5. Erik
Erik
I leave the clearing with the sound still in my ears.
Tonight of all nights, finally something happens. Humming, so quiet I’d have lost it if I weren’t always listening. Gone before I could be sure it was real. I’ve gotten good at calling things imagination. It’s easier to live with.
I get onto the bike and start the engine.
I tell myself that’s why I’m heading back early. The sound. Not the time. Not the fact that Ashley collected Elara at six, and Ashley has never once closed down a bar in her life. Two drinks in, Elara starts narrating. Three, and she’ll hand a stranger her whole childhood.
I know her at every count. I know it the way I know which board in my floor creaks.
I check the time.
Then again.
By the third time I stop pretending I’m not doing it.
It’s 9:51 when I reach the block, and I slow down without deciding to.
Nothing to worry about. If anyone asks, I was coming home.
At a reasonable hour. To the building where I pay rent.
A coincidence that I arrive the same minute Ashley’s car turns the corner.
Also a coincidence that I timed it to that minute, but that part stays with me.
I’m tired of lying to myself. I keep at it anyway, because the alternative is admitting I did this on purpose.
Then the car door opens and Elara steps out and every reasonable plan I had dies on the curb.
She’s upright. Mostly. She’s got a hand flat on the roof of the car for a second longer than getting out requires.
She steadies herself while she says goodbye to Ashley and steps onto the sidewalk.
The careful way she’s standing tells me how the night went — she’s fine, she just had enough that the filter’s off and the floor’s negotiable.
Ashley’s eyes find mine over the roof of the car as I park the bike and start toward them.
She takes in the whole picture in under a second and looks delighted.
Or predatory. With Ashley it’s hard to tell the two apart.
She doesn’t say a word. Just gives me a small two-finger salute, gets back in her car, and leaves me alone with the problem.
I’m going to kill her. Slowly.
She knows exactly what she’s doing.
Who am I kidding? I’m here specifically for the problem.
Elara aims herself at the building and arrives at the door on a diagonal, reaching for a handle that isn’t where she thinks it is. I catch it before it catches her.
We’re too close.
She looks up. I can see her working through it, the wheels turning slow and out of sync. The confusion is a little funny. The slow smile that comes after it is not something I can afford to think about right now.
“Oh,” she says. “It’s you.”
“It’s me.”
“You live here.”
“I do.”
“Across the hall.”
“That’s the one.”
She nods like I’ve given her something new to think about, and walks past me into the lobby like the conversation’s settled.
I let out a breath. Because, fuck. How does that woman smell like night-blooming cereus?
She gives walking her full attention and still nearly loses. I follow. For safety reasons.
That’s it.
I press the elevator button. She watches me do it like it’s a card trick — actually leans in to watch my thumb, like the button’s the interesting part of the evening. The doors open. We get in.
It’s a small elevator and there’s nowhere to stand that isn’t close.
She turns and studies me. Openly. Head tilted, eyes moving over my face like she’s seeing it for the first time.
Her brows go down and I know whatever she says next won’t be anything I’m ready for.
“What’s with the jaw?”
I have answered a great many questions in four hundred years. I have nothing for this one.
“…The jaw?”
“Yeah.” She gestures at it. The whole thing. My entire face, implicated. “Do you practice that?”
“Practice what?”
“Looking like that. It can’t be an accident. Nobody’s face just does that.”
I decide not to help her with that. She takes the silence as encouragement. She usually does.
“Is the leather required?”
“For what?”
“Whatever this is.” She waves at all of me, head to boots, a slow gesture that loses confidence halfway down and has to start over. “The jacket. The boots. The whole — situation. Is there a meeting? Is it a club?”
“It’s a jacket.”
“That’s what a member would say.”
I hold still. Keep her talking. She’s closer than she was a second ago and doesn’t know it.
That’s when I hear it.
Under her voice. Low. She’s humming — not on purpose, the way some people sing quietly when their guard’s all the way down. She repeats a few notes. It’s not a song, just a piece of one.
And I know it.
It’s the sound from the clearing. The one I stood in the dark an hour ago straining to catch, and lost. Three years of nothing, and tonight it finally came — and now it’s six inches from me in a steel box that smells like cheap wine and those flowers, coming out of her like she’s known it her whole life.
It’s her.
The whole night reorganizes around that one fact and nothing else in the box matters.
Not the jaw conversation. Not how close she’s standing.
The thing I’ve driven across a city and waited three years for has been across the hall the entire time, humming in elevators, and she has no idea she’s carrying it.
“You’re not listening,” she says.
I am. To the wrong thing. “I’m listening.”
“What’d I say?”
“Something about a door.”
She points at me, vindicated. Squinting a little to keep me in focus. “You’re good.”
The doors open. I’ve never been more grateful to leave a room. Or less willing.
She steps out and drifts. A slow lean, like the floor’s tilted under her.
It isn’t.
I move with her, closer than I should be. My hand comes up to the small of her back, on its own, no decision in it.
No.
I force it down.
For fuck’s sake.
“You think I’m going to fall.”
“You almost walked into a wall.”
“There was a wall there?”
“There still is.”
“…It moved.”
I can’t keep my mouth from tilting. Good thing she’s giving the carpet her full attention.
We make it down the hall like that. Her wandering, me a half a step off her shoulder with both hands to myself, doing nothing, which is the hardest thing I’ve done in years. Every few feet she tips and corrects and I track it without touching her, ready and useless at the same time.
She gets the key in on the second try and grins like she’s won something. She has, a little.
Then it’s too quiet. The humming stopped. I want it back. I didn’t know I’d need it back until it was gone.
“You good?”
“Mm-hm.”
“You sure?”
She turns to look at me. And for one second it isn’t the wine — it’s her. Those big green eyes clear and steady and aimed right at me, like the fog cut out and left only the part that means it.
It’s almost worse than the elevator.
If we weren’t this close I’d have missed it. The small catch of breath. The way she goes still.
The hall shrinks to the foot of space between us.
I could close it. Everything in me wants to close it. Ella, I almost say, and the name gets as far as my teeth.
But not now. Not like this — not with the wine still in her.
“If you need anything,” I say instead, “I’m right across the hall.”
I mean it. Not a line. A standing offer with no expiration date on it.
Her eyes go soft a moment.
“Oh,” she says, smirking. “I know.”
And shuts the door in my face. Hard.
The latch clicks.
I stand there in the empty hall, by myself.
Seriously?