Warm Blood

eleven

11

present day

At nine forty-five in the evening is when Paul Mackus messages me to stop by his office. He's burning the midnight oil to grade the assignments he's been pushing off, and he wants my company—but company, to him, means sex and I don't know why he won't just say it. 'Come over and fuck' is a much more inviting demand than 'want to help me grade papers?'. We crossed our professional boundaries long ago, and yet he is still desperately latching onto any semblance of morality he once possessed. Still, I tell him I'll be there shortly and begin to make my way out of my apartment.

I'm stopped by my roommate, Lily, once I cross into the kitchen. She is leaning against the marble-topped island with a manicured hand placed on her protruding right hip and a matching scowl on her thin lips so as to scold a child for not listening to their parent. "Heading out?" she questions me, though she already knows the answer. I don't spend much time in the apartment, neither does she, so her accusatory tone of voice immediately annoys me.

"What's up?" I ask, feigning curiosity.

"Oh, nothing," she sighs, committed to the whatever role she thinks she's playing. "I just want to know if I should be expecting anything weird to happen when you come back tonight."

"Weird?"

"Yes." Lily's colorless eyes grow wider now as she takes a daring step towards me. "I saw Professor Mackus creeping around our apartment last week and let me tell you—that was not something I wanted to see!" She opens her mouth to make a gagging gesture, and it makes me wonder how she would sound if she was gagging on her own blood.

My patience is wearing thin, and I don't want to entertain this conversation anymore. Lily is known around campus for spreading her legs to anyone who asks, and she also has a tendency of bringing random strangers into our apartment (R.I.P southern salt-and-pepper O-negative), so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if she's also had an affair with a professor. Why I am suddenly hearing about her aversion to my choice in sex partners is beyond me. "What's your point?" I ask, blunt.

"My point?" she fires back as her eyes turn wild along with her body language. "I know you fucked that guy I brought over."

I smirk. "Which one?"

She stomps her foot, like the child that she's so effortlessly emulating. It's the hopeless romantic in her—giving her body to everyone in hopes they'll give her everything. It probably pains her to know I get the male attention she desires without even trying. "Oh, my god, Chloe! You're actually a fucking bitch, you know that?"

I shrug and say, "so I have been told," before I decide this conversation has gone on for far too long. I continue my trek to the front door, but Lily doesn't seem to want to let it go.

"I saw him bleeding," she blurts out, and ah, finally, we get to see what she really wants. "Professor Mackus—he was bleeding from his neck and I asked him if he was okay but he didn't even realize that he was bleeding and he looked like he was on drugs or something. And that made me remember how I saw a smear of blood on the kitchen floor the other day, which I thought was weird, because it was a lot, and I put the pieces together and—look, I don't know what kind of kinky stuff you're into, but like, that's not okay."

I smile genuinely. Clearly, I was careless about the way I chose to feed and clearly, I was also wrong about Lily. I chose her as my roommate because I thought she would be too self-centered to pay attention to me, but her envious personality could not allow her to. If there is anything that I have noticed about living in this modern 21st century is that humans are full of juxtapositions that make them even more complex than I pinned them out to be. And to that, I applaud Lily. "Well," I say, giving her a smirk to show her I am not the least bit fazed by this information, "maybe, if you were into more kinky stuff, you'd actually keep a guy." And I leave her like this, with her jaw dropped open and the creases in her forehead at an all-time high.