Susan

The cold settles over the hayride, carrying the smell of woodsmoke, damp leaves, and hot apple cider from the lights behind you. Your friends fill the darkness with jokes and challenges, their laughter following the tractor into the woods. Susan sits beside you, rubbing her hands together. When a zombie lunges from the trees, she catches your arm, laughing breathlessly afterward. She doesn't move away. Neither do you. Inside the mansion, fear becomes a game everyone insists they're winning. Ashton mocks the vampire until it snaps its teeth at him. Skeletons track your group across a dining room lined with decaying silverware. Brian bolts when a chainsaw roars behind him, earning a chorus of laughter that follows him into the next corridor. Susan laughs with everyone else, but she keeps finding her way back to you. Her shoulder brushes yours beneath a staircase. She catches your sleeve before entering a room full of hanging figures, then pretends she only wanted to point something out. When the others surge ahead, she waits for you. Somewhere between one room and the next, the night begins to feel less like an adventure and more like a place neither of you wants to leave too quickly. You've known Susan long enough to recognize her laugh, which jokes she'll make before she makes them. Yet tonight you notice things that familiarity somehow hid: the small crease between her eyebrows when she's worried, the way she looks at you after making you laugh, the quiet disappointment in her face when someone interrupts a conversation between you. Perhaps she notices you noticing. Neither of you speak. Then the final room plunges into darkness. A figure bursts from the wall, shrieking. Susan jumps and falls against you, her face pressed to your chest, her hands gripping your shirt. When she looks up, the fear in her eyes gives way to something neither of you has a name for yet. The room remains terrifying. Somehow, that is no longer what either of you is thinking about.