Page 40 of My Roommate Is a Vampire

Mother

Hey Freddy

Whats with the packages

They are from Esmeralda Jameson.

I do not want them.

Shes still sending you stuff?

Yes.

I have asked her to stop, to no avail.

Mother refuses to intervene.

She thinks it’s a GOOD thing.

So you’re giving them to me?

The ones I think you’ll enjoy, yes.

One of us might as well get use out of them.

What am I going to do with a cross-stitch that says “Home Sweet Home” made from what looks smells and tastes like human entrails, Freddy

Why did you think I’d want this

I thought it matched your decor, Reginald.

Okay, that’s fair

Frederick was already at a table in the back when I arrived at Gossamer’s, taking in his surroundings with the dazed, wide-eyed wonder one might expect from a tourist visiting an exotic location halfway around the world.

He always looked good, but even by his own standards he looked like an absolute snack. A single dark lock of his hair fell beautifully over his forehead like he’d sprung fully formed from the pages of one of his Regency novels. Seeing him sitting ramrod-straight in his chair, wearing a three-piece suit that fit like he’d had it tailor-made, I began to doubt the wisdom of us meeting in public after all. Because other people were also noticing how good he looked. Two women wearing Northwestern University sweatshirts and drinking coffee at the table beside his kept stealing surreptitious glances in his direction.

A strange, unfamiliar possessiveness I neither recognized in myself nor liked swept through me.

What if one of those women started hitting on him?

I bumped their table a little as I breezed by them, telling myself it was purely accidental.

Frederick held my gaze as I approached him. His thick, long eyelashes were just as wasted on a man now as they’d ever been.

In truth, it wasstrangeseeing him here. This was the first time we’d interacted outside of the apartment, and until now I hadn’t realized how much I’d come to think of him as a fixture of the lavish place where he lived. Seeing him outside of it was as jarring as seeing a flamingo on the El.

His gaze slid over me, nose twitching a little when his eyes fell on my awkwardly bandaged left hand. Could hesmellthe cut on my hand? I didn’t want to think about it.

His brow furrowed. “What happened to you?”

I hid my injured hand behind my back.

“It’s nothing.” It was the truth. That afternoon’s trip to the recycling center had been productive, in the sense that I found several usefully large pieces of scrap I wanted to take back with me the next time I had access to Sam’s car. But on my way out I snagged my hand a little on the jagged underside of an old bicycle seat. It barely even rose to the level of a bad paper cut, and it stopped bleeding almost immediately—but the guy working there had freaked, babbling about tetanus risk and liability. He insisted on bandaging me up before letting me go.

I’d been such a tangle of nerves on my way over, I’d forgotten to take off the bulky padded bandage and swap it for a more appropriately sized Band-Aid.

“It doesn’t look like nothing,” Frederick countered, still staring at me. He sounded genuinely concerned. “Show me.”