Aven #2
I remember late nights in the Seminary library, the smell of old paper and Ezra's skin, the fumbling, desperate sex we had in the shadows because we weren't supposed to want anything but the Divine.
I remember him telling me to communicate, to stop shutting down, to let him help.
I wanted him to be enough. I wanted his touch to be the thing that finally made the voices stop, but it never was.
His skin is just skin. There's no silence in him, no warmth opening through my palm, no living anchor, no protective field.
Just memory, pressure, and the old ache of wanting someone to save me because they were standing closest.
I pull my hand back and tuck it into my lap.
Ezra notices. He doesn't say anything, but the corners of his mouth tighten, and he looks away for a split second.
A thin grey spirit with hollow eyes drifts toward him, hovering inches from his ear, its mouth moving in a frantic rhythm no one else can hear.
The vampire planned it, the spirit hisses. The quiet was bait. The blood-thief knows where to put the hook.
I flinch, and my coffee splashes against the side of the cup. Ezra is instantly alert, his hand reaching out again before he stops himself, his face settling into careful empathy.
"Aven? What is it? What did you see?"
"Nothing." My voice sounds thin and brittle even to my own ears. "Just a shadow. It's fine."
"It's not fine," Ezra says, voice dropping into the firm, steering tone he uses when he thinks I'm about to make a bad decision and needs to be guided back to sense. "You're spiraling. You're letting the visions win because you don't have the tools around you anymore."
There it is. Tools. Structure. The soft architecture of control.
I wrap both hands around my coffee so he can't reach for me again. "I'm not letting anything win. I had a reaction in a room full of caffeine addicts and ambient ghosts. It's called multitasking."
His smile is pained, almost fond. That makes it worse.
"Have you tried wearing the cross again?
Not as punishment. Just grounding. You're away from the Seminary structure now, and whether you want to admit it or not, that kind of withdrawal can make the perceptions worse.
One hour, Aven. In your pocket, even. It might help. "
I look down at my coffee, at the faint tremor in my hand, at the ghostly smear of condensation curling along the table's edge.
The suggestion is so gentle that I hate myself for wanting to recoil from it.
He's not holding metal against my skin. He's not calling me damned.
He's not doing anything I can point at and say there, that, that's the thing that made my stomach turn.
"I left my religious accessories in the drawer where they belong, Ezra."
His smile holds, but only because he makes it. "You always did make jokes when something scared you."
"True. It's either that or develop a personality around inspirational quotes, and frankly, I've suffered enough."
"Aven." He says my name like a hand on the back of my neck. "I'm not trying to control you."
The terrible thing is, I think he believes that.
He looks at me with worry in his eyes and coffee cooling between us, and I remember being nineteen and grateful for that focus.
I remember thinking if he watched me closely enough, maybe I wouldn't disappear inside my own head.
I remember wanting his concern to have no teeth.
"I just don't want you isolated," he continues, soft enough that I almost believe him too. "Not with your family history. You know what happens when people carry this alone."
The mention of my family lands like a pressure point pressed by careful fingers.
Not a punch. Nothing that dramatic. Just enough force to make my breath catch, just enough familiarity to make the room tilt.
Every answer I've given him has become data.
Every joke has been translated into evidence.
Every refusal is another symptom of the condition he already decided I have.
"I'm not alone," I say.
Ezra's eyes drop briefly to Cain's coat, to the sleeves hanging a little too long over my wrists. "No," he says, and the warmth in his voice thins. "I can see that."
A spirit by the espresso machine dips its hands into another paper cup.
The woman waiting for the drink shivers without knowing why.
Somewhere near the bathrooms, a dead man coughs coins into his palm and tries to count them.
The coffee shop continues around us, alive and dead and too loud, and I realize I'm waiting for Ezra to become obviously cruel so leaving will feel clean.
He doesn't give me that.
He only looks tired and sad and worried in a way that used to make me feel cherished. "I miss you," he says. "Whatever else you think, that part's true."
My throat tightens, which feels like betrayal from an organ I've personally kept alive through years of whiskey and poor decisions. "I know."
"Then let me help."
"You're helping by having coffee with me," I say, pushing my chair back before my hands can start shaking hard enough for him to catalog that too. "And I'm helping by leaving before I say something that turns this into a scene everyone in this overpriced brick box remembers forever."
"Aven, wait."
I do wait, which is embarrassing. Not long. Just long enough to prove some old, trained part of me still responds when he asks me to stop.