Page 52 of By the Pint

Dima? This is Dima’s room.He breathed out a tremendous sigh, and brought a closed fist up, hovering it inches from the metal, as though he was about to knock.

My mind raced with what I’d say to him should he knock, or should I simply open the thing, but there was no need. A moment later, he ran his other hand through his hair, blew out another breath, and turned on his heel, picking up his gym bag, and disappearing down the corridor.

I wilted against the inside of the door, slipping down it like a wet sponge on a bathroom wall. The noise that escaped my throat was more squeegee than sponge.

“You still there, D?” Goldie said.

“Physically,” I whimpered.

Goldie waited a few moments before speaking again. “Buddy? Do you want your options?”

I waited an equal amount of time before answering him. “Hit me.”

“Number one, convince him to stay human. Fall in love with each other. You get forty, fifty years of happiness.”

“Right …” I already saw the flaws in the plan. “This is … He’s wanted immortality since he was a kid. He’s dressed as a vampire every Halloween since he was three. He’s not suddenly going to say, oh yeah cool, this vampire I have a crush on, and slept with once wants me to stay human, so I think I’ll just do that.”

Goldie took a slurping sip of his coffee. “Fair point. But he has got a crush on you?”

I let my head flop back against the metal and closed my eyes, remembering that first moment when he rounded the corner at the convention. Casey’s thoughts had transformed from recognition and nerves and excitement to realising his assumptions about me had been right all along.

To triumph and instant want.

“When I’m with him,” I began, “He is constantly thinking about me. About touching me, kissing me. The feel of my cold skin against his hot fucking skin. How amazing it felt to have me inside him. How he might convince me to fuck him again without things getting weird.”

“Oh,” Goldie said.

“Yep.” But that was the crux of it. Without things getting weird. He didn’t want a relationship. Casey cared about manythings. Yet all of those things pertained to himself. He intended to remain single and unburdened of everyone else’s problems. All of them. Which was fine, and he was perfectly entitled to feel that way. So, I couldn’t ask him to stop mentally undressing me because, for one, I didn’t think he had any control over it, and two, those were his, independent thoughts. I had no claim on what anyone thought. Even if their thoughts were about me. And if I did confront him on all the times he replayed the noises I made as I came, I’d be the one making things weird. Not him.

“Maybe try gently talking him round,” Goldie said.

“Into giving up his lifelong dream for a guy he’d fucked once? Sounds like a plan.” I thought the sarcasm in my voice was evident, though Goldie, who was fae and couldn’t lie, often struggled with sarcasm as a general concept.

“That can be plan A.”

Well, at the very least, it was worth trying. “What’s next? Also, are you naked?”

“You didn’t give me time to put sweatpants on.”

“Mal will kill you if he catches you at the dining table with your junk out again.”

“Yeah, especially because I’m in his chair.”

“What the fuck, mate?” I actually managed a laugh. “You’re playing with fire there.”

“Maybe he’ll kick Holly and me out.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t mind-read through the telephone, but I suddenly understood. It reminded me I wasn’t the only one with problems.

“We got a letter through last week to say the construction on Holly’s—on our apartment will be finished in a few months, and they expect people will be able to move in from the end of May. I … I know he knows we’ll be moving out soon, but … I just don’t want to tell him. Or you actually, but here we are.”

Goldie, Mal and I had lived in that apartment for twenty-five-ish years, since it had been built. And before that, we’d been flatmates for three centuries. Moving often, but always moving together. When I got out of gaol, and ran from my community, Mal took me in. Like a father figure. He and Goldie had already been in this kind of pairing for a century before I met them. Four hundred years as family, about to end.

“Okay, your problems are worse than mine,” I admitted.

“But let’s talk about yours, because I don’t reckon I can handle it all now.”

“Fair enough, mate.” It really was. I wasn’t sure my heart was ready for Mal’s heartbreak, too. “You know what we need to do? We need to find a nice girl for Mal and set him up, and then at least he won’t be home alone.”

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