august 25th, 2019, 12:32 p.m.

"Who was that?" asked Fritz, rounding the corner wearing only an oversized Santa Monica T-shirt and boxers. His longish black hair was pulled back by a psychedelic headband and there was a cup of chia pudding in his hand. Of all the things to eat when no food had any caloric value, Julien could not fathom why anyone would choose chia pudding.

"Iman," said Julien, clicking the phone off and setting it on the sofa beside him. He was lying on his back, eyes rolled back behind him to see where Fritz stood by the front door. It was a strange thing: this place, and Fritz's existence within it. It was the third day, almost, Julien had spent in the other vampire's Baltimore apartment, and it was still off-putting.

Fritz and his house were contradictions of each other. Where Fritz was dark, somewhat brooding, all angles and sharp words and stark clothing, his dwelling was a burst of color. Tapestries adorned every available wall space—that, or Andy Warhol-esque portraits of modern day celebrities: Barack Obama, Yoko Ono, Kylie Jenner. The furniture was all low to the ground and vintage-chic, most of the doors in the house replaced with curtains of multicolored beads. The kitchen's fiery backsplash and bright yellow refrigerator made Julien's eyes hurt.

The only reason, in fact, he was still here at all was because Fritz refused to let him leave.

Three nights ago, after Fritz had shown him the blood bank, Julien had been locked in such a haze that it had taken him half an hour to realize they were heading out of DC and not further into it. Julien had shot up in a frenzy. "Holy shit, Fritz, are you kidnapping me?"

Fritz had only clicked his tongue: tsk, tsk. "You're staying with me until I know you're not gonna go psycho and eat a bunch of children."

When Julien protested, all Fritz had to say was: "Besides, it's best to keep Sera guessing, isn't it?"

Julien did not want to think about Sera, even if he was always thinking about Sera. For that reason, he was silent the rest of the drive.

Now, Fritz finished off his chia pudding, dropped it in the waste basket—equally as psychedelic as his headband—and perched himself on the couch arm, peering down at Julien. "Iman. That's the time traveler, right?"

"Sí."

Something passed over Fritz's face, but Julien couldn't tell what it was. Confusion? Distress? Or...fondness, maybe? Either way, there was something that Fritz wouldn't say, and Julien didn't like it. "Why are you making that face?"

The something vanished immediately; Fritz's face went blank. "What face? I'm not making a face."

Julien sat up, turning around to look at him squarely rather than crane his neck so much. "You know her well?"

An extremely slight beat of hesitation, so slight that Julien nearly missed it. "Besides when we met at your housewarming," said Fritz, leveling what Julien thought was a glare at him, "no. But she seems very nice. How long have you known each other, again?"

Fritz was deflecting all of this, Julien knew. Directing the conversation away from himself and back at Julien. Just this once, however, Julien allowed it. "I don't really have an answer to that question," Julien said. He grabbed a fluffy white marshmallow from beside him that he realized soon after was a pillow, hugging it to his chest. "I first saw her in...it was 1959, I think. Then I saw her later that same year, and in '60, '61, didn't see her at all in '62—you know. It's weird. Sometimes she came consistently for days in a row and sometimes I didn't see her for three years."

Fritz scoffed. "How the hell are you friends, then?"

"She popped up in my house uninvited at random times. It was kind of hard for it not to turn out that way," Julien said. He was wearing one of Fritz's worn, woolen sweaters, and the fuzz from the marshmallow was clinging to it. He tore the tiny fuzzballs away from the sweater fibers, averting his eyes from Fritz's. "Besides...I was lonely back then. It was nice to have her around, even if it wasn't as often as I wanted."

For a somewhat uncomfortably long period of time, Fritz sat still on the edge of the couch and just studied Julien, entirely silent. Julien kept trying to read his expression, but the small furrow to his brow was too vague to interpret.

In a sudden flurry of movement that made Julien jolt, Fritz jumped to his feet, walking backwards to the center of the living room. Julien just watched him, head tilted.

Tapping his throat with mindless fingers, Fritz asked, "Remember Pashay?"

The name tore at the back of Julien's mind, in the sort of way that would bug him until he pinpointed just why the name was so familiar. "Pa...shay?"

"Pashay. She was a girl you met at a bar in French Indochina—the part that's Laos now. She had golden skin, lots of dark hair, you know, the whole shebang."

"Oh!" Julien yelped, throwing his arms up. He remembered Pashay. He remembered the way his name rolled off her tongue and her snaggletooth grin and the way her pink and gold dress hugged her in all the right places. He'd gotten so terribly drunk that night that it somehow came out that he was a vampire, a monster. Pashay had smoothed his hair back and said to him, We all monsters, some days, yes?

Pashay.

He wondered if she was alive now. He realized, with an all too familiar dart of hot, hot pain in his chest, that she almost undoubtedly was not.

"Wait," said Julien then, swallowing away the memory. "What about Pashay?"

"You talked about her for months after," Fritz mused, folding his arms. "Pashay this, Pashay that, Pashay, Pashay, Pashay. You were so sad we had to leave her there, with the war starting and all. Even when we were back in Europe, you couldn't go a day without talking about her, and always with the same look on your face."

Julien's eyebrows rose. He kicked the marshmallow pillow at Fritz; he caught it, of course. "Your point?"

"It's the same look on your face when you talked about Iman just now."

Julien hesitated.

He remembered a time many years ago, after Laos and Pashay, after France and Sera. He remembered a night he found Iman on his doorstep, only for such a violent wave of relief to pass over him that he nearly staggered—and he remembered the cold emptiness in his chest twenty-three minutes later when she vanished again. He had missed people before, he thought, but never in the savage, unpredictable way he missed Iman. Missing people was different if you never knew when or if you would see them again.

"Oh," said Julien. "Oh...that's...we're just friends, Fritz. Really."

Fritz hurled the marshmallow pillow at the ground, smashed it under his foot, then looked up at Julien with one black eyebrow sharply risen. "That's you," he said, "if you're lying right now."

Julien's bones still echoed faintly with the force of being chucked across the hospital parking lot like a rag doll. He cleared his throat, holding up a hand. "I only kissed her once. One night. That was it."

Fritz let out a dramatic yelp. "I knew it. I fucking knew it."

"Fritz," Julien warned. "That was like—over fifty years ago. I am far beyond that now. We were younger then, Iman and I; we have both moved on to other people."

"Don't tell me you mean Sera again."

Julien hesitated. "I—"

"Oh my God, whatever. I'm sorry. I don't want to talk about Sera," said Fritz. Julien shut his eyes, letting out a quiet breath that was half relief and half distress. When he opened his eyes again, Fritz was kneeling in front of him, his dark eyes alight with so much curiosity that it made Julien sick.

"What the hell?" Julien asked. "What do you want?"

"Iman's new guy friend. Black Holden Caulfield," said Fritz, and Julien stifled a laugh, figuring that would be a description worth repeating. "Does he know you and Iman have history?"

"No," answered Julien, with possibly too much haste. "Not unless Iman has told him, which she better not have, because it was a mutual agreement we made later that we wouldn't ever talk about it."

And that was a mutual agreement, Julien thought, that had fared well over the years, however sporadic those years were. It would complicate things, they'd agreed. It would make it harder to be friends, they'd agreed. It would make it way weirder than necessary, they'd agreed. Considering how uncomplicated, easy, and normal their friendship was now, Julien was convinced all those assertions were true.

"Jesus, this is really reminding me of high school drama," said Fritz. "Not that I ever went."

Julien rolled his eyes. He didn't exactly remember how old Fritz was, but he knew Fritz was old enough and had been rich enough to likely be educated by a governess, within a palace.

How one got from there to here, Fritz would never say.

"Yeah, and it's reminding me how much I want to go home now," Julien said, standing and shoving Fritz backwards. He stormed to the bedroom down the hall, shucked off Fritz's too-clingy, too-dark clothing and put his own sweaty ones back on. Smelling of bagged blood and floor cleaner, Julien returned to the front hall, where Fritz was already waiting by the door.

"Your car's back in DC," said Fritz, cocking his head. "You do realize you're not going anywhere unless I take you, right?"

"I could walk."

They both cast a glance at the sun gleaming through the window, ultra-bright.

Julien deflated. "Please take me home. Im's going to worry."

"Im?"

Julien let out an exasperated sigh. "Fritz—"

"Only if you promise me," he said, his voice suddenly gruff. He stepped forward, pressing something formless and plastic against Julien's chest that Julien realized belatedly was another bag of blood. The coppery tang of it rose in his nostrils; Julien licked his lips.

Fritz smacked him. "Only if you promise me," he said again as Julien's ears rang, "that you won't let Sera get in your head, Jules."

Julien took the bag of blood from Fritz, hiding it beneath his shirt. Even as he did, he knew what Fritz asked of him was a virtually impossible request—a promise made to be broken.

He made it anyway.

"I promise, Fritz," he said. "Sera and I...are done."