, ascientist. “How can you believe in ghosts when nobody can prove their existence?”
“You believe in human consciousness, right?” She nodded. “Well, we all experience it, but we can’tproveit exists outside our minds. Through string theory, scientists are convinced other universes exist; the math supports it, but it can’t beproved.”
Okay, that was a logical response, but she wasn’t convinced. “I refuse to believe that ghosts are haunting my very new, hardly used dance studio.”
Dane smiled. “So, looking on the bright side…”
“There’s a bright side?”
“It didn’t shuffle your Spotify playlist to send you a message.”
Wren threw up her hands and laughed. She had to, because it was so damn ridiculous. Dane smiled at her, placing his hand low on her back to steer her to the door. His hand was warm, broad, and light, his fingers barely made an impression before they fell away, but she felt like she’d been hit with ten-thousand volts from a stun gun. This man affected her like no other—even Alex—ever had; he made her feel, made her react, made her skin bubble and pop, her stomach flip over. Around him, her whole body came alive. It was as if she could feel each hair root, each pore, the twitch of micro muscles. She was hyper-aware of him.
If she was going to have a drama and man-free summer, one where nothing more exciting would happen than her getting a tan and dropping her stress levels, then she needed to avoid him. Keep her distance…
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
“Sure,” she replied.
Yeah, great start, Dunlop.
* * *
The ghosts sat in the presently empty back corner booth of the Night Owl Diner, their eyes on the couple across the room. Silas frowned at them. The doctor and the dancer hadn’t stopped talking since they arrived, and neither had dropped their eyes from the other’s face. It was like no one else existed in the little bubble they’d created around themselves. Maybe Miss Lila was right; the living had no idea how obvious they could be when they were falling for each other.
Silas watched the waitress carry a carafe of coffee past his nose, and sent it a longing look. Coffee was the thing Silas missed most. On the battlefield, a cup could lift morale and steady nerves before a fight. And when he caught a tiny hint of its rich aroma sliding through the veil, he remembered sharing early-morning cups with his friends, the mist rolling over their boots and shrouding the trees. The mist temporarily hid them from the gruesome reality the day would bring: the blood and screams. They were all aware there was a very real chance one of them, maybe more, would not be present the next morning.
