Chapter 12
ALEXANDER
Alexander couldn’t focus, which was rare enough for him that his stomach twisted in knots because of it.
It felt as though Tobias was playing a game with him.
Toying with him. Driving him to the point of insanity.
He kept creeping closer and then darting away, so much like an actual wild deer that Alexander was left wondering if his surname was more appropriate than he’d thought.
The way he’d left the soup kitchen was unsettling, and Alexander couldn’t help but think that the reason for Tobias’ uncertainty was something about him.
Humans could sometimes tell that he wasn’t one of them, but that usually involved quite a bit of screaming and running away, so Alexander didn’t think it was that he’d been caught out.
No, it felt more like he was simply failing at attempting to…
date Tobias – if that was, in fact, what he was in the process of trying to do.
He’d never had a relationship with a mortal, not a true one.
He had a preference for people who would enjoy the sexual gratification of a good fuck and then let him feed off of them, but Alexander rarely felt the impulse to wine and dine them.
They were curiosities, sustenance, a way to work out his sexual needs.
They were means to an end. He used his power of suggestion on them to get them to conveniently forget his existence when he tired of them, or they of him.
It was how he managed to keep his private life and his life at Rothburn separate, and to keep the mortals safe. Alexander never wanted to make them feel safe. That wasn’t the point. They weren’t the mortals he was helping as penance. They were food and sex and distraction.
Yet here he was, dissecting his every word and movement from the night prior to figure out where he’d gone wrong, what had caused Tobias to run.
The promise of seeing him again wasn’t enough – Alexander needed to make sure that when he saw Tobias next, he wasn’t going to make the same mistakes and send him fleeing again.
He idly tapped a few keys on his keyboard, the screen of his laptop blinking to life.
He was meant to be marking essays – they sat in a forlorn stack next to his computer, the first assignment of the semester, ready for him to tear to metaphorical shreds – and yet he couldn’t bring himself to pick up his pen.
The tapping of his finger on the keyboard, though, gave him an idea.
Having been around for quite a bit longer than the internet, Alexander sometimes forgot that it existed as a way to search for information, despite being hopelessly addicted to gossip sites and apps and stupid online games.
He wondered if, somehow, he had been prodding at the wound that Tobias had hinted at the night at Quod – that his entire family had passed away and that in some way he blamed himself.
If he could figure out what had happened, perhaps he could figure out how to stop putting his foot in his mouth and being an asshole. Maybe he could do a better job of making Tobias happy, now that apparently mattered to him quite a deal.
The first few Google searches for “Tobias Osian” turned up nothing. He tried several different spellings, then added “Wales”, since that’s where Tobias had said he was from. Adding “accident” and “tragedy” also had no effect.
Alexander bit compulsively on his thumbnail as he searched around.
He had hundreds of years of experience doing research, and it was baffling to him that nothing turned up.
He hadn’t followed Tobias on social media – was that considered rude?
He had no idea – but he’d been so wrapped up in Tobias’ confusing behaviour and his father’s demands that he hadn’t gone looking for Tobias’ accounts.
He did now, though. And… nothing.
It was possible that he was spelling Tobias’ last name wrong, he thought, or that he used a different name online.
Not everyone was safe to be who they truly were on the internet, because their families might find out or their jobs would fire them.
Maybe Tobias tended towards the risqué online and wanted the freedom to do that in private.
Still, not being able to find any trace of the accident, of Tobias, made him feel vaguely sick.
He knew from working with Oxford’s struggling families that the media often overlooked the poor, and the idea that something tragic had happened to wipe out nearly an entire family and it hadn’t even merited an article in the local online paper made him wince.
Tobias didn’t deserve to be overlooked. His family didn’t deserve to be forgotten about.
He pressed a hand to his breastbone, because all of a sudden it felt like his chest was aching.
The wood-panelled walls of his small office felt a tad like they were closing in, and he rose out of the uncomfortable desk chair he’d been provided to round the large wooden desk and crack open the lead-paned window.
The alley wasn’t letting in much sunlight, the few coloured pieces of glass embedded in the window were dull and dark, but at least the cool air coming into the room made him feel a little less overwrought.
He wished there was room to pace around like in his massive office at Rothburn, but here there were a mere five paces from his desk and the chair for students sitting in front of it, to the bookcase that he’d stuffed full of what he needed to read for the semester.
Sitting back down seemed like a better choice than physically banging into his to-be-read list over and over.
Still massaging his chest with one hand, he used the other to navigate to one of the genealogy websites, which would at least be able to give him alternate spellings of Tobias’ last name to try.
There was only one Tobias Osian listed, from sometime in the 1500s in Wales.
So it was definitely a surname, but given that there were none other in the modern era beyond that, Alexander was probably fucking up the spelling.
He jiggled his foot and continued biting his lip, fooling around with the letters and almost completely missing that someone was knocking at his door.
“Professor?”
Alexander’s head jerked up as a student poked her head in. He couldn’t for the life of himself remember her name. “Yes?”
“It’s your office hours now?”
The poor girl had gone ashen-faced, and before she could faint he gestured for her to come in, letting her settle in the chair between his desk and bookcase.
Even the addition of a single person made the cramped room feel smaller, and Alexander winced at seeing another mortal right over the spot where he had lost control and murdered Aubrey.
“I’m sorry, yes. I got distracted while doing some research. What can I help you with?”
It was a miracle if Alexander could make it through the conversation, as horribly distracted as he was by thoughts of Tobias. God, he couldn’t even get the man’s name right.
The impossibility of sharing anything with a human, of having any sort of equality in that type of relationship, was something that Alexander was all too aware of and incredibly reluctant to touch on.
He knew all the many ways in which attempting something with a mortal could go wrong, not the least being that their lifespans would be sorely mismatched.
Some of the more sentimental vampires in the old clans had taken true human lovers.
But not the Damianos family or anyone associated with them.
“I’m still not sure I’m getting it right.
” The girl was chewing on her lip now, clearly nervous.
“I’m starting to draft my seminar essay, and every time I sit down to write I just think of what the others in class will say if they read it, all the holes in the argument that are apparent from the moment I write it down.
So nothing ever seems good enough, and I get stuck in this loop of doing something wrong, backtracking, making the same mistake, and ultimately getting nowhere. ”
Don’t we all. It was an apt description of the way he felt about how he’d been with Tobias. But Alexander tried to shove all thoughts of Tobias and his failing love life away to focus on the student, because she deserved more than a distracted professor.
“You’re getting it right,” he said as kindly as he could manage. “I know that advanced seminars have a way of making students feel insecure, because here we are tearing apart the works of these great philosophers. If they can’t get things right, who can? I remember feeling that way.”
He didn’t mention that Jeremy Bentham had personally made him feel like a fucking idiot many a time, although that had less to do with Alexander’s lack of intelligence and more to do with Jeremy’s shit attitude.
“But it’s easier to dissect an argument than it is to create your own, and learning to find the weaknesses in what others write is what we teach students first for that reason.
It gets nasty, though, especially in upper-level seminars for undergraduate students.
Too much critique and not enough praise. ”
He made a mental note to encourage more positivity in the classroom, because if students were feeling discouraged, he wasn’t doing his job quite right.
Imperfections like that in his performance always rankled him.
If he was defying his father and earning his ire in the process, he might as well be doing it perfectly.
“You know,” the student said, blowing away a curl that had fallen from her bun, her eyes crossing as she looked at the lock of hair, “that makes sense. Why you teach it that way, and why it makes me feel like shi–” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry!”
“Shit,” Alexander finished for her, grinning. “It’s alright. I’m a professor, not a priest.”
That earned a giggle from her, and when she lowered her hands, her eyes were just a little bit brighter.