Page 114 of My Roommate Is a Vampire

As I approached he looked up and gave me a bright smile.

“You’re here.”

“I am,” I agreed. I took his hand and gave it a squeeze. “How was your day?”

He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “It was fine. Boring. I spent most of it tied up in communication with our realtor, who seems to think we should be able to close on our new home by the end of next month.” He paused. “The rest of the day was spent listening to Reginald wax amorously about his accountant.”

A group of students from my afternoon welding class passed by. They waved at me, and I waved back at them, smiling. It was still so hard to believe I was in this job, with students who respected me and wanted to hear what I had to say.

When I turned back to Frederick, he was looking at me with an expression so heated it was almost inappropriate, given that we were not only at my place of employment but also in front of a whole bunch of kids.

“Reginald has an accountant?” I asked, pushing the strap of my bag up a little higher on my shoulder. “Really?”

“So it would appear.”

“Why?”

“It takes a lot of expertise to manage wealth that began accruing two hundred years ago.” He gave me a lopsided smile. “Reginald has never had a head for business—that should be no surprise—but over the years he has amassed a fortune more than large enough to subsidize his lifestyle. Anyway, it appears he has become infatuated with his veryhumanaccountant, which has led to all the problems you might imagine and quite a few you probably cannot.”

He was likely right about that. “Let’s not talk about Reginald anymore,” I suggested. I nodded down the hill the fine arts building perched on, towards the small man-made lake sitting in the center of Harmony’s campus and the path that circled it. My impression of it when I interviewed here a year earlier—that it was probably a popular place to go walking when the weather was nice—turned out to be accurate. It was a favorite place to gowalking at lunchtime, after lacrosse games, and on Friday afternoons. “Go for a walk with me?”

It was warm for early December, and I wanted to spend a little more time outside enjoying it before going back home. The overcast sky wouldn’t make things too uncomfortable for Frederick, who was recovered enough from his century of accidental slumber to be able to handle daytime excursions provided there was adequate shade. Besides, it was four o’clock on a December day in Chicago; the sun wouldn’t be up for much longer either way.

To my surprise, Frederick hesitated, a pained look flitting across his face.

“What is it?” I asked, concerned.

“Nothing.” He shook his head, then schooled his features into a semblance of his normal expression. He squeezed my hand. “A walk around the lake sounds lovely.”

The path was more crowded than usual for a Tuesday, with clusters of students and even some people unaffiliated with Harmony enjoying the unseasonably mild weather with a lakeside stroll. While walking around campus was usually one of our favorite midweek activities—Frederick’s ability to be awake during the day for longer stretches was something he liked taking advantage of—the walk didn’t seem to have lessened his earlier agitation. He visibly startled every time a particularly rambunctious group of students passed us on the path, and the fingers of the hand I wasn’t holding drummed a constant staccato beat against his right thigh.

When Frederick nearly jumped out of his skin at the approach of a duck quacking noisily at something it must have seen in the grass, I stopped walking and tugged on his hand.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“What?” His eyes were on the duck, who was now waddling its noisy way back into the water. “Nothing’s wrong. Why would you think something was wrong?”

His voice was half an octave higher than usual, the words spoken at nearly twice his normal rate of speech.

“Just a guess,” I said, peering at him.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said again. His jaw worked as he stared down at his feet, at the water, at the clouds in the sky. “I promise. Shall... shall we keep walking?”

The last time I had seen him this agitated was when we’d talked about moving into a new apartment together. One that didn’t feel like it was only his. One that didn’t carry with it the bad associations of the century he’d spent too incapacitated to notice the world around him.

Something was definitely on his mind.

“Whatever it is,” I said in as gentle a voice as I could, “you can tell me.”

He closed his eyes on a shuddering sigh.

“There’s something I would like to ask you.”

He shoved his hand deep into the pocket of his slacks. When he pulled it out again, in his hand was a small velvet box.

My heart stopped.

“I don’t have the right to ask you to stay with me forever,” he said. His voice had recovered its normal cadence and pitch. I wondered if he was starting a speech he had practiced during my long hours away from the apartment the past few months, since I started my new job here. “But I never said I wasn’t a selfish man. Or that I was a good one, for that matter.”

---