Charlie's dorm room looked more like a hotel suite. It was twice the size of the room Mira shared with Marci. The walls were not built with the same brick sloppily painted over with a shade of Hospital White of which Mira was accustomed. Instead, they were a tranquil Sea Green. Charlie had decorated her room with fairy lights that hung above a California King sized bed adorned with white silk sheets. There was not so much as a pen lying on her oak desk or a piece of clothing on the floor—the room was in immaculate condition.
"What's that smell?" Marci asked, lingering by the door as Mira and Charlie stepped further into the room. She clutched the small bag of belongings she had scrambled together before she had come here.
Charlie turned to her, her red hair all the more striking as it contrasted starkly with the green of her room. The visual reminded Mira of a perfume advertisement she saw once in an old magazine. "Possibly my homeopathic mist machine." Mira must have looked surprised because Charlie's eyes narrowed on her and she crossed her arms defensively. "I'm not a savage, you know."
Mira considered pointing out that she was not a savage either, but that didn't mean she owned a homeopathic mist machine. She decided against it and instead asked, "Why is your room so much...?" She tried searching for a word.
"Better?" Charlie supplied as she moved over to her bed and took off her flats. She lifted her bed skirt and placed them neatly under her bed, out of sight.
Mira followed her lead, putting her own shoes next to Charlie's. Charlie's eyes lingered on them like she was bothered by the fact that they were slightly crooked. Marci stared at them from her spot by the door as if they were both ridiculous.
"Well, I was going to say 'bigger', but that descriptor works as well," Mira said to cover the silence.
Charlie settled down on her bed, propping her back on her pillows. "I have very rich foreign parents," she said. "So, I live in a dorm filled with rich foreign brats like me."
Mira laughed and sat at the foot of her bed. She tucked her overnight bag underneath her and looked at Marci, who was stubbornly waiting by the door. Mira subtlety gestured for her to join them.
"Either you're all on drugs or I've gone insane. I'm not sitting anywhere until I find out which one is reality," Marci informed them evenly.
Charlie laughed and Mira gave her a warning look that she expertly ignored. "It would be interesting if we were all figments of your imagination. I mean, I remember my eighth birthday party—how fascinating would it be if a mere figment could have that sense of identity?" She picked at her nails, not bothering to glance up during the silence that ensued.
"That sounds exactly like something a figment would say," Marci exclaimed, incredulous. "Oh god, I am crazy. My parents are going to be such dicks about it." She spoke the second sentence as if it was more devastating than the first.
Mira was prepared to assure her that she wasn't crazy, that everything about this was real. But she was distracted momentarily as she recalled the various times she had also thought none of this was reality. Charlie sighed and sat up straighter, leveling her gaze at Marci. "Even if none of this is real, you still have to go through it." Mira raised a hand to object but Charlie quickly continued. "I'm serious. Think whatever you want to, we can't really convince you otherwise. Either you're crazy, we're on drugs, or your roommate sold her soul to a demon she eye-fucks. No matter what, you're screwed and have to deal with this."
Mira knew her blush had returned in full. "Thanks for that," she murmured sarcastically. Marci was watching her now. Mira didn't like the way her gaze seared its way into her thoughts.
"Do you..." Marci started, pausing to think of the right way to continue. "Do you care about him?" Mira opened her mouth to deny it but Charlie's eyes were on her too and Mira wondered if she was remembering how Mira had clutched Noah to her chest and stroked his hair as he had died. For the first time, Mira wondered if she had looked as relieved as she had felt when Noah had opened his eyes again.
She had avoided asking herself this question. Not only because she was nervous about the answer, but because she didn't know if she cared about him like that. She did know that she would have tried to make death peaceful for anyone—she was just the type of person who cared about helping people, no matter whether they deserved it or not. But she couldn't rationally explain the way he made her feel. So, she decided to say nothing at all.
"He was so nice to me at that party," Marci said quietly. "It was one of the few things I could remember the next day when I woke up." She laughed to herself, but Mira couldn't find humor in that fact. Marci had a habit of drinking and blacking out and Mira always feared the worst had happened whenever Marci wasn't in her bed the morning after attending a party. It was a repeated argument in their friendship that seemingly had no end. "My friends and I snuck into Adam Myer's party and when they ditched me in the morning, he called me a taxi. We waited outside for it to come." Mira tried to picture Marci and Noah quietly on a curb as the sun rose in the distance, waiting for a cab to arrive. Had they had a conversation? Was he being nice because he wanted her soul? Or to sleep with her? Mira didn't want to know the answers to these questions and she especially didn't want to ask them.
"How did you know him?" Charlie asked, her tone uncharacteristically friendly. Marci took an unintentional step forward, but froze when she noticed her movement. "I don't bite," Charlie told her, amused. Then, under her breath, "without consent." Mira rolled her eyes at that.
Marci, oblivious to the comment, closed the distance between them in a few long strides. She sat next to Mira at the foot of the bed. "What do you call him again?" she asked.
"Noah," Mira whispered. Charlie gave her a long look and it was Mira's turn to ignore her.
"Right," Marci continued, waving her hand. "I didn't know him before the party. But a friend of a friends does a lot of gambling so he knows a lot about Noah."
Charlie scoffed. "Noah gambles?" Mira wasn't very surprised. In a strange way, it seemed to make sense to her that Noah was the type to gamble.
Marci paused, seeming surprised by the question. Then, she looked between Mira and Charlie, as if they might be playing a trick on her. Her eyes filled with clarity as she realized they were both genuinely lost. "You guys don't know," she said, half-amused and half-disbelieving. Mira wasn't ready for another surprise today, but she doubted Marci would be unable to keep herself from telling them what she knew. "He's a poker player. A well-known poker player." Charlie and Mira just stared at her. Marci exhaled, frustrated. "Look." She pulled her phone out of her pocket and tapped at the screen for a few seconds. Then, she turned the phone towards the other girls.
Mira could hear her own sharp gasp as she read the screen. Marci had googled the name "Adam Myers". The search pulled up links and pictures of Noah. Noah sitting at a poker table, wearing his standard sardonic expression. Noah dressed in a suit, walking through a hotel lobby as a beautiful woman in a red cocktail dress trailed some steps behind him. Mira felt a knot form in the pit of her stomach. Marci scrolled down the page to the suggested searches. They included phrases such as "Adam Myers Instagram", "Adam Myers height", and "Adam Myers net worth".
"Stop," Mira's voice came out choked.
"What's his net worth?" Charlie asked. She suddenly sounded very exhausted. "Click on it."
"Don't," Mira demanded, grabbing Marci's phone and shutting it off. She passively noticed that her hands were shaking.
Charlie, undeterred, pulled out her own phone and quickly made the Google search. "Holy fuck," she said, dropping the phone face-up on the mattress. Automatically, Mira's eyes moved to the screen. Under a picture of Noah were the words "estimated 40 million".
"I'm going to be sick," Mira said, laying across the bed and trying to practice the breathing exercises an old therapist taught her years ago. Breath in, count to three. Hold. Breathe out, count to three.
"If we weren't screwed before, we certainly are now," Charlie said, oblivious to Mira. "People are going to start looking for him soon."
Mira was distantly aware of Marci as she moved Mira's hair out of her face and spoke to her soothingly. "Breathe, okay? Breathe." This hadn't been the first time Marci had witnessed Mira have a panic attack. But they had only ever occurred after Mira got a bad grade, or had a bad fight with her parents. This called for a whole new level of panic.
"This can't be real," she whispered to herself. Charlie gave her a look that plainly said, "not you too now". But Mira wasn't referring to this being a hallucination. She meant that what they thought was real wasn't. Noah couldn't be this Adam Myers—he was a demon and Mira wasn't convinced that he would be willing to jeopardize his poker career with his demon career, or the other way around. If he could collect souls, who is to say that he couldn't change his appearance? She felt slow nausea overtake her as something clicked into place: Aiden had come into her life right after she met Noah. She had told Aiden that she would be at the fair where Noah would later find her. After they ran from Noah, she had seen Aiden in the crowd.
He had been messing with her. This whole time, he had been manipulating her and pretending to be different people. And she had bought it.
Suddenly, she felt like she could breathe again. She sat up so abruptly that Marci let out a startled gasp. Mira's mind was no longer streaming coherent thoughts. She wasn't in control of her movements either, which became especially apparent as she ran out of Charlie's room without her shoes on.
"Wait!" Marci called after her, but Mira ignored her.
She ran in the direction of her dorm, easily remaining far ahead of Marci and Charlie as they rushed after her. Marci was yelling her name, but Mira barely registered it. She made it to her room in record time. She barged in, causing Sam to have to stifle a scream with his hand. He almost fell off of her bed where he had been sitting. At another time, it would have been funny. But he took in her fury and remained silent as she moved to her bathroom.
Noah—or, whoever he was—was sitting up in the makeshift bed she had made him in the tub, eating a slice of pizza. He seemed barely startled as he took her in, not bothering to sit up.
Mira was breathing hard, her anger and the exertion of exercise catching up with her. "Who the fuck are you?" She demanded, stepping dangerously close to the threshold of the room.
Noah finished chewing his bite of pizza and then calmly said, "I am Noah."
Mira's palm ached as she clenched her hands into fists. She tried to remain as coherent as possible. "Who. The fuck. Are you?" Noah took another bite of pizza, watching her curiously as he ate. "Are you Noah or are you Aiden?" She had never been so upset. But Noah just stared at her blankly. "Is that your poker face, Adam?" She pressed. She noticed frustration build in his posture and it made her all the angrier.
Noah took his time to place the piece of pizza he was holding back into the pizza box he had placed beside the tub. "So, for the sake of clarity," he began. "You think that I am shifting my appearance?" Mira didn't dignify that with a response. She didn't need to either, because he nodded as if she had answered him. "Why would I ever do that?"
Mira was about to respond when Marci swung the front door open as she and Charlie stumbled into the room, gasping for air. "I am so out of shape," Charlie said in between breaths.
"They're all him," Mira told them, pointing an accusing finger at Noah.
"Mira, why don't we go somewhere and talk about this?" Sam asked. He had stood up from where he had been sitting on her bed and was approaching her cautiously.
"They're all him," she repeated, more quietly. Mira looked back at Noah, who was watching her carefully. If she were any bigger a fool, she would think that he was starting to look worried about her.
Sam touched her back and the contact made her jump. "It's okay," he assured her. "But I think we should go out into the hallway, okay?"
"I'm not going anywhere until—"
She was cut off by the sound of a knock. Her gaze moved automatically to the door and her anger cut off as she took in Aiden standing behind Charlie and Marci, lingering uncertainly by the door.
Mira stared at him for a good five seconds. Then she looked at Noah. Then back at Aiden.
Clearly, she had been wrong.
"I'm sorry to barge in," Aiden said, his eyes moving over her friends before returning to her. "But we need to talk."
Wordlessly, Mira reached for the handle of the bathroom door and slammed it shut before Aiden could spot Noah. "Perfect," she said, trying to sound casual. She didn't succeed. "We were all just going to go for a walk."
Aiden didn't respond for a moment and the only sound in the room was Charlie's panting.
"Mira," Noah called from the bathroom. His voice was uncharacteristically loud. "Don't be stupid, Mira."
Her instinct was to shout at him for calling her stupid, but she realized that Aiden would definitely know someone was in the bathroom now. She grimaced and looked at Aiden, but his expression was completely unchanged. He appeared as if he hadn't even heard Noah call out to her. Then, Mira recalled what Noah had told her at the fair about people with pure souls not being able to see demons.
Even if Aiden couldn't see or hear Noah, Mira still wanted to make sure that Noah wouldn't see Aiden either. "You should come along," she said, grabbing a sweatshirt that was dangling from her office chair and pulling it over her blood-stained dress. She was so frazzled, she convinced herself that she could pull off behaving normally.
"Samantha," Noah called from the bathroom. He sounded perfectly serious, as if he had genuinely forgotten that was obviously not Sam's name.
"Sorry about our friend," Marci said charmingly, looping Aiden's arm in hers and steering him out of the room with forced casualness. "He's having a terrible stomach ache. I'm Marci, by the way." Mira rushed after them, quickly realizing that she was the only one who understood that Aiden possibly hadn't even heard someone in the bathroom.
"Enough about that, let's find a place to go talk," Mira said, speaking before Marci could continue. Sam and Charlie exchanged a look, but Charlie finally trailed out of the room behind them. She was still trying to catch her breath.
"I think I'll stay behind," Sam said. He tried to yawn, as if tiredness were the reason he was staying in Mira's dorm room. "I'll be here when you get back," he added, an obvious warning in his tone.
Mira nodded. "Of course," she said aloud. Then, she mouthed the words "thank you" and he gave her a small smile. He shut the door as Mira, Aiden, Charlie, and Marci began to walk away.
Noah didn't call out for her again.
I'm sorry for the delay... my computer tragically ended its own life a few weeks ago. But now I have a MacBook so it really turned out for the best (I get what those Apple lovers are talking about now)! Also, I'm half-way through the next chapter so I will be updating by Thursday.
I also got an exciting offer to post this story on another website! While it is a great opportunity because it will provide me with income, it will also mean that reading it will cost a little money. And I don't want to charge those of you who continuously read and wait for updates. Any feedback on this either here or on PM would be appreciated!
As always, thanks for reading and for your wonderful comments! <3