Olivier-Land

"Well if you make it on the team, I'll go to every single game you play in and I'll cheer for you," Natalie promised. She gave him a quick peck on the cheek. "That's what best friends are for."

She heard him sigh when he realized what she wanted to do and giggled. He seemed resigned to his fate though, and he tugged her toward the house. "Gabi wouldn't go in. She absolutely refused," she said with delight.

Stepping onto the porch made Natalie shiver with excitement. "What if it really is haunted?" she asked, grinning.

Natalie also thought it was lucky that Landon was not her sister, otherwise kissing him like that would have been extremely awkward. She gave Landon's hand a light squeeze, then opened the door and went inside, with him very close behind her.

There wasn't much inside. There were very few pieces of furniture, and whatever was in there was covered in dust. It didn't look very haunted, yet. She took a few steps inside, the floorboards creaking beneath her feet.

"What do you reckon, start upstairs or down here?" she asked, not quite sure where she wanted to go first. "Do you think there's a basement?"

Natalie was confused when Landon started carving into the wall, but when she saw what he had done, she thought her heart may have completely melted. "We're just like the alphabet," she giggled, running her fingers over the letters. She hadn't noticed before, but it was a funny coincidence.

"Let's go look upstairs," she said, tugging him gently toward the staircase.

She climbed it carefully, just in case it couldn't support a lot of weight, although it seemed to handle it fine. The second floor was smaller than the first, it had only a few rooms. One of them looked to be a bathroom, another a bedroom, and then an office of some kind.

To make it more interesting, Natalie decided it would be fun to split up and poke around. "You take the office, I'll take the bedroom and bathroom," she said. She gave herself two rooms to investigate, since the office had far more stuff in it than the other rooms.

The bathroom was uneventful. There wasn't anything in the bin, and it wasn't stocked with any toiletries at all, not even a toothbrush. She quickly moved on to the bedroom; it was clear that there wasn't anything to see in the bathroom.

She floorboards up here creaked just like the ones on the main floor. It added to the haunted house feel that the old structure had. The bedroom was nearly as empty as the bathroom; it had only a bed, a bedside table that was adorned with a large lamp, and a tall, wooden wardrobe. There was a slightly ajar window on the wall opposite the wardrobe, framed by limp, lifeless, grey curtains.

A faint sound, almost like a fluttering, drew her towards the wardrobe. Her hand was shaking from adrenaline as she reached out and took the handle. She took a deep breath, then pulled.

Something small and black shot out just above Natalie's head, causing her to scream and jump backward, accidentally running into the little table and knocking the lamp to the floor with a crash.

She glanced over her shoulder just in time to see a bird slip through the open window. She sighed in relief that it hadn't been something that wanted to eat her. Looking down at the mess, she sighed. "Oops..."

Natalie stepped cautiously around the shattered glass and wrapped her arms tightly around Landon, in a bit of shock from the sudden "bird attack".

"I'm fine," she mumbled. She desperately needed to slow her heartbeat. Maybe hugging Landon wasn't the best idea...

She released her grip on him and took a few calming breaths. "It was just a bird," she explained. "It flew out when I opened the wardrobe and it scared me."

She wondered how long the bird had been in there. It couldn't have been too long, or it would have been dead, but this house was definitely abandoned. Had someone been there not too long before them?

"Should we clean up or something?" she asked. She couldn't remember seeing a broom or anything downstairs, so she wasn't quite sure what to do.

Landon's kiss was the opposite of calming for Natalie; it made her heart race even faster, not that she minded much.

"Well that's something else we have in common, I don't want me to hurt myself either," she said with a wink. "Did you find anything interesting in the office?" she asked, leaving the room (and avoiding a few pieces of glass that had traveled into the hallway) and going to where Landon had been before her little accident.

Natalie shrugged. She still wanted to check it out. Like the bedroom and the bathroom, the office was scant with furniture. One wall held a bookcase, another, a desk, and a threadbare rug lay in the middle of the floor. The desk looked most promising, so Natalie decided to start there.

She rustled through the top few drawers and found nothing of interest, but in the bottom drawer, beneath a pile of old papers, sat a small, leather-bound book with a brass lock on the front. "Do you know what this is?" she asked excitedly, pulling it out of the drawer. "This is a diary!"

She tried to open it, but it was tightly locked. She'd have to wait until she got back to her house to ask her mother to open it for her. Hugging the book to her chest, she returned to Landon's side, completely satisfied with the house for now. She didn't know what to say, so she just smiled contentedly at Landon.

"No, I think we're done," Natalie said with a smile.

Just for fun, she gave him a light whack on the arm with the diary, then transferred the book to her other hand and slipped her hand into his.

"What do you want to do now?" she asked. They had already covered everything that she wanted to show him.

Natalie returned Landon's kiss and felt her heart flutter. She was pretty sure that most best friends didn't act like that, but she found that she didn't mind a single bit. She laughed when he started to pull her out of the house, since normally it was her who did the pulling. "What's so special about the grass part?" she asked.

Natalie pretended to be exasperated. "Fine," she fake grumbled. "We can do what you want... but just this once!"

She stuck close by his side with their hands clasped together until they made it to the lawn in front of the possibly-haunted-but-probably-not house. "Is it a surprise? Should I close my eyes?" she asked, withdrawing her hand from his grasp and clasping them both over her eyes so she couldn't see. "Hey, that rhymed," she giggled.

She wasn't sure she knew what was happening; one minute, she was standing, the next, she was flat on her back. She was a little disoriented, but she was lucid enough to recognize that she was being kissed. She opened her eyes when Landon told her she could.

"You pounced on me! I cannot believe you just pounced on me!" she laughed, shaking her head slightly from side to side before reaching up to kiss him once again. "I swear, you're almost as much of a danger to me as I am to myself."

Natalie gave her eyes an exaggerated roll. "You go ahead and think that," she said, then stuck her tongue out at him playfully.

She gave his shoulder a light push and made him roll off of her and onto his back beside her. She scooted closer to him, still laying down, and looked up at the vibrant blue sky. It was dotted with puffy white clouds that Natalie loved to figure out the shapes of.

"That one looks like a duck," she said, pointing upwards at the cloud she was looking at.