Page 30 of The Invisible Roommate

Gerard didn’t have an expression to go off of, so he couldn’t tell if Emory was thinking or scowling or appearing remorseful. All he heard was crackling silence. All he saw was a propped-up robe and a pair of downturned glasses. “For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that you’re a monster,” Gerard said before he left with his jacket in his hand, “but I do think it’s easier for you to believe that you are so you don’t have to face the fact that maybe you’re just a self-absorbed asshole.”

With that, he slammed the door.

16Emory

Invisibility was not invincibility.

At least not emotionally.

All day, Emory clawed at his research, desperately seeking a shred of focus. Every time he attempted a calculation, that withering, disappointed look Gerard had worn earlier on his way out the door spirited to the front of his mind, and all his momentum was lost.

How could someone with a face like Gerard Wells’s not want to be on posters and album covers? As someone who had always questioned his looks—whether his face was too long, or his arms were too skinny, or his hair made him look old—he couldn’t wrap his head around Gerard Wells being self-conscious. Even frowning, Gerard looked billboard ready.

If Emory was going to present his invisibility serum at the alumni gala with replicable results to rub everyone’s noses in, he needed to continue working. The only place he could do that was here. In this apartment. Where Gerard Wells was paying the rent.

He hated being at the mercy of another person like he was a child again, but he supposed there were worse potential roommates than an international pop star.

Gerard had taken his story surprisingly well. Sharing it felt like exhuming a long-buried John Doe. Nobody had ever asked him about his past before—not in any real way—so he took the coroner’s tools to the flesh, the memories cutting deep.

While his social smarts needed some fine-tuning, he was self-aware enough to know that were he to try to explain his plight again to someone less eager to listen, he might be laughed at, mocked, or thrown to the wolves. Gerard was offering him a haven for the moment, so he needed to offer an olive branch in return.

Abandoning his experiment, he flung open the fridge. There weren’t many ingredients to work with, but that only heightened the challenge, and Emory Griffin loved a challenge.

Moving while invisible meant learning to walk for the first time again. Proprioception was impossible, given that Emory’s gaze lasered through his own limbs. His brain was an isolated control board, and his body was a satellite robot he was maneuvering from an undisclosed location.

Cooking proved a brand-new beast.

In the kitchen, he struggled anew with his motor functions. How far could he chop a carrot without severing a finger? How close was he really to the flames of the gas burner when he set the pan on it? For his already-strained sight, his other senses had to pick up the slack.

By the time his slapped-together stir-fry was about finished, the door to the apartment swung open.

“You’re still here,” Gerard said in a tone that Emory could not exactly call happy-to-see-him, which wasn’t saying much, given he literally couldn’t be seen.

Emory turned with the pan in his hand. “I made dinner.” Gerard hung up his coat and went to the table, which Emory had set with a napkin and utensils. “I hope you meant it when you said you liked simple. My college job was food service in the campus dining hall. Since I didn’t really know how to cook before they hired me, I manned the wok station for most of my first year. It’s pretty hard to screw up ingredients tossed in a pan.”

Unspeaking, Gerard sat, then unfolded the napkin on his lap. Emory filled a plate and set it down in front of him. He smiled before remembering Gerard couldn’t see his friendly expression. “Bon appétit,” he said cheerily instead. Still, Gerard made no move to eat.

“You’re not going to make yourself a plate?” Gerard finally asked.

Emory sighed because he was hungry. The scent of peppers and onions still sizzling in the air made it worse. “I don’t want you to have to see me eat.”

Gerard raised a suspicious eyebrow. “See you eat? I can’t see you at all.”

“I don’t want you to see the food as it goes down,” Emory clarified, not wanting to spoil Gerard’s appetite with talk like this, but Gerard threw out a barrage of follow-up questions that Emory felt obliged to answer. “I’m invisible, but the food is not. From the moment I put it in my mouth, you will be able to see it go down until it’s assimilated.”

“Oh … okay, I get the picture, but how do I know you didn’t poison this?” he said.

“I did not poison it,” Emory said, hackles up already.

“Then prove it.”

Instead of arguing, like a good scientist, he set about disproving Gerard’s ridiculous theory. He served himself, fed himself, and watched as Gerard’s eyes nearly bulged right out of his head at the masticated food traveling down his see-through esophagus. Thankfully, he wore a sweatshirt, which shielded Gerard from the rest of the process. “There, happy? I’m not choking.”

“How do I know it’s not a slow-acting poison you put in there? Your lips could be turning blue as we speak, and I wouldn’t be able to see them to know,” Gerard said.

“Why would I purposefully poison myself?” he asked, annoyed that he’d taken time out of his day to make this meal that would go cold over the course of a silly argument.

“Because you’re all sciencey and would know the antidote and I wouldn’t.”