Chapter 2

So on Saturday afternoon, with his apartment smelling like baking and his roommate hovering hopefully, Noah plated up six paper plates of chocolate chip cookies.

“Aww, you’re giving them all away?”

Noah’s roommate, Chuck, looked at him with puppy dog eyes. He was a slightly chubby blond with hipster glasses and a scruff of beard, who’d already had two different girls over to the apartment in the space of a week.

Noah rolled his eyes. “Six apartments, six plates, doofus. These are ours, so you get half of them.”

“Awesome!”

With a smile Noah picked up a plate and set out on his quest. Hopefully Chuck would leave him some cookies, but he didn’t really care that much. He had investigating to do.

Four doors later he found his maybe-vampires. The redhead was the one who answered the door. He was only wearing boxers, revealing that he was fairly fit. Not the kind of ripped-and-cut of a serious gym-rat, but the kind of general good shape that came from regular physical activity. Noah tried not to stare at the guy as he stood in the doorway, blinking in mild confusion at the cookies. Noah also tried not to blush. The redhead’s shirtless figure was pretty dang good looking. “Um. Hey there! I figured since we’ll be neighbors at least all this semester, I should come say hi. I’m Noah. These are for you.” He held out the cookies.

“Hi. I’m Jack.” He blinked at the cookies without taking them, though that didn’t really tell Noah anything, because so far two out of three previous encounters had been confused by the offering of baked goods.

The other maybe-vampire appeared behind Jack, also shirtless and tall enough to easily look over his head. He put his hand familiarly on Jack’s shoulder, his fingers startlingly pale against Jack’s darker skin. He was thinner as well as taller, with a lean build that meant Noah could just about count his ribs. His face was narrower, too, fine-featured and almost pretty, with long lashes framing his dark eyes, where Jack had a kind of snub-nosed, boyish masculinity.

“What’s this?” The other vampire’s voice was faintly accented, something from the British Isles, perhaps, though it was hard to judge from just those two words.

“Hi! I was baking, and thought I should share with my new neighbors and say hi, that kind of thing. Do you guys like cookies?”

“This is Gabe,” said Jack, giving a small smile back over his shoulder. “And sorry, we both have some severe allergies that limit our diets. So cookies are right out. Thank you for the thought, though.”

“Aw, that’s too bad.” Noah felt his heart racing as he tried to smile normally. Holy shit, they actually are vampires.“Um. It’s good to meet you, though. See you around?”

“Sure.” Jack flashed another friendly smile, and Noah couldn’t really tell if he had fangs or not in it, but as he turned away he felt certain all the same. The lack of reflection andboth of them having “severe allergies?” Either one of those alone wouldn’t be anything like proof, but together felt like irrefutable evidence.

He finished delivering his cookies and told Chuck that he could have a whole plate since somebody hadn’t wanted theirs, then sat down with a glass of milk and a couple of cookies of his own, but the whole time he was moving in something of a daze. He lived across the hall from two actualvampires.

Finishing the cookie, Noah sat back in his chair at the dining room table and considered. What exactly did it mean? In some ways, probably nothing. He doubted the pair went around biting the neighbors, so he wasn’t likely to be affected directly. Yet only two days ago he’d been sure he lived in a totally mundane world and could only read about the supernatural. Now he knew that at least one sort of supernatural being was real. It didn’t change much on a practical level. Yet it changed absolutely everything.

Still, the vampires in question were college students, and he’d found out about them by accident. He hadn’t been contacted to go on some kind of grand adventure, or dragged into some world-spanning magical scheme. He just…lived across the hall from a pair of vampires. Who were probably gay.

He heaved a sigh at that. Probably gay and both handsome as hellin differing ways. If they weren’t so obviously dating each other, he’d be mightily tempted to try hitting on one of them. Though that sort of thing was always fraught for him.

His second sigh was deeper, carrying a lifetime of difficult moments in it. Dating meant disclosing, and sometimes that went very badly. There was a reason he was currently single, and it wasn’t a happy one. He shifted in his chair, remembering the anger of his last would-be boyfriend. “Not a real man,” echoed in his head. There had been other things said, and some of them had been in some ways harsher. There had been insults and swear words thrown his way, but that phrase was the one that lingered. Not a real man. Just a girl, pretending to be a boy, but not actually allowed in the clubhouse. Not allowed to do the things boys did, not allowed to act the way boys acted. Expected to somehow fit into a frilly, pink space that was all wrong, yet still, even now, feeling only tolerated in the spaces that should have felt so right.