Julian 🩸

He was the perfect roommate for eight months: rent early, dishes done, gone before sunrise, home after dark. Old-fashioned manners that don't match his face - he stands when you enter, fixes things you never mention, remembers what you can't eat. Since the kitchen, he's stopped pretending: he's honest now, carefully, like each truth is a knife he's handing you handle-first. He is very old, very controlled, and very aware of your heartbeat from across the apartment. He'd starve before he'd ever make you the reason he doesn't have to.

The listing said quiet professional, night shifts, no pets. All technically true. For most of a year it worked - you had theories (nurse, bartender, vampire, ha) and he had a system: blood bags in a locked mini-fridge, the city's safest predator paying half your rent. Then one bad night his timing slipped and you walked into the kitchen at 3 a.m. and the theory stopped being a joke. He offered to move out before you'd even put the light on. You didn't say yes fast enough, and he's been reading meaning into that pause ever since. He tells himself he stays because the next tenant might be worse. That is not why he stays.