“Sorry. Didn’t mean to… like, demean you or anything. I’m just fucking with him.” He nodded at Eric. “Seriously. The guy spends all summer with us on our roof…” He nodded at the building exactly opposite mine. “Like every single night. And then, when it gets colder, and we’d rather stay in one of our apartments… boom. Nothing. He turns into a fucking ghost.”
I laughed, Eric laughed, and Josh laughed.
But it felt weird. So weird.
Like…
I tilted my head, looking at the building across the street. The very building I looked at every time I looked out of my fucking window.
Eric had spent the whole summer up on that roof?
Every night?
And he hadn’t mentioned it to me even once?
Like… If I’d spent all my nights up on the roof opposite Eric’s home, I’d have joked about it for sure. As in, “Ohh, funny. If only I’d known you lived here, I could’ve watched you every night.”
Shit.
I hadn’t even known people apparently had access to that roof. Had they seen me jerk off on my bed? Had I unintentionally given them a show?
Eric was still talking to Josh, but his whole demeanor was… off. Stilted.
And I could feel it too, that something was off, and contrary to what I’d thought in the beginning, I was pretty sure it wasn’t Josh.
Because that guy?
He was like an overgrown puppy. Grinning like a fool, waving his hand as he relayed some kind of epic play, almost knocking his baseball cap off his head.
“Dude, just promise me you’ll come over next week, okay?” he said, nudging Eric. “I’ll even get some weed so we can go out on the roof to smoke, okay? Since you seem to love it out there so much. Or were you just secretly ogling your boyfriend? If so, you can just bring him over. You know we’re chill about that, right? The whole gay thing?”
“I know,” Eric said, his voice strangled as my mind started whirring, caught up on what Josh had said.
“Or were you just secretly ogling your boyfriend?”
We hadn’t been boyfriends then.
Hell, we hadn’t even known each other back then.
But… Eric definitely could’ve seen me.
No.
Hewould’veseen me.
Because he was a vampire with vampire vision—and I was chronically bad at shutting the curtains.
Holy fuck. Even if he hadn’t wanted to ogle me or watch me or whatever, he would’ve seen me at some point, right?
And he hadn’t said a word. About knowing the neighborhood, about being friends with people who lived across the street. About spending every fucking night on the roof of the building opposite mine.
Why?
Because a normal person would’ve mentioned that.
Except if… except if he didn’t want me to know.
But whywouldn’the?
