In what universe does a guy hear the words 'I like you' from his crush, and in the exact same week finds out that his crush's most important ex-lover is one of his own best friends from university?
Right, my universe. The universe with ghosts and boba tea and blobfish in it.
I wheeled myself lethargically down between the desks at work until my chair jostled me in and out of the little dip in the floor between the office and the tea room. A stuttered laugh made me raise my head, enough to see Pan tittering at me, all baby blue pantsuit and shiny hair, soft hands carefully cleaning dust off the half-dead plants in the corner.
"Wait right here," she ordered, grinning widely. "I want to get in on this chair action too. It looks like the vogue thing to do around here."
She knocked her knees against the spine of my chair as she hurried out, and I got a brief view of the office between spins. I almost expected it to change seasons out there like in Pride and Prejudice. Or I think one of the Twilights did it too – Pan won a bet once and made me, Oab and Lee marathon all of them in one night. It wasn't as bad a time as society had taught us it would be. They weren't great movies, but the next morning we did go hit baseballs as hard as we could in the park, and Oab had been a super fan of Robert Pattinson ever since.
Pan came rolling up to the door just as I realised I'd spent the entire time – that I should have been preparing my inquisition – on reminiscing about Twilight.
"As kooky as you can be, I'm going to bet this was not originally your idea," Pan snorted, pushing into me like we were in bumper cars. I planted my toes so that I wouldn't crash into the sink too clownishly.
"You would be right," I replied. I stood up to flick the button on the kettle and Pan ran her nails along the stippled arms of her chair as she waited for me to take my seat again. I decided to dig around in the cupboards for whatever fifteen-year-old tea might be rotting in the back.
"Tay, will you play an ice-breaker game with me?"
My finger sunk into something that was all the wrong kind of soft. "Because there's probably a lot we don't know about each other now, after eight years?" My teeth found a familiar divot in the skin inside my mouth. They closed around it like a sharp hug.
The way Pan mumbled made it sound like her teeth had resorted to something similar. "Got it in one."
I poured boiling water over an English Breakfast tea bag that had been stamped [Best Before 2003] and stepped back into my chair. Pan's eyes dropped to the segmented yellow linoleum between us, counting each square, and then she scuttled herself farther away. I raised my eyebrows at her and sniffed my putrid tea.
"I like 'What if' questions. Let's ask 'What if' questions," she said, ignoring my expression. "You go first."
"Okay..." I punctuated her unexplained point by scooting right back into the opposite corner of the tea room. The room wasn't big, but I thought the movement made it feel so, to both of us. "What if..." –I eyed the roof for something easy to start with– "What if you hadn't gone to New York?"
I hadn't been able to spot anything easy.
Pan didn't even blink. Her glittering cheekbones rose, but slowly, stretching over a shallow creasing around her mouth. "What if I'd told you I liked you?"
She always did meet a challenge.
I thumbed the lip of my tea cup. Its heat stung my skin. "What if Oab hadn't liked you?"
Pan crossed her legs. "What if Oab hadn't liked me?"
"What if it wouldn't have made a difference?"
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...
