I’d always felt my art was an extension of my innermost self, and the sight of his large, graceful hands touching every single part of this early drawing felt almost unbearably intimate.
“What do you find fascinating about it?” I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sight of his hands touching my work. I felt moments away from melting into a puddle at his feet.
“All of it.” His hand left the page. I felt him withdraw as much as saw it and exhaled for the first time in what felt like minutes. An unexpected, indescribable feeling of emptiness coursed through me. “I do not claim to understand what you see when you draw and build these things. But the intricacy of your detailing suggests that whatever it is, it is big and deliberate. This is intentional. It means something to you. I cannot help but respect it.”
His eyes met mine, his gaze so piercing it punched the breath from my lungs.
It took a moment for me to remember how to form words.
“Yeah,” I said. Like a moron.
His expression went suddenly distant and wistful. “There was an artist in the village where I was raised. She drew the loveliest things. The sunset in winter. A child playing with a small toy.” He paused. “Me, when I was just a child myself, laughing with friends.”
I bit my lip, trying to ignore the sudden stab of irrational jealousy that went through me at hearing the word she.
Get a grip, Cassie.
“Your girlfriend?”
His smile slipped. “My sister.”
I winced, feeling like an asshole. She had to have been dead for hundreds of years.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He shook his head. “Mary lived a long, rich life, full of art and other beautiful things. The village she married into was small and close-knit. I don’t doubt she lived happily until the end of her days.”
These details about his sister were the first personal details about his life he’d given me, beyond the basics of how he’d ended up in his current situation. I wasn’t sure why he’d chosen to share this with me now—but the decision felt momentous.
In truth, I still knew almost nothing about my weird, fascinating roommate. This small tidbit was like a dam breaking on my curiosity about him.
Suddenly, I was greedy to know more.
“Where did you grow up?”
“England.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, his eyes distant as though he were picturing the town in his mind’s eye. “About an hour south of London by car if you were to make the journey today. When I lived there, though, the journey to London involved nearly a full day of travel.”
England? That surprised me. “You don’t speak with an accent at all.”
“I have lived in America for much longer than I lived in England.” He gave me another small smile. “It doesn’t matter where you were born, Cassie. After you’re gone from a place for a few hundred years the accent’s barely detectable anymore.”
After you’re gone from a place for a few hundred years.
I bit my lip, gathering the courage to ask something I’d wondered about ever since I found out what he really was.
“You’ve . . . been gone from England for a few hundred years?” I asked, dancing around it.
He nodded. “I have not been back to where I was born since just before the American Revolutionary War.”
“How old are you, exactly?”
He looked at me for such a long, heavy moment before answering that I began to worry I’d overstepped. Before I could apologize for prying, though, he said, “I am not entirely certain. My memories before I turned in 1734 are . . . opaque.” He swallowed and looked away. “There was a vampire attack on my village that year. Most of us were either killed or turned. I believe I was in my mid-thirties when it happened.”
1734.
My mind was reeling as it tried to process the fact that the man sitting beside me on the couch was more than three hundred years old.
“And that is precisely why I have not returned in so long,” he continued. “All the people I knew from before I turned are long gone, except for—” He abruptly cut off, as though he’d been about to say more but decided against it at the last minute. He shook his head. “All the people I knew and loved from my childhood are dead.”
The firm set of his jaw told me there was more he wanted to say, but he simply pressed his lips together and looked again at the art notebook spread open before us on the coffee table. For the first time, it occurred to me that it must be incredibly lonely to live forever while everyone around you aged and died.
Maybe this was why he kept Reginald around. Having one constant from his past must be a comfort to him—even if said constant was also kind of an ass.
“What was your hometown like?” I asked.
He’d already shared more about his past in these few minutes than he’d done the entire time I’d known him, and part of me wondered if asking for more was pushing it. But he was still such an enigma, even after all these weeks with him. Now that we were talking about his past, I couldn’t help myself.
If he minded my question, he didn’t act like it.
“I don’t remember much,” he admitted. “I remember feelings. My family, some of my closer friends. Some of the things I liked to eat. I used to love food.” He smiled wistfully. “I remember the house I lived in.”
“What was it like?”
“Small,” he said, chuckling. Looking around his spacious living room, he added, “You could probably fit three of them in this apartment. And there were four of us living there.”
“No McMansions in England three hundred years ago?”
He shook his head, still smiling. “No. Certainly not in the small village where I was raised. No one had the money or the resources to build anything bigger than what was absolutely required to keep a family protected from the elements.”
I thought of what little I’d learned of the architecture in eighteenth-century England from my art history classes. I could almost picture Frederick’s little house in my mind’s eye. A thatched roof, possibly. Floors made of simple wood.
How did a boy raised in a place like that end up here—in wealth and splendor, in a fabulous apartment across the ocean—hundreds of years later? The details he’d shared with me only whetted my appetite for more information about him. But he leaned back against the couch cushions then, arms folded across his chest, signaling that he was done sharing for the evening.
I didn’t have to be done talking, though. After sharing with me what he had about his sister, the urge to reciprocate and share something of my own life was too strong to resist.