Chapter6
1584 Words
Adrian
The apartment became quieter after she left.
It should have been a relief.
I stood in the bedroom doorway and listened to the distant sounds of Mason scraping ruined food into the trash while Oliver lectured him on the difference between cooking and combustion.
Ordinary noise.
Familiar noise.
Safe noise.
None of it held my attention.
The room had changed overnight.
That was the problem.
Golden lights glowed above the opposite bed, weak against the morning sun but stubbornly warm. A worn purple quilt covered the mattress. Books filled shelves that had stood empty for years, their bright spines interrupting the careful neutrality of the room.
Her scent remained everywhere.
Lavender soap. Coffee. Paper. Something faintly sweet beneath it all that I could not name and had no desire to name.
I had shared rooms with humans before. Dozens of them. Men who snored, shouted into telephones, left sweat-soaked clothes on the floor, and stumbled home drunk enough to mistake my bed for their own. I had endured each arrangement until discomfort or instinct drove them away.
Humans sensed predators even when their minds could not identify them.
They slept poorly near me. Became irritable. Restless. Uneasy.
Eventually, they asked to move.
Evangeline had slept through the night.
I had heard the gradual slowing of her heartbeat shortly after midnight. The shift of blankets. The soft catch in her breathing when a dream disturbed her. Then stillness.
No fear.
No instinctive awareness that something dangerous occupied the bed across from hers.
I had not slept at all.
I crossed the room, intending to open the window.
That was all.
Fresh air would clear the lingering scent. The room would become tolerable again, and by evening, housing would have contacted her with a sensible reassignment.
I stopped beside her bed.
The purple quilt looked even older in daylight. Several stitches had loosened near one corner, and one patch had been worn nearly transparent. The fabric carried traces of dust, detergent, and something faded by years.
Grief.
I recognized that scent.
It clung to objects the living could not bring themselves to discard.
My gaze moved toward the framed photograph on her desk. A red-haired woman smiled into the sunlight, her features echoed unmistakably in the daughter who had placed her there.
I looked away.
I had no interest in her life.
No interest in the few clothes hanging in the closet or the textbooks stacked with reverent care. No interest in why a nineteen-year-old scholarship student had arrived with everything she owned packed into one suitcase.
I especially had no interest in the memory of her walking into the kitchen in sleep shorts.
My body disagreed.
The reaction had been immediate, unwanted, and shamefully human.
Bare legs.
Sleep-warmed skin.
A pulse beating steadily beneath the fragile line of her throat.
I had spent more than two centuries mastering myself. Hunger was an inconvenience. Desire, when I allowed it, was deliberate and brief. Nothing touched me without permission.
Yet one glimpse of Evangeline half-awake and unaware had unsettled me enough that Mason had nearly burned down the suite before I noticed the flame.
Absurd.
I reached for the window latch.
Her scent strengthened as I moved, concentrated in the small space between her bed and desk.
My fangs pressed painfully against my gums.
I froze.
Not hunger.
I knew hunger.
This was something else.
Something sharper moved beneath my skin, an instinct without language or reason. It surged when I pictured her running alone across campus, distracted and late, surrounded by strangers who did not know how easily she could be hurt.
The thought came without warning.
Mine.
It struck me like a fist to the sternum.
I recoiled so violently that the desk chair scraped across the floor.
“No.”
The word sounded harsh in the empty room.
I gripped the edge of the desk until the wood groaned beneath my fingers.
Mine was ownership.
Mine was blood and chains and a hand around the back of my neck while someone else decided what my life would become.
Mine was a word used by monsters.
I had spent two hundred and twenty-three years refusing it.
Evangeline Harper belonged to no one.
Certainly not me.
I forced my fingers to loosen and stared at the shallow dents I had left in the wood.
This was proximity. Nothing more.
Her presence had disrupted old habits. Her scent was unfamiliar. Her heartbeat was too close at night. Any predator would react to an unexpected variable within its territory.
That explanation was rational.
It was also a lie.
I had lived among millions of humans.
None had ever done this.
The bedroom door opened behind me.
Oliver stepped inside, took in the displaced chair and my grip on the desk, then looked toward the open window.
“You all right?”
“Yes.”
His gaze lingered on the damaged wood. “You’re crushing the furniture.”
I released it. “It’s poorly constructed.”
“It survived Mason.”
“That proves nothing.”
Oliver leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. He had always been too observant. Most humans filled silence because they feared it. Oliver used silence to gather information.
His eyes moved toward Evangeline’s bed.
“She changes the room.”
I followed his gaze despite myself. “Yes.”
“Not a criticism.”
“I didn’t assume it was.”
Oliver looked at me. “You usually do.”
From the kitchen, Mason shouted, “WHO USED MY GOOD SPATULA?”
Oliver closed his eyes briefly. “He owns one spatula.”
“It is not good.”
“I know.”
He started to leave, then paused. “Housing called.”
My attention snapped toward him. “And?”
“They confirmed the assignment.”
The room seemed to become smaller.
“For how long?”
“The semester.”
“That’s unacceptable.”
“They said there are no vacancies. She’s a scholarship priority, and this was the last registered bed.”
I looked toward the opposite side of the room.
Warm lights. Purple quilt. Romance novels. A photograph turned partly toward the wall.
“She won’t stay,” I said.
Oliver considered me. “You seem very certain.”
“Humans don’t stay.”
Something changed behind his eyes, but he only nodded.
“No,” he said quietly. “Usually they don’t.”
Then he left. I remained alone.
From the bathroom came Mason’s voice.
“...Uh.”
I closed my eyes.
“What now?” Oliver called from the kitchen.
“I found something.”
A beat of silence.
“It isn’t another fire, is it?”
“...No.”
I stepped into the hallway just as Oliver reached the bathroom.
Mason stood frozen in the doorway.
Between two fingers, held as far away from his body as physically possible, was a bright raspberry-pink bra.
He looked at us with complete sincerity.
“I don’t know the protocol.”
Oliver blinked once.
“You found... a bra.”
“I know what it is.”
“You sounded less certain.”
“I’ve never found one in my bathroom before.”
“Our bathroom,” Oliver corrected.
“Our bathroom,” Mason agreed. Then he looked back down at the bra as if it had materialized out of thin air.
“I think she forgot it.”
Neither of us answered.
Mason cleared his throat.
“So...”
“What?” I asked.
He lifted it another inch.
“Do I take it to her?”
“No.”
“Leave it on her bed?”
“No.”
“Text her?”
“You don’t have her number.”
“Right.”
He frowned.
“So what do I do?”
Oliver sighed with the patience of a man who had accepted long ago that this was somehow his life.
“It was hanging over the shower rod.”
“Yeah.”
“So...”
Oliver gently took it from Mason’s hand.
“...put it back where you found it.”
He stepped into the bathroom and draped it neatly over the towel bar.
“There.”
Mason stared into the bathroom.
“Crisis averted.”
“No,” I said quietly.
“Crisis postponed.”
Both of them looked at me.
Neither understood what I meant.
It wasn’t the bra.
It was what it represented.
Yesterday, this suite had smelled like cedar soap, coffee, laundry detergent, and three hockey players.
Today...
Lavender body wash stood beside my shampoo. A pink toothbrush rested in the holder. A purple quilt occupied the other half of our room. Fairy lights glowed against gray walls. Romance novels filled an empty bookshelf. A bright pink mug now traveled somewhere across campus. And a forgotten bra hung in our bathroom.
Tiny things. Ordinary things. Evidence. Evangeline Harper wasn’t visiting. She was settling in.
I had lived among humans for more than two centuries. Roommates came and went. Professors retired. Neighbors moved. Nothing ever stayed. Nothing was supposed to.
Yet somehow, after less than twenty-four hours, this apartment already looked less like mine and more like ours.
The thought tightened something painfully beneath my ribs.
I hated it.
Because if she stayed... The room would change. Our routines would change. My carefully ordered existence would change.
And despite everything I told myself— Some part of me had already begun making room for her. That was the most dangerous thing of all.
- Writer
