Chapter Text
It starts out super simple, actually. Which is why it’s also super funny that, given a few years and wedding vows and a decrepit upstate mansion with a treacherous staircase to Spookytown, it all becomes kinda-sorta complicated.
The first time Jay sees her, he gets caught on the fact— okay, the casual observation— that she’s all alone. Her hair is aflame from the rust-colored lights above the bar, and the sugar-bomb daiquiri she’s sipping on is being stirred in a lonesome, lazy twirl, and her eyes are fixed on a memory or maybe a passing thought. In other words, her eyes are not fixed on him, but Jay would very much like to change that.
Therefore it’s only natural that he walks up to her, as suave as his lanky stature and overall personality allow him to be, and goes, “Is this seat taken?”
Okay, fine, it doesn’t come out quite as smoothly as that. The question is more of a plea, a mumble-cough hybrid that limps through the words “So, uh, please tell me no one’s sitting here.”
Well, she sure is looking at him now. “Okay,” she says. “No one is sitting there.”
Hell yes, Jay thinks. This is a win. For five seconds, he is the mother-freaking king of this corner of Tribeca.
Sliding onto the stool, he flashes a grin that would totally be a charming wink if teeth had eyes. Or something. “You know, it’s funny running into you here,” he says. “I mean, what are the odds, right?”
She blinks at him for a few seconds, and his heart stutters, and oh no, he’s messed it up. He hasn’t even spoken enough words to meet the Twitter character limit, and Jay has lost her. Only then something weird happens.
She steals the tiniest sip of her drink. She carefully rests the palm tree-shaped swizzle stick on a cocktail napkin that has half a ring of condensation pressed into it. Then she meets his eyes again and plays along. “Right?” she echoes. “So funny. I can’t— I can’t even believe it, honestly.”
He laughs, and she joins in his laughter, and Jay’s blood has this odd little glitch where it feels like it’s being flambéd in a frying pan. He almost stoops to the level of his buddy Mike and asks her “Is it hot in here, or is it just you?” But considering that the last time Jay took advice from that guy, he ended the night nauseous in the backseat of an Uber with his shirt and pants shoved on backwards, Jay chooses to refrain from making such a statement. It’s 2018, men. Do better.
And besides, Mike is notorious for growing a nasty god complex whenever he’s the Dungeon Master, so. Forget Mike.
Jay resists the urge to offer her his hand like a dork. “I’m Jay,” he says. “And sorry, I hope I’m not actually bothering you. Because if I am, you can, uh”— here, he adopts a regrettably atrocious British accent— “gimme the ol’ boot, dear guvnah.”
He doesn’t have the time to bury his head in his hands, because somehow she’s laughing. Again. Jay has made this beautiful woman laugh twice before even getting her name. Is this Narnia?
“Oh, that’s a great accent,” she replies. She is a liar. “Do you... are you an actor?”
Jay scrubs his hand over his face, head swaying in shame. “No. I absolutely am not. Never have been. And I’m not sure what sort of ungodly pit that emerged from, but I sincerely apologize to you for having ears. Ugh.”
She smiles anyway. Another sip, another covert glance sent his way, and then he finally gets to learn his new favorite name. “I’m Samantha,” she says. “Sam.”
He grins back. “Hi, Sam.”
“Nice to meet you.” Then she mutters something else that he doesn’t quite catch under a heavy layer of piped-in alt rock.
Jay tries not to lean too close to puncture her personal space bubble. “What’s that?”
“Sorry. I am... a bit of a mess right now, because I recently lost my boyfriend since college, and it’s like, without him, New York feels strange again, as if I haven’t been living here for years. But he’s haunting me everywhere I go, because all my favorite spots were also his favorite spots, and I can’t stand going everywhere and seeing his ghost—”
“Hold up. I’m sorry— is he dead?”
Sam frowns. “What? No. I— oh.” A wince and a nod brings her back to the same page. “That was... a weird choice of words on my part. Sorry, I’m a writer. No, he’s, um, he’s still very much alive. And I am reminded of it every day because I still haven’t unfriended him on Facebook.”
Jay leans an elbow on the bar and tries on a coat of confidence. It doesn’t fit him that well. “You should block him.”
Sam peers back. “Should I?” She sucks on her teeth. “I mean, I’d kind of feel bad, because what if he—”
“Nah. I apologize for interrupting, and obviously I say this with absolutely zero background knowledge of what went down between you two, but you owe him no apologies and none of that I-feel-bad stuff. It’s his loss. You lost him, but he lost you, like, way more. If you catch my drift.”
“Mm. I think I’m catching what you’re... drifting.” She grits her teeth, pulls out her phone. “Don’t know why I said those words.” She taps on her screen for a moment, then looks back at him. “Okay. Done. I’m... taking your advice. Taking advice from a man I just met. This is great.”
Jay just looks at her. He really likes looking at her. Her eyes put every other blue thing to shame. What good is the sky, anyway? “I kind of get the vibe you’re not originally from here.”
“Which part of me screamed ‘Ohio,’ the general aura of naïveté or the very Applebee’s choice of drink?”
“There are better ways to go here than a strawberry daiquiri. But hey, I’m not judging.”
“I sort of feel like you are.” She leans in closer. He matches her head tilt.
“My opinion is so irrelevant right now,” he says, “it might as well be in New Jersey with my family.” This earns him another snort. Jay has never seen anything so remarkable as the tiny scrunch of Sam’s nose.
“Okay, Jay. If you’re such an expert on the drinks here, what can you recommend?”
He lightly taps his knuckles on the bartop. “You have no idea how badly I want to buy you a drink right now.”
“I might have a small idea,” she teases.
He clumsily steers them into a diversion. “Um, you said you’re a writer. What sort of ideas are you writing about?”
Sam lifts her shoulders. “Well, I graduated a couple of years ago with a degree in journalism that has been quite lucrative, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
Jay points a cautious finger at her. “Please don’t say you’re at BuzzFeed?”
“BuzzFeed? God, no. Oh, right, you said not to say it. Oops.” She digs around in her purse, then presses something lightweight into his hand. “But look, at least I made myself these sad little business cards that I carry with me everywhere. Sometimes I swear I was born in the wrong time.”
“Hey, you never know who might be lurking around the ol’ bar and grille, scouting out new talent. We did actually have one of the editors from the Times as a regular here a few months back.” Jay peeks down at her card. This ultra-romantic Garfield-orange bar lighting doesn’t do him many favors as far as actually reading it, but his eyes skim for the most important scraps: Samantha Ahearne. A phone number.
Sam’s gaze settles gently over him as his eyes flit back upward. Jay hasn’t touched a sip of alcohol, and yet a woozy, euphoric filter unfurls across his vision. These same clouds drift through his head, demanding that the entire rest of the world stands frozen around the two of them while they begin to fall.
“You haven’t mentioned yet,” she says, “what it is you do.”
“Well.” He sighs, clicks his tongue. “There’s a reason I’m the de facto expert on drinks at this place. It’s because I—”
A bellow comes from the kitchen. “Arondekar! Your break was up five minutes ago.”
“— yeah, I work here.” With a measured grimace, Jay hops down from the stool, though his eyes never leave her. “Look, Sam, I—”
“C’mon, man! Dinner rush!”
“Be right there!” Jay yells back. He grabs onto her gaze and prays she won’t let go just yet. “If you would do me the honor of having your phone number, I’ll—”
“I believe you already have it.” Sam lifts her eyebrows, grins all sly. “See, business cards still have their merits.”
“Oh my god, I could kiss you right now,” Jay says. “Did I say that out loud?”
Sam laughs again, and then she’s shooing him away. “Go, go. I don’t wanna get you in trouble!”
Before disappearing into the back of the house, Jay comes to an urgent stop at the far end of the bar, where his coworker boredly taps through the POS system to carve a dent in some rich dude’s Amex card. “Hey, Alison. Can you pretty please do me a solid and put anything that woman orders on my tab?” He tips his head subtly in Sam’s direction. “I don’t care how much it is. And I don’t care if I’m an idiot.”
The bartender offers him a dubious glance. “You two know each other?”
Jay only grins in reply before rushing onward.
In the heat of the kitchen, where pots and pans clang between his ears and his heart repeatedly stabs itself on his ribs, Jay grips his phone in sweaty hands and types out a message. Mike, his fellow line cook, tosses Jay’s apron at him. “Didn’t even eat your plate of nachos, bro. What’s up with you?”
“Shut up. I’m having a life-changing moment,” Jay answers, laser-focused on the screen.
He doesn’t have to wait long to see Sam again. When his shift ends two hours later, she’s there waiting for him, all wringing hands and windswept hair against the damp brick wall. He takes her on a tour of much better, non ex-boyfriend-affiliated places, though when she asks him to skip his favorite Mexican restaurant, he doesn’t argue.
Neither one knows this yet, but two years to the day, on their Glad-I-met-you-versary, Jay will fumble through a proposal in the very same spot where they met. (Okay, fine, maybe like two seats down. The original ones are occupied.) He will ask her to marry him all out of order, sniffling before he even gets the words out, and then forgetting to show her the ring before he asks the question, but they’re both crying when she whispers yes, and he’s such a good fiancé that he waits until they’re back home to properly get down on one knee because he knows she’d be embarrassed if he did that part in public, even though he adores the way a blush spreads like splotchy fireworks through her cheeks.
They will kiss each other on courthouse steps in October, and the informal gathering afterward will consist of more friends than family, which is par for their course. It will very well be a contender for the best day ever in all of recorded human history. On that day, Sam will take her old business card from where Jay has kept it stashed in his wallet all this time. She will cross out her surname and scribble Arondekar in its place, and then replace it for him to find days later. And yes, he will cry about that too. They both will. Then he’ll kiss her on the couch and the wall and the bed and she’ll take all of his breaths away like they’re a hot commodity.
One more year, three hundred and eighty-nine more kisses (give or take), sixty-four more date nights, three argyle sweater Halloweens and holiday cards, and his wife will inherit some creepy old mansion. Okay, cool, new house. Okay, cool, new business venture. Okay, cool, Sam can talk to ghosts now.
Life as they know it will never be the same again. But Jay signed up for this for life when he sobbed a passionate vow of devotion while sliding a ring onto Sam’s finger, so hey, who is he to get in the way of what life offers them? There is just one tiny footnote that he hadn’t noticed: the condition of near-death and what that entails.
What a bizarre tumble of dominoes that has led them here.
Good thing he’s a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. Surely that won’t be tested too much. Right?
The expression currently on Sam’s face is not unlike the one she wore when Jay asked her “Do you believe in ghosts?” on their second date.
He remembers it well— he made a kick-ass shrimp-free paella, if he does say so himself, though the bouquet of roses and lilies he bought caused Sam to sneeze just about every other minute the entire night, even after he banished said flowers to the pint-sized balcony of his apartment. Then they finished off the night with risqué cuddling and the Ghostbusters remake and a bottle of mediocre red blend, which led to the ghost-believing question. The movie led to it, not the wine. Well, maybe the wine led a little.
But damn, that paella! Jay would remember the taste of it better, he thinks, if he hadn’t spent a decent portion of the night with Sam’s mouth all over his. Not that he’s complaining or anything.
“Hold on, Jay, some ghosts just came in.”
“Who is it?” he asks. He watches his wife’s face carefully as she listens to their invisible freeloaders-turned-friends. She wears a look of mild concern, an unspoken “Are you good?” It is one and the same as her expression all those years ago when she answered his ghost-believing question with “No, I don’t think so.”
Sam holds up a finger, her eyes pinned pointedly on stale barn air. It’s almost like the first time Jay saw her, lost in her own world that he couldn’t experience with her. Never have human senses felt so useless!
Jay waits and waits, admiring the slight twitches of Sam’s eyebrows, the wrinkle above her nose, the way her eyes push at their seams. Seems like tough work, listening outside their plane of existence. Jay doubts he could handle it. He can understand the nearby Walmart being the devil’s playground, but missing out on the chill vibes in their local Starbucks hellscape is brutal.
Just when he’s accepted that this spirited conversation will take a while, and he returns to cleaning up the mess around them— where the hell is Mark, by the way?— Sam clears her throat and returns her attention to him.
Before she can speak, Jay says, “Let me guess. Is it Pete?” A few finger guns go flying. “Pete, my pal?”
“Nope,” Sam says lightly. “Close, though. Well, not really. They’re all pretty different. But I appreciate you trying.” There’s a pause, and her frown returns. She nods. “Right. Uh-huh.” Another pause, and Jay’s anxiety grows its own anxiety. This is like the world’s longest phone call, even worse than when his middle school principal would call up his mom and all Jay could hear of their conversation were her terse “Mm-hmms.”
“Babe, please don’t tell me another portal to hell has opened up in here or something. We need good energy in this barn if we want this place to work out. What we don’t need is a dude walking around making people horny with his bad touch. And while we’re on the subject, we really should get his corpse removed from the safe. I’m sort of worried he’s gonna figure out a way to reanimate himself and make us horny until we die, and I don’t know about you, but that is not in my top five ways to die. Might be in my top ten, though.”
Sam shushes someone, but Jay can tell it isn’t intended for him. Probably.
Two years living here, and he’s still learning. Half the time Jay wonders if he should have Sam knock him on the head with a two-by-four, and die a little, just so he can get the full experience. Then he remembers his wife lying so still on that hospital bed, and he thinks twice about it. She was so still, though also not— because she was fighting to come back. He sat there and held her hand for hours. Her fingers were so cold. All the blankets in the building weren’t enough.
Finally, Sam turns to him. “Everything’s fine. The ghosts are just saying we should be careful in here, because with how long everything has sat untouched, there’s a chance we could stir up another spirit.”
Jay sighs. “Right. And I take it that this spirit wouldn’t be too pleased we’re disturbing their resting place. Kind of like ‘80s prom girl.”
“Yeah. That reminds me, Stephanie’s still not doing too well after her new boyfriend got sucked off.” It has taken some time, but now Jay and Sam can both use that phrase almost without having to stifle a snort. “She keeps waking in the night wailing like a baby. I feel like a new parent.” Sam’s shoulders droop. “I even put an Alexa up there in the attic and asked Alberta to make it play, like, soothing rain noises, or Madonna, whatever makes Stephanie feel better, but, well, you know how that’s backfired.”
“Never thought I’d retrospectively regret playing the Dirty Dancing soundtrack at our wedding reception, but after hearing it on repeat at three A.M., here we are.”
“Even Alberta’s tired of it. And she can belt out ‘Hungry Eyes’ like nobody’s business.”
Jay crosses his arms, grins fondly at her. “I really do wish I could hear that.”
Sam grins back. “She says thanks, but that it pales in comparison to your rendition of SexyBack in the shower.”
Jay’s smile falls.
“— don’t worry, she’s kidding.”
“Ha. Right,” he says. “Good one, Alberta! So... so creative, where’d she get that idea from?”
It has been a process getting to know the ghosts secondhand. Jay used to worry they were distancing him from Sam, but now he realizes he’s gotten to know her better than ever before— reading her face, playing along with the ghosts’ whims, guessing what will happen next. It’s all an adventure.
Some ghosts are easier to get along with than others. No Pants took some getting used to, considering the whole hitting-on-Jay’s-wife-nonstop thing. Now, he and Trevor have a heck of a time playing Hangman and other not-safe-for-work party games with nothing but some breath fog and a mirror. It mostly helps that Trevor is now apparently hooking up with Sam’s great-great-great-great-great-aunt, which is a whole other can of worms.
With a new air of cautiousness, Jay and Sam pick their way through the not-so-finely-aged clutter, clearing out a space that he tries to reimagine as a kitchen or dining area. It’s tough to believe this is happening. Jay, who cut his teeth in the culinary world by working at a Subway in a strip mall, is now opening a restaurant with his super-supportive, couldn’t-have-done-this-without-her wife! Wild.
Suddenly there’s a yelp from Sam. “Ah! Did you see that?”
“See what?” Jay peers around, but all he sees is dust glittering in the air and old stuff. “What am I missing?”
“Are you serious? There was just— oh.” Sam brushes hair out of her face, puts her hands on her hips. “Um, Jay?”
“Yeah, babe?”
“I think we might have a ghost cat.”