Luna stopped the car.
Josh looked out the window at a building he had looked at approximately nine thousand times.
"That's my place," he said. "I thought we were going to yours."
"Well." Luna stared straight ahead, both hands on the wheel. "That's the thing, you see. I..."
She let it hang for a second.
"...don't have a place," she mumbled.
"So you sleep in—"
He turned around to look at the back seat.
The leather back there was worn through in one long stretch, the nap rubbed off it in a shape about the length of a person, with a deeper dip at one end where the same head had gone down on the same spot enough times to make a hollow.
Josh turned back around and didn't finish the sentence.
"Okay," he said. "Come up to my place. I'll sleep—"
He glanced at the building and tried to work out where, in his apartment, a second human being could be stored.
By the time he'd gotten anywhere with it, Luna was already out of the car.
So he stopped thinking about it and went up with her.
✦ ✦ ✦
The door was unlocked, because he'd left it unlocked, because he'd been abducted out of it about three hours ago and had not been consulted on the matter.
It didn't bother him. There was nothing in there to take.
Inside, the computer was still on, still open on the page he'd been losing to, and the screen was the only light in the room. It threw everything in that flat blue-white that makes a place look like the inside of a fridge.
Luna took two steps in, which put her most of the way across it, and stopped.
"So." She looked around. "A cramped studio apartment, with a single bed, and a single desk, and no more floor space." She turned in place. "Great. Is the rent that high?"
"Not really." Josh shut the door. "I got this place for free. Just, no pets allowed."
Luna's eyebrows went up.
"Of course," she muttered. "The rich get stuff for free. Why else?"
"Dude, I nursed the landlord's dad for a few years." He put his keys down on the desk, on the same square inch he always put them. "Rest in peace, Mr. Winsow."
"...That turned depressing." She winced. "Are you sad? Okay. What am I saying? I should stop."
Josh laughed a little.
"Nah, that's fine. I'm fine." He pulled the chair out and then didn't sit in it. "People die. That's the way this is."
Luna watched him not sit down in the chair, and found herself thinking about something she hadn't thought about in a very long time.
(Luna:He was becoming inhuman. Slowly, but it had started. And from where he was starting, with that essence and that rate and the way he'd taken all of this in without flinching, he could end up a mage.
There hadn't been a mage since before anybody kept count of things like that.
They'd all found their way to immortality, back then. Every one of them did, eventually. It was practically the last thing each of them ever worked out how to do.
And then, one after another, over more years than she could count, every one of them finished himself off.
It would be interesting, she thought, to watch this one go the same way.)
"It's getting late," Luna said. "So. You're the boss. Where should we sleep?"
"Sleeping this early?" Josh looked at the clock on the monitor. "Then take the bed. I'll be working till late anyway. You can have it."
"Sure. Suit yourself." She flopped down on it without further discussion, which put her knees higher than the mattress. "You don't have to treat me differently because I'm a girl."
"Oh — right. Food." He turned around. "Dinner. What do you want tonight? It's on me."
"I don't have much, so." Luna didn't even pause. "Of course. Steak it is."
"Okay, steak it is. Pricey." Josh pulled his phone out. "You sure know how to empty pockets."
He got the app open and then stopped with his thumb over it.
"Quick question. How much do you eat?"
"Don't ask a lady that question," Luna snapped.
And that killed the room.
Josh stood there with his phone in his hand and his thumb not moving. He knew he was supposed to say something. He went through about four options, and all four of them were worse than silence, and the silence kept going.
Luna got there first.
"Since this is your first time," she said, to the wall, "I'll tell you. Just once."
"Okay."
"Eight," she said. "Maybe nine, if they're small."
Josh made a noise.
It wasn't a word. He'd been halfway through a breath and the breath went the wrong way, and he coughed once into his fist and then had to stand there and finish coughing while she waited.
Because eight.
Eight steaks. Delivered. He did the math fast, then again more carefully, and it came out the same: five hundred. Six. Closer to seven if she meant good ones, and she probably meant good ones.
Six hundred dollars. One meal. One person.
He didn't say any of that.
He didn't make the obvious joke. She'd said it to the wall, with her shoulders up around her ears. She'd hated saying it. She could have said two and gone hungry all night, and he'd never have known.
So Josh made himself laugh.
"Right. Okay. Well, from next time on, it's only home-cooked stuff." He pointed his phone at her. "Got it? That's the trade."
Luna didn't say anything.
She had both hands up over her face, and the palms had gone big enough to cover all of it.
✦ ✦ ✦
It was late, but not that late. Still before midnight.
Josh stayed up until dawn. That part wasn't new. He always did: screen on, room dark, sleep sometime after the birds started.
What was new was the girl asleep in his bed.
That wasn't the problem either.
The problem was that she was going to eat.
She'd gone through it earlier without stopping and without talking, and he'd watched her do it, and there had been nothing greedy about it. It had been methodical, and it hadn't paused, and it had been the eating of somebody who hadn't been sure about the next one. He'd sat there with his own plate and understood, in a slow and unpleasant way, that she had been hungry for a while. Not tonight. For a while.
So that was going to keep happening.
Which meant time in the kitchen, unless she could cook, and he'd have bet the apartment against it.
And it meant ingredients.
Josh looked at the page he'd been failing at all evening, and closed it, and opened a spreadsheet instead.
He built the thing properly. He always did.
Delivery first, because that was what tonight had been. Tonight's receipt, with the fees and the tip: $594.37. That was one meal.
If she ate like a person, just more, that was three meals a day: $1,783.11 a day. An average month is 30.4 days:
Her foodPer monthDelivered, three meals a day$54,206.54He looked at that for a second and deleted the row.
Groceries, then. Raw, no restaurant markup. Sirloin, the cheapest cut he'd be willing to hand to another person, was $14.36 a pound.
Tonight's steaks had been twelve ounces each. Eight of them made six pounds. Six pounds at $14.36: $86.16 a meal.
Three meals a day: $258.48. Times 30.4 days:
Her foodPer monthGroceries, raw########The total came out wider than the column.
He widened the column.
Her foodPer monthGroceries, raw$7,857.79He sat back.
That was the right number, too. He didn't get to argue with it, because he'd watched her eat, and eight had been an honest answer, and she'd been embarrassed to give it. If anything, it was low. She'd said maybe nine.
That wasn't all his. He worked for himself, so nobody took tax out of it for him. He'd been paying it himself for years, big checks every quarter, and he knew the numbers by heart. Self-employment tax, which pays for Social Security and Medicare. Income tax, after the standard deduction and the 20 percent deduction for running his own business. Together, $2,428.65 a month to the IRS. About 24 percent.
Then his own costs: the loan, the phone, the internet, the software, his own food.
He filled in the last row.
ItemPer month$10,186.42Self-employment tax−$1,439.30Income tax−$989.35Kept$7,757.77Her food−$7,857.79His own costs−$1,864.00Left over−$1,964.02Her food alone was more than he kept.
Every month, he'd be $1,964.02 short.
He could raise the tier prices. He'd been putting that off for a year. Twenty percent more on every tier would make $12,223.70 a month. But about one in ten people always quit when prices go up, which left $11,001.33.
That was $814.91 more a month. After tax, $566.48 more. Against $1,964.02 short, that was a bandage.
His savings could cover the gap for a while. He wasn't touching his savings.
And it wasn't one month. The paper she'd signed said she stayed until he died. He was twenty-four. Every month for the rest of his life, that column came out red.
She needed a job.
Not sex work. He'd already decided that for her without noticing.
So what else. What does she — what can she even do. She can be anybody, that's got to be worth something, that's got to be worth a lot, and he chased that around for a while and got nowhere, because every version of it he came up with was either illegal or worse.
And underneath all of it, the part that kept surfacing:
Why is a girl who bought that car new still broke?
She'd had infinite time. That was the one thing she'd definitely had. Infinite time and, presumably at some point, that car when it was new, and somehow she'd ended up asleep in a stranger's bed at eleven at night, after wearing a hollow into her own back seat.
He was still going around on that when the hand reached him.
He didn't see it coming, which was fair, because it didn't come from anywhere a hand comes from. It came off her back, out from under her somewhere, over the edge of the mattress and across the floor, and it was long, much longer than an arm, and it had no joints in it at all. Or too many. It slid across the floor like a snake, feeling its way along the leg of the desk.
It found his waist.
Then it yanked.
Josh left the chair without any input from Josh. He got maybe half a syllable out before he hit the mattress, and by then Luna had already wrapped herself around him, arms, one leg, all of it, and pulled him in against her chest like a body pillow, still asleep.
The extra arm went away somewhere. Josh registered this. Josh did not follow up on it.
Because a girl was holding him.
A girl was holding him.
His face went hot. His heart was pounding. And he was hard, instantly. He lay there rigid in the dark.
Then Luna, still asleep, gathered him in tighter, got comfortable, and settled.
He was not going to survive this.
Then she said, into the back of his neck, in a thick sleeping mumble:
"Finally. Some meat. After all this time."
That killed some of it.
Not all of it; he was twenty-four and a virgin. But enough to get his head working again, because that hadn't sounded like a girl with a guy in her arms.
That had sounded like a starving person having a good dream.
He lay there and let that sit.
The thing was, and he was aware of how this made him look, he liked it. Somebody had hold of him. He was warm on both sides. There was a person breathing against the back of his neck and the breathing was slow, and he was thirty seconds from sleeping harder than he had in about four years.
Then the blood finished coming back, and his brain started working, and it said: no.
No, this is not okay.
You're being a creep. She's a stranger. She's asleep, she's only here because she has nowhere else, and you're lying here enjoying it. That's taking advantage.
So he got out.
It took a while. She was strong and she wasn't letting go on purpose, and he had to work himself down and out from under her arm an inch at a time like a guy escaping a seatbelt. She never woke up. She never came close to waking up. She made one small noise when he got free, resettled around the space where he'd been, and went straight back under.
Out like a log.
It looked like the first time she'd slept in a bed in a long time.
Josh stood there a second. Then he went over and shut the computer, which took the last of the light out of the room, and he stood in the dark and made a decision.
He went and slept in the bathroom.
Door shut, lid down, sitting up. It seemed like the responsible call at the time, and it had the added benefit of putting a wall between him and whatever else could come off her back while she was dreaming.
It was a bad decision.
He found that out the next morning, at speed.
Luna woke up needing the bathroom and went to it first thing, eyes mostly shut, running on nothing, not expecting the room to have anything in it. She pushed the door open.
Josh was on the toilet. Upright, fully dressed, lid down, one elbow on his knee and his chin propped on his fist. Fast asleep and holding the pose perfectly, like a small statue somebody had installed in there overnight while she wasn't looking.
She screamed.
He also woke up with a cold.
It cost him six days of pages. He did not have six days.