Chapter 23
In an incredibly sweet gesture, Lorenzo let Charlie set up a mini home office in his bedroom.
It was just a little secretary desk that he could tell Lorenzo never used—sort of a vanity without the mirror—but he’d let Charlie lay claim to it, keep his water bottle and box of tissues there, and that’s where he’d set up his laptop when he was going to be spending a while at Lorenzo’s and wanted to be able to work a bit.
Sometimes he’d get to Lorenzo’s place before the sun had set and putter around the room while Lorenzo lay in bed, still all corpse-like; he’d shower and get some writing done, eat a snack, and wait for Lorenzo to arise.
At the moment, he was scrolling aimlessly in front of a blank page. According to the new widget he had on his home screen, sunset had been six minutes ago, but Lorenzo was still lodged under the covers and showed no signs of stirring. He sighed.
An email pinged as it arrived—Ava, probably wanting to know where his next column was. The only downside of the column being a smash hit was Ava and their bosses breathing down his neck, always looking for the next installment. He was still dodging her calls.
He loved writing the columns—he wasn’t sure that would ever change—but hitting publish every week was getting harder and harder. The bigger the column got, the more inescapable it became—all the things he needed to do, and everything he had to answer for.
He clicked on Ava’s email anyway, out of resigned guilt.
She was not checking in on his next column. He saw the words Advance Media, a conglomerate that owned hundreds of outlets worldwide. And he saw the word offer.
Panic choked his throat, and he shut his laptop before he finished the email.
From the bed there was a soft rustle of sheets, and he looked up to find Lorenzo, blearily awake and looking at him, drowsy eyes peeking out from over the crest of a pillow.
He couldn’t see the rest of Lorenzo’s face, but he could tell he was smiling, and his chest gave a little happy clench at the sight, his anxiety about his job and the column melting away.
“Good evening,” Charlie said, and came to sit on the bed next to him. He threaded his fingers through Lorenzo’s hair, petting him as he stretched and groaned, throwing some of the covers back.
“Hmm,” Lorenzo said. “When did you get here?”
“A little while ago.”
Lorenzo sat up and kissed him undemandingly. Then he yawned, stretched again until Charlie could hear something pop, and mumbled “Let me brush my teeth” against Charlie’s lips.
Charlie flopped back onto the bed while Lorenzo trudged off to the bathroom. He felt warm and tingly all over, like he might start purring. The sheets were cool and silky, and he could feel himself melting into the mattress. “Have I said enough that I love your place?” he shouted to Lorenzo.
There was the sound of water running, on and off. Charlie frowned as the silence stretched, but he still heard little echoing noises as Lorenzo moved around the bathroom, so he waited patiently. Eventually, Lorenzo came back and sat next to him on the bed. “Yes,” he said, though he looked distant.
“What’s wrong?” Charlie asked.
Lorenzo smiled at him faintly. “I like that you’re here.”
“Me too,” he said, disarming the non sequitur. “But . . .?”
Lorenzo glanced around. “This place just—it can feel a little lonely sometimes.”
“This place?” Charlie said skeptically. “It’s a palace. And you have your roommates.”
“That’s true,” Lorenzo said unconvincingly.
Charlie glanced up at the ceiling, the one incongruous element in the entire room—in the entire building, for that matter. “I don’t remember,” he murmured, and held his breath as he said, “How did you end up living here in Brookville, anyway?”
Lorenzo sighed. “This house . . . belonged to a descendant of mine.”
“Oh,” Charlie said. “Wow, your—okay.” Descendants. That would mean that, when he was still human, Lorenzo had . . .
He cleared his throat. “How did you . . . find them? I mean, what made you want to look for them?”
“I was just so bored,” Lorenzo said, flopping back onto the bed.
“I was made a vampire while I was still living in Sardinia—as you know—and I spent much of that first century in Europe, living . . . wildly. Carousing, drinking from people—sometimes, er . . . violently.” He flicked a nervous look at Charlie, but he just nodded and motioned for him to go on.
“But after a hundred years of that sort of thing, it gets a bit old. I came over to America in the nineteen . . .” He squinted.
“Was it the 1900s? 1910s? I’m not sure. But here in the New World it was much the same as it was at home. So much meaningless revelry. Drudgery.”
He sounded exhausted. “Eventually I began to yearn for something more to my undead existence.”
“So,” Charlie said, “you found out that you had a great-great-grandchild in Brookville?”
“A great-great-granddaughter,” Lorenzo said softly. “Dorothy.”
The name sounded lovely in his accent, formal and fond.
Charlie waited for him to go on. “I could never figure out why she wasn’t afraid of me,” Lorenzo said, sitting up.
“By the time I found her, she was a little old lady—a widow, no children, living alone in this mansion. And then I appeared on her doorstep, a mysterious, dangerous stranger, and I turned out to be an actual monster, and she . . . didn’t care. ”
“She knew what you were?”
“She wasn’t a mark,” Lorenzo said, smiling, his eyes gone distant and warm.
“That’s what she’d say. She was—gorgeous.
A tiny bit cruel, just enough to be good fun.
She invited me to live here, and she was never scared of me.
She—” He laughed, rubbing the back of his neck self-consciously.
“Well, she told me what to wear. Vampires dress to impress, she’d say.
Elegant, not tasteless. She scolded me when I forgot my manners, but she also .
. .” He grinned. “She loved lying to the police anytime a human said they’d spotted something spooky or strange.
And by that point in her life, she didn’t sleep much, so we’d stay up late, looking out the window.
She’d poke me and point at passersby, and tell me who to bite. ”
Charlie raised his eyebrows, delighted by the mental picture. “She picked the people that you . . .?”
Lorenzo scoffed, looking genuinely offended—maybe even horrified. “I wouldn’t feed on someone my—”
He stopped, abruptly, and it felt like it punched all the air out of Charlie’s lungs. “She told people I was her grandson,” Lorenzo said in a helpless, empty voice. “And at a certain point I could just—it wasn’t a lie, for her, anymore. I was her grandson.”
Charlie said nothing. He could feel it building up in his throat, dread and fondness and misery, and part of him hoped Lorenzo wouldn’t finish the story.
But of course he did. “I was living here with her,” Lorenzo said. “So when she passed away in 1972, it came to me.”
Charlie glanced up at the mess of wood and rags covering the ceiling. “Was this her room?”
Lorenzo nodded. Charlie felt his throat closing up.
“I know it’s silly,” Lorenzo muttered. “I should just sell it. But . . . I can’t sell it.”
“Of course not,” Charlie said. “You—”
“No, it is foolish of me.” He’d started to sound angry.
“It’s not—”
“Why?” Lorenzo demanded. “Because I am honoring her memory by staying here? Her memory is gone. I watched it happen. It’s been fifty years since she left, and no one remembers Dorothy. No one but me.”
“But—” Charlie’s voice was growing thick. “You—”
“I watched her be forgotten,” Lorenzo said. “This town—this community—this place that Dorothy loved—it forgot about her. It was so easy for her to just fade away.”
He looked up at Charlie, and there were tears slowly making their way down the sides of his nose, leaving small trails of steam rising from his skin. “You don’t have to be dead to be forgotten,” he whispered. “Actually dead, I mean. I’m still here, and I can feel myself being forgotten every day.”
“Hey, hey,” Charlie said, going to his knees in front of Lorenzo, hugging him around the waist, holding him tight. “You are not disappearing, okay? You’re right here, with me.”
“I am, though,” Lorenzo said brokenly. “Look at me. What do I do, Charlie? What do I contribute?”
“You’re not a . . . machine,” Charlie pleaded with him. “You don’t have to contribute something to matter.”
“You don’t understand,” Lorenzo said. “Every year, it goes faster. It all— Why can’t I . . .”
Charlie waited urgently for him to continue, but Lorenzo just shuddered.
Charlie felt cold all over, desperate to reach Lorenzo somehow, to bring him out of this funk and into the version of himself that Charlie could see.
The warm, funny, wonderful guy who Charlie couldn’t get enough of.
“I think you’re just . . . in a rut,” he tried.
In a rut. What did that mean? He was so bad at this.
He leaned closer, took one of Lorenzo’s shoulders in his palm, and stilled the small tremors that were running through him. “You’re right, you’ve been alive—or undead—a long time, it’s no wonder you might feel . . . aimless,” he said lowly. “So—why don’t you pick an aim?”
“An aim?”
“Yeah, like a goal, or a project or something,” Charlie said.
He ran his fingers through Lorenzo’s hair, tucking it back behind his ears.
“My mom read me this book when I was little—it was about this woman who went around planting flowers everywhere. Purple flowers. And when they went into bloom every year, she was the reason. That was her thing. The flower lady.”
“You want me to plant flowers?” Lorenzo asked. His small, confused glare through reddened eyes made Charlie’s breath catch.
“I think you should plant something,” he said softly. “You have so much going for you, I think you just need to look around and see it. I mean, look at all the supernatural creatures you’re friends with.”
“You mean that I work for.”
“Okay, but, that’s kind of cool too,” Charlie said. “I mean, they all seem pretty segregated. You’re the guy who knows everyone. That’s interesting.”
“It’s not—”
“What if you—formalized it?” Charlie suggested.
“Formalized what?”
“What if you started, like, a club? For the supernatural creatures of Brookville.”
“Like a support group?” Lorenzo asked doubtfully.
“Like anything,” Charlie said. “I’m just saying. Maybe you’re not the only one feeling this way.”
“I’d rather plant flowers,” Lorenzo muttered.
“Mm,” Charlie said, levering himself up to sit next to Lorenzo on the bed, moving his arms from Lorenzo’s shoulders to his waist. “They were pretty. I think they were called lupines.”
Lorenzo scowled at him. “What?”
“The flowers.”
“You want me to plant werewolf flowers?”
“What if you had a party,” Charlie said. “With all your friends—everyone you’ve introduced me to over the last few weeks, and anyone else you can think of?”
“For what?”
Charlie shrugged. “To see if it . . . feels like something.”
Lorenzo rolled his eyes. Charlie crawled into Lorenzo’s lap, lifting his jaw gently until Lorenzo looked at him. “And for the record,” he said, “you do contribute. You contribute to your roommates being happy. You contribute to the overall hotness in the town of Brookville.”
Lorenzo scoffed.
“And you contribute to me being happy,” Charlie said quietly. “Very happy. And having lots of orgasms.”
Lorenzo was watching him again, his eyes inscrutable. His cheeks were still steaming slightly from the last of his tears. “And you contribute to my knowledge of the world around us,” Charlie said. “Like that vampires tears are . . . acidic?”
Lorenzo frowned, then swiped at the tears on his face, swearing a little. “Not acidic,” he said. “Or . . . just to us. To vampires.”
Charlie lifted a hand and touched Lorenzo’s face hesitantly, and found that the tear tracks on Lorenzo’s handsome nose felt just as he might have expected them to—soft and harmless. Damp. Human.
Holy water, he thought. Maybe this was where the myth came from—vampires could be burned, not by religious faith, but by sorrow, or regret, or vulnerability.
“It’s kind of . . . beautiful,” Charlie said.
Lorenzo shrugged.
“I know no one wants to hear that they look good crying, but . . . you really do look hot crying,” Charlie added.
Lorenzo hiccupped out a laugh, and Charlie kissed him to chase it.