and bodywash.
Jeez, this was like being in a hotel.
She used it all. Everything. She even shampooed twice just because she liked the smell of the Biolage whatever it was. After she was done with the cleaning thing, she backed into the spray and closed her eyes, letting the water hit her head, and flow down her hair, and fall over her shoulders, her back, her legs, and her feet.
Before she ran the hot water heater out—in case he wanted to take a shower, too—she turned things off and stepped onto the bath mat. The towels hanging on the rod across from her were fluffy and white, and as she took one off and put it to her nose, she breathed in and smelled a delicate scent of meadow flowers.
Big difference from the rough, pilled-up stuff she had at the rooming house. That one bath towel she’d bought at HomeGoods was on its last legs already. Then again, for $1.99 on clearance? What could she expect.
Once she was dried off, she took a gamble and opened a couple of drawers under the pair of sinks. Yup. Brand-new toothbrushes in every size and brush configuration Oral-B had ever thought up. As well as seven or eight different brands and kinds of toothpaste. Unbelievable. Whoever managed this house was worth every penny.
Plus they brought groceries. Even when you didn’t ask them to.
As Therese brushed her teeth, she wanted to stay. She really did—and not just as in tonight. She wanted to live in a nice place like this, with clean, sweetly scented towels, and cupboards that were stocked by a thoughtful doggen, and rugs that were vacuumed by someone else. She wanted internet that she didn’t pay for, and shelves she didn’t have to dust herself, and dishes that cleaned themselves.
More than anything, though, she wanted to wake up next to Trez every night. And take coffee across from him down at that little table. And ride into work with him to her job at the restaurant. She wanted text messages from him throughout her shift, just little nothings, a meme, a stupid gif, a quick story about a crazy happening at his club. Then she wanted him to pick her up and drive her back here, the two of them chatting about what work had been like.
When they got home, she wanted to split meal prep with him. She wanted to chop vegetables on a wooden cutting board while he broiled steaks in the oven. She wanted fresh bread that smelled good, and a meal set out family-style on plates on the little table. She wanted more traded stories, from the human news or the vampire social media groups or something he’d overheard at the club from one of the bouncers.
Then cleanup. Then making love up here.
Then again, and again, until the years became decades and the decades centuries.
’Til death—in a long, long, incalculably long time off—did they part.
After which… the Fade. For eternity. Side by side.
“God, what am I thinking,” she muttered to herself.
But yes, fine, if she were honest, she wanted the mortal version of forever on the earth with him and then the mystical one on the Other Side. And if there were young? Great. And if there were not, great.
That they were together was all that mattered.
As these wild fantasies went through her mind, she stared at herself in the mirror over the sinks, a strange awareness rippling through her consciousness and going deeper. Much, much deeper.
It was as if she had thought these things before, and not because she was in a relationship with someone else.
It was him. For some reason… it had always been him.
Trez seemed, tonight at least, to be her ghost lover and her destiny, all wrapped up in one.
“And I know that’s crazy,” she said as she pulled a towel around herself.
Turning the lights off with her mind, she meant to turn away from her reflection. She did not. She could not.
That strange sense of connection with Trez, of bonding with him, of being fated to be with him, refused to go away—and she didn’t want to go back out there until she placed it in a more reasonable context. She had learned long ago that romantic feelings were powerful—but that didn’t mean they were permanent. And considering the sex they’d had? Followed by his emotional breakdown and her SuperSoul Sunday sharing stuff?
To paraphrase Oprah.
It was best to remember that anything her brain coughed up right now was the result of all the