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It’s called a chivalric romance. You know, where the handsome knight carries out all his grand duties in the service of some fine lady who might as well not even know his name, and doesn’t get so much as a kiss for his trouble, but that’s okay, because all he needs to sustain him is his courtly love. Yeah, Peter knows all about it; he had a classical education, didn’t he? Not to mention the fact that he’s living one right now. Just substitute an absentminded, status-obsessed, chronically sweaty engineer in his thirties for the fine lady, and Peter himself for the knight (come on, it’s not that much of a stretch), and the analogy is basically perfect.
Well, here’s what his teachers, for all their degrees combined, failed to mention about these chivalric romances: they fucking suck. No, really. After the life he’s led, Peter Venkman considers himself somewhat of an expert on topics like glorified suffering, topics he likes to avoid, generally, and therefore, he feels qualified to say that, out of all the hardships life has thrown his way, none of them burn quite so badly as his desperate, enduring, unconsummated, courtly love for Ray Stantz.
It’s bullshit, is what it is. Peter will be the first to admit that he’s just about the least likely candidate for unselfish affection and the goddamn act of torch carrying in the city—the state!—of New York, and yet here he is, trailing his entire career behind the whims of a guy too absorbed in ghost stories and gadgets to give him the time of day. It’s basically antithetical to everything Peter holds true about himself… but it’s Ray.
The thing about Ray is, he’s capable of making Peter do a whole laundry list of things that he would never, under any circumstances, consider otherwise. Take the purchase of the Firehouse, for instance. Or, more relevantly, take tonight: they’ve been at it nonstop since sunrise. Free-repeaters in the morning, a gnarly Class 5 in a church uptown around lunchtime (not that Peter had much of an appetite left after facing that), and then they’d split off around the afternoon, Ray and Egon being called on some cushy consultation thing back at the college, while Winston and Peter got stuck hauling ass halfway to New Jersey and back for a false alarm that turned out to be a neighborhood prank. So, yeah, needless to say, Peter is in a bad mood. There’s nothing he’d like more than to scoot on back to home base, take a nice, hot shower before Egon gets a chance to monopolize the warm water, and catch some z’s—or, failing that, turn on the boob tube and vegetate in front of something mind numbing until Janine opens the place up again come morning. That’s what Peter would like to do.
What he ends up doing, pulling the Ecto into their main foyer with a black cloud in its wake, is slamming his door open with just a little too much force, gathering up the empty traps with one gloved hand and patting his pockets for a much-needed smoke with the other, and looking up right into the half-apologetic, half-impatient face of Janine Melnitz, fanning herself with what Peter immediately recognizes as the printout of another goddamn job.
She’s already holding court with Egon, Ray, and Winston—who was, okay, a little quicker in vacating the Ectomobile than Peter himself. Why don’t you sue him? He’s had a long day, and his knees…
Eh, who is he kidding? A glance around would tell anyone that they’d all had a long day—to a man, the Ghostbusters are sporting bloodshot eyes and vaguely dreadful expressions, mouths pressed into a universal flat line. Winston hadn’t been any happier than Peter about their wasted trip to Jersey country—there had been very little in the way of conversation on the car ride back—and, while Peter had been privately resenting Ray and Spengs for their comparatively breezy speaking engagement, it, too, seemed to have taken its toll. There’s a reason Venkman has always been the advocate of their threesome; neither of them do well in the public eye. Even Janine seems to be sporting some unbecoming dark circles in the hollows of her eyes as she slaps the pages down on her desk.
“It’s a haunted house,” she says, like that explains everything.
“Well, gee, can you get any less specific?”
Janine scowls at him, and snatches the paper back to read off of. “At the intersection of 43rd and Broadway. It’s—”
“Wait a sec, I know that place,” Winston interjects. “That’s a literal haunted house. A tourist trap.”
“Oh, hell no,” Peter says before it even occurs to him to bite his tongue. “After you sent us out three hours on a false alarm? I know advertisers—I smell a publicity stunt. Noooo thank you.”
“Hey, now—don’t you think we should at least hear her out?” Ray cringes a little, but he also darts a pleading glance at Peter, who holds out for all of two seconds before groaning and flapping a hand at Janine to continue.
Jesus, he can’t believe himself sometimes.
“According to the proprietress, it started up a couple weeks back. Bleeding walls, dizzy spells, the works. It was only when the phenomenon started affecting people’s behavior that they got worried—apparently there have been half a dozen fights on the premises, in addition to memory gaps and a couple of unreported accidents. Sounds to me like demonic activity—I recommend a two-man job.” Gathering her coat and checking her watch, Janine intones, “I also recommend you figure that out among yourselves, because my shift was over an hour ago. Goodnight.”
Pulling on the coat, Janine manages an impressively fluid maneuver wherein she shoves the pages at Ray’s chest and stomps off toward the door at the same time, and leaves. She probably doesn’t have the energy reserves to bear witness to the squabble that’s going to ensue over whose turn it is—which, again, Venkman thinks is fair. He’s going to be a part of it (a very vocal part of it, if he has any say in the matter), and he doesn’t care to see grown men make fools of themselves, either.
“All due respect, you’re on your own for this one,” Winston cuts in before Peter gets the chance to volunteer him. “I took that solo job out on Long Island last night—if I don’t get some shut-eye in the next ten minutes, there’s gonna be one more vengeful ghost coming for you guys’ sorry ass.”
Another completely valid point. Persuasive and concise. Peter is getting really tired of all his coworkers being so reasonable. And so exhausted. Hey—he can be reasonable, too. Just watch how reasonable he can be.
Winston thus excused on all grounds of decency, Peter can see the window to his idyllic night of vegetation closing by the second. Fortunately, he has a quick tongue and an endless list of excuses as to why he should never have to put his neck out—many of them proven, in past encounters, to come up quite reasonably —and is more than happy to use both when it suits him. But…
Well, the closing window of opportunity isn’t all that Peter sees in that moment. What Peter also sees is this: a brief, knowing look shared between Spengler and Stantz. The look of weary, long-suffering colleagues resigned once again to picking up someone else’s slack.
“Hey, I’ll go,” Peter says before he has a chance to think better. Hands jammed casually into his jacket pockets, he shrugs. “No skin off mine. Who’s with me—Raymond?”
Three sharp looks ranging from bemusement to abject disbelief immediately find Peter’s affected disinterest.
The closest to amazement out of the three of them, Ray cracks an incredulous smile and huffs out a short bark of a laugh. “Uh—sure, I’m in. But… are you certain about this, Venkman? I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you volunteer for extra work so quickly; are you feeling alright?”
Now it’s time for Egon and Winston to exchange a glance—the one, by all accounts, reserved for gift horses and those careless enough to look them in the mouth region.
For reasons Peter feels no pressing need to unpack at the moment, this exchange bothers him considerably less.
“Are you kidding? I’m the picture of health.” He slings an arm around Ray’s shoulder, turning him toward the car. “Now come on, let’s hit the road before these two slackers stuff a gag in you and superglue your hands to the wheel.”
Ray sniffs out the rat the way he always does—close, but no cigar. Pausing with his fingers loose around the handle to the passenger-side door, he makes one final, brow-furled appeal back at Winston and Spengs, who studiously avoid matching his gaze. Figures; they have too much to lose now. Peter suppresses a smile as he goes around, finally sticking the cigarette between his lips and tossing the empty traps in Ray’s lap while he starts the engine. It won’t last, but a serene peace has settled over Peter now, as it sometimes does when he gets Ray to himself. Turning them out once more unto the breach, he grins at his company (still eyeing him with reservations, the suspicious sunnuva) and wiggles the cigarette around meaningfully.
“Got a light?”
That prompts Ray into action, at least. With a little “Oh!” expression on his face, Ray pats his pockets, retrieving a bic from his breast and plucking the cancer stick from Peter’s lips without preamble. He sticks it between his own to light—it’s a good thing Peter was already fully aware of this particular ritual of Ray’s, or the only thing getting busted tonight would be their fender around a light pole—and takes a short drag before passing it back to Venkman. The nicotine seems to soothe him into complacency, at least.
Venkman lets his fingers linger near Ray’s for just a second too long on the retrieval, and tries not to think about how tightly his other hand is gripping the wheel all of a sudden. For a split second, he gets a mental flash of himself in another time, taking not a cigarette but a delicate hanky that had once passed his fine lady’s dainty lips—a token by any other name—and he knows, then, why he does this. Only Ray, or the abstract notion of Ray’s disapproval, could have wrenched Peter away from that couch tonight without a crowbar, but here he is, putting on the armor and mounting the steed at his own discretion, just to bask for a while in the glow of Ray’s delighted confusion. He’ll fight the dragon. Hell, he’ll fight twenty, so long as Ray’s the one who asks him. And if, somewhere along the line, in his overworked fugue state, there comes a dragon Peter can’t slay, he may not be happy with it (Peter’s never really seen the glamor in self-sacrifice, to say the least), but he’ll do the next thing in Ray’s honor, too.
So much for reason.
“Demonic activity was right,” Ray announces cheerfully, holding up what Peter assumes to be the incident report. “Loss of faculties, traces of brimstone… they’re sporting all the usual signs. But listen to this!”
Peter chances a brief flick of his eyes away from the road, relishing in it. No matter how mundane it becomes for the rest of them, Ray always tells ghost stories like he wants to be shining a flashlight under his chin.
“Apparently, this pesky infestation was no accident. Just before the first signs started popping up, the owners went into a frenzy over low turnout—decided they needed a new attraction to get people talking.”
“So they got in contact with Satan? I dunno, Ray,” Peter takes a final drag of his cigarette and flicks the butt out the window, where it goes sailing into a glowing orange arc that rapidly loses his eye. “Sounds thin. Are you sure we’re not chasing down another crank call?”
“No, listen!” Ray swats blindly at Peter, engrossed in the handout he’s pouring over. “Their new attraction was supposed to be a potion-brewing witch. They set her up in the basement with a table and booth, and once a day, she did a big, witchy demonstration where she chanted over a cauldron. But it was malarkey! The woman they hired was an actress—only, just a few days after she showed up, all these… bad vibes showed up, too. And a couple days after that, she vanished into thin air! Not only stopped showing up to work, but her number’s disconnected, her apartment’s abandoned… it’s like she never existed!”
Oh, Ray, I love it when you talk crazy. Listening to Ray work like a Baptist preacher up to a fever pitch—complete with fire and brimstone, no less—is about the last thing that should be getting Peter all hot and bothered. And it doesn’t, not really; he’s a grown man. He’s more than capable of controlling himself—he is not, for instance, pulling off onto the shoulder right now to ravish his longtime colleague and coworker, which Peter considers a tremendous show of self-restraint and, if he’s being honest, a truly impressive example of moderation winning the day. Besides, going down that road—well, it wouldn’t be a very courtly thing to do. Peter understood back in their Columbia days, the starry-eyed, flush-faced possibilities of their first meeting only a few weeks hence, that Ray would be forever oblivious to Peter’s courtship, or forever polite enough to affect the same to disguise his disinterest. Not usually one to sacrifice his own happiness for the comfort of others (the notion of suffering in silence being completely foreign to his worldview), Peter knew then what he knows now—that this one thing in his life, his friendship with Ray Stantz, is too precious to lose to anything, including his own base whims. He’d solemnly locked away any blooming growths of hope in his chest back then, and fuck them anyway for strangling him out now; you’d think a rosebush untended by rain or sun would have deigned to wither over a decade hence.
Anyway, mixed metaphors aside, none of it means that Peter can’t enjoy his alone time with Ray when he gets it. His face is held in an outward lopsided smirk, indulgent at best, but inside, Peter is drooling and twisting a lock of hair around his finger, giggling like a bobbleheaded co-ed in a deceptively sadistic experiment. His chest feels warm and light with fondness, and he’d attribute it to a coronary before he owned the reality.
“Well, that’s weird,” he says instead, voice a comedic monotone. Ray jumps on it; he’d always needed a straight man.
Ha, ha.
“To say the least! And get this —two days ago, the night janitor called up the owner at four in the morning, speaking in tongues. Isn’t that cool? All she was able to produce after the fact was one word: Rxl. He kept saying it. You know, that could be what we’re dealing with, here.”
Peter makes a face. “Wrexel?”
“Rxl.”
“That’s what I said.”
“No, Pete—Rxl.”
“Stop that!” Phonic demonics make Peter’s head hurt. “So wait, wait. We have a pretty good picture of whatever it is that’s making things go ‘bump’ at the haunted house. We even have a name. Remind me why we’re rushing in blind instead of holing up in a library somewhere? I thought you and Spengs got off on this stuff.”
Ray shrugs ruefully, a comedic picture of regret.
“I guess there just wasn’t time. That’s the dark underbelly of Ghostbusters, if you think about it; much as I love our work, it does become a little brutal and repetitive every now and then. You get so lost in moving from one job to the next, you forget the scientific research we’re pioneering.”
Peter snorts.
“Maybe you do. Never let it be said that Peter Venkman let his aspirations be guided by anything less than the Nobel Prize.”
“Oh yeah, right. You don’t even know how to spell Nobel.”
It’s an old joke, and comfortable. It’s the conversational equivalent of the pair of jeans with the seat worn so thin it’s practically transparent, yet you can’t bring yourself to get rid of them, because there’s nothing you’d rather slip into at the end of a long day.
He cracks a grin, eyes never leaving the road.
“It starts with a K, right?”
Now Ray is grinning; Peter doesn’t have to look to know it. He does, anyway. They share a moment too sunny for Peter’s chance-of-rain disposition.
Then it’s over, and the road drags on.
They make it criminally close to the job site before the good humor breaks. Really. You’d think, with mere blocks to cover and a demon to bust, the sowing of strife and discord among old friends could be left until the return journey. Or, hey, why not postponed indefinitely? That would suit Peter just fine.
Not Ray.
He’s never seen a rock he can bear to leave unturned; that’s Peter’s professional diagnosis. It’s a treacherous way to live, but he can see some logic in it—Peter himself will let rot fester underneath until it spreads to the surrounding garden and can no longer be ignored, and still stubbornly refuse to lift the rock, but that’s him. Ray’s way, at least, never lets the spores take hold.
It also tends to destroy a hell of a lot of delicate ecosystems. Not that Ray means to. He just can’t help it.
“Alright,” he says at last, with the nail-in-the-coffin finality of the other shoe dropping. (Nails and coffins and dress shoes, oh my!) “Now tell the truth—what the hell are you doing on this job, Venkman?”
Peter feigns innocence. “What, a guy can’t take pride in his work?”
Ray snorts. “I said the truth.”
“The truth. Okay, the truth.” Peter grits his teeth, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel almost involuntarily. When he speaks again, his tone is deceptively jovial. It also decidedly does not tell the truth Ray is looking for—though, in a way, it certainly is a truth. “Truthfully, Ray, I just thought I’d better come along to stop you putting the moves on another client, that’s all. Seriously, you horndog, the guys and I talked it over, and we think you’re way out of line.”
The immediacy with which Ray accepts this obvious deflection is both gratifying and fundamentally insulting. Peter can hear the “of course” in Ray’s scoff before a single word is spoken.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Ray says, undercutting his brewing storm somewhat with the obvious embarrassment that flashes in his eye once he’s realized what he said. Peter feels no real joy in the argument (indeed, he’s feeling rather unjoyful, all of a sudden), but he flashes a mechanical shark grin, anyway—predatory and sharp. “Uh, no offense. But that’s what this is about? Christine?”
Christine, Christine. Christine was the traumatized client of a fairly straightforward bust undertaken over a month ago—which, by all rights, should make her ancient history, name known only to herself and their tax guy come April. What gives Christine staying power well beyond her sell-by date is the fact that, in all her pitiful glory (the target of the bust, if memory served, had been her late husband), she managed to seduce ever-oblivious Ray with her tears and feminine wiles—and, Peter’s sure, her being a flimsy young blonde thing didn’t hurt much, either. “Concerned” about her wellbeing, Ray has practically been in thrall to her ever since, always making time to meet her for coffee, or “checking in” with gratuitous phone calls, or just tainting otherwise innocuous conversations with updates about how Christine is doing.
Of course, Ray claims that they’re “just friends,” which, for reasons Peter can’t quantify, is only salt in the wound, so… to the point; is Peter on this bust tonight because of misplaced jealousy over a client? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an unturned rock in his garden with her name inscribed on the side.
“Hey, don’t blame me,” Peter taunts through piss and vinegar. “I’m not the one who’s been conducting himself so unprofessionally. You want to get mad, Ray, Mr. Jackson has a song I think you might find enlightening…”
“You hypocrite,” Ray bites back. “Acting like a couple followup meetings with the victim of a nasty Class 4 are anything but cordial. Does the name Dana Barrett mean anything to you?”
It’s a lucky thing that the street is deserted; Venkman jerks the car halfway into the next lane before he stops himself. Even once he manages to get their course back under control, the sting of Ray’s words in the back of his throat keep him from speaking; all he can do is work a tense muscle in his jaw, stare out at the dirty city block, and drive.
As a general rule, they do not talk about Dana Barrett.
Ray notices the line he stepped over in the second after he tread on it; the backtrack to cover his blunder feels like nothing so much as a second slap in the face.
“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for—just—I don’t understand why you of all people have such a problem with Christine! You’re the one who’s always encouraging me to date around, but when I take a friend up on an invitation to go out for lunch every once in a while, just to see how she’s doing, I get the silent treatment!”
Whatever spell was put on Peter to freeze his motormouth starts to loosen its grip then; enough, at least, for him to scoff out an unfriendly, “Friend.”
Ray punches the dashboard in frustration. “Yes, friend! And I don’t get what’s so hard for you to believe about that. I don’t want to have… have sex with her, but I like her, and I enjoy her company. Is that a crime? Or is it just inconceivable that I might have a friend who isn’t you?”
Not inconceivable, Peter wants to say, just inconvenient. When they first met, Ray had been so clumsy and timid that, though he had the disposition of a golden retriever and was more than easy on the eyes, it was hardly a stretch to say that Peter was his first—and closest—friend. Taken under Peter’s wing, he’d dropped most of the stuttering and the shyness by the time they’d graduated, but his social circle remained (until recently) quite limited, which suited Peter just fine. Oh, there was Egon, of course—but he didn’t count. Peter had introduced them. And Winston, but again, he was from work; these were mutual friends.
Only in the last few years had Ray really started seeking out a life separate from Peter entirely, emerging from his dorky chrysalis to become a goddamn social butterfly. His point to Peter over all of this, the one time when his bitchy comments about the development weren’t as thinly veiled as he’d assumed (the amount of alcohol-imbibing that had preceded the mess having, of course, everything to do with it), was simply that he’d thought Peter would be happy about it, having spent most of their college years urging him to cut loose. That was the last Peter had spoken of it, truth be told; for how could he admit now that his admonishments in the past had been empty bluster, and all he’d ever desired from Ray was the ability to keep him all to himself, forever?
The thing about Ray is, the thing that Peter’s noticed ever since he’s come into his own with the friendships and the social calls and the wine tastings (yes, really), is that for such a nice guy, he’s a cruel mistress. See, Peter’s observed Ray in the wild, the way he acts with these so-called “friends” of his, and he knows—it’s fake as hell. That’s the part that gets him about the whole situation, the insult to fucking injury. Ray goes out with these people and he forces himself to laugh at their jokes, and he nibbles their hors d'oeuvres, drinks their fucking wine, and he’s just generally so. very. nice, and then he has the nerve to call that friendship. Friendship, which is all he and Venkman will ever share. In a way, it’s what makes Peter crave the inevitable, bitchy blowouts like this one, because in these fights, Ray brings out a side of himself that Peter knows those fairweather buddies like Christine will never see, a side that belongs only to Peter. That’s how he knows that he and Ray have something special, a friendship that goes beyond Ray’s paltry definition of the term.
Look, he never claimed it was healthy.
“No, Ray, I believe you,” Peter says, shoulders slumping in defeat as he lazily flips his blinker. They’ve only just arrived, but he already feels somehow both drained and restless—maybe he should have let Spengs take the slack on this one, after all. “You’re a real friendly guy.”
The inside of the building smells, and not of sulfur. Or, Peter should say, not just of sulfur—the sulfur is, in point of fact, a strong, but ultimately forgivable contributing factor to the general eau de ew. You have to show a little compassion, with demonic possession; most of the general grossness isn’t really the victim’s fault, even if they get all pea soupy on you. The foot smell and BO, though, that’s not demonic. That’s a surcharge, Peter thinks, wrinkling his nose.
Beyond that, the interior of the attraction isn’t much to write home about. If you’ve seen one kitschy, fake-o haunted house, you’ve seen them all, and growing up as he did, Peter has seen the best of the best—and this money trap in uptown New York doesn’t have anything on a hand-painted plywood deathtrap only one step up from a hayride, made to be set up and taken down again over the course of a day in the rural midwest.
The exterior had been much the same. Sheepish and awkward after their fight, Ray had been the one to take his sweet time loading up on traps and strapping on his proton pack; he dawdled so long, in fact, that by the time he trudged reluctantly over to the entrance, Peter was already standing there with his hands on his hips, inspecting the flickering sign with his discerning eye.
“WUNDERLAND,” it read in big marquee letters. The W had been hung at a jaunty angle too artistic to have been an accident, and flickered in and out, rendering the apparent name “UNDERLAND” about half the time. Cheap.
“Ugh,” Ray shivers. Peter knows what comes next: this is the part where Ray attempts to bury the hatchet under meaningless pleasantries, and Peter lets him. It’s a sacred step in their ritual. “No matter how many real haunted houses I see, places like this still give me the creeps.”
“Eh,” Peter says, upholding his side of the bargain. “I got my first blowjob in a place like this. Sort of lost its intrigue after that.”
Actually, he gave his first blowjob on the fantastic mystery ride. He got his first blowjob on the ferris wheel, but who was keeping score?
Rolling his eyes to cover the involuntary chuckle, Ray gestures toward the entrance, moving lighter now that he’s been absolved of all sins. “Shall we?”
Peter gets there first, holding the door for Ray with a sweeping mock bow that, considering the weight of the pack on his back, is more impressive than it looks. How’s that for chivalry?
“After you, my dear Alphonse,” he says, and Ray gives a short, solemn bow back before traipsing inside.
Per instructions, the proprietress left the door unlocked and the place deserted, any would-be looters left to fend for themselves against the building’s demonic occupant. It doesn’t seem as if anyone has taken up the challenge; then, Peter thinks after a glance around, that kind of figures. There isn’t much of value to be seen that isn’t literally bolted down. The foyer spills out into a cramped hallway with four competing doors, all painted with fake blood, hypnotic spirals, and menacing warnings: “BEWARE,” “OPEN AT YER OWN RISK,” “ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE,” and, of course, “GIFT SHOP.”
The night keeps getting better and better; it's a maze.
“Oh, Wrexie?” Peter croons, glancing around hopefully. “Any chance you, uh, want to turn yourself in? Save us the trouble? Things’ll go easier for you…”
He waits a second; nothing. Damn it.
“’Course not.”
Ray pats him sympathetically on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Venkman. The night is young.”
“That’s what concerns me,” Peter grouses, but Ray has already flounced ahead, unbothered. He regards each of the ominous doors in turn.
“Given what we know, I’d bet money that the basement is the center of the infestation. That seems as good a place as any to start,” Ray says reasonably. Peter frowns.
“Great. So, uh, how do you suggest we find that? And if you even think the words splitting up, I’ll hit you.”
“Cheer up! According to the schematic—” It’s then that Peter notices the pages from the car, still lightly crumpled in Ray’s grip. He snorts in disbelief as Ray raises them to the light.
“Schematic? On every other job Janine has to fight to get directions out of these people, and this dinky haunt sent a schematic? Lemme see that.”
He makes a grab for the papers, not thinking of much more than course-correcting for Ray’s abysmal sense of direction and the need to witness the marvel of a helpful client with his own eyes. When Ray tries to hold them back with a reserved, “Um, Venkman…,” then it gets personal. He takes another swipe, brow furrowing when Ray keeps it out of his reach again.
“Jesus Christ, Ray,” Peter says, seconds before the outbreak of a full blown tussle. “Gimme!”
“No—” Ray manages from somewhere within a choke hold. “Just—trust me—”
“Kinda hard to do that,” Peter wheezes, taking an elbow to his gut as he scrabbles for purchase. “What’s on the paper? Ray.”
“It’s—nothing! Ah!” He makes another weak snatch for it before admitting defeat; Peter has finally come away victorious. Holding the incident report over Ray’s head, irritated at the effort it took, Peter unfolds the crumpled ball to see… a visa bill.
He flips the page over. Blank. Shuffles through the subsequent couple of pages. Blank. He looks at Ray.
Drained of color, Ray’s expression is pretty goddamn blank, too.
“Well, nothing was right,” Peter says dryly, shoving the pages, as Janine had, into Ray’s chest. “Ray? Explain.”
“There’s… no schematic,” Ray relents. “Here. I did see one!”
“When,” Peter grits out, and the look in his eye as he starts to piece it together must be downright homicidal, because Ray squeaks.
“Yesterday! I saw it… yesterday. When I was, ah, doing preliminary research for this case.”
Clarity washes over Venkman. Here’s the other benefit of a charlatan upbringing: when he sniffs out a rat, he does it with far more accuracy than is afforded poor, sheltered Ray Stantz.
“I knew it. I knew you’d never take a case like this without working your fanboy boxers in a twist.”
Already cringing, Ray sinks into himself even further, looking for all the world like a man who wants nothing more than to curl up into a ball and disappear. Well, too bad. There are to be no disappearances, spontaneous or otherwise, until Venkman gets his answers. He feels he’s owed that much, at least.
Leveling Raymond with an unimpressed stare and arms crossed in the universal language of “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed,” Venkman waits to be paid his dues.
“Look, I messed up, alright? I promised a rush job on this one, and I know you hate doing them. How was I supposed to know you’d volunteer?”
“Oh no, no, no—you do not get to pin this on me. You withheld information, buster. Did Spengs know?”
Ray hangs his head. “Spengler was the one who found the schematic. He wanted to tell you.”
“Yeah, I bet,” Peter snarls. “And our client?”
He already knows, but some nasty, vindictive part of him needs to hear it from Ray.
“She’s… a friend,” Ray admits, hanging his head. “I met her at a cocktail party last month, and she came to me a few days ago with this demon problem. I told her we’d help her out, but our schedule was already pretty tight…”
Perfect.
Peter doesn’t know why he’s mad, really. Anyone could have seen this coming.
Anyone but him, a treacherous voice in his head reminds him. If there’s one thing Peter really, really hates, it’s getting played, and his soft spot for Ray means he walked straight into this one. Turning around, Peter takes deep breaths until he can trust himself to speak again, then whirls back to jab Ray in the spot above his heart where he still clutches at the world’s most useless “schematic.”
“Okay. Here’s what you’re gonna do. First, you’re going to tell me everything you withheld about this case. Second, since we’re here, we’re going to bust this fucking ghost. And I don’t care what you told this friend of yours, we are not giving her the ‘friends and family’ discount. In fact, I’m tempted to charge double for emotional distress.” Ray gulps and nods in that kicked-dog way he has. He makes an aborted motion to turn away, but Peter catches him by the collar of his jumpsuit, reining him in. “Third, next time one of your good buddies needs a hand with a little infestation, you’re going to have them call their exterminator.”
Jesus, kid, Peter wants to say. He’s not even mad at Ray for this—not just Ray, at any rate. Can’t he see these people are taking advantage of his good nature? It makes Peter sick.
You know. Only he gets to take advantage of Ray like that, and so forth.
What he says instead is, “Or, hey, take care of it alone, it’s a free country. The point is, you think twice before endangering your real friends with this new secret keeping bullshit. And don’t come haunting me when it gets you killed.”
Having said his piece, Venkman pushes up his sleeves with a huff and looks meaningfully between Ray and the doors. Knowing better than to brave a response at their current juncture, Ray tries the knob for the one marked “YER,” and they wade in hostile tension through to the haunting proper.
True to Peter’s word, Ray gives a full report on what he gleaned from a few hours of quality time with the least-accessed microfilm in New York City. Apparently W/UNDERLAND has been in business since ‘79 (how exactly it stayed afloat on such basic thrills being a mystery truly worthy of the title), and its official lore claims that it grew out of an old soap factory, once rumored—but never proven—to melt down human remains along with animal fat. The factory fell on hard times, and after a couple of strange accidents that the owners went bankrupt trying to gloss over, they were forced to sell to some enterprising carnie barkers from New Hampshire. Of course, the real story was nothing so glamorous; according to Ray, a soap factory was the last thing the building could have been. Really, it was a warehouse that stored used furniture, and remained so until the furniture company moved overseas in ‘78—but the place next door had been a church that burned down under mysterious circumstances. As for Rxl, all Ray could dig up pointed to it being a New World entity, first contacted in the last hundred years or less, and not terribly powerful. The only entry on it greater than a footnote was a very, very sketchy source mentioning a “Rexelle” used in conjunction with some off-the-books CIA experiment with Russian spies in the 50’s—but even Ray takes that with a grain of salt.
In truth, the information is nothing special. At their heart of hearts, “haunted” houses and legitimate hauntings aren’t that different—if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Same shit, different day; same demon, different name. Really, the most disturbing part of the account for Peter by far is Ray’s flat delivery; far from cheering up halfway through the lecture on his favorite topic, Ray remains morose throughout, barely elaborating on even the most fanciful (and thus, the most exciting) bits of his story, and clamping his mouth shut the second he finishes.
It isn’t like Ray—Peter’s conscience is starting to itch with guilt. Plus, they’ve just gotten turned around for the third time on their way to the stairs (which is just like Ray), and there are only so many times Peter can contemplate the same diorama of a woman giving birth in a (gasp!) demon hospital, complete with Beelzebubs in surgical masks and some wriggling hellspawn emerging screaming from her bloody vagina before he loses all grip on reality.
Peter rarely apologizes, but the situation seems to call for it. Heaving a deep sigh, he does no small feat of soul searching, and says, “Ray, I’m wildly upset with your actions and not even remotely sorry for what I said, but your moping is inconvenient and annoying to me. Can you do me a favor and bottle it up already, please?”
Ray blinks. Peter blinks. It takes whole seconds for the reality of what Peter said to sink in, and then they find themselves gaping at each other—in that moment, it doesn’t even seem to occur to Ray to be angry, or hurt, so great is the abject disbelief at what he heard. Peter, too, is downright amazed; he puts a hand to his mouth in an emotion that is not horror, but is almost definitely its close cousin.
“Um,” he says. “I can explain?”
From deep within the bowels of the deceptively labyrinthine building, a resounding cackle echoes off the walls—the first sign since they got here that they really are dealing with some unearthly presence. Or maybe the second, Peter thinks, fingers still pressed to his lips, jaw slack.
“Gee, Venkman. Usually when you say that to me, it’s just subtext.”
“Yeah, yeah. Shut up for a second.” Peter thinks he’s onto something now. “My favorite color is green, closely followed by a nice brown. Not any brown, mind you—it’s specific. I like lasagna, but more than a reasonable amount. It was me who misplaced that deviled egg and got our entire dorm evacuated back in ‘71 because they thought there was a gas leak.”
Bingo.
“Hey, Ray. What do me and George Washington have in common?”
“What, besides the false teeth?” Ray rattles it off so quickly that Peter is forced to be begrudgingly impressed. Okay, if he can’t apologize without meaning it, then Peter will at least give him that one.
“You said that was our secret. What else?”
“You cannot tell a lie,” Ray says, and in a second, his face goes from deep concentration to an expression of unencumbered excitement. There he is. “This is great! Um, I mean, it’s bad, because it indicates a control over the environment we haven’t really accounted for. But besides that, it’s great! We’ve never seen a demon with this type of ability—we could write a paper!”
“Only you could say all that with a straight face,” Peter observes, and just like that, he’s back to drooling. If he had a notebook and some pom-pom tipped glitter pens, he’d be doodling Mrs. Ray Stantz with hearts for the As.
“Oh, oh—I want a turn! Um, Spengler wasn’t the one who forgot to do the dishes last week. He asked me to switch with him, and I forgot, and let him take the heat.” With open wonder, Ray beams at Venkman. “Cool!”
Playing along, Peter admits, “I like silk so much, I went out with three separate girls just to steal their underwear.”
He waggles his eyebrows lasciviously at Ray.
“I had a kleptomaniac phase in high school. I stole candy, library books, Marlboros… you name it.”
Peter stops with his eyebrows mid-wag; that one’s actually kind of impressive.
“Yeah, well, I—” he stops in his tracks, noticing for the first time a diorama that hadn’t caught his eye before. Inside it, mannequins in bad wigs and jumpsuits labeled “Spengler,” “Stantz,” and “Ramsey” hold rudimentary approximations of proton wands with multicolored pipe cleaners coming out the tips, all aiming at a crude mockup of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (not to scale). The arms of their suits, though missing most of the finer details of the Ghostbusters’ uniforms (they hadn’t even sprung for elbow pads—come on!), do have their own rendition of the “No Ghost” logo displayed front and center, as if there could otherwise be any doubt over what Peter is looking at here. “Did I say I was charging double? Scratch that. The second we get out of here, I’m filing a lawsuit.”
Ray bounds up ahead, too excited to pay heed to the threat that, just by voicing, Peter has all but guaranteed his intention to make good on.
“I—I really like Madonna!”
Peter pauses for a second. “Uh, yeah, we all pretty much figured that one out.”
Ray’s face falls a fraction. “Oh. Really? Well, I bet you don’t know this: when Zeddemore and I took that job out at Fort Detmerring, I—”
But however shocking, gross, or fundamentally mortifying Ray’s admission was gearing up to be, that’s one truth he’ll never unburden, for in that same moment, it all comes to a head.
Though he’d barely been aware of it as they spoke, the laughter Peter heard before had been rising steadily in volume, growing more real with every bald truth they’d forced themselves to tell. Now, with a whipping breeze and static in the air, it seems like whatever is in the building with them can take it no longer; with an underwhelming puff of blue smoke and a clap of thunder that’s much more impressive, something that looks halfway between a baby blue purse dog and a baby blue leprechaun materializes into being.
“Ah. Rxl, I presume?”
“Hey, you got it!” Ray says, entirely unconcerned with the storm clouds brewing around them. Fair enough—if you’ve seen one demon…
Rxl turns out to be a rude little bugger. No time for small talk or even genial threats with him (either one being enough to assuage Peter’s curiosity over whether or not the thing will speak like a Lucky Charms commercial, befitting its stature and cool “lounge lizard” style suit); it just keeps laughing as it snaps its fingers and throws Peter and Ray together telekinetically. They bounce off each other with some concussion, Peter starting a failed campaign to help Ray to his feet before the little devil materializes again, between them. It flicks Peter on the nose and laughs, and laughs. Rxl itself has a funny little bat nose; Peter is getting the feeling he’d like to rip it off of its funny little dog face.
The problem is, they’re coming at this completely unprepared. Oh, Peter and Ray had started with their proton throwers at the ready, but they’d then proceeded to reholster, all the better to have their hands free for that squabble in the hallway. Now, whenever they reach for the things, Rxl intercepts them before they get the chance, alternatively zapping them with lightning and just flinging them clear across the room.
Peter’s one hope—and it isn’t a promising one—is that it might eventually grow bored of tossing them like ragdolls and pick up a new sport better suited to getting captured. In the meantime, all he can do is try to inch over to Ray, who’s struggling like a cockroach against the weight of his proton pack, trapped with his vital organs exposed.
Rxl’s attacks—wonder of wonders—seem to be slowing down, and Peter just makes it to Ray before the next jolt of electricity knocks them separate again. He’s got his hand around Ray’s, and is hoisting him up—
—and then, suddenly, he’s heaving him through a pane of glass into a ghastly rendition of the crucifixion, and being pushed by a force he doesn’t understand toward the opposite wall.
It turns out to be surprisingly thin. Where Peter expects to collide with it and maybe feel a few of his ribs shatter on impact, it turns out he keeps going, until he’s finally located the stairs by crashing down them, and only at the bottom is he allowed to give in to the sweet relief of unconsciousness.
Peter awakens in what seems to be the hall of mirrors. Either that or he’s suffering from the dual ailments of an out of body experience and double (or, more accurately, quintuple) vision, and even as unlucky as he might be, that feels like too many afflictions for one person in one day. Tenderly, and with nothing better to do, Peter gets to his feet, faintly surprised when both legs seem to more or less support his weight, and neither arm protests too much when he bends them. Thank God for small miracles… though, now that Peter thinks about it, he’s not sure appreciation is first on his list of things he’d like to show God right now. Aren’t demons supposed to be His problem?
There’s something profoundly disturbing (he might have said humbling, but if there’s one thing Peter Venkman refuses to be against all rhyme or reason, it’s humbled) about looking into his own bruised face after that. The introspective irony isn’t lost on Venkman as he scans around and is met only with his own sad eyes, his own tired grimace; what was it he had said to Ray back in the car, again? A song he’d find enlightening….
Some knight he’s turning out to be.
Oftentimes, Peter feels vindicated by his failures. Hey, he said that he was no good candidate for this courtly bullshit, didn’t he? This is Peter putting others first. This is what comes from suffering in silence. The fact of the matter is, Peter’s just not cut out for taking scraps where he can get them; he’d rather have a stolen feast than be thrown an honest bone.
He pulls himself away from the pathetic image, unsure even in his own head whether or not this is really one of those times. What’s more important right now, what matters more to Peter than the cliched impulse he has to send his fist crashing into his own reflection, is Ray. And Ray, last Peter saw him, was languishing in the most heavy-handed metaphor possible for his own errant crisis of faith.
No telling what that could do to a man’s psyche.
Being blown back about twenty feet into the mirror maze by his overly enthusiastic fall from grace, Peter has a disorienting moment where he gets turned around and has to feel along the walls, inch by inch, to reach the stairs again. He’s in the dubious process of hyping himself up for the climb when his fair maiden himself comes barreling down the stairs toward him, calling out his name.
“Peter?”
Something in the oozing concern, when Peter is supposed to rescue Ray, sets Venkman’s teeth on edge.
“Yeah, I’m here. No need to yell.”
Unexpectedly, and with no small enthusiasm, Ray throws his arms around him in a tight embrace.
“Venky! Thank God you’re okay. Did you see—?”
“After I got pushed down a flight of stairs? Honestly, Ray, I didn’t see much.” He holds Ray out to arm’s length, squinting to take him in. “How ‘bout you? That hard head of yours holding up?”
He raps lightly at the crown of Ray’s skull; Ray rubs the spot, blushing, and shakes him off.
“Oh, I’m fine, now that I know you are. Honestly, I was so worried!”
Noble, Peter wants to scoff. So very noble. Venkman’s a failure, but Ray has always been a shoe-in for this courtly business, always putting others first, never paying mind to his own worldly concerns. Excommunicated or not, Venkman is just certain that the Vatican has a countdown set for the day Ray dies, so eager they are to make him a saint.
He’s not sure where this new anger is coming from; if it’s residual, or chronic, or even organically him at all. Bristling with irritation that he knows is unfounded, his last selfless fantasy dashed on so many pointless stairs, Venkman returns at last to the demon. They still have a job to do.
“Well, I found the basement,” he says, and without checking to see Ray follow, he trudges again into the secondary labyrinth of the mirror maze.
Ray follows. Near the stairs, all the mirrors had been perfect, or nearly enough so that it hadn’t mattered, but the deeper they get, the more imperfections, concavities and convexities—not to mention complexities—colored glass, and false windows get strewn in, until Peter can only vaguely recall what he really looks like without distortion. They walk in silence for a time, Ray conspicuously slowing down once every turn or two to check himself out in the funhouse mirrors, waving his hand with a not-unfounded trepidation that in one of the images they pass, his virtual self might fail to wave back.
“Trippy,” he observes, squatting down to inspect an inch-tall reflection of himself, trapped in a bump on the floor they’d almost tripped over. Getting up again, he puts a concerned hand on Venkman’s shoulder, worried again. “But Pete, are you sure you’re up for all this walking around so soon? We can take a breather, you know. No shame in it.”
“Hey, lay off me, will ya?” Venkman jerks his shoulder away from Ray’s light touch, fuming. “I’m not the one who got cut to ribbons after his best friend chucked him into a production of Antichrist Superstar. Why don’t you worry about that?”
There is a deep gash in Ray’s cheek where flying glass had caught him unawares, and several similar lacerations on his forearms, where he’d held them up trying to protect his face. True to form, Peter would bet money that Ray has yet to notice.
“Oh, come on. I know that wasn’t your fault!”
Unaired grievances and leftover tension from the unsatisfied previous fights aside, Peter knows now what’s rackling him about Ray’s demeanor. It’s fake. Fake, fake, fake. Fake, like his schematic map. Fake, like how he presents himself to all those false friends who are only interested in him because he’s something of a New York celebrity, and thus, a minor god of his own pantheon. Peter knows the real Ray, or he used to, and he knows now that every day, he gets less and less of him to himself.
This saccharine falsehood, scrubbed clean of all the ugliness and selfishness that endeared Ray to Peter in the first place—this, Peter cannot abide.
So he gets mad.
“You know what your problem is, Ray? You’re a phony.”
Ray, for a second, looks baffled. “What?”
“Yeah. A fake. And all these new people—all the Christines in your life—they don’t know it, but I do. You’re a fraud.”
There’s a second of hurt in Ray’s eyes, a second where he doesn’t seem to understand. Then the second is over, and Ray rises to the occasion.
Somewhere very far away, a familiar laugh starts deep in the walls.
“I’m a fraud? That’s rich, coming from you. You lure people in and—and use them up! I can’t even begin to describe how many times I’ve seen it happen!”
Nerves alighting, one by one, Venkman can’t seem to decide whether he wants to give Ray a wide berth, the better to circle around him like a jungle cat, or if he can bear anything less than the closest proximity imaginable. He settles for taking one step in, putting him just within range to prod his fair lady in the chest.
“No, no. Whatever I’ve done, I know what I am. You,” prod, “you believe your own publicity, my friend.”
“What you are,” Ray scoffs. “I know a few words for what you are, I can tell you that!”
Peter’s eyes flare, and he grins horribly. Without either of them realizing it, a verifiable windstorm has broken out in the hall of mirrors, further obscuring their ugly visages and forcing them to shout to be heard over the maelstrom. It’s a cyclone, an ouroboros, chasing itself around and around, and Peter and Ray are at the center of it all.
“Oh, yeah? Lay ’em on me,” he taunts.
“You’re… easy! Promiscuous!”
Peter’s so up in Ray’s face now that they’re practically nose-to-nose, and he smirks.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m the Whore of Babylon, baby. Tell me another one.”
And Ray looks like he might, but he never gets the chance. Venkman takes it from him.
It’s called a chivalric romance, but when Peter smashes Ray’s mouth to his, he’s not feeling very chivalrous at all.
He’s pulled Ray in, gripping him tight around both biceps and kissing him just as hard. For the first few seconds, Ray is too shocked to move; there’s a brief, incredible moment when Peter thinks Ray might be kissing him back, and then, inevitably, he’s pulling away in disgust, eyes murderous in a way that Peter’s never seen them.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Like he said, vindication is often more important to Venkman than happiness. Incredibly satisfied for a man who just ruined his own life, Peter wipes slobber off his chin with the back of his glove.
“Hey, you said it yourself—I’m easy. And since we’re both just about guaranteed to die here anyway…” He shrugs. “What can I say? I’ve always wanted to do that.”
It’s in about this moment that Rxl itself materializes again, spinning and spinning in the tornado of glass and mirrors. All around, pieces of Peter and Ray in minutiae glitter off shining shards of sea glass, eyes reflecting mouths reflecting questionable stains on their jumpsuits, ad nauseum. They don’t seem to notice.
They only have eyes for each other.
Rxl, too, is content to watch now, its never-ending cackle the backdrop to the pointed barbs flung like so many broken mirrors. If it had been a modern beast, or a little more on the (bat-shaped) nose, it might have materialized a popcorn bucket with which to sit back and enjoy the show. Alas, demons tend toward unknowledgeable in the realm of human affairs, and lag decades behind in their visual gags.
Ray grips his own hair in both hands, pulling until it sticks out at every angle. If he had the space, he might have been pacing the floor; anything to put some distance between himself and Venkman.
“Shut up, shut up! You don’t get to say that, Venkman, not to me. Don’t you get it? I’m not one of those floozies you use up and throw away. I’m supposed to be different!”
Peter wants Ray to look at him. He grabs Ray by the arm, but whatever he does, he can’t quite catch his eye.
“You are different. You don’t think this means you’re different? You’re special.”
“Special like Jennifer? Like, like Reagan? Or Annie? Sylvia? Meg? You forget, but I’ve been right here through all of it. Now you have the nerve to pull the same crap on me?” There’s a decision reached in Ray’s eyes then, a split second warning before he’s rearing back with all his strength and tackling Peter to the floor. “No! I won’t let you!”
The eye of the storm retreats a little into the elliptical, as if Peter and Ray grappling on the floor is a spreading muck it doesn’t want to get on its nice shoes. Eerily, Rxl’s laugh can no longer be heard over the thousand shattering panes; where it sits atop its mess, the little demon’s gaze is enrapt, and oddly, scarily calm.
“You’re—forgetting something crucial, Ray,” Peter manages as Ray throws his weight to flip them over. He looks up directly into Ray’s face, blood dripping from his nose, and though Peter is by all accounts losing this fight, it feels like a win when he says, “Remember? I cannot tell a lie.”
All color drains out of Ray’s face. He sits where he is, frozen, face barely inches from Peter’s once again, and it feels like victory. The pyrrhic kind is the only one Venkman’s ever known.
“That’s right. I love you.” The words are a weapon on Peter’s tongue, corruption of the worst, last, and most deadly kind. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you—”
“No, you don’t,” Ray protests, rage welling in his eyes until it threatens to spill over. “I don’t believe you.”
“I do, Ray, I love you, I love you, I love—”
“Stop it! If you know what’s good for you, Venkman, you’ll stop,” Ray warns, rising unsteadily to his feet now. He unholsters his neutrona wand and holds it in shaking hands before him, like a shield between himself and the reality of Venkman’s confession.
“I love you, I love you,” the tell-tale signs of the pack coming to life buzz in Peter’s ears now, and all he can say is, “I love you, I love you, I love—uh, Ray? Now might be good.”
For a second there, the twin lights of fury and intent in Ray’s eyes had been a bit too realistic, and Peter caught himself afraid, for the first time, that he’d miscalculated, landing them on wildly (and fatally) different pages. Then, in the next turn, Ray’s expression forms an embarrassed little “Oh!” for the second time that evening, and, blushing, he twists to fire his special pipe cleaners at the great and terrible demon Rxl.
It lets out the most vicious wail Peter thinks he’s ever heard when Ray ensnares it, but by then, there’s nothing it can do. Demon, ghost—after a little adjustment, the packs work the same. With no small measure of relief, Peter throws the trap, and in a matter of seconds, the least of their problems disappears in an inverted pyramid of light.
This leaves just Peter and Ray in the wreckage of the mirror maze.
They stare at each other for a long time, panting hard and exhausted. Then, by unspoken agreement, they set to putting themselves together again, any discussions of what had happened between them best left until they are at least breathing the smoggy air of the city proper once more.
Ray gives Peter a hand to his feet, and seems to hold it a second too long before dropping his grip like he touched the hot stove. Practically all the mirrors having been destroyed in the cyclone, there isn’t much of a maze left, which makes reaching the stairs, at least, easy enough. By the top of them, all of Peter’s bumps and bruises have caught up to him; falling into Ray, an arm slung around his shoulder, doesn’t set his nerves alight so much as it seems downright necessary for survival. By the time they’ve limped in circles long enough to discover the exit by pure coincidence, it would hardly be a stretch to say that supporting each other’s weight is the only thing keeping either of them upright.
Every path out, according to what little Ray remembers from the schematic, leads through the giftshop. Peter pockets a pair of Hypno-Glasses™ and figures he’s earned them—emotional distress.
On the street, as they expend the last of their effort to help each other out of their packs, Peter slips on the goggles and looks at Ray with a deliberately goofy expression.
“So,” he says, “kleptomaniac, huh? That’s pretty funny—I never woulda guessed.”
Ray snorts, taking the glasses off Peter’s face just to fiddle with the arms.
“Oh, yeah. But what about the part where you wear ladies’ underwear?”
They smile at each other in hopeful uncertainty for a moment, and then each of them individually feels the other shoe drop. It’s not as poetic the second time around.
“About the debriefing. How much of tonight do you think we can stand to ix-nay before it interferes with scientific discovery?”
Ray looks faintly pained for a moment. “To tell you the truth, Peter, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one report that mysteriously went missing among our files.”
Peter smiles, and it feels serene. “I’m at peace with that,” he says.
“Peter…”
Peter had just turned to circle the car, ready to settle, heavy and tired, into the driver’s seat again. Get them home safe, let Ray handle Rxl’s eternal reward in the oblivion of their containment unit. If not for all the vivid, horrifying details he hasn’t yet gotten the chance to try to scrub his mind of, it’d be like nothing had changed from the time they set out, hours before—all that Peter wants in the world is his hot shower and to sink into that couch that’s calling his name.
Except, he turns back at Ray’s call, and that hot shower is not all that he wants. Before he knows what to do with himself, Ray’s hand is on his cheek, and their mouths meet. Gently. Ray pulls back just as soon as he leans in, but he was there. Peter knows he was.
He can’t make sense of it.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” he says, stunned. “What was that for?”
“Well, it’s only fair, isn’t it?” Ray asks, innocent. “It sounded like you’ve had all this worked out for years. I only found out tonight.”
“Oh,” Peter says. “That makes sense.”
And before he knows it, his hands are in Ray’s hair, and his back is pressed to the Ectomobile, and he’s kissing him.
And he’s kissing him.
And he’s kissing him.