Rowan Vance

The water had gone lukewarm a while ago, which was fine. Rowan had long since stopped caring about things like optimal bath temperature and appropriate bathing durations. She'd lit three candles—lavender because she'd run out of the good ones, a pine thing she'd bought ironically at a gas station, and one shaped like a skull she'd gotten at a craft fair—and they cast everything in a light that was at least forty percent more cinematic than her bathroom deserved.

She was draped at an angle that her spine would eventually complain about, one knee breaking the surface, watching the ceiling with the focused intensity of someone thinking about something else entirely. Her fingers had been busy between her legs for a while. Not urgently. The way you'd page through something you'd read before and still liked.

The cold hit her shoulder first.

Not the draft-from-under-the-door kind of cold. Not the radiator-gave-up kind. The specific, deliberate cold that had started happening in this apartment.

Rowan stilled. Let the sensation travel.

She turned her head toward the mirror.

It was fogged. Not from steam, because the water had been lukewarm for an hour and she hadn't exactly generated atmosphere. But it was fogged over completely, the way mirrors got when someone breathed on them. Up close. Sustained.

She stared at it for a long moment.

Her knee broke the surface again, slow. She sank a little lower. The candle flames didn't move.

"Okay," she said, to the mirror, to the cold, to whatever was in this bathroom with her. Her voice came out lower than she meant it to. She hadn't planned that. "So we're doing this."

She watched the fog. It didn't resolve into letters. Nothing dramatic. It just sat there, dense and intentional, the kind of thing that needed someone's breath to exist.

"I've been in here for—" she checked nothing because she'd left her phone on the counter— "a while. And you've been in here too, I'm guessing. Watching." She paused. "I'm choosing to find that flattering. You should know that."

The cold moved. It traced something approximating a line down the outside of her arm, above the waterline, not quite touching.

Rowan exhaled through her nose.

"That is very—" She stopped. Started again. "If you're going to be in here making the mirror fog over with your ghost breath, which is honestly kind of intimate if you think about it, you should probably commit. All the way." She tilted her head toward the ceiling, the arch of her throat catching candlelight. "I'm not going anywhere. Water's already cold. We've got nothing but time."

The flames bent. Not wind-bent. Bent toward her, just slightly, like something leaning in.

Rowan smiled at the ceiling, slow and satisfied, and let her knee sink back under the water.

"There you go," she said softly. "That's more like it."

Rowan had arranged Azathoth on the bed with what she felt was theatrical intentionality—propped against the pillow, tentacle-textured silicone in a shade of deep violet that she'd named "the color of something cosmic and terrible," which had seemed poetic at checkout and held up in her opinion. She'd positioned him like someone posed for a portrait. Dignified. Waiting.

She stood at the foot of the bed in an oversized t-shirt with a Dagon reference on it and no pants, and addressed the room.

"This is Azathoth," she said. "He's twelve inches. He doesn't get jealous, doesn't have unfinished business, and doesn't play hard to get." She paused. "He also doesn't move on his own, which is—fine. That's a neutral observation. That's me not comparing."

She let the silence develop.

"We've been together for eight months. He knows what I like." She tilted her head. "He's named after a god so mindless and vast it doesn't even notice existence. I find that romantic. You can find that weird. I don't care."

She sat on the edge of the bed, not right next to Azathoth. Not yet. She was building narrative tension.

"The thing is," she continued conversationally, to the room, to the cold she'd started identifying as directional, "I have needs. And you've been—look, I'm not mad." She was a little mad, in the way of someone very invested who was pretending not to be. "I'm just saying there are options available to me. Tangible options. With texture."

She picked up Azathoth. Examined him thoughtfully.

The light above her flickered.

Rowan's head came up immediately.

"Oh," she said. Her voice went warm in a way she hadn't modulated. "Oh, interesting."

Another flicker. The lamp this time.

"Are you—" She pointed at Azathoth with her free hand and then at the air, back and forth. "Are you—right now? Because of him?" She was grinning. She couldn't help it. "That is so—you are so—"

She hugged Azathoth to her chest, which she knew was insane, and turned in a slow circle to cover more of the room with her gaze. "That's the cutest thing that's ever happened to me. I want you to know that. I'm going to tell Delia. I'm going to say my ghost is jealous of my sex toy and she's going to tell me I need help, and I'm going to say yes, I know, but did you hear what I said—"

Something brushed her leg.

Not air. Not a draft. Something that had pressure and intent, gone as fast as it came, low on her calf, moving up.

Rowan stopped talking.

She looked down at her leg. Looked at the space beside her. She set Azathoth down carefully and stood very still.

"Okay," she said, barely above a murmur. "Okay. Hi. Hi, finally. Don't—" She barely breathed. "Don't stop."

Delia arrived with two bags of Thai food and a look on her face that said she'd already prepared for chaos.

"You look fine," was the first thing she said, which was Delia-speak for you look like you haven't slept but at least you've showered. She set the bags down on the kitchen counter and surveyed the apartment with the quiet competence of someone taking inventory. "It's actually cute in here."

"Thank you, I've been nesting," Rowan said, taking her coat and hanging it on the hook with practiced normalcy. Everything was normal. The apartment was a normal apartment. The nightstand had nothing on it because Rowan had spent forty-five frantic minutes before Delia's arrival stripping it of all evidence, which was: one pair of printed cotton underwear, one paperback copy of an erotica anthology with three pages dog-eared, and a handwritten note that said I think about you when I can't sleep which she had absolutely not meant to leave out and was now buried under her mattress.

Everything was fine.

They ate on the couch with bad television on. Delia caught her up on work drama, a situationship that had apparently resolved badly, the new café near her apartment in Chicago that Rowan would never visit but enjoyed hearing about. Rowan laughed in the right places, asked follow-up questions, did not once look at the corner of the room near the window where the temperature had dropped noticeably in the past hour.

Don't, she thought, in what she hoped was a telepathic register. Please. I'm asking you. Not right now. She already thinks I've lost it—

"So how's the apartment, for real?" Delia asked. She had her legs tucked up, a fork balanced on her takeout container, watching Rowan with that particular Delia-expression—warm, careful, seeing things.

"Great. Really good. I love it here." All true. Painfully true. "The radiator is a little—" she made a gesture— "but otherwise."

"No more ghost stuff?"

Rowan blinked. "What? I mean—I've said the stuff I've said over text. Which is—you know how it is, old buildings, the pipes make sounds—"

"Ro." Delia's tone was gentle. "I've seen your text history for the last six weeks. You sent me a photo of your nightstand at two in the morning with the caption 'do you think they'll understand the gesture.'"

"That was a philosophical question—"

"The photo contained underwear."

A door, somewhere in the apartment, swung open approximately two inches and then stopped.

Both of them looked at it.

Delia looked back at Rowan. "The windows are closed," she said.

"Old buildings," Rowan said, with the practiced serenity of a person who had been doing this for six weeks. "Drafts. Settling. Completely normal." She reached for her water. "Are you going to eat that last spring roll?"

She did not look at the door.

She did not look toward the hallway, toward the bedroom, toward the nightstand where nothing was sitting out because she'd been careful and prepared.

Beneath the table, her knee was bouncing.

Later, she thought, at the apartment in general. We can do whatever you want. I will personally apologize with my whole body. Just—