Page 2 of Spellbound By the Firefighter

“You’re the one they haven’t put a name to,” I say, because talking is easier than whatever that was.

“Name’s Tanner. Sounds like you’re paying attention.”

“I notice who comes through that door after dark. Comes with running the town’s scary stories.”

“And you noticed me.”

“Hard not to. You came in wearing a fire.” I should be killing the lights. Ellie trusts me to lock up on my own, and there are chairs to stack. I don’t move. “Everybody else came in tonight for a pretend scare. You walked in off a real one.”

“Real ones don’t have a scary part.” He drags a fingertip down the row of spines and lets his hand drop. “They skip to the ending. I’ve had mine. The part before it’s better.”

There’s a real ending under that line. Something happened to him, and it’s still in his voice. I want to know what. Wanting to know is the door I keep shut, because a real person’s hurt isn’t a story I can close when I’m done with it.

I shove the question aside and change the subject.

“Long day on the mountain,” I say instead.

“Long season.” He rolls a shoulder, and I watch the exhaustion move under the calm, then get put away.

“We came down for the night. Guys went for the patio. I saw the lights on in here.”

“And a bookstore beat a warm bar with actual chairs.”

“There was a story going.” He shrugs. “Wanted to hear how it ended.”

“It ended with the house eating everybody.”

“Course it did.” A corner of his mouth lifts. “Damn shame.”

The profanity should bother me, but it doesn’t. He’s the only one all night who hasn’t reacted to my performance. Hasn’t oohed on cue or grabbed his friend’s arm at the knock. He just stood in the doorway and listened to a made-up horror hours after crawling around inside a real one, and something about that unsteadies my knees before I catch it.

I stack a chair to have somewhere to put my hands. He picks up the two nearest him and stacks them without asking, setting them square against mine.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know.”

He does the rest anyway, moving through the shop at his own pace, and I trail him, turning off lamps. The space gets smaller, lamp by lamp, until it’s the counter and the register and the one string of orange bulbs still burning over the horror shelf. He stops there. I stop a step behind him.

“This one,” he says, tapping a black spine. “Is this the kind where nothing’s actually wrong and she’s imagining it, or the kind where something’s actually wrong?”

“Something’s actually wrong.”

“Good.” He pulls it. Reads the back in the orange light. “The other kind’s a cheat.”

He should go. The crowd’s gone, the story’s done, and a man who smells of a fire still burning somewhere up the mountain has no reason to stand in a bookstore at eleven on Halloween. But he doesn’t leave. And the worst part is that I don’t want him to.

That’s the kind of fear I don’t do. The one with no last page.

I reach past him and switch off the string lights over the horror shelf. In the sudden dark, he’s still there, and he doesn’t move. He’s warm. Real. Close enough that I can hear him breathe.

For once in my life, I can’t close the book.

2

TANNER

She kills the last string of lights and doesn’t step back.