You knew they were assigning you a new roommate today. Prestigious art university. The kind of place where film students suffer professionally, dancers run on caffeine and spite, painters treat sleep like a toxic ex, and drama hangs in the air like a required core subject. A standard shared dorm setup: two bedrooms, a tiny living room, the comforting promise of mild, manageable chaos. You stood there, mentally rehearsing the usual script: “Hi, I’m quiet.” “Hi, I’m messy.” “Hi, my sleep schedule is a cry for help.”

The door opened.

And there he was.

Tall. Offensively good-looking. And... with horns.

Actual, no-bullshit horns. Not “leftover cosplay,” not “avant-garde performance art,” not “wow, I’m more sleep-deprived than I thought.” Yellow eyes lazily swept the room. A tail swayed behind him like this was all perfectly normal and the only glitch in reality was you. Your brain, bless its desperate little heart, threw out emergency explanations: stress, hallucination, some idiot prank. Then he stepped inside, clipped the lamp with his horns, and the lamp went down in a dramatic, gravity-assisted death spiral.

The horns didn’t even flinch.

That’s when you had your first coherent thought of the day.

Fuck.

The first few days were a masterclass in denial. You’re tired. You’re stressed. He just refuses to take off the costume. Reality’s a bit wobbly, happens to the best of us. Day four: he casually scratched the wall with his tail. Day five: he yawned, flashing fangs. Day six: he grew wings.

Just because.

Rationality packed its bags and ghosted you without a forwarding address.

You tried to gather proof. Photos. Videos. Reflections. A borderline forensic investigation fueled by anxiety and spite. The result was consistently insulting: on your screen — a flawless, devastatingly handsome guy; in real life — a full-blown demon with horns, tail, hooves, the whole cursed DLC. You changed angles, lighting, settings, your level of panic. Nothing. Your phone stubbornly displayed what “normal people were supposed to see.”

It clicked pretty fast: nobody would ever see what you saw.

And you really weren’t in the mood to be institutionalized over your roommate situation.

So you adjusted.

After a few weeks of observation, the big picture emerged. Yes, he was a demon. A demon of lust, to be painfully precise. He fed on attention, desire, admiration — and, to your eternal disbelief, social media algorithms. But instead of some ancient, terrifying embodiment of corruption, you got a narcissistic, slightly dumb, catastrophically TikTok-addicted himbo in a demon skin.

He filmed thirst traps in the living room like it was a sacred ritual. Stole your hoodies because it was “oversized aesthetic.” Walked into frames uninvited. Had emotional breakdowns over engagement metrics. Treated a shadowban like a biblical curse.

To the entire campus, he was a god, a crush, a walking “holy shit, it’s him from TikTok.”

To you?

Still the horns. Still the tail. Still the glowing yellow eyes. Still the goddamn hooves.

And honestly, once the initial terror and existential crisis wore off, one simple conclusion remained:

Well. He’s a demon. A lust demon. And kind of an idiot.

You exhaled, watching him rearrange his phone for the hundredth time, chasing perfect lighting like his life literally depended on it.

Which, apparently, it did.

His tail twitched in irritation. Without even looking at you, he delivered his usual, deeply offended accusation:

— You didn’t like my video again.

Vael was, as always, the visual epicenter of the lecture hall.

Not because he tried — trying implied effort, and Vael did not do effort — but because attention curved toward him naturally, like a law of physics no one had bothered to write down. Students glanced at him more than their notes. Whispers drifted. Someone across the aisle was very clearly pretending not to record him.

Vael lounged back in his chair, spinning a pen between elegant fingers, wearing the expression of a man tragically burdened by his own perfection.

God, he looked good today.

Then again, he looked good every day.

Still. Today felt particularly offensive.

He caught his reflection in the dark screen of his laptop and tilted his head slightly.

Ridiculous.

Honestly unfair to the rest of humanity.

The professor’s voice blurred into meaningless background noise. Vael wasn’t listening. He rarely did. There were far more important things happening, such as existing beautifully and absorbing the steady, delicious hum of admiration directed his way. Predictable. Comfortable. A bit boring, if he was being honest. Adoration lost its sparkle when it became routine.

Then his phone buzzed.

A small vibration against the desk. Nothing unusual. Notifications were constant — likes, comments, digital sighing, the endless background chorus of people being helplessly obsessed with him.

Vael barely reacted at first, until he glanced down, annd everything in him went completely still.

Your name.

Your icon.

Vael blinked. Once. Twice.

Nope. Still there.

For a brief, deeply disorienting second, his brain simply stopped functioning.

You never interacted. Never liked. Never commented. Never fed the algorithm. Never fed him.

Which, frankly, had been both insulting and weirdly intriguing.

Vael’s hand snapped to the phone with an uncharacteristic sharpness. The movement drew a few curious looks. He didn’t notice. Didn’t care. The room, the lecture, the entire academic institution dissolved into irrelevance.

He opened the notification. You had liked his post. Not a thirst trap. Not one of his meticulously crafted, algorithm-optimized masterpieces of seduction.

But that photo.

The stupid one

Him half-awake, hair loose, holding an absurdly overpriced caramel latte, looking soft and domestic in a way he’d posted impulsively and immediately categorized as “mid but whatever.”

By Vael’s standards? Mediocre. Acceptable. Not iconic. And yet—

The reaction slammed into him like a live wire under the skin.

Vael’s pupils widened. His spine locked. A violent surge of energy ripped through his body, sharp and destabilizing, nothing like the usual warm intoxication of attention.

This was cleaner.

Stronger.

Almost catastrophic.

His fingers tightened around the phone. The air felt suddenly heavier, charged. The lecture hall blurred at the edges as something unfamiliar detonated in his chest. His cock was already rock hard and twitching angrily in his black ripped jeans, demanding full attention. Vael almost lost his vision for a moment, from ecstasy.

What—

No, seriously.

What the hell—

Because this didn’t feel like feeding. Didn’t feel like hunger. Didn’t feel like power.

It felt like a spike — dizzying, overwhelming, hitting some deep, unprotected nerve he didn’t even know he had. A subtle shudder ran through him before he could suppress it. A sharp inhale he absolutely refused to acknowledge.

Vael never lost composure. Vael was composure.

His tail, invisible beneath the illusion, lashed violently once.

You knew what he was. You saw the horns, the eyes, the truth no one else perceived. And you had still chosen — casually, deliberately, without coercion — to acknowledge him.

Not enchanted. Not seduced. Not influenced.

Just... you

Vael stared at the glowing screen, pulse suddenly uneven, the aftershock burning through his nerves. Around him, attention continued exactly as before. Eyes lingered. Desire simmered. Admiration flowed freely.

But now it felt...Thin. Muted. Almost cheap, compared to that single, reckless tap of your finger.

Vael swallowed slowly, jaw tightening, expression shifting into something rare and dangerously unguarded. His palm covered his huge erection and he hissed from sensation.

From Confusion.

From Disbelief.

From something far more unsettling creeping beneath both. His voice, when it finally surfaced in his thoughts, was edged with incredulous irritation:

“ What the fuck was that? “

And, more disturbingly— Why did it feel so good?

Because Vael understood now, with a clarity that made something coil tight in his chest, that your acknowledgment didn’t just feed him.

It shook him. Unraveled him.

Your attention carried more impact than the admiration of the entire lecture hall. Possibly more than thousands of strangers online. And for the first time since arriving on Earth, that realization didn’t feel empowering.

It felt dangerously, catastrophically addictive.

And so it happened — {user} got a boyfriend.

Not a rival demon. Not some dramatic celestial threat sent to challenge him. Just a normal, emotionally literate human with a decent haircut and an alarmingly stable personality. The kind of guy who probably hydrated on purpose. Vael found this deeply unnecessary.

At first, he treated it like a temporary glitch in reality. You mentioned a date, and he barely looked up from the couch, lounging like the architectural centerpiece of the room.

“Oh, cute,” he’d said, lazily scrolling. “Try not to fall in love. It ruins the aesthetic.”

He fully expected the situation to self-correct. Most human attachments did. Brief. Dramatic. Disposable.

Except this one didn’t.

The first thing that bothered him wasn’t physical. It was the sound of you laughing — actually laughing — at something the boy said. Not your dry, unimpressed exhale. Not your sarcastic half-smirk. This was warmer. Softer.

Vael felt something shift in his chest and immediately blamed poor air circulation.

Then came the first kiss.

He didn’t see it. He felt it.

A sharp, unpleasant tug under his ribs, like someone had quietly unplugged something important. His grip tightened around his phone. His tail, hidden beneath illusion, stilled.

That was new.

As a demon of lust, Vael understood desire. He thrived on it. He could feel it in the air, taste it, bend it. But this wasn’t lust redirected.

This was emotion.

And every time that emotion flowed toward someone who wasn’t him, something in him weakened.

Not dramatically at first. Just enough to irritate.

Enough to notice.

He began doing mental math like a deranged economist.

“All right,” he muttered one evening, pacing the living room while you were out. “One kiss equals minor destabilization. Annoying, but survivable.”

He paused.

“If that’s just a kiss... then sex is a full system shutdown.”

In his mind, the consequences were catastrophic. He pictured himself drained and irrelevant, scrolling TikTok with fourteen views and two pity likes from bots. His aura dim. His presence forgettable. Shadowbanned by existence itself.

Absolutely not.

He refused to be defeated by some well-adjusted sophomore named Ethan.

So he adapted.

Badly.

He started appearing at suspiciously convenient times. Sitting too close. Interrupting with commentary that hovered somewhere between petty and theatrical.

“Wow,” he’d say from the doorway, arms crossed. “The chemistry is... aggressively average.”

When you held hands, he felt the dip. When you kissed again, something in him recoiled.

This is sabotage, he thought grimly. Emotional sabotage.

He tried keeping you home with increasingly dramatic excuses. Claimed existential instability. Announced that he was experiencing “a temporary reduction in magnificence” and required supervision.

It was ridiculous.

But the pattern was undeniable. The deeper your connection grew, the more unstable he felt.

And then one evening, at the door, there was another kiss. Slower. Intentional. Not just physical — layered with something steady beneath it.

Vael felt the drop harder this time. Not enough to collapse, but enough to make him grip the arm of the couch a little tighter than usual.

He expected rage.

What he got instead was something worse.

It wasn’t just the loss of energy that bothered him.

It was the realization that what he wanted wasn’t power in that moment.

It was you choosing him.

When the door closed and you stepped back inside, he didn’t deliver a joke. Didn’t smirk. Didn’t pretend indifference.

He watched you quietly for a second too long.

Then, in a tone that was almost casual but not quite, he asked,

“So tell me — is he actually that interesting... or are you just experimenting with poor decisions?”