“You enjoy it, though.”

I shouldn’t. At least, that’s the stereotype, right? Immortals are supposed to be sullen and full of regrets, always a hairbreadth away from stepping into the sun and get it all over with. But mal de vivre, meaninglessness, pain and suffering . . . They’re not really my thing. I consider myself lucky, because I’m not prone to ennui. It may sound foolish, but I never get bored of watching the trees change, of seeing girls walk around hand in hand while giggling over a text from a crush, of finding a good poem.

Immortality can mean deep thoughts and philosophical pondering and the relentless pursuit of knowledge, sure, but for me it was always the opposite. I found it so easy, falling into the day-to-day. The humdrum. Staring out of the window with an empty mind. A crossword, a walk in the rain, a well-written book. Flowers blooming.

Perhaps the abbess was right, and I romanticize insignificant things too much—although, if I recall correctly, the way she put it was more like, Life is not a brightly painted knight’s tale, Sister Aethelthryth. Stop wasting time on fancies and follies, and go scrub the privy, child. Still, I’ve learned to live in the moment, and to be happy, even on my own. I’ve learned to treasure little joys, like making other people’s lives better by lending a hand or a smile, doing small talk, laughing at bad puns.

Sometimes I’m lonely. Sometimes I want more—whatever that means. Not everything is ideal. But I’m capable of finding my own meaning.

“Yes,” I say firmly. “I didn’t choose it, but I enjoy it.”

“I feel the same,” Lazlo says after a pensive beat.

My spine straightens. “Have you remembered something?”

“No. But what you said about becoming something without wanting, and still trying to make the best out of it . . . It makes sense. On a visceral level.”

“Oh.”

We finish eating in silence—and by we, I mean he efficiently shovels food inside his mouth, and I play with the worn edges of the place mat I found in the drawers. Afterward, he stands and heads for the sink to do the dishes like it’s a reflex, a simple courtesy after a meal. I cannot help but wonder who taught him that.

Maybe he is married. Maybe during the Reign of Terror, while I was milling around the falling guillotines to get a good drink out of people who’d have died anyway (hate wasting food), Lazlo was having a beachside wedding with a colleague. Maybe his partner is currently worried sick about him, tossing and turning in the bed they usually share, because he hasn’t come home and . . .

My train of thought stops, and my head explodes into a panic.

“You okay?” he asks, still drying the plates we used as though he heard my entire brain detonate.

“Yeah,” I say. But no, I’m not okay. Because I just remembered something very important.

There are no beds in this apartment.

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Chapter 7

Vampires don’t sleep.

It’s part of the whole curse thing—no rest, no quiet, no respite from our evil deeds. We are condemned to an eternity of staring at empty walls and reflecting on what we have done, all in the hope of atoning for our very existence. The possibilities for self-flagellation are endless.

But my white-hot take is that I’ve done nothing wrong, at least not since I began observing a strictly asshole-tarian diet. So I politely excused myself from the pity party and retooled that time for playing sudoku.

While my apartment does have a bedroom—mostly packed with clothes, books, and the equipment I have accumulated over years of taking up, and almost instantly quitting, all kinds of crafts—it doesn’t have a bed.

Which, I realize now, is only slightly less suspicious than putting a coffin in my living space.

“You are a horse,” Lazlo says. He surveys the room from behind me, cross-armed.

“How do you remember that horses sleep standing up but not what gluten is?”

“Maybe gluten is another one of my nemeses.” He gives a skeptical glance to my stack of friendship-bracelets kits, then moves back to the living room. “You sleep on the couch,” he says in his usual pragmatic, matter-of-fact tone.

Not asking but informing.

I decide to piggyback on that. “Of course. But it’s okay, you can take it. I think I have an air mattress”—fun fact: I know I do not—“so I can—”

“No.”

I halt, momentarily speechless. “No?”

“We both sleep on the couch,” he declares. “Together.”

“We can’t sleep together.”

“Are there laws against it?”

“No.”

“Then we sleep together.”

Goddamn this man. “No, we don’t. What if you have a family? How would your partner feel about that? How would your kids react to Daddy sharing a love seat with—”

“I’m not married.” His tone is final. “And I have no children. Some things, a man just knows about himself.”

My eyebrow lifts. “Really?”

“Really.” He turns away and starts stripping the cushions off the couch to make it more spacious.

“Out of curiosity,” I ask, peeved, “what else does ‘a man just know about himself’ despite a dire case of sudden-onset global amnesia? The date of his last colonoscopy? The best brand of jigsaw? How to build a ham radio— What the hell are you—”

He is, quite clearly, gripping my wrist and pulling me toward the couch. It should trigger my fight reflex and make me headbutt him in the nose, but for some reason it doesn’t. A moment later, I’m horizontal with him, wedged tight between the length of his body and the back of the couch.

“Oh,” I hear myself say.

Just that: Oh.

Lazlo’s reply is a vague grunt, followed by a tightening of his grip. I can feel every cord of his muscles pressing against me, and it should be a new and destabilizing experience, but it seems disturbingly familiar.

He and I, after all, have been this close before.

On the numerous occasions that he tried to kill me.

“I don’t think this is—”

“Hush,” he says gently. He’s as hot as the sun’s core. I must be the opposite, because he murmurs something about my icy limbs and how my poor body must have misplaced all its vitamins, and what can we do to find it again?

If you only knew, I think darkly, trying to free myself without too much conviction. The truth is, this is very enjoyable. Being surrounded. Pressed in. Bundled. It’s evolutionary: My kind was programmed to enjoy tiny, suffocating spaces where the sun cannot reach. And boy, does this specific slayer provide.

It’s cozy. And cozy is pleasant. And pleasant—the little things that give joy—is something one learns to value when approaching one-point-four millennia alive.

And yet. “By doing this, you’re probably destroying your decades-long marriage,” I mumble against the unwieldy pillow of his biceps. “I just hope you have nice feet.”

“Why?”

“You’re going to have to sell lots of pictures of them to afford a divorce lawyer.” He hums, patient, clearly confident about the state of his toes. “Seriously, Lazlo, this is a bad idea.”

“Stop fidgeting, I’m dozing off.”

“Didn’t you sleep all day?” I mumble, perhaps more harshly than he deserves, considering his recently concussed status. Maybe too late, it occurs to me that I should pretend to breathe. “Listen, since neither of us knows whether you are in a relationship, I think that—”

An impatient sigh interrupts me, and he crowds me even more against the cushions, which presses him close enough to me that . . . Oh my God. Is that a stake in his pocket, or is he just glad to see me?

“Ethel, stop it.”

“Stop what? I’m only—”

“The bugs, the job, the nemeses stuff. You don’t have to tell me the truth, but you can stop pretending.”

“Pretending what?”

His chest heaves. “I might not remember my name, or anything about who I am. But I could never be near you and not know exactly what you are to me.” A second later, he falls asleep, leaving me to stare at the chevron pattern of the couch for eight straight hours as I try not to enjoy the heat of his body against mine, desperate to decipher exactly what his last words meant.