Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
Release Date: March 11, 2025
Publisher: Tor Teen
Source: Publisher
Genre: Young Adult / Horror / Dark Fantasy
The epic conclusion to Kristen Simmon's masterful breakout duology for young adult readers that's "Jumanji but Japanese-inspired" (Kendare Blake) about estranged friends playing a deadly game in an eerie folkloric underworld.
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"Death is not an ending, it’s simply the next chapter. Do not be afraid to turn the page...."
It’s been one month since the hellish game of Meido ended, and Owen, Maddy, and Emerson are still reeling over the trials they endured there. With Empress Izanami destroyed, and the gate to the world of the dead closed, they take solace in the fact that they rescued Ian from that nightmare. There’s just one problem—Ian didn’t come home alone.
While Maddy chases a lead to find their yokai friend, and Emerson is haunted by a new, deadly creature, Owen is forced to face the empress—now possessing Ian's body—by himself. She tells Owen that the only way to free Ian is to find the artifacts—three sacred objects—which have been hidden across the realms of Hell, Heaven, and Earth. Unwilling to leave Ian behind, Owen dives into a new deadly game, but even when he’s joined by Maddy and Emerson, the challenges prove impossible. If they don’t solve each terrifying task and get the artifacts by the time the giant’s eye closes, Ian will be lost forever, but if they do, it's the end of the world as they know it.
Only one person can help, but Dax hasn’t been human in a long time, and he’s got some serious yokai problems of his own.
She Waits for You Beyond the Dark is the second and final installment in author Kristen Simmons's Death Games duology. This book has Five main characters: Ian, Emerson, Maddy, Dax, and Owen. The story takes place a month after the events of Find Him Where You Left Him Dead. Billed as “Jumanji but Japanese-inspired” by Kendare Blake, this duology has carved out a unique niche, and Simmons sticks the landing with a blend of supernatural suspense, diverse representation, and raw human connection.
It’s been one month since Ian’s reunited friends escaped the hellish game of Meido and saved him. The survivors may have sealed the gate to the world of the dead shut and destroyed Empress Izanami, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still reeling over the challenges they endured in her grim game. They can relax back in the world of the living, taking solace in the fact that they rescued Ian from the nightmare that tried to steal him away. There’s just one problem―Ian didn’t come home alone.
While Maddy chases a lead to find their yokai friend, Dax, and Emerson is haunted by a new, deadly creature, Owen is forced to face the empress—now possessing Ian's body—by himself. She tells Owen that the only way to free Ian is to find the artifacts—three sacred objects—which have been hidden across the realms of Hell, Heaven, and Earth. Unwilling to leave Ian behind, Owen dives into a new deadly game, but even when he’s joined by Maddy and Emerson, the challenges prove impossible.
If they don’t solve each terrifying task and get the artifacts by the time the giant’s eye closes, Ian will be lost forever, but if they do, it's the end of the world as they know it. The stakes feel personal this time, amplifying the tension as the friends splinter and reunite across a fractured, folklore-rich landscape. From chilling encounters with shape-shifting yōkai to the eerie beauty of realm-crossing quests, the settings pulse with dread and wonder. The artifacts—echoes of the Imperial Regalia of Japan—add a layer of cultural depth that rewards readers familiar with the lore, while still being accessible to newcomers. The horror elements are visceral: think blood-soaked challenges and psychological terror that lingers long after the page turns.
In conclusion, this book doesn’t quite reach the same heart-stopping intensity as its predecessor, but it does a great job tying up the duology. The pacing is much better, and the mythology becomes richer and more detailed, which helps to offset the somewhat reduced intensity of the gaming scenarios.
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IAN
“What did you like?”
Ian’s heart stuttered, heat rising in his cheeks as he met Owen’s gaze. The light caught the lenses of Owen’s glasses, then his eyes, making copper flecks stand out in his dark irises.
Ian gulped.
“I liked…” It was a simple question. It wasn’t like Owen was asking him to do calculus, or how his chest looked when he took off his shirt.
Static filled Ian’s brain.
“Um…” Focus. “I liked all of it?”
“All of it,” Owen repeated with a skeptical smile, leaning back in the corner booth they’d always taken, ever since they were old enough to meet here alone. He scratched a hand down his smooth jaw, and Ian felt a new flush warm his cheeks. “I knew it. You didn’t listen!”
“I did!” Ian sighed. “I love your playlist! I just don’t remember the names of all of the songs. I liked the one with … the guitar? And the girl who sings that high part like…” He made a sound like an angry bat and Owen began to laugh.
“That was beautiful,” Owen said.
“Shut up.”
“I mean it. Put this kid on a stage.”
“I hate you.”
“That’s not what you said last night.”
Ian’s face heated. Was Owen flirting with him? Since Ian had made it home last month, Owen had been polite. Cautious. Frustratingly attentive to whatever Ian needed. But now he was more relaxed, more confident. Nothing like the shy kid he’d been four years ago.
Ian liked it.
“Sorry, I was home last night,” he said. “You must be thinking of someone else.”
Owen nodded thoughtfully, his brown eyes glinting behind his wire-rim glasses. “You’re right. There are so many people I spend hours curating the perfect playlist for. It’s hard to keep you all straight.”
With a laugh, Ian kicked him under the table.
“Drinks up, gentlemen.”
Ian startled at the sight of the barista, a man with forearm tattoos and a lumberjack beard, who’d appeared beside the table. He was holding a wooden tray with their coffees and a buttery croissant.
“Iced coffee for you, sir,” he said, setting the drink on the table before Owen. “And a cappuccino for my good friend Ian.”
Ian stiffened at the title. They weren’t friends; Ian hadn’t even known the barista knew his name. But then, lots of people did now. He’d been missing since he was thirteen, and come back without a clear explanation of what had happened.
He glanced down at his hands in his lap, relieved to find his nails blunt and pink, not clawed like they were in his nightmares, and swallowed the knot in his throat.
“So what’s on the agenda today?” the barista asked, setting the croissant down between them.
“I’m trying to educate Ian on good music, but he’s resistant.” Owen sent a mock glare Ian’s way.
“I’m not resistant,” Ian argued. “I just can’t sit for that long. I need something else to do.”
He didn’t say why. That when he wasn’t busy, his thoughts went places they shouldn’t. That flashes of cold, dark places filled his mind. That he felt so lonely he could hardly breathe.
It was easier when he was with Owen. Everything was just better.
He didn’t want to ruin it.
He reached for his cappuccino, but the first sip was scalding and tasted absolutely terrible. He tried not to make a face, but Owen noticed, and smirked. Ian set down the cup. He didn’t even like coffee, he just didn’t know what else to get and it was the only thing on the menu he recognized.
“You could listen while you play a game,” the barista suggested. He motioned to the bookcase stuffed with board games against the wall. “We’ve got—”
“No games,” Owen said quickly. A muscle in his jaw ticked as he stared down at the ice floating in his drink.
Ian tensed. Owen had been forced to play a game with Maddy, Emerson, and Dax in the place where Ian had been trapped for four years. Meido. Ian couldn’t remember much of what had happened there, but he knew they’d almost died to save him.
And that Dax hadn’t come back.
A surge of guilt filled him, as it always did when he thought about his old friend. He knew it wasn’t true, but he couldn’t help feeling like Dax’s absence was his fault somehow. That the only reason Ian had been able to come home was because they’d traded places.
He wished it hadn’t been this way—that they both had come back. That they were all here together. Dax’s absence burrowed into Ian, a pit that couldn’t be filled. Had the others felt that way when he was missing? He wouldn’t wish this kind of emptiness on anybody.
“Well, we have puzzles too, you know,” the barista said. He crossed his arms over his chest, and the hearts and cartoon characters inked from his wrists to his elbows stretched.
“We’ll take a puzzle,” Ian said when Owen didn’t respond.
The barista smiled and retrieved a 150-piece picture of a ceramic teapot and cups. Ian wondered if all the puzzles matched the coffee- shop theme.
“Some people think I could pull off a sleeve,” Owen said when the barista had returned to the counter. He still wasn’t meeting Ian’s gaze.
“A sleeve?” Ian dumped the pieces on the table and spread them out. “You mean tattoos?”
He imagined Owen with a tattoo. Owen wasn’t the full sleeve type; he’d probably get something small. Hidden beneath his clothes somewhere.
Ian’s mouth went dry.
“I can only assume you’re surprised because my arms look so good without them.”
“That, and I remember you crying for six hours after getting stung by a bee.”
“I was allergic.”
Ian smiled, sneaking a peek at Owen’s slender arms. Arms that looked great in a T-shirt. Arms that gave amazing hugs. It occurred to Ian that Owen had seen him looking at the barista’s tattoos, and this was why he’d brought it up.
“Maybe I’ll get a big heart with Emerson’s name in it,” Owen went on.
Ian grinned. Owen and Emerson loved to pick on each other. Mostly because neither of them saw how alike they were.
“She’d love that. Where is she anyway?” She was supposed to meet them an hour ago, after she’d finished studying for her GED.
Ian still couldn’t believe she’d left high school. She’d always been the smartest of their group.
“Doing something with Maddy.”
That was good. Maddy had talked constantly when they were younger, but she was so quiet now. Sometimes, when they mentioned Dax, she’d stare off, and he could feel her sadness, and wonder if she didn’t wish he had come back instead of Ian. It hurt, but he didn’t blame her. From the way she talked about him, Ian could see that he’d missed a lot when he was gone.
Dax was Maddy’s person. And without him, she was lost.
Ian and Owen lapsed into a comfortable silence, fitting pieces together. The border was easy enough, but the inside was harder. A jumble of shapes that didn’t connect, and overwhelmed Ian to sort through. He made small piles of colors while Owen found a song on his phone and played it softly. It was the one Ian had liked, with the guitar and the high melody.
“This is it.” Ian reached for the croissant they were sharing and tore off a chunk. The buttery pastry melted in his mouth, and he nearly groaned at the pillowy feel against his tongue.
“What can I say?” Owen said. “I have excellent taste.”
“In some things.”
“In all things,” Owen insisted, giving a victorious smile as he fit two pieces of the puzzle together. “You didn’t see me order a cappuccino like a forty-year-old soccer dad.”
Ian tried to look offended, but broke down. “You could have warned me.”
“I could have. But I didn’t.” Owen slid his iced coffee toward Ian. “Here. Try this.”
Ian hesitated for only a moment before lifting the cool cup to his mouth. He wondered if his lips were touching the same place Owen’s lips had touched. When he looked up, Owen was watching him taste the cool, milky coffee, and he forgot that they were making a puzzle, that they were in public at all.
But as he lowered the cup his heart gave a painful pang. His hand jerked. The episode was only a moment, but coffee had sloshed over his knuckles. He hoped Owen hadn’t noticed. He forced a steady breath, and quickly wiped his hand on a napkin.
“See? Excellent taste,” Owen said, motioning toward the drink.
“Well, you still separate your noodles from the chili,” Ian said, remembering last week at Skyline when he, Maddy, Emerson, and Owen had all dared each other to eat cracker bombs with hot sauce and laughed so hard he’d almost cried. “And you don’t even add the cheese.” He found two puzzle pieces and connected them, and then two more, making the golden outer ring of the teapot.
Owen cringed. “Because it’s disgusting. Because chili shouldn’t have cinnamon in it. Because a metric ton of grated cheddar doesn’t go with noodles. Would you like me to go on?”
Ian gave a skeptical shrug, fitting the cluster of pieces into the frame of the puzzle. “Ninety-eight percent of Cincinnati’s population would disagree with you.”
“You made that up.”
“If I’m lying you can pour hot sauce all over my next three-way.”
Owen sputtered. “To be clear, you’re referring to the absurd regional specialty of chili and cheese on noodles.”
Ian bit his lip so he didn’t laugh. “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.”
Owen blinked. “What were we talking about? My brain just reset to factory settings.”
“You sound like Emerson.” With a little cheer, Ian connected another piece to the cluster Owen had been working on.
Owen blinked at him. “She’s in my head. This is my worst nightmare.”
Another rush of heat spread through Ian’s chest as Owen slid out of the booth, crossed to Ian’s side, and sat beside him.
Their shoulders touched. And their hips. Owen’s heel bumped the toe of Ian’s shoe.
Ian held his breath to focus and in the quiet, he heard a woman’s voice.
I’m waiting.
The hair rose on his arms and nape.
He looked over his shoulder, but there was no one there.
“All right?” Owen asked. He was close enough Ian could smell his tea tree oil shampoo. His nerves settled. The voice wasn’t real. It was anxiety, that’s what the therapist Ian’s parents had hired said. Breakthrough trauma. It would pass, someday. Hopefully.
“Yeah.” His voice was shallow.
Owen frowned, but didn’t push the issue as he lifted his phone and took a picture of them. He showed Ian. It was cute. They were cute. Smiling like a couple, their drinks and food and puzzle pieces strewn over the table before them.
Were they a couple?
He didn’t know what people did now to make it official. Owen had been catching him up on all sorts of movies, just like he had with the playlists. Cultural education, he called it. But that was something any friend would do, right?
He doesn’t want you, the woman’s voice whispered.
Ian rubbed absently at his chest, wishing the voice would leave him alone.
“Puzzling pros…” Owen spoke as he texted. “See, Emerson? We’re not just pretty faces.” The phone made a little whoosh as he sent it to the Foxtail Five group text, a name they’d called each other when they were kids. Ian’s phone dinged a moment later, and even though he’d already seen the picture, he looked again, grinning down at Maddy and Emerson’s ID pictures beside Owen’s and his.
Foxtail Five, they still called themselves, even though there were only four now.
The phone dinged again a moment later, and a new picture appeared from Emerson.
Not a new picture, the same one, zoomed in on the puzzle on the table. There were red mark-ups—pieces circled and then pointed into place with arrows.
“Is she solving it?” Ian said with a laugh.
Another ding.
“Take a better picture,” Owen read aloud. He turned to Ian. “She says we’re blocking the right side. She refuses to work under these conditions.”
“Same,” said Ian, gesturing dramatically toward the counter. “I can’t even hear your perfectly curated playlist over the steamer.”
“We could go somewhere else,” Owen said.
Ian stilled. The noise of the coffee shop seemed to grow ten times louder around them.
“We could go somewhere quieter, I mean. So we can hear the music better,” Owen said.
Ian was nodding quickly, as if this was the best idea in the world. “Your place?”
If they went to his house, his dad would sit next to Owen on the couch like they were pals and grill him about school, and his mom would barge in on them every five minutes with snacks. He loved his parents, but they hovered. It was bad enough they were tracking him on his phone and messaging every hour to check in.
Owen’s house, on the other hand, would be empty. His mom was still at work. He’d said that when they’d first gotten here. They would have the place to themselves.
“Sure,” said Owen, his voice a little rough. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Sure. That works.”
Was he nervous? That couldn’t be right. Owen was … Owen. Cool, and funny, and always so at ease with the everyone and everything around him. Sometimes Ian envied that calm. Mostly though, he was in awe of it. If he could be half that confident, that stupid voice in his head would never speak a harsh word to him again.
A hum of anticipation seemed to fill the space between them.
“Let’s go,” Ian said, standing. “My dad gave me money for the coffee.” He blew out an uneven breath, leaving the cappuccino on the table.
“Great,” said Owen, then scratched his head. “Can I meet you at my house? I need to pick up my room.”
“I don’t care that you’re a slob,” Ian said with a grin.
“I’m not a slob,” Owen retorted, standing across from him. Was he closer than he normally stood? It felt like he could lean forward and touch him at any moment. “I just need to … make my bed and stuff.”
Ian’s throat went dry.
Owen needed to make his bed. Because they might be lying on it. Together.
“Yeah,” said Ian. “Yes. You go make your bed. I’ll pay, and meet you at your house.”
“You’re okay to walk by yourself?”
It was only a couple blocks, and it was light outside, the streets busy with people. But it was nice that Owen asked.
The truth was, Ian kind of wanted the challenge of walking alone. He needed to be more independent. He didn’t want his friends worrying about him all the time.
“I’m okay. Go.”
Owen nodded, and hurried out.
“What did you like?”
Ian’s heart stuttered, heat rising in his cheeks as he met Owen’s gaze. The light caught the lenses of Owen’s glasses, then his eyes, making copper flecks stand out in his dark irises.
Ian gulped.
“I liked…” It was a simple question. It wasn’t like Owen was asking him to do calculus, or how his chest looked when he took off his shirt.
Static filled Ian’s brain.
“Um…” Focus. “I liked all of it?”
“All of it,” Owen repeated with a skeptical smile, leaning back in the corner booth they’d always taken, ever since they were old enough to meet here alone. He scratched a hand down his smooth jaw, and Ian felt a new flush warm his cheeks. “I knew it. You didn’t listen!”
“I did!” Ian sighed. “I love your playlist! I just don’t remember the names of all of the songs. I liked the one with … the guitar? And the girl who sings that high part like…” He made a sound like an angry bat and Owen began to laugh.
“That was beautiful,” Owen said.
“Shut up.”
“I mean it. Put this kid on a stage.”
“I hate you.”
“That’s not what you said last night.”
Ian’s face heated. Was Owen flirting with him? Since Ian had made it home last month, Owen had been polite. Cautious. Frustratingly attentive to whatever Ian needed. But now he was more relaxed, more confident. Nothing like the shy kid he’d been four years ago.
Ian liked it.
“Sorry, I was home last night,” he said. “You must be thinking of someone else.”
Owen nodded thoughtfully, his brown eyes glinting behind his wire-rim glasses. “You’re right. There are so many people I spend hours curating the perfect playlist for. It’s hard to keep you all straight.”
With a laugh, Ian kicked him under the table.
“Drinks up, gentlemen.”
Ian startled at the sight of the barista, a man with forearm tattoos and a lumberjack beard, who’d appeared beside the table. He was holding a wooden tray with their coffees and a buttery croissant.
“Iced coffee for you, sir,” he said, setting the drink on the table before Owen. “And a cappuccino for my good friend Ian.”
Ian stiffened at the title. They weren’t friends; Ian hadn’t even known the barista knew his name. But then, lots of people did now. He’d been missing since he was thirteen, and come back without a clear explanation of what had happened.
He glanced down at his hands in his lap, relieved to find his nails blunt and pink, not clawed like they were in his nightmares, and swallowed the knot in his throat.
“So what’s on the agenda today?” the barista asked, setting the croissant down between them.
“I’m trying to educate Ian on good music, but he’s resistant.” Owen sent a mock glare Ian’s way.
“I’m not resistant,” Ian argued. “I just can’t sit for that long. I need something else to do.”
He didn’t say why. That when he wasn’t busy, his thoughts went places they shouldn’t. That flashes of cold, dark places filled his mind. That he felt so lonely he could hardly breathe.
It was easier when he was with Owen. Everything was just better.
He didn’t want to ruin it.
He reached for his cappuccino, but the first sip was scalding and tasted absolutely terrible. He tried not to make a face, but Owen noticed, and smirked. Ian set down the cup. He didn’t even like coffee, he just didn’t know what else to get and it was the only thing on the menu he recognized.
“You could listen while you play a game,” the barista suggested. He motioned to the bookcase stuffed with board games against the wall. “We’ve got—”
“No games,” Owen said quickly. A muscle in his jaw ticked as he stared down at the ice floating in his drink.
Ian tensed. Owen had been forced to play a game with Maddy, Emerson, and Dax in the place where Ian had been trapped for four years. Meido. Ian couldn’t remember much of what had happened there, but he knew they’d almost died to save him.
And that Dax hadn’t come back.
A surge of guilt filled him, as it always did when he thought about his old friend. He knew it wasn’t true, but he couldn’t help feeling like Dax’s absence was his fault somehow. That the only reason Ian had been able to come home was because they’d traded places.
He wished it hadn’t been this way—that they both had come back. That they were all here together. Dax’s absence burrowed into Ian, a pit that couldn’t be filled. Had the others felt that way when he was missing? He wouldn’t wish this kind of emptiness on anybody.
“Well, we have puzzles too, you know,” the barista said. He crossed his arms over his chest, and the hearts and cartoon characters inked from his wrists to his elbows stretched.
“We’ll take a puzzle,” Ian said when Owen didn’t respond.
The barista smiled and retrieved a 150-piece picture of a ceramic teapot and cups. Ian wondered if all the puzzles matched the coffee- shop theme.
“Some people think I could pull off a sleeve,” Owen said when the barista had returned to the counter. He still wasn’t meeting Ian’s gaze.
“A sleeve?” Ian dumped the pieces on the table and spread them out. “You mean tattoos?”
He imagined Owen with a tattoo. Owen wasn’t the full sleeve type; he’d probably get something small. Hidden beneath his clothes somewhere.
Ian’s mouth went dry.
“I can only assume you’re surprised because my arms look so good without them.”
“That, and I remember you crying for six hours after getting stung by a bee.”
“I was allergic.”
Ian smiled, sneaking a peek at Owen’s slender arms. Arms that looked great in a T-shirt. Arms that gave amazing hugs. It occurred to Ian that Owen had seen him looking at the barista’s tattoos, and this was why he’d brought it up.
“Maybe I’ll get a big heart with Emerson’s name in it,” Owen went on.
Ian grinned. Owen and Emerson loved to pick on each other. Mostly because neither of them saw how alike they were.
“She’d love that. Where is she anyway?” She was supposed to meet them an hour ago, after she’d finished studying for her GED.
Ian still couldn’t believe she’d left high school. She’d always been the smartest of their group.
“Doing something with Maddy.”
That was good. Maddy had talked constantly when they were younger, but she was so quiet now. Sometimes, when they mentioned Dax, she’d stare off, and he could feel her sadness, and wonder if she didn’t wish he had come back instead of Ian. It hurt, but he didn’t blame her. From the way she talked about him, Ian could see that he’d missed a lot when he was gone.
Dax was Maddy’s person. And without him, she was lost.
Ian and Owen lapsed into a comfortable silence, fitting pieces together. The border was easy enough, but the inside was harder. A jumble of shapes that didn’t connect, and overwhelmed Ian to sort through. He made small piles of colors while Owen found a song on his phone and played it softly. It was the one Ian had liked, with the guitar and the high melody.
“This is it.” Ian reached for the croissant they were sharing and tore off a chunk. The buttery pastry melted in his mouth, and he nearly groaned at the pillowy feel against his tongue.
“What can I say?” Owen said. “I have excellent taste.”
“In some things.”
“In all things,” Owen insisted, giving a victorious smile as he fit two pieces of the puzzle together. “You didn’t see me order a cappuccino like a forty-year-old soccer dad.”
Ian tried to look offended, but broke down. “You could have warned me.”
“I could have. But I didn’t.” Owen slid his iced coffee toward Ian. “Here. Try this.”
Ian hesitated for only a moment before lifting the cool cup to his mouth. He wondered if his lips were touching the same place Owen’s lips had touched. When he looked up, Owen was watching him taste the cool, milky coffee, and he forgot that they were making a puzzle, that they were in public at all.
But as he lowered the cup his heart gave a painful pang. His hand jerked. The episode was only a moment, but coffee had sloshed over his knuckles. He hoped Owen hadn’t noticed. He forced a steady breath, and quickly wiped his hand on a napkin.
“See? Excellent taste,” Owen said, motioning toward the drink.
“Well, you still separate your noodles from the chili,” Ian said, remembering last week at Skyline when he, Maddy, Emerson, and Owen had all dared each other to eat cracker bombs with hot sauce and laughed so hard he’d almost cried. “And you don’t even add the cheese.” He found two puzzle pieces and connected them, and then two more, making the golden outer ring of the teapot.
Owen cringed. “Because it’s disgusting. Because chili shouldn’t have cinnamon in it. Because a metric ton of grated cheddar doesn’t go with noodles. Would you like me to go on?”
Ian gave a skeptical shrug, fitting the cluster of pieces into the frame of the puzzle. “Ninety-eight percent of Cincinnati’s population would disagree with you.”
“You made that up.”
“If I’m lying you can pour hot sauce all over my next three-way.”
Owen sputtered. “To be clear, you’re referring to the absurd regional specialty of chili and cheese on noodles.”
Ian bit his lip so he didn’t laugh. “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.”
Owen blinked. “What were we talking about? My brain just reset to factory settings.”
“You sound like Emerson.” With a little cheer, Ian connected another piece to the cluster Owen had been working on.
Owen blinked at him. “She’s in my head. This is my worst nightmare.”
Another rush of heat spread through Ian’s chest as Owen slid out of the booth, crossed to Ian’s side, and sat beside him.
Their shoulders touched. And their hips. Owen’s heel bumped the toe of Ian’s shoe.
Ian held his breath to focus and in the quiet, he heard a woman’s voice.
I’m waiting.
The hair rose on his arms and nape.
He looked over his shoulder, but there was no one there.
“All right?” Owen asked. He was close enough Ian could smell his tea tree oil shampoo. His nerves settled. The voice wasn’t real. It was anxiety, that’s what the therapist Ian’s parents had hired said. Breakthrough trauma. It would pass, someday. Hopefully.
“Yeah.” His voice was shallow.
Owen frowned, but didn’t push the issue as he lifted his phone and took a picture of them. He showed Ian. It was cute. They were cute. Smiling like a couple, their drinks and food and puzzle pieces strewn over the table before them.
Were they a couple?
He didn’t know what people did now to make it official. Owen had been catching him up on all sorts of movies, just like he had with the playlists. Cultural education, he called it. But that was something any friend would do, right?
He doesn’t want you, the woman’s voice whispered.
Ian rubbed absently at his chest, wishing the voice would leave him alone.
“Puzzling pros…” Owen spoke as he texted. “See, Emerson? We’re not just pretty faces.” The phone made a little whoosh as he sent it to the Foxtail Five group text, a name they’d called each other when they were kids. Ian’s phone dinged a moment later, and even though he’d already seen the picture, he looked again, grinning down at Maddy and Emerson’s ID pictures beside Owen’s and his.
Foxtail Five, they still called themselves, even though there were only four now.
The phone dinged again a moment later, and a new picture appeared from Emerson.
Not a new picture, the same one, zoomed in on the puzzle on the table. There were red mark-ups—pieces circled and then pointed into place with arrows.
“Is she solving it?” Ian said with a laugh.
Another ding.
“Take a better picture,” Owen read aloud. He turned to Ian. “She says we’re blocking the right side. She refuses to work under these conditions.”
“Same,” said Ian, gesturing dramatically toward the counter. “I can’t even hear your perfectly curated playlist over the steamer.”
“We could go somewhere else,” Owen said.
Ian stilled. The noise of the coffee shop seemed to grow ten times louder around them.
“We could go somewhere quieter, I mean. So we can hear the music better,” Owen said.
Ian was nodding quickly, as if this was the best idea in the world. “Your place?”
If they went to his house, his dad would sit next to Owen on the couch like they were pals and grill him about school, and his mom would barge in on them every five minutes with snacks. He loved his parents, but they hovered. It was bad enough they were tracking him on his phone and messaging every hour to check in.
Owen’s house, on the other hand, would be empty. His mom was still at work. He’d said that when they’d first gotten here. They would have the place to themselves.
“Sure,” said Owen, his voice a little rough. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Sure. That works.”
Was he nervous? That couldn’t be right. Owen was … Owen. Cool, and funny, and always so at ease with the everyone and everything around him. Sometimes Ian envied that calm. Mostly though, he was in awe of it. If he could be half that confident, that stupid voice in his head would never speak a harsh word to him again.
A hum of anticipation seemed to fill the space between them.
“Let’s go,” Ian said, standing. “My dad gave me money for the coffee.” He blew out an uneven breath, leaving the cappuccino on the table.
“Great,” said Owen, then scratched his head. “Can I meet you at my house? I need to pick up my room.”
“I don’t care that you’re a slob,” Ian said with a grin.
“I’m not a slob,” Owen retorted, standing across from him. Was he closer than he normally stood? It felt like he could lean forward and touch him at any moment. “I just need to … make my bed and stuff.”
Ian’s throat went dry.
Owen needed to make his bed. Because they might be lying on it. Together.
“Yeah,” said Ian. “Yes. You go make your bed. I’ll pay, and meet you at your house.”
“You’re okay to walk by yourself?”
It was only a couple blocks, and it was light outside, the streets busy with people. But it was nice that Owen asked.
The truth was, Ian kind of wanted the challenge of walking alone. He needed to be more independent. He didn’t want his friends worrying about him all the time.
“I’m okay. Go.”
Owen nodded, and hurried out.
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