Page 76 of The Invisible Roommate

Emory glowed to hear this. “I’m glad I made it in time.”

“Me, too. Just, yeah, I appreciate you coming.”

“How could I not after that note?” Emory said, removing his shirt and pants.

“The note I left with the costume?” Audible confusion peppered the space.

“Yeah…” A new apprehension sprouted in Emory’s stomach.

“What about it?” Gerard asked.

Emory wondered if his mind had played a mean trick on him. But no. Shoved into the back pocket of his pants, the note was there for him to fish out. When he did, the paper was waterlogged, causing some of the ink to bleed, but the salutation was there still, albeit slightly smudged. “The way you signed it?”

Wind smacked up against the building, causing them both to tense. The lights above the row of porcelain sinks flickered once and then twice, but they came back to full blast right away. Emory breathed a sigh of relief, then realized he couldn’t streak through town in a storm like that. He’d catch his death. Though death might’ve been his sentence either way. Who knew how the islanders would react to his sudden reappearance?

Invisibility had been fun for a time but had grown steadily tiresome. Before, he lived in fear of never being noticed; now he lived in fear of the slightest slip of a glove. Both were equally dreadful. He wished he could go back and undo everything.

Everything except Gerard.

“It’s okay if you didn’t mean it,” Emory said. Of course it wasn’t actually okay. His heart might’ve piledriven his stomach right out of his body if Gerard rescinded the declaration. But some bravery remained inside him, so he used it up. “It was probably force of habit.”

“No. Emory, I…” Gerard turned slowly toward him. “I … I can see you.”

Certain he hadn’t heard Gerard right, Emory pawed at his ears.

Gerard’s expression was 110 percent shock.

“What?” Emory looked down at himself.

Where he expected to see nothing, he saw feet and legs, arms and hands. When he moved toward the nearest mirror, he expected to see empty space reflected in the glass. Instead, his slender torso, his long, thick neck, and his angular face stared back at him.

At first, he had this uncanny sensation that the person in the mirror was a stranger he’d known long ago that hijacked his spirit and was taking it for a spin. There was no way that pale-skinned man was him. But shortly, his brain caught up to the moment.

An elated smile crested over his face when it dawned on him that he would now be able to properly calculate the duration of his serum. That elated smile squashed itself when, as he turned to the door, in a rush to get back to the apartment and document this fact, he remembered where he was. That he was in only his underwear. That just beyond the bathroom there was a whole island of people waiting to lock him up and throw away the key. He whipped back to the mirror to make absolutely certain he wasn’t hallucinating all of this.

A second figure appeared in the mirror reflection. Gerard stood behind him, eyes roving like a gentle caress over his skin. He might not have said it aloud, but Emory affirmed there was love in that gaze. Even if Gerard had written the salutation without thinking, some part of his subconscious must’ve meant it.

“Do I look like you imagined I would?” Emory asked, aware how loaded the question was. In some ways, even he hadn’t looked the way he expected to. Since memory was only ever a recall of a recall—never static or perfect—even one’s appearance could be distorted over time spent without seeing it.

Before the invisibility, Emory had tolerated his body. He fed it enough to keep its energy up and slept enough to keep its facilities sharp, but his physical appearance was a complete and total afterthought.

“I never could’ve imagined you,” Gerard said in a way that made Emory certain it was a compliment. A tentative, warm hand skimmed the outside of his arm. Tenderness broke his fears into a thousand pieces. “Emory, I meant what I wrote on the note. I … I do love you.” Gerard bowed his head, and his lips planted a kiss on the summit of Emory’s right shoulder, which was sprinkled with freckles despite his disaffinity for the sun. “I love you, and I’m going to get you out of here.”

Emory’s eyes welled up as he spun around to face Gerard. He pulled him in for a tear-dewed kiss that solidified everything that had come to pass over the previous four weeks. “I love you, too, Gerard,” he said, voice breaking without a note of embarrassment.

Gerard cried then, too, as he brought Emory’s hand up to his mouth and planted several reverent kisses on his overworked knuckles.

All of it felt unreal and dreamlike. To confirm he wasn’t making this up, with his heart speeding, Emory turned back to the mirror so he could see the two of them together again. Before he could soak in the sight, an ear-splitting thud came from outside, and the room flooded with darkness.

36Gerard

Hand in hand, Gerard and Emory groped their way out of the pitch-black bathroom and into the hallway.

The school had lost all power, evidenced by the emergency lights spearing the darkness over every exterior door.

Outside, the storm raged. Gerard pulled Emory closer for support.

At the opposite end of the hall, the islanders poured out of the multipurpose room in a line of flashlight beams, looking like a cult on their way to a ritual offering. Everyone spoke in hushed tones. Gerard squeezed Emory’s gloved hand in reassurance, even though he had no idea how this would go.