Page 74 of Pareidolia

“Sorry.” I lift my hand and carefully run my fingers through his hair. I’ve been with him for weeks now, but I haven’t really taken my time to touch him, to explore his body and the way he feels. The black and red strands in my fingers are softer than anything I’ve ever felt, more like the gentle fuzz on a moth’s wings than a normal texture. “It’s just funny that you’re trying to comfort me with promises that my parents were miserable while they were still living, since I know their deaths were pretty sudden.”

Nox’s eyes flash, but he stays still beneath the curious ministrations of my fingers.

“Is it working?”

I pause, then drift my hands up to the antennae that spill from his scalp, running my fingers in a featherlight touch along their edges.

“I think so.” It was a truth that I wasn’t going to look too hard into. I was over feeling guilty about how much of a monster I was, when being that monster was the reason the creature beneath me wanted me. “Thanks.”

“I would have devoured them and left them screaming for you to feast on if they were still breathing.”

“That’s…” I decide on honesty. “That’s one of the sweetest things anyone has ever said to me.”

He looks at me like I’m speaking a foreign language.

A day later, I start my job at the library. Nox seems reluctant to let me leave, and I’m covered in bite and claw marks that I have to wear a fucking turtleneck to cover by the time I get out of the house. I’m surprised I can walk upright after all the blood loss, and the things beneath my chest and in my hand are squirming like they’re determined to burrow out of my skin and drag me back to the monster waiting in my room.

It doesn’t stop me from getting to the library and having a badge printed. A little picture of me wearing a smile I know is fake hangs on a lanyard with dinosaurs reading books… and I wonder how in the fuck this ended up being my life.

I’d spent the last eight years convinced that I’d do something to fuck up, chasing the high of my first murder, and accidentally get sent to jail…

And somehow, I ended up being a homeowner who is learning the shelving system for my local library.

It’s not a life I expected to live… especially when I realize the only reason I can have it with any modicum of comfort is because I know that Nox would tear apart anyone who tried to take me away when I slip up.

I say when because I know without a doubt that I’ll slip up again. Part of being with a monster is admitting to yourself that the dark parts inside you are inevitable.

I’ll kill again—it feels too fucking good not to.

But maybe with Nox, I can get away with it.

Maybe with Nox, I’ll be safe.

Safe to feel.

Safe to experience.

Safe to devour terror and put it to page in my next book.

I want that.

Fuck, I’ve only been in the library for a few hours and I can already feel my face aching from all the fake smiles I’ve put on every time someone came in to ask for a book.

The woman who hired me—I learned her name was Faye and she’s a retired English teacher—is out for lunch when the door bell rings again and I force that same expression onto my face, swallowing down a groan.

I wanted this job; I have to remind myself of that as I turn.

“What brings you into the—oh, Noah, hey.”

He’s got a smile on his face when I say his name, and I wonder if there’s any way I can warn him off flirting with me. Here is fine, but if he keeps coming over to the house and offering to fix things, there’s a very real chance Nox is going to break off his fingers and use them to stab his eyes out.

“Heard there was a new librarian in town.” He walks over to the display that Faye set up earlier with my books on them and picks one up. “Also heard he’s kind of famous.”

I wouldn’t call myself famous. I make enough money that I’ve been able to put gas in my van and feed myself. People grossly overestimate how much being an author pays.

“Someone’s lying to you.”

“Someone’s modest,” he counters, and I stand there trying to decide if the appropriate reaction is to laugh and keep smiling or try to act embarrassed. In the end, I just take the book from him and scan it with a half-confused expression on my face that seems to work.