16. Emory
Emory
Invisibility was not invincibility.
At least not emotionally.
All day, Emory clawed at his research, desperately seeking a shred of focus. Every time he attempted a calculation, that withering, disappointed look Gerard had worn earlier on his way out the door spirited to the front of his mind, and all his momentum was lost.
How could someone with a face like Gerard Wells’s not want to be on posters and album covers?
As someone who had always questioned his looks—whether his face was too long, or his arms were too skinny, or his hair made him look old—he couldn’t wrap his head around Gerard Wells being self-conscious.
Even frowning, Gerard looked billboard ready.
If Emory was going to present his invisibility serum at the alumni gala with replicable results to rub everyone’s noses in, he needed to continue working. The only place he could do that was here. In this apartment. Where Gerard Wells was paying the rent.
He hated being at the mercy of another person like he was a child again, but he supposed there were worse potential roommates than an international pop star.
Gerard had taken his story surprisingly well. Sharing it felt like exhuming a long-buried John Doe. Nobody had ever asked him about his past before—not in any real way—so he took the coroner’s tools to the flesh, the memories cutting deep.
While his social smarts needed some fine-tuning, he was self-aware enough to know that were he to try to explain his plight again to someone less eager to listen, he might be laughed at, mocked, or thrown to the wolves.
Gerard was offering him a haven for the moment, so he needed to offer an olive branch in return.
Abandoning his experiment, he flung open the fridge. There weren’t many ingredients to work with, but that only heightened the challenge, and Emory Griffin loved a challenge.
Moving while invisible meant learning to walk for the first time again. Proprioception was impossible, given that Emory’s gaze lasered through his own limbs. His brain was an isolated control board, and his body was a satellite robot he was maneuvering from an undisclosed location.
Cooking proved a brand-new beast.
In the kitchen, he struggled anew with his motor functions. How far could he chop a carrot without severing a finger? How close was he really to the flames of the gas burner when he set the pan on it? For his already-strained sight, his other senses had to pick up the slack.
By the time his slapped-together stir-fry was about finished, the door to the apartment swung open.
“You’re still here,” Gerard said in a tone that Emory could not exactly call happy-to-see-him, which wasn’t saying much, given he literally couldn’t be seen.
Emory turned with the pan in his hand. “I made dinner.” Gerard hung up his coat and went to the table, which Emory had set with a napkin and utensils.
“I hope you meant it when you said you liked simple. My college job was food service in the campus dining hall. Since I didn’t really know how to cook before they hired me, I manned the wok station for most of my first year.
It’s pretty hard to screw up ingredients tossed in a pan. ”
Unspeaking, Gerard sat, then unfolded the napkin on his lap. Emory filled a plate and set it down in front of him. He smiled before remembering Gerard couldn’t see his friendly expression. “Bon appétit,” he said cheerily instead. Still, Gerard made no move to eat.
“You’re not going to make yourself a plate?” Gerard finally asked.
Emory sighed because he was hungry. The scent of peppers and onions still sizzling in the air made it worse. “I don’t want you to have to see me eat.”
Gerard raised a suspicious eyebrow. “See you eat? I can’t see you at all.”
“I don’t want you to see the food as it goes down,” Emory clarified, not wanting to spoil Gerard’s appetite with talk like this, but Gerard threw out a barrage of follow-up questions that Emory felt obliged to answer.
“I’m invisible, but the food is not. From the moment I put it in my mouth, you will be able to see it go down until it’s assimilated. ”
“Oh … okay, I get the picture, but how do I know you didn’t poison this?” he said.
“I did not poison it,” Emory said, hackles up already.
“Then prove it.”
Instead of arguing, like a good scientist, he set about disproving Gerard’s ridiculous theory.
He served himself, fed himself, and watched as Gerard’s eyes nearly bulged right out of his head at the masticated food traveling down his see-through esophagus.
Thankfully, he wore a sweatshirt, which shielded Gerard from the rest of the process. “There, happy? I’m not choking.”
“How do I know it’s not a slow-acting poison you put in there? Your lips could be turning blue as we speak, and I wouldn’t be able to see them to know,” Gerard said.
“Why would I purposefully poison myself?” he asked, annoyed that he’d taken time out of his day to make this meal that would go cold over the course of a silly argument.
“Because you’re all sciencey and would know the antidote and I wouldn’t.”
Emory sighed. “I know I talked a big talk yesterday when you busted in with the holy water, but I swear to you on all that is scientifically proven, I wouldn’t hurt a fly. I was just trying to keep a handle on things.”
“I get that,” Gerard said after a beat. “You don’t sound like your throat is closing up.”
“Killing you would solve nothing. It would only bring more attention on me, this house, my work, and then when everyone found out about your real identity, I’d be in even bigger trouble than I already am.
” He heaved another sigh, hungry but unwilling to subject Gerard to another VIP show of the miracles of the human digestive system.
“On my walk today, I got to thinking: It’s not like you ripped the X-ray machine off the wall or set the building ablaze or killed a cat. What could they really have charged you with? I doubt they would’ve thrown you in jail if you’d told them what happened with Anderson,” said Gerard.
“People don’t usually listen to me when I talk,” he confessed, then watched the words register on Gerard’s face. The importance of the night before twined between them.
“Still, you could’ve tried,” Gerard said in a gentler tone.
“It would’ve been my word against a doctor’s. Even if they had listened, they wouldn’t have believed me.” He stared at his barely touched plate. “Doesn’t matter. I panicked. People do foolish things when they panic.”
Gerard ate a forkful of stir-fry and nodded. “I really get that.”
“Do you think running away was foolish?” he asked, ready to hear more facts about Gerard that he didn’t learn from reading a journal he’d had no right to even open. He knew he owed the pop star a real apology, but—
“I know it was foolish,” Gerard said, “but it was foolish and necessary. My brothers are probably back in New York at Electric Lady Studios with some hot producer in a writing session starting work on the next album even though the tour just ended, and we haven’t even signed a contract with the label yet. ”
“Do you wish you were there?” Emory asked, partially hoping Gerard would realize he needed to leave ASAP.
Gerard shook his head, ate some more, then said, “The thought of being in that room testing out hooks and coming up with guitar licks makes me want to fake my own death.” He must’ve sensed Emory’s shocked expression because he added, “I would never. It’s just …
it’s torture when the thing you love the most in the world turns into the thing that gives you the most anxiety. ”
“I understand where you’re coming from. My whole invisibility project has been fueled by anxiety,” he said, cataloguing all the different subgenres of anxiety that had spurred him on. Not-good-enough anxiety. Not-smart-enough anxiety. Not-worthy-enough anxiety.
Gerard shoveled the rest of the stir-fry into his mouth and pushed his now-empty plate toward the center of the table, clearly happy to not have been poisoned and appearing satiated. “I’m sorry I called you a self-absorbed asshole.”
“I was being a self-absorbed asshole,” Emory said in a shocking show of deprecation. It felt good to take ownership like that and admit that he wasn’t perfect instead of letting himself believe other people were the problem all the time.
“Still, I could’ve been nicer. I know you’re scared,” he said.
This wasn’t the first time Gerard had said that to Emory, so his fear must’ve been palpable because Gerard certainly wasn’t reading the fear on his face.
“I’m scared, too. One post, and a helicopter is going to land on the island’s airstrip and take me away before I figure anything out. ”
“What is there to figure out?” Emory asked, leaning in.
“Whether I can come out and unmask and still be this public commodity, or if I need to step away from fame for my own sanity.” The way his head bowed suggested that this had been on his mind for the last several years.
That not being himself had left him without a true identity.
Maybe he hated the posters and album covers because they represented someone Gerard wasn’t on the inside.
“Even if you left the band, is fame something that you can reverse?” Emory asked.
Gerard noticeably bristled. “Is invisibility?”
Emory bore a secret, pained smirk. “Touché.”
Changing the subject, Gerard asked, “What do you look like?” He tilted his head and squinted his eyes as if he were trying to make out the image in an incomplete paint-by-numbers.
Emory fumbled a bit. “Like this but with … features?”
“Can I see a picture of you? I’d at least like to know who I’m living with and talking to,” he said.
“I don’t think I have one.” Emory had always been camera shy. Any photographic evidence of his existence was likely him unwittingly skulking in the background of someone else’s captured, treasured memory.
“Driver’s license?” Gerard asked.
“I don’t drive.”
“Student ID?”
“Chucked it when I left the university.”
“Yearbook photo?”
“I would never pose for one of those inane souvenirs of scholarship.”
“Not even a single selfie?” Gerard sounded exasperated.
Emory shook his head.
“You are really off the grid, huh?” Gerard said.
“I’m not even sure the grid knows about me.” He took a certain pride in that. His priorities had never aligned with those of the common man. He wanted the first picture he posed for to be the headshot that would accompany the lauded publication of his invisibility findings.
Gerard chuckled. “Guess your face will have to remain a mystery.” He cleared his plate, set it in the sink, and went over to the rocking chair, which gave a slight scrape on the wood floor as he turned it away from the table. “You may now eat in peace.”
Grateful, Emory dug in, uncaring that the food was barely even warm. “If the offer still stands, I’d like to be your roommate.”
“Really, now?” Gerard asked.
“It’s not every day you get the opportunity to have a celebrity as your roommate,” Emory joked to lighten the mood, though he was out of practice and Gerard didn’t laugh.
“I don’t think anyone in history has ever had an invisible roommate,” Gerard said.
“There’s a first time for everything,” Emory said, glancing over at the back of Gerard’s head, which was somehow just as handsome as every other part of him.
Emory’s mind broke loose with thoughts of other types of first times, but he shut those down immediately.
The last time he’d allowed hormones to cloud his thinking, he’d let his life’s work get burgled right out from under his nose.
He vowed, Never ever again.