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He didn’t have anything to follow it with. Nate seemed to know that, because he got up and rinsed his mug and let the morning go back to being ordinary. Leo stayed by the window a while longer, looking at the road.

Chapter

Twenty-Two

By evening, Nate’s arms ached and his head wouldn’t stop spinning.

He’d put in a full day on the dining room wall. Good, dumb, heavy work. Usually that helped him sort his thoughts. Not today. He’d hauled plaster and thought about the burial index. He’d cut lath and thought about I’d know his voice through a wall. He’d swept up and thought about how Leo had said it.

I loved him.

It wasn’t the words. It was the way they’d been delivered. Like Leo had something riding on that line, like he expected to be challenged. As if his body still expected something to happen when a boy said that out loud about another boy.

Nate had never had to struggle like that. There’d been no announcement, no speech, no held breath at the dinner table. He’d grown up with a mother who did not keep track of her lovers, in a community that firmly believed sexuality should be both free and fluid—and he’d been out in the world a while before he understood how rare that was.

Not that he’d done much with the freedom he’d been given.

His troubles hadn’t come from being gay. They’d come from being him. Dating was difficult when he flinched at empty hallways and couldn’t say why, when he couldn’t explain to his boyfriend that he’d rather not stay over because of the dead man in his stairwell.

It had been years since his last attempt at a relationship, and it had only lasted a few months. Declan. A kind, normal guy who’d spent half a year politely knocking on doors Nate kept locked, and then stopped knocking.

Nate had let him go, concluding that romance just wasn’t worth the struggle. He scoffed at himself.

All his struggles seemed tiny compared to what Leo must have faced.

And yet Leo had managed to love fiercely, in the dark, behind drawn curtains. He possessed a kind of strength that Nate had never had.

One that he probably did not even give himself credit for.

Nate sat with his back against the wall of the sitting room and listened for sounds of ghostly activity. He wasn’t sure where Leo had gone, but at least he wasn’t up by the turret and wailing anymore.

For a day or two, Nate had genuinely worried about the ghost. If he hadn’t come back down when he had, he might even have called his mother.

Or used the tea.

His thoughts drifted to the tin he’d stowed in the kitchen.

No, he did not want to think about the tea. He needed to do something else, think of anything else.

He opened the laptop. Checking on his videos’ performance would take his mind off things. The crown molding video was doing fine. Better than fine, actually, which was good because Nate’s savings were drying up.

His top comments did not exactly make him happy, though.

@danielleGM: my aunt lives in alder hollow!! she says everyone there knows this house lol. apparently it’s THE haunted house. like actually haunted

@tbrayden: bro my grandpa grew up near there and he will NOT talk about it. something really scares him about the place

More replies stacked under that. Somebody asking haunted how.

Nate groaned audibly when he spotted one comment talking about the corpse that was definitely walled up in the cellar.

And now people were asking for his input on that.

@nateflips you gonna address this or...

Nate’s thumb found the little menu. He could delete the comment.

He could just delete the whole thread.