Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
A Caro.
Trish, shy, gentle, blushing-if-you-look-at-her-too-long Trish, is secretly dating a blood drinker.
I still don’t know how it happened. She won’t tell me the details, only that they met “by accident” and that it’s “complicated” and that she refers to him only as “the man I’m dating” because using his actual name out loud would, in her words, “make it too real and then I’d have to deal with the fact that I’m in way over my head.”
I understand this more than she knows.
“Lunch,” Trish says breathlessly, arriving at my desk with her bag already over her shoulder. “Now. Please. I need to talk.”
“Scale of one to ten?”
She considers this. “Seven. Maybe eight. Definitely not below a seven.”
I save my file and grab my lunch bag. “Roof?”
“Roof.”
THE ROOF TERRACE IS technically for all employees, but nobody ever comes up here except us. It’s too windy for most people, and the altitude makes some of the human employees dizzy. But I like it up here. The view is staggering, endless peaks and pine forests and sky that goes on forever, and the wind is the sort that makes you feel clean, like it’s blowing away everything you don’t need.
We sit on our usual bench, and I unpack my homemade onigiri, which has been my best budget-saving hack thanks to an amazing YouTube recipe reel. Beside me, Trish unwraps something that looks like it was prepared by a professional chef.
I eye her bento box. “Let me guess. The man you’re dating.”
Trish goes pink. Not just her cheeks. Her entire face, her neck, all the way to her ears. It’s sort of magnificent. “He found out I’ve been eating vending machine food for lunch.”
“And?”
“And now there’s a delivery service. Every day. To my desk. The packaging is completely unmarked so nobody can trace it, but the food is...” She gestures helplessly at the bento box, which contains what appears to be seared salmon, perfectly arranged vegetables, and some grain that I’m pretty sure costs more per ounce than my monthly rent. “...this.”
“That’s really sweet, Trish.”
“It’s really terrifying.” She picks up her chopsticks and stares at the salmon like it’s personally offended her. “What sort of person arranges an anonymous gourmet lunch delivery service for someone they’re dating?”
“A Caro?”
She goes even pinker. “Zia.”
“I’m just saying. From what I’ve read, Caros are...” I search for the right word. “Intense about the people they care about.”
This was one of the things I’d learned after That Day, when the preter world came out of hiding and suddenly everyone was googling supernatural races like they were studying for the world’s weirdest final exam. Caros were known for being fiercely protective and, according to multiple sources, incredibly aloof, incredibly obsessive, incredibly ruthless, and just about everything incredible in a Cruel Intentions sort of way, I suppose.
Which is a very clinical way of saying: when a Caro likes you, they really like you.
“It’s just lunch,” Trish mumbled.
I give her an uh huh look, and she buries her face in her hands. “I really don’t think it means anything special.”
“But you said this is a seven-maybe-eight situation.”
She peeks at me through her fingers. “Do you think it’s too fast?”
And there it is. The actual question underneath all the blushing and the chopstick-staring and the magnificent full-body flush. Is this real? Can I trust it? Is it safe to feel this happy?
I know that question.
I’ve asked it myself, once, about a boy who made me feel like the center of his world for two years before reducing our entire relationship to four sentences on a phone screen.
But Trish isn’t asking about Billy. She’s asking about her own story, and her story isn’t mine.
“I think,” I say slowly, “that the man you’re dating is going out of his way to make sure you eat well. And I think that says something good about him.”
Trish lowers her hands. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She smiles then. Small, private, the smile of someone who’s falling and hasn’t hit the ground yet and is still in that breathless, terrifying, wonderful space in between.
I smile back.
And I don’t think about the fact that nobody has ever sent me anonymous gourmet lunches. Or that the one person who was supposed to be my scientifically compatible match chose his parents’ money over me. Or that I’m eating onigiri on a rooftop while my best friend’s secret Caro boyfriend sends her food that looks like it belongs in a magazine.
I don’t think about any of that.
Mostly.
THE AFTERNOON PASSES the way afternoons at Lykaios Holdings usually do: quickly, because the work is absorbing, and quietly, because the design wing operates with a focused hush that I’ve come to love.
I’m working on packaging prototypes for a new line of portable safety devices, compact units that emit a frequency only vampires can hear, designed to give humans a few crucial seconds of warning during an attack. The technology itself was developed by a joint team of Caro and Lyccan scientists, and my job is to make the outer casing intuitive, durable, and something that a person would actually want to carry around every day rather than shove in a drawer and forget about.