Page 65 of Static/Cling

“You trust me, right?”

“Do we have a choice?”

“You could have bailed back there. I assume that’s what you wanted privacy to talk about.”

Neither of them responded.

“But you’re still here, and I have to believe it’s not just because you want to fuck your office mate. I know you barely know us, but I swear to you, we’re the good guys.”

“I know,” Leif said at last, as they found the left branch and took it.

And that was good enough for Bjorn. If Leif said he knew, he knew. And Bjorn had faith in his friend. His lover. He puffed up his chest and suddenly the tight walls and dark smells didn’t matter so much. He reached forwards and caught Leif’s hand in his.

A tiny spark zinged between them, briefly lighting the passageway in a ghostly blue haze before dropping it back into mostly dark.

Leif gasped lightly and calm settled in Bjorn’s gut. As long as they were together, this was fine.

The left branch was only a few dozen yards longer than the entrance tunnel, and ended, as Sal had told them it would, in a door at the bottom of a dimly lit stairwell.

“So I should warn you,” Sal said as Leif eased the door open, “people say this stairwell is haunted. That’s why no one uses it.”

“Haunted?” Bjorn asked. “Isn’t that a little?—”

Leif gasped and jolted back into him, face pale and entire body shaking.

“Babe?”

“The more empathic a person is,” Sal whispered, “the more this stairwell tends to affect them.”

Leif pressed his back tight against Bjorn’s chest, and shook.

Bjorn wrapped an arm over his shoulder and held him there. “Sal. What the fuck?”

“They’ve found people dead at the bottom of the stairs,” Sal went on, as though reading from a tour guide script.

“People? As in more than one?”

Sal made a distressed sound.

“Dead how?”

“Broken. Like they fell down the stairs. Violently.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Bjorn growled at them. “How many ghosts are we talking about here?”

“Not sure. A few.”

“And you couldn’t have told us this before now?” Bjorn didn’t necessarily believe in ghosts as in the lost spirits of dead people, but he did know, empirically, that places full of death had an adverse affect on Leif. It had been hell finding an affordable apartment that didn’t give his lover the heebie-jeebies.

“Sorry. I forgot.”

“You forgot.”

“Well. Not that it’s haunted. Just that it affects some people more than others.”

“Because of how it affected you,” Bjorn guessed, putting some of the puzzle pieces together.

“I’ve never?—”

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