When you think about Cassie not living with you anymore how does that make you feel When I think about Cassie never returning to me it makes me sad.
Waking up in the evening isn’t exciting anymore now that I know I won’t be seeing her face.
So you’re into her, is what I’m hearing
Absolutely not. I am NOT “into her.”
I just like her drawings.
And her everything.
Oh this is gonna be good
Sam lived in a part of town that was popular among young professionals who had tiny little purebred dogs and worked sixty hours a week at their jobs in the Loop.
Visiting Sam and Scott in their second-floor brownstone apartment usually reminded me of what a colossal failure I was in most areas of my life. And staying with them after fleeing Frederick’s apartment was supremely awkward.
For one thing, sharing one small bathroom with two guys—even guys as neat and tidy as Sam and Scott—was not ideal. I didn’t have quite enough time to myself in there in the mornings, and because they were a lot hairier than I was, the bathtub drain was twenty-five percent grosser than strictly necessary. For another, their cats Sophie and Moony, while adorable, liked to walk on me in the night as I tried to sleep on the living room couch.
For yet another, Sam and Scott were newlyweds in every sense of the word. Their walls were regrettably thin. Sam was loud. Bunking in the living room gave me a front-row seat to their nightly sex-having, a punishment no one deserved. Least of all me, Sam’s best friend since the sixth grade.
As bad as living with a vampire who hid being a vampire from me had been, living with newlyweds—even for just two days—might have been worse.
“Good morning,” Sam said, yawning, as he left his bedroom. He was sporting a huge purple hickey on his neck. I was pretty sure I’d heard every second of the hickey-giving process the previous night. God, I wished I hadn’t.
“Morning.” I pushed back the quilt I’d slept under and rubbed my eyes. I was exhausted. Between all the sex happening in the next room, Moony’s penchant for getting soft white fur on my pillow, and Sam’s lumpy couch, sleep had been elusive the past two nights. But I didn’t want Sam to know that. The accommodations might be lacking in several very key respects, but he and Scott were still doing me a huge favor.
And neither of them had asked any probing questions about why I was there when I’d shown up two nights ago. I was grateful for that.
Sam pulled out the box of oatmeal from the pantry and asked, his back still to me, “What are your plans for the day?”
I didn’t know if that was a passive-aggressive comment on my still sleeping on his couch two days after showing up with none of my stuff and no explanations. It felt like one, though. In an hour he’d be leaving in his slacks and button-down shirt, ready for another day as a law firm associate—and I’d still be semi-homeless and as unsure of my next move as ever.
I looked away, fidgeting with the fringe of the quilt still covering my legs.
“I’m going to the recycling center today.”
That was part of the truth, anyway. Sam didn’t need to hear the rest of it—which was that before heading to the recycling center I planned to watch a few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For research—or so I told myself. The show had to be wildly inaccurate when it came to vampiric details, but after two days of processing what had happened with Frederick the other night, my panic over the situation was fading. And my curiosity was growing.
What was it like to be an immortal who drank human blood? Did Frederick’s heart beat? What were the rules governing how he lived and ate . . . and died? It wasn’t much, but without getting back in touch with Frederick himself, Buffy was about all I had for guidance. It had to be a more accurate representation of vampires than Twilight or those old Anne Rice novels, right? Plus, it was an enjoyable show.
The fact that Buffy also showed romantic human–vampire relationships had absolutely nothing to do with my interest, of course. Neither did the fact that I hadn’t been able to get Frederick’s pleading eyes, or his assurances that he would never hurt me, out of my head since the morning I first woke up on Sam’s sofa.
“The recycling center, huh?” Sam’s back was still to me as he rummaged through the cupboards for a saucepan.
“Yeah,” I said. “I need to get cracking on my art show submission.” Since running out of Frederick’s apartment, my idea of a pastoral scene that incorporated bits of disposable plastic was beginning to take shape in my mind. But I still needed to think through some of the finer details. What colors would work best for the decaying manor house I’d be painting? Should the field in front of the house abut a lake or a stream?