Chapter 19 #2
Lorenzo tipped his head back and sighed deeply. “Charlie.”
“Come on,” he said, taking a step closer to Lorenzo. Lorenzo looked away and didn’t move at all as Charlie slowly invaded his space. “You have to admit, curse aside—”
“It’s a hex,” he muttered.
“You’ve been—you’ve been so helpful to me,” Charlie said, finally letting his hands rest gently on Lorenzo’s chest. “Introducing me to all these people, taking me to a—a werewolf wedding, a druid initiation. You know everyone.” He smiled, no longer sure if he was buttering Lorenzo up or just thinking out loud. “I’m so lucky I ran into you.”
Lorenzo had a strange, sour look on his face. “Yes, well,” he said, and he shifted away from Charlie, ostensibly to rinse his mug in the sink. “I’m pleased my connections from decades spent doing nothing are of use to you.”
Charlie frowned at him. “You haven’t spent decades doing nothing.”
Lorenzo rolled his eyes. Charlie got the feeling he wished he hadn’t brought any of this up.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, as he shook out his arm, making it pop, and then looked at his hand.
It still wasn’t back all the way; the tips of his fingers were barely there as Lorenzo slowly wiggled them back and forth.
How could Lorenzo describe his life as nothing?
“You are a very cool person,” Charlie said.
Lorenzo glanced up at him, something barbed in his eyes. “Charlie—”
“What?” he asked defensively. “You are. You’re a vampire. You’ve done everything. You know all kinds of cool people.”
“Thank you,” Lorenzo said stiffly.
Charlie nudged him. “What’s bugging you?”
“Nothing.”
“I think you have a much cooler life than you might think you do,” Charlie told him. “Which is understandable, because . . . it’s your life. And it’s easy to take it for granted.”
That got Lorenzo to turn around and glare at him, though he could tell his heart wasn’t in it. “You’re the expert, huh?”
“You’re a vampire with a bunch of cool supernatural friends,” Charlie said. “You have this . . . community.”
“It’s not a community,” Lorenzo snapped.
Charlie thought he was probably trying to sound angry, but it didn’t come out that way; he sounded exhausted and grim.
“We’re all from different—they’re not—” He sighed.
“We’re not the same. It’s not like that.
It’s just . . . I know people. But it’s not a community. ”
Charlie thought about every time Lorenzo had introduced him to someone for his nonexistent thesis, and the way they’d all been unfailingly happy to see him. “It could be.”
That seemed to give Lorenzo pause, though he didn’t respond.
A moment later Charlie popped again, and then a strange feeling of sudden, blissful rightness washed all over him.
It was not unlike the first few notes of a Sade song, or being under a weighted blanket.
“Oh,” he said, “I think I’m done popping.
” He looked down at his hand, trying to see if it looked different. “I think I’m back.”
“Good,” Lorenzo said, smiling faintly. The tips of his fingers were still slightly blurred.
Charlie took Lorenzo’s hand in his, lacing their fingers together. “I’ll wait with you.”
Charlie had almost completely acclimated to a nocturnal schedule by now, and one of his favorite parts of his new routine was the sunrise walk home.
He didn’t always walk; his apartment was kind of far from Lorenzo’s, but when the weather was just right, he enjoyed it.
The streets were quiet, and the soft pink light made everything feel magical.
His phone ringing interrupted the serene beauty. He frowned at the unfamiliar number, but his phone wasn’t tagging it as spam. Curious, he answered.
“Why aren’t you returning my calls?” Ava demanded.
The surprise of hearing her voice sent a wave of nausea through him. He looked at the number on his phone again, and Ava correctly interpreted his silence. “It’s Henry’s phone,” she said. “I was wondering if it was me you were dodging or everyone. Guess I have my answer!”
“Jesus, Ava,” Charlie said. “Are you watching Killing Eve again?”
She giggled. “Yeah, I’m a spy. So . . .”
He swallowed, saying nothing, and she sighed. “Listen—we need to talk about the column!”
“It’s doing well,” he said, reflexively. He had the jittery feeling that he needed to get off the phone as soon as possible, which didn’t really make any sense. But every second the conversation ticked on, he felt a little closer to crawling out of his skin.
“It’s doing incredibly well,” Ava said, pride radiating through the phone. “That’s why we need to capitalize on it!”
“Capitalize,” Charlie said. “Yeah. What do you, um.”
“I mean, anything!” Ava said. “For one thing, I feel like you need to come in and do a victory lap around the office. You know boomers don’t think anyone’s real unless they see them, in person, wearing a suit.”
Charlie laughed thinly. “I guess.”
“But it’s not just that,” Ava gushed. “You’re crushing it lately! People love the Crone. We could get you on some panels, or—you could write a book!”
“A book?” His voice echoed off the sleepy streets around him, sounding unnaturally loud.
“Whatever you want, Charlie,” Ava said. “I just don’t want you to waste what you have right now. People are finally paying attention! Let’s show ’em what you’ve got.”
“Right,” Charlie said. He felt dizzy. “I’ll, uh, think about it.”
“You should,” Ava said. “If we play our cards right, you could even get an offer from somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else?” Charlie asked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’ve been kicking such ass, some other site might want to steal you away.” She sounded positively smug about the idea. “To move your column—or, you, really—your services as an advice writer, to some other platform. For a big cash payout.”
He laughed a little, hollowly. “That’s not a real thing.”
“Um, it totally is,” Ava said. “You’d be an amazing get for a lot of places. Midnight might not be big enough for you anymore.”
Charlie scoffed.
“And listen, on that topic, I feel like we should put a meeting on the books about your latest Crone columns, in terms of voice,” Ava said.
Charlie paused. “What do you mean, voice?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, sounding distracted. “Normally as the Crone you kind of ham it up, but some of your latest columns have been sounding a lot like a regular twentysomething gay guy.”
“I am a regular twentysomething gay guy,” he said flatly. An early-morning jogger gave him a funny look as he passed by.
“Right, I just mean that’s not usually the Crone’s voice,” Ava said. “You were talking about, like, circling back in one of your columns. That’s not really a Crone thing.”
It was beginning to feel like there was a fire in Charlie’s chest, slowly smoldering and eating everything away.
Maybe it had been there ever since he’d started his column; because of what it meant to him, how lucky he knew he was, and how much he had at stake.
But that fire was burning harder than ever now with everything he was keeping from Lorenzo, and Charlie felt like he was losing more and more of himself to crumbling ash.
“In another column I think you said speaking for myself,” Ava said. “You don’t usually—”
“Speak for myself?” Charlie snapped.
“Babe,” Ava said, sounding like he’d suddenly caught her attention. “Are you feeling like a change in persona? Because we can talk about that—”
He hadn’t heard anything after the word persona, which swamped him with shame. “Ava, I gotta go,” he choked out.
“Charlie, wait—” Ava said, but he hung up on her. He slid his phone into his pocket, then pulled it back out, after a moment, to block her husband’s number.