"Yah, Kim Hyung-jae, what did I tell you about getting too far from the castle? Hm? You wanted a hot chocolate? There's a drinks station in the staff room! Who cares if it's instant? You think the park drinks aren't? Look, just send Fern if you're so desperate. Don't walk that way any longer. I'm on a boat, I can't take two lots of nausea. No I don't need you to come get me. As if I'd let you embarrass me like that. Good! That's just what I want! Go freeze them off, what do you care? You're not using them are you–?"
Kapook jerked her head back from her phone and shook it at the far-off Disney shore. Mint finished off a bottle of cold tea and then reached over to straighten the pirate hat on Kapook's head. "He went wandering, then?"
"He almost definitely did it on purpose. I told him we would be on the mini Black Pearl in this timeslot." Kapook's fingers hammered at the screen. Mint smiled with closed lips so that little dimples appeared in her cheeks. Tay and I hung out over the stern of the ship, pretending like the wispy ripples in the water had sent us both into deaf daydreams.
"Okay so technically," Mint said across the top of Kapook's muttering, "technically, Kap has a boyfriend."
My hand slipped on the safety railing and Tay just about choked me pulling me back by my collar.
"She's already got a boyfriend?" I spluttered, half my sweater bunched under my chin. Mint scratched at her nose and then I saw Tay was doing it too. "You knew?!"
He had the decency to keep the corners of his smile flat, baring his teeth and shaping his lips like two straight Chinese sausages. "Well, Namtan gave me a bit of a heads-up, yeah."
I closed my eyes and brought my voice to a regulated level. "A heads-up."
"She thought we'd get along really well," Kapook explained from somewhere outside the pulsing dark of my eyelids, "since we both have – no, apparently have – what she calls an 'attachment problem' with our tethers."
"She was genuinely hoping they might fall in love!" Mint popped in. "That they would help each other, um, let go, so to speak."
I opened my eyes to see Tay with his cheek sucked in between his teeth. He caught my look and gave a big sigh, choosing to shrug only. He evidently felt like he'd made himself clear on the hopelessness of that point earlier. I reached over and pinched his face until his cheek ballooned into my hand.
"That's the only reason you agreed to come along, huh?"
He was doing a surprisingly good job of holding off any kind of expression, even with half his face being pulled away from his gums. "I kept my word, after losing the lighthouse game."
"And making me follow you around all day thinking you were on a date?"
Tay stacked his arms, arching an eyebrow. I still had a grip on his cheek so he didn't look cool in the slightest. "I didn't make you do that," he said. "I told you we should all just stick together and have fun as a group."
"To be fair, we were on a date," Kapook added, "and in fact I like Tay a lot, and I think we'd get along great as a couple. If anyone could break my attraction to my idiot Hyung-jae, it'd probably be Tay. He's totally my type. But, you know... Ten minutes in and we knew it wasn't going to be possible."
The captain of the Black Pearl, clad in ragged European clothes and a black-feathered hat, shouted something unintelligible and suddenly the ship gave an enormous, very much motorised lurch to spin us around. The four of us ended up clinging to canons and planks of wood and, in my case, the perch of a stuffed parrot.
YOU ARE READING
The Ordinary Haunting II
Fanfiction~Sequel to The Ordinary Haunting~ Tay Tawan was not expecting to get tied to New Thitipoom when he died. He used to be a happy-go-lucky kind of guy; the kind with no real troubles or regrets that he considered important enough to stop him from his e...
