Unexpected Ghosts

Holland

I drove home arguing with my stomach like it could vote on dinner. Freedom, I reminded myself. I could eat whatever I wanted without someone complaining the whole time, without side-eye over ingredients, without the inevitable, “You know I don’t like onions,” as if the onions were a personal attack. I used to plan menus around what Robbie wouldn’t throw a fit about, adjusting my own cravings like they were the problem. Food, money, time—little sacrifices until the math didn’t add up anymore.

I shook my head like I could rattle his ghost loose. Not tonight.

The sky hung low and blue, streetlights blinking on one by one as if someone was testing them, and I pulled into my complex thinking about noodles slick with sauce and fried rice that left your lips salty. If freedom had a smell, tonight it was sesame oil and garlic.

Chinese, my brain decided. Greasy buffet plate, questionable heat lamps, the joy of not doing dishes. My budget made a faint disapproving noise. My sanity shushed it. “Not every night,” I told myself, because sometimes you have to negotiate with your own rules to feel like a person.

The buffet was one of those places with a neon dragon sign that buzzed a little when the winter air hit just right. When I reached for the door handle, a voice behind me made my shoulders jump.

“No way—Holland?”

I turned and there was Todd, hands shoved in his jacket pockets, grin already dialing up. Seeing him outside of work shifted something in me. In the shop he filled a doorway; here he looked like someone’s favorite neighborhood regular.

“Oh—hi, Todd.” I lifted a hand, suddenly aware I’d marched right up to the door like a woman on a mission.

“You grabbing takeout or dining in?” he asked, glancing past me to the glinting buffet bars.

“I was just debating that,” I said, like I hadn’t been having a full-blown conversation with my appetite. “What about you?”

“Missed my usual time today,” he said, amused with himself, “so I was gonna take something back. But if you want company—and don’t mind me joining—I’ve got time. Shop’s dead.”

Independence tried to raise its head and make a speech. I didn’t need saving, didn’t need a chaperone, didn’t need anything but my own two legs. But there was something about Todd that didn’t trip the old alarms. The part of me that had learned to scan for angles couldn’t find one. If any other man had asked, I would’ve heard intention under it. With him, I heard friendliness, steadiness.

“You know what,” I said, surprising myself, “let’s do it.”

“Awesome. I’m starving.” He pulled the door for me and let me go first.

Inside, the air smelled like soy sauce and fryer oil. A waitress looked up, took one look at Todd, then at the small booth she’d been about to point to, and shook her head at herself with a laugh. She rerouted us to a table with regular chairs and more legroom. Todd sent her the kind of grateful smile that makes people want to be useful for you.

“Two checks or one?” she asked after taking our drink order.

“Just one,” Todd said easily. “Hand it to me.”

I leaned in. “Thanks, but I can get my own.”

“I know.” He held my gaze, gentle. “I insist. Consider it a bribe for conversation.”

That made me laugh. The drinks came. Todd lifted his soda. “To new friendships?”

I tapped my glass to his. “To new friendships,” I echoed, and meant it. “Let’s eat.”

We did the buffet walk, those slow measured steps where you pretend to be picky so you don’t look like a raccoon who found a dumpster. I loaded my plate with lo mein, pot stickers, a scandalous amount of broccoli beef, a crab rangoon because I’m not made of stone. Todd’s plate looked like a daring architectural project. Back at the table, he was half done by the time I sat, like a magician who made food disappear for applause.

“So,” he said, after I came back from washing my hands, “where are you from, Holland?”

“Small town,” I said between bites, “about an hour south. You?”

“Thirty minutes south.” He nodded like the cardinal directions sat in his bones. “What brought you up?”

A landmine of a question in ordinary clothes. “Wanted to start over,” I said. Vague, polite. “If you’re making a big move, might as well make it big.”

He didn’t pry. He didn’t get that nosy lean some people do when they sense there’s more. He took a sip and swapped angles like a pro. “Family up here? You mentioned you usually eat alone.”

“No family,” I said. It felt like an answer with a period. I added, softer, “My mom passed when I was young. My dad a few years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, not like a script but like a real thing. “Were you close with him?”

“He was my best friend.” That sentence always came out clean and cut. I stared down at my lo mein and then looked up because I didn’t want to be submerged in old losses in the middle of a buffet. “You? Family?”

He lit up. “Married, ten years. Angie keeps me from being a gremlin. We’ve got three boys.” He shook his head, fond and exasperated. “Handful is the polite word. Chaos is the honest one.”

I could see it in the way his face softened—the missing in his eyes when he talked about going home. “That’s wonderful,” I said, and meant that, too. “You seem like you’d be good at it.”

“Love it.” He took a big drink, wiped his mouth with a napkin that disintegrated like tissue, and grinned. “Makes being yelled at about brake pads a lot less interesting.”

We ate, talked, ate more. He told me a story about a tech who misheard a part number and spent a full hour insisting the customer’s truck didn’t exist. I told him about a woman who insisted the truck returned itself overnight. He taught me two shortcuts for reading internal notes on units that would save me twenty minutes a day. I realized somewhere around the second crab rangoon that it had been a long time since I’d eaten with someone and just—talked. No monitoring, no bracing. The conversation didn’t steer toward me in a way that put me on display. He let me be a person, not a confession.

By the time I pushed my plate away, my fullness was a slow, warm weight. Todd saw it and laughed. “I always forget there’s a difference between hungry and buffet hungry.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked.

“One is a normal human condition,” he said, eyes wide and solemn. “The other is a lifestyle.”

“Noted.”

He paid before I could argue about it, waving me off with a “Don’t worry about it,” that didn’t feel like obligation. Outside, the air had sharpened into a colder edge. He walked me to my car without making a thing of it.

“You good getting home?” he asked, and I knew he didn’t mean directions.

“I am.” I tugged my coat tight. “Thanks, Todd. For the company.”

“Anytime.” He tapped his temple like he had a thought. “If you ever want to talk shop—vent, brainstorm—the door is always open. I’m not a therapist, but I’m excellent at nodding.”

I almost said I was fine. Instead, I said, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

He took me at my word. He didn’t ask for my number. He didn’t push. He just gave me a casual salute and headed for his truck.

At home, I kicked my shoes off and let my coat fall on the back of the couch. The TV murmured itself into being while I scrolled aimlessly. The high from the meal faded into a soft hum, the kind that makes you yawn even if you’re not ready for bed. Eventually I peeled myself off the cushions, showered until the mirror fogged and the steam loosened the stiffness in my shoulders, then pulled on an oversized shirt that had been a favorite since college—threadbare-soft, sleeves swallowing my hands.

In bed, the sheets were cool, and the hum of my old apartment building’s heater rattled like a faraway train. I thought about Todd’s boys. I thought about the way he didn’t push me, about how unusual that felt. I thought about Remy—and that thought did something slippery and bright in my chest that I pretended not to notice. I closed my eyes, phone glowing on the nightstand like a small, patient moon, and let my body decide how far it could go toward sleep without dragging my mind with it.

BANG.

The sound peeled me from whatever shallow sleep I’d found and stood me up in the dark inside my own skin.

BANG. BANG.

Adrenaline is a cruel alarm clock. I fumbled for the lamp switch and got nothing. My salt lamp—usually a soft pink glow even in the dark—was off. Unplugged? The digital clock on the dresser read 3:17 AM in blood-red numbers that suddenly looked too bright and not bright enough.

Someone was at my door.

Another crash, harder, and the sound of wood complaining. I sat up so fast my head spun and yanked open the nightstand drawer. My fingers closed on empty velvet where the pistol should’ve been.

“What the—” My whisper broke apart. I dug again, uselessly. Nothing. The absence felt personal.

Footsteps thundered from the front room, heavy in a way that made the floor pick up the sound and deliver it to my ribs. Something—someone—was in my apartment. Drawers slid. A lamp hit the ground. The shuffle of someone who wasn’t afraid of making noise.

I scanned the room. Closet? Under the bed? Bathroom? Every option felt like it ended in a corner. My mouth went dry. I slid out of bed quietly, bare feet on chilled floor, and tiptoed toward the closet out of instinct, like I could disappear between coats.

The bedroom door swung open so hard it smacked the wall. A shape filled the doorway—wrong, familiar, like a nightmare you’ve had enough times to recognize it by the sound of its breathing.

I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t need to. Recognition is a whole-body thing. My muscles remembered. My stomach remembered. The part of me that had learned when to flinch did, at the exact second his silhouette moved.

My voice tried to scream and found nothing to lift it. Air sawed in my throat. He crossed the room in two steps and his hand clamped around my upper arm, fingers digging down to bone. The pressure sent a bloom of pain that brought the room into too-sharp focus.

“Hello, Holly,” he whispered, and the name ruined me. I could taste years of it in my mouth.

I jerked back so hard I might’ve wrenched something. I kicked—wild, graceless—and punched, and it was like hitting a wall. He didn’t flinch. He leaned in close enough that his breath hit my cheek and smelled like something metallic and sour.

This is it, a small voice in me said calmly, the one that likes to narrate disasters. This is the part where you die.

Another set of footsteps pounded in the hallway. For a second my brain tripped—friends? accomplices?—and then another sound landed, deeper, a thud like a body redirecting force.

Robbie’s grip faltered. A noise broke out of him that wasn’t a word.

I ripped my arm free and launched myself toward the far corner of the room, colliding with the wall and sliding down it, knees to my chest, arms wrapped tight enough to bruise. I put my face in the crook of my elbows because looking was suddenly impossible.

The next impact was seismic. Something heavy hit the floor, the kind of thud that makes pictures tremble on their hooks. A low sound, not human and not not human, rolled through the space like it had weight.

The overhead light snapped on.

I lifted my head, blinking against the brightness. Remy stood in my bedroom doorway, shoulders filling it, chest heaving, eyes the color of a winter sky right before it snows. For a heartbeat I thought I hallucinated him—wanted him there so badly that my brain conjured him like a talisman. But the heat from his skin reached me from across the room, and the smell of him—soap and something wild I couldn’t name—cut through the sour in the air.

He crossed the space and scooped me up without asking, one arm under my knees, the other around my back, like I weighed nothing. A sound broke out of me then, half laugh, half sob, which embarrassed me until he said, at my ear, low and sure, “You’re safe. I’ve got you.”

The words landed in my spine like a command. My body listened before my brain could second-guess it. I tucked my head against his chest and felt the steady drum of his heart like a metronome I could borrow. Warmth radiated through my shirt, seeping into places that had been cold a long time.

I let my eyes close. The brightness behind my eyelids pulsed. Somewhere far away—maybe the hallway, maybe inside me—someone growled. The sound threaded with my breathing until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

Light woke me. Not the brittle kind you get from lamps, the soft relentless kind that sneaks around curtains. The room looked like my room. The salt lamp glowed its sleepy pink like it always had. The clock read 7:42 AM. My mouth tasted like night air and adrenaline’s afterburn.

Remy wasn’t there. The doorway stood empty. The bed had a me-shaped hollow and the comforter had been pulled back like someone had set me down carefully and tucked me in. I reached for the nightstand drawer like a woman trying to catch a lie before it ran and found the pistol exactly where it always sat, cold and real under my fingers.

“What the hell,” I whispered. I got up and padded to the front door, heart punching even though the sun was up and the hallway sounded like normal people doing normal morning things. I checked the frame. No splintered wood. The deadbolt turned smooth. The chain hung unbroken. I opened the door, cracked it, half expecting a dent in the world.

Nothing. Just my ugly welcome mat and the sound of someone on the next floor bustling with laundry.

Maybe it was a dream. That’s what logic said. I could hear it in a reasonable tone: stress manifests in familiar shapes; brains replay old danger. Maybe I’d imagined Remy's voice and him coming to my rescue because I wanted it. Maybe that was worse.

Back in the bedroom, I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my arm. Four faint ovals darkened my skin where fingers would have been. I pressed them and hissed. Not deep, not dramatic. But there.

I chose not to know what to do with that.

The kitchen felt like a set piece from the life I was practicing. I measured coffee like a ritual, poured it over ice, shook cinnamon in with my stubborn hand, as if flavor could anchor me to something factual. My phone lit with benign things: a coupon for tires, a weather alert, a spam call. I showered again because the night stuck to my skin even after dawn. When I got dressed, I chose clothes that looked like order: pressed slacks, cream sweater, small earrings. My mind grabbed at small decisions like they were rungs on a ladder.

What did the dream mean, if it was a dream? Why did my body still hum in place where his arms had been, like something in me had learned his shape without permission?

Remy Smith, I thought, and the name felt like a tide moving in and out. Every time I drew lines around him in my head, he slipped. Owner. Grumpy. Gentle. Dangerous. Weirdly careful. Electric. The energy between us wasn’t static. Static bites and goes away. This did something else. It lit and stayed and made parts of me I’d covered up tilt toward it like plants toward a window.

The worst part wasn’t the not knowing. It was not having anyone to say it out loud to. I didn’t know how to bring this to a person without sounding like the kind of woman my past made me terrified to be again—needy, foolish, spinning stories around a man. And I didn’t want to invite someone into the place where my fear slept just so they could see it and ask for a map.

So I drank my coffee. I put on my shoes. I checked the door twice. I slid the gun into my bag, then took it back out, then put it away again because I didn’t want to be a person who brought a weapon to a rental counter and also because I didn’t want to be a person who didn’t. I settled for sliding the pepper spray into my coat pocket like a compromise with no one but myself.

On my way out, I paused at the bedroom doorway. The light pooled warm across the floor where Remy had stood in my maybe-dream, exactly where my carpet now looked like carpet and nothing else. I stood there a second longer than made sense, hand on the doorframe, the quiet ringing in my ears like the end of a song.

I locked up and headed to work.

I told myself I’d focus on the day: on contracts and keys and the way the morning light hit the hood of the trucks out front. I told myself I’d be practical, familiar, useful. I told myself I would not look for him.

But the truth was simple and annoying and persistent.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to Remy Smith than met the eye—and that whatever it was had already reached for me in the dark.