CHAPTER 24
October 31. Halloween. Ten years ago.
When the guys said showing off with an expensive car was the least John King could afford, they hadn’t been lying.
His house wasn’t just big — it looked like an estate. Three stories in the colonial style: pristine white columns at the entrance, manicured lawns, statues that looked especially unsettling now in the glow of the lanterns. The entire property was drowning in decorations. Thousands of lights and strings of garland, fake cobwebs stretched over the bushes, plastic skeletons, pumpkins lined up like an army along the path. A huge inflatable flying dragon hung from the roof, its eyes flashing red.
As usual, his parents had gone away “on business,” leaving the house entirely at his disposal. As if John could ever pass up the chance to turn his own home into a stage for showing off in front of everyone.
Inside, everything thundered.
The music pounded so hard the walls vibrated, the floor was sticky with spilled alcohol, and the air was heavy with the mingled smell of cheap beer, sugary cocktails, and expensive perfume. The crowd roared and buzzed and laughed as though this weren’t a party, but the last day on Earth. There were so many people it felt as though the house might give way at any moment.
Costumes flashed everywhere: masks, hats, glitter, feathers. Witches in torn stockings, vampires with painted drops of blood at the corners of their mouths, zombies with fake scars. Someone had shown up in an ordinary T-shirt that read
THIS IS MY COSTUME, while someone else had spent a month’s salary on an outfit that sparkled with every movement.
Rick felt as though all that chaos was pressing in on him and pulling him deeper at the same time.
As though he had accidentally wandered into some other world, where no one thought about consequences, the music was too loud, people laughed louder than usual, and strangers’ hands and eyes lingered longer than they should.
He stood at the very edge of the room, lazily turning a blue plastic cup of punch between his fingers. The mask with the crooked grin kept slipping over his eyes, and he was seriously considering taking the damn thing off.
The party was stifling even for Halloween. Faces flashed through the crowd, someone was already making out on the stairs, lights flickered beneath the ceiling, and everywhere was that particular drunken roar people made when they were trying far too hard to look as though they were having fun.
Rick took another sip.
His fourth cup of the night—and still no use.
“I can see you’re enjoying yourself.”
The calm voice came from right beside him, and Rick smiled before he even had time to turn his head.
Aaron stood there in his usual clothes — dark jeans, a black hoodie, none of the Halloween spectacle around them. His hair was gathered, as always, into a low, careless bun, with a few dark strands falling softly along his cheekbones.
And somehow, that looked more appropriate here than anything else.
Rick let his gaze travel over him and only then took another sip of punch.
“So you did come?” he asked as though it hardly mattered. “I thought you had practice.”
Aaron’s lips twitched almost imperceptibly.
“Sometimes you can take a day off.”
“Wow,” Rick murmured. “For a party?”
“Not exactly,” came the calm reply.
Rick tilted his head slightly.
“So that’s what we’re calling it now.”
Aaron said nothing, only looked at him a little more closely, and that was the moment Rick suddenly realized the fourth cup might actually have been one too many.
Or maybe the alcohol had nothing to do with it.
Someone squeezed past them toward the punch table, forcing Aaron to step forward and move closer.
“Do you have any other ideas?” he asked more quietly.
Rick ran his tongue briefly over his lips, trying not to look as though the question had somehow knocked every thought out of his head.
“A couple.”
Aaron gave a quiet huff and took a drink from his red cup.
“Can’t spend all my time at the gym,” he said lazily.
“I was starting to think you lived there.”
“Only on weekdays.”
The guy with the punch quickly disappeared back into the crowd, but for some reason Aaron didn’t step away again.
Rick noticed and lowered his eyes to his cup, hiding an involuntary smile.
His throat suddenly went dry, and he took another drink.
He couldn’t understand why even the most ordinary conversation felt like something else entirely when Aaron was near.
“I can see you’re having a wonderful time,” Aaron observed, glancing around at the nearly empty space surrounding him.
“I just had the wrong company.”
“Better now?”
Rick looked at him over the rim of his cup.
“Maybe.”
The corner of Aaron’s mouth lifted almost imperceptibly.
Rick gave a quiet laugh and turned toward the crowd, where someone was already shouting the lyrics of a song directly into a plastic skeleton by the wall.
“I don’t really understand how everyone has the energy to keep pretending they’re having fun all night.”
“Pretending is usually what people do best,” Aaron said calmly.
Rick looked at him again.
“So you never pretend?”
For a second, silence settled between them. Aaron held his gaze a little longer than usual.
“I try not to.”
Rick gave a quiet snort and suddenly realized that, for the first time all evening, he genuinely wanted to smile.
And somehow even being silent beside him felt easy — as though, in the middle of all that noise, they had accidentally found a quiet space of their own.
“Why aren’t you wearing a costume?” he asked, glancing over the black hoodie.
“If I want to feel ridiculous, I won’t need a costume for that.”
Rick’s smile turned warmer.
“All of this really does look a little ridiculous.”
“Mhm.”
Parker allowed himself to study him surreptitiously. The faint flush on his cheekbones gave away the fact that the alcohol had relaxed him a little after all. Rick caught himself unexpectedly liking the sight of him that way.
A little less composed.
A little more open.
“Listen, what are your plans…” he began, but didn’t get the chance to finish.
Someone in a Spider-Man costume rushed past and slammed into his elbow. The punch sloshed dangerously in the cup, and Rick had only just managed to mutter a curse under his breath when someone’s hand suddenly caught his elbow and pulled him closer. A few drops still splashed onto his costume, but most of the drink miraculously stayed in the cup.
“Sorry, guys!” came a voice from somewhere in the crowd.
“Hey! Watch where you’re going!” Rick protested, immediately running his gaze over Aaron to make sure none of it had hit him. Only after confirming that the punch had landed solely on his own costume did he look down in annoyance at the dark stain spreading across the fabric.
“You okay?” Aaron tilted his head slightly, for some reason making no move to remove his hand from Rick’s elbow.
“Damn… a few drops still got on me,” Rick muttered, not pulling away right away.
Gray-blue eyes flicked briefly over the dark stain.
“At least your costume looks more convincing now, Michael Myers.”
Rick’s eyebrows shot up.
“So you did recognize me.”
“How could I not recognize you?” Aaron replied calmly, taking a drink from his cup.
And only after looking away did he smile faintly to himself.
Warmth spread through Rick so suddenly that, for a second, the noise of the party seemed to recede.
Then Aaron looked at him again — with that same attentive gaze that somehow made the skin at the back of Rick’s neck go numb.
“So what were you going to ask?”
And he said it so casually, as though nothing unusual had just happened.
Rick automatically set his cup on the edge of the nearest table.
“I…” Rick faltered, suddenly realizing his mind had gone suspiciously blank.
Because of how close they were, because of everything happening around them, his thoughts began tangling completely, and his heart gave a heavy thud somewhere beneath his ribs.
“There you are!”
Steve’s voice cut straight between them, breaking the moment before Rick had even understood what was happening.
He appeared beside them in the ridiculous costume of some video game character, carrying a plate of snacks and wearing an expression of absolute delight.
“Why did you both suddenly get so serious?” he frowned. “And where’s your costume, Lake?”
“Leave me alone,” Aaron said without heat, stepping back slightly.
Steve only gave a pleased huff and clapped Rick on the shoulder.
“I’ve been looking for Thomas for half an hour. Have you seen him?”
“No,” Aaron answered shortly.
Rick had barely managed to exhale when Emma appeared beside them in a Little Red Riding Hood costume, along with Misty dressed as a sexy nurse.
“Aaron, can I borrow you for a minute?” Emma flushed even more than usual and took hold of his arm, clearly leaving no room for refusal.
Lake set his red cup beside Rick’s blue one before she pulled him away toward the dance floor.
Rick followed them with his eyes automatically and, for some reason, couldn’t make himself look away.
Emma was talking quickly, visibly nervous, laughing a little louder than usual, constantly fixing her hair and touching Aaron all the time—his elbow, his hand—as though she were afraid he would leave before she managed to finish. Aaron listened calmly and attentively, sometimes leaning slightly closer so he could hear her over the music.
Something inside Rick tightened unpleasantly.
He reached for the table without thinking and took a long drink.
The alcohol was unexpectedly much stronger. It burned his throat, and only then did Rick lower his gaze to the plastic cup.
Red.
It was Aaron’s cup.
The heaviness inside him only deepened.
“Oh, Thomas!” Steve shouted happily and immediately disappeared farther into the crowd with his plate.
Rick was left beside Misty.
She lazily followed the direction of his gaze, then looked at him with a faint smirk and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“I wonder what they’re talking about.”
“No,” Rick answered too quickly.
Misty only hummed.
“Emma’s been crazy about him since tenth grade. She spent all day working up the nerve to finally confess.”
Rick said nothing.
He watched Emma laugh again, winding a red strand of hair around her finger, then lightly run her palm over Aaron’s forearm and take his hand.
He didn’t pull it away.
Something inside Rick tightened painfully.
“Although,” Misty drawled thoughtfully, “to be honest, I always thought they were already seeing each other.”
Rick turned to her sharply.
“What do you mean? Why would you think that?”
Misty shrugged.
“Well… I don’t know. Lake’s always surrounded by pretty girls. Everybody knows that. If he wanted any one of them, she’d be his.”
Something told Rick she wasn’t lying.
The bonfire celebration immediately came back to him: a crowd of girls around Aaron, smiles, flirting, other people's touches. The memory made his jaw tighten on its own.
“Besides, he and Emma act kind of strange around each other. And… Emma told me they had a really nice talk by the bonfire. He listened to her for almost twenty minutes while they were walking and never even tried to get away.”
Those last words landed especially hard.
Rick looked back toward the dance floor.
Aaron had just leaned a little closer to Emma so he could hear her over the music, and she immediately broke into such a radiant smile that it seemed the entire evening had narrowed down to a single person for her.
Something inside Rick slowly, heavily sank.
And the worst part was that he didn't even understand why the hell it bothered him.
So they were talking. So she was holding his hand. So what?
Then why did the mere sight of her fingers around Aaron's wrist suddenly make him want to smash something?
“Hey.” Misty nudged his shoulder. “What are you zoning out for?”
The music around him suddenly became irritating, along with everyone else's laughter, the flashing lights, and the whole damn evening.
“There you go again, looking like you want to kill someone,” she said, a teasing note creeping into her voice. “You know, you can tell me what's going on.”
“Nothing's going on,” Rick shot back too quickly.
She only smiled.
“Oh, screw them. Come on, let's go have some fun instead.”
Rick didn't answer. His attention remained fixed on the dance floor — on the way Aaron listened to Emma so calmly, as though all of this were perfectly natural.
Something inside him twisted even harder.
He drained the rest of the alcohol in one swallow, feeling the bitterness burn down his throat, and let out a hoarse breath through a crooked smile.
“…Let's go.”
Rick followed Misty into the crowd, disappearing into it, but before he turned away completely, he looked back toward the dance floor one last time.
At that exact moment, Aaron looked up.
Their eyes met for a second, and Rick clenched his jaw harder, angry at himself for how fiercely everything inside him had begun to boil.
Then he looked away first and kept walking without another glance back.
Aaron held his breath. His eyes followed Rick of their own accord. As though something important had just slipped through his fingers.
“Aaron, I…” Emma shifted nervously from one foot to the other, blushing as she tightened her grip on his hand. “I… I wanted to tell you that I…”
Her touch was unpleasant to him. Her hand clung to him with desperate force. He raised an eyebrow slightly but said nothing.
“I just… you… I really like you. I have for two years… I thought maybe…”
He understood where this was going.
“I’m sorry,” he interrupted quietly, immediately and firmly. “I don’t feel the same way.”
The words hung dully in the air. Emma froze. Her lips trembled. Her eyes filled with tears almost at once.
Aaron hated moments like these more than anything. When someone stood in front of him crying like this, looking at him with hope, waiting for something he simply couldn't give.
“Is it because… because I'm f-fat and ugly?” Her voice broke, and she clung to him even tighter.
Aaron frowned, genuinely unable to understand how she had come to that conclusion.
“What? No. You're very beautiful. It has nothing to do with you.” He wearily rubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “It's just… everything's too complicated, Emma.”
He turned, instinctively searching for Rick in the crowd. But he was nowhere to be seen.
Gone.
As though he'd disappeared along with all the air around him.
“But I love you!” Emma suddenly cried, tears spilling freely down her cheeks.
Aaron frowned even more deeply, his voice growing quiet and distant.
“Emma, please don't.” He gently but decisively freed his hand from her desperate grip. “You're truly a wonderful friend. Smart, funny… and you genuinely deserve to be happy. Just not with me.”
“You idiot!” she shouted so loudly that several people nearby turned to look. “How do you even know who I'd be happier with?”
He instinctively stepped back, as though the force of her emotions had become physically overwhelming.
For several seconds Aaron simply looked at her, painfully searching for the right words.
He found none.
“I can't. I'm sorry,” he said quietly, then turned away.
***
The alcohol spread sluggishly through Rick's body, making every movement slow and fluid, as though he no longer had complete control over himself. Everything around him drifted in neon flashes, dissolving into blurred faces, bright costumes, and strangers' hands flickering beneath strings of lights. The world itself seemed to soften, to lose its sharp edges, while the music, on the contrary, felt overwhelming — every bass beat striking somewhere beneath his ribs, vibrating through his entire body.
The dance floor lived by its own rhythm, and at some point Rick simply stopped resisting, letting the music carry him along with everyone else.
Misty spun beside him — loud, radiant, smelling of sweet perfume and alcohol. She laughed, moved with effortless confidence, pressing herself almost flush against him one moment before slipping away again into bursts of colored light, making him reach after her.
Her hands slid over his shoulders and around his neck, her fingers catching on the collar of his costume. She danced far too close, swaying her hips to the music and looking at him beneath her lashes with open, drunken interest.
Rick himself barely understood what he was doing anymore.
He thought he was laughing.
He thought he was whispering something into her ear.
He thought there had been another couple of drinks after the red cup.
Time stretched into something slow and disconnected.
At some point, his fingers became tangled in her dark hair, and Rick suddenly remembered all too vividly the soft dark strands that so often fell along Aaron's cheekbones.
Something twisted unpleasantly inside him.
The thought immediately drowned beneath another heavy burst of bass as Misty pressed herself against him again, warm and noisy.
He almost forced himself to focus on her.
“You dance well,” she whispered into his ear over the music, her breath hot against his skin.
“So do you,” Rick breathed hoarsely, sliding his hands over her waist.
She laughed with satisfaction, throwing back her head, then pulled him close once more.
After that, everything dissolved into one long, indistinct blur of light, music, and unfamiliar voices.
At some point Misty disappeared — as suddenly as she'd appeared — leaving behind only the sweet scent of her perfume and the sticky heat beneath his skin.
Unsteady on his feet, Rick made his way into the hallway and dropped heavily onto a couch, hoping to clear his head for at least a little while.
But to his surprise, he didn't remain alone.
Two girls seemed to appear out of nowhere and almost immediately drew all of his attention to themselves.
One of them, dressed as Sailor Moon, settled onto his lap, pressing herself so closely against him that his breath caught instantly, then kissed him hungrily on the lips — wet, hot, without the slightest hesitation. The other, dressed as a witch, slid up beside him, her fingers moving slowly over his neck, brushing his ear before tangling in his hair.
Everything was happening far too quickly and yet with the strange heaviness of a dream.
Someone else's lips.
Breath thick with alcohol.
Laughter that disappeared beneath another kiss.
Someone gently caught his lower lip between her teeth, and Rick let out a muffled groan into the kiss, automatically pulling her closer. His hand slid higher along her thigh, beneath the hem of her short skirt, feeling the warmth of her skin beneath his fingers, and the drunken, heavy arousal inside him only tightened further.
The girls kissed him, then each other, colliding with quiet laughter before reaching for him again, and Rick let it happen, throwing himself into it with almost desperate determination.
As though he were trying to prove something.
To someone.
Or to himself.
He had almost completely lost track of time.
Sticky kisses. Feverish breathing. The aching throb low in his body. Everything merged into one hazy, burning mass in which thinking became harder and harder.
Warm lips settled against his neck, and Rick answered by burying his own against someone else's skin, drawing a muffled moan from her chest.
He opened his eyes for only a second.
The party still raged around him. Someone else was kissing against the wall. Someone laughed far too loudly. People walked past without paying any attention. The lights fractured through his drunken haze. But amid all that chaos, something stood out with painful clarity.
He was standing in the doorway.
Motionless.
A stranger amid all the noise.
His face remained calm, almost expressionless, but his eyes…His eyes were too direct.
Too heavy. Even through the fog of alcohol, Rick felt everything inside him suddenly drop away.
The air vanished from his lungs.
For a moment, he couldn't move.
Then Aaron simply turned around and walked away, disappearing into the crowd as quickly as he'd appeared.
And in that same instant, the drunken haze seemed to crack.
Rick sucked in a sharp breath, as though only then remembering how to breathe at all. The music crashed back into his ears far too loudly, the strangers' hands suddenly felt heavy and repulsive, and the sticky heat beneath his skin gave way to a dull wave of nausea.
What the hell was he even doing?
Who were these girls?
He didn't even know their names.
One of them leaned in toward his lips again, but Rick only turned his head away irritably and rubbed a hand over his face, trying to gather his thoughts.
Hopeless.
His temples pounded, everything still swam before his eyes, but now, instead of drunken desire, something entirely different was slowly boiling inside him — something angry, heavy, and sickening.
“All right, girls…” he exhaled hoarsely, pushing one of them away. “I'm done for tonight.”
They only whined something in protest, clearly not taking him seriously, and reached for him again. Their touch suddenly made his skin crawl.
“Well, well…” A familiar, grating voice drawled nearby.
Parker froze, then slowly lifted his head.
Standing in front of him was John King himself: dressed as a king, wearing a ridiculous crown, sporting a smug grin and the expression of someone already certain he was about to put on another show.
Lucas stood just behind his shoulder in a jester's costume, while Mark lingered nearby with Darth Vader's helmet tucked under one arm.
“I see you're enjoying my party, aren't you, newcomer?”
