The scream got him up at eight forty. Later he would decide it was the only piece of luck he got all day.
Left alone he'd have gone under until two. He worked till the birds and slept till the light got aggressive, and a day that starts at two in the afternoon is not a day, it's a leftover. So the scream did him a favor. He'd have thanked her for it if his throat had been in a condition to.
It wasn't. He found that out on the way to standing up.
His head was stuffed. His throat hurt when he swallowed. His face felt hot. And his neck was stiff from six hours of sleeping sitting up on a toilet lid.
A cold. That was all. He'd had about forty of them and this one was ordinary.
Luna, for her part, had screamed, established that the thing in the bathroom was breathing, and then gone about her morning like the matter had been closed by mutual agreement.
(Luna:She'd thought he was dead. That was the whole scream. It wasn't about him; she'd met him yesterday. But still. A dead man is a dead man.)
✦ ✦ ✦
The problem showed up while he was brushing his teeth.
She was going to eat today.
Not maybe. Definitely. He'd watched her eat last night, and it hadn't been for show. And when she told him how much she eats, eight steaks, she'd said it to the wall like she hated saying it. Nobody makes up a number like that. It was the real one.
Ordering was about six hundred dollars a meal. He'd already run it twice, once fast and once carefully, and it came out the same both times.
There were twenty-nine days left in the month.
Rest of the month29 daysDelivered, three meals a day$51,710.19Groceries$7,495.92Groceries came out almost seven times cheaper.
Raw. Bulk. No paying someone else to cook it.
So. Groceries.
He stood there with the toothbrush in his mouth and worked out that he could not remember the last time he had bought groceries at all. He didn't buy food. He DoorDashed it. It had been working for years.
He had to look up where the store was.
"I'm going out," he said.
Luna was on the bed with her phone. She made a sound that was technically a response.
✦ ✦ ✦
He bought by the pound and by the calorie and by nothing else.
Chicken leg quarters at a dollar sixty-seven a pound, the cheapest protein in the building by a margin that felt like somebody's mistake. Whole fish at four dollars a pound, three of them, silver and heavy and still looking at him. Rice at a dollar eleven. Eggs at two nineteen a dozen. Potatoes, the big sack, under a dollar a pound. Nothing that cost money for being convenient, nothing pre-cut, nothing sitting in a tray.
Then he got to the beef.
GROUND BEEF · PER LB$6.92
Six ninety-two a pound. For ground beef. The cheap meat, the one people buy because they can't afford real meat, and it cost nearly seven dollars a pound. Everybody online had been complaining about grocery prices for years, and he'd scrolled past all of it, because he'd never bought groceries. He was buying them now.
He took the packs with the yellow markdown sticker. All of them. He was still annoyed about it.
He'd planned on more than that. He had a list in his head with more on it.
What happened was that he got to the second sack of rice and stood in the aisle with one hand on the shelf and worked out, slowly and unpleasantly, that he had to carry all of this. Two flights. On foot. With a fever he had decided not to call a fever yet.
He put the rice back.
He wanted more. He was not going to get more. That was the whole negotiation and he lost it standing up.
The bags cut into his fingers the entire walk. The stairs went badly. He got to his own landing and set everything down to change grip, and then stood there a while longer than a grip change takes.
✦ ✦ ✦
Luna was on the bed. Some of Luna was on the bed.
She had her back flat to the mattress and her legs folded up and over, knees down past her own shoulders on either side of her head, ankles crossed somewhere behind her that he chose not to trace. And her head had gone around further than the shoulders had, considerably further, so that she was looking back down the length of her own spine at the phone she was holding at the foot of the bed.
Josh stood in his own doorway with four bags and read it, because he couldn't not.
Six years of drawing bodies meant he saw the joint before he saw the person. And the joints were fine. That was the disturbing part. The hips were doing something a dancer could do on a good day. The knees were fine. The shoulders were fine. Everything down there was merely extreme.
The neck was a lie. The neck was where she'd stopped bothering.
She looked up at him.
She nodded once.
Then she went back to the phone, and her thumb went back to moving.
Josh carried the bags in and set them on the floor, because there was nowhere else, and then he straightened up and looked at his kitchen properly for the first time in four years.
It was a wall.
One wall, and against it, left to right: a sink, a stove, an oven under the stove, and a mini fridge.
That was the kitchen. That was all of it. There was no counter, unless you counted the eleven inches to the left of the sink, which he had been counting for four years, because eleven inches had been plenty.
And it had been plenty, which was the bit that got him. He had never thought about this wall. He ate at the desk. He'd eaten at that desk somewhere in the four figures by now and had never needed a second burner or a second shelf or a flat place to put a cutting board, because he was one guy who ate like a guy who was working: badly, and with one hand.
Now there was a girl living here who ate eight steaks in a sitting.
He looked at the mini fridge.
Then at the bags on the floor.
Then at the mini fridge again, and he ran the only arithmetic still available to him, which wasn't money this time, it was volume, and it came out the way the money always came out. He had bought as much food as he could physically carry up two flights of stairs. And there was nowhere to put it.
That was when the room moved.
It went about four inches to the left and then came back. He got a hand onto the desk and waited it out, and it mostly stopped, and he stood there breathing through his mouth.
Fine. He'd lie down for a minute. Just until the floor settled. Then he'd get the cold stuff into the fridge and work out what happened to the rest of it, and there was still a version of today where he cooked in the evening if he was smart about the next few hours.
He was asleep before he finished putting that in order.
✦ ✦ ✦
He woke up because of a sound.
It was wet, and it was regular, and it was about five feet away.
Josh got his eyes open. The light had gone orange and low, which meant hours, which meant the day was gone. Luna was sitting on his desk chair, turned around to face the room, and she was eating one of the fish.
Not cooked. Not cut. She had it up in both hands, held like corn.
"That's raw," Josh said. His voice came out as a croak. "Don't eat it."
"Isn't this sushi?" She turned it slightly. "Without all the fancy presentation?"
"No—"
"Should I make some for you?" She held the fish out to him.
"No. This fish isn't sushi." He got up onto one elbow, which cost him. "Have you ever eaten sushi? Do you know what it tastes like?"
Luna lowered the fish.
"I stopped tasting," she said.
Then she stuck out her tongue. It kept coming, long and thin, way past where a tongue should stop, and she held it out for him to look at. It was completely smooth.
"See? No taste buds." The tongue went away. "That makes everything food for me."
"Um. What?"
"Everything is food to me. Once you remove the taste buds, you can eat anything."
Josh's head was too foggy to follow that.
"That might work for you," he said. "God. How do you live without tasting anything? That's so boring."
"Hey." She actually straightened up. "I'm not completely devoid of taste. I can regrow them as needed. Last night's food was delicious."
"Yeah. I know." He put a hand over his eyes. The light hurt. "And that fish'd be delicious too, if you'd let me cook it instead of gnawing on it like a bear. Ugh. My head."
"That's expected." Luna took another bite. "Duh? You're already running hot."
"And?" Josh took the hand off his eyes. "Aren't you supposed to do something? I know I have a fever."
"Do what? I've never had a fever. What am I supposed to do here?" She looked honestly confused.
"Tsk." His head went back down on the pillow. "Being a shapeshifter sure is fun. You can eat anything. Never have a fever."
The chewing stopped.
"Hey. Stop being rude." She stood up. "I'm leaving. Go sulk in your own corner."
And she went. Out the door, with the fish, still eating it.
She came back a few seconds later, got a second fish out of the bag on the floor without looking at him once, and left again.
The door didn't slam. It closed.
She hadn't gone anywhere, either. He could hear her out there, the small shift of somebody sitting down on a floor with their back against a wall, on the other side of his door, four feet from where she'd started.
Then he could hear her eating again.
✦ ✦ ✦
Josh lay in the bed and got angry.
It came up slowly, because everything was slow now.
He'd been sick alone before. Plenty of times. It's fine: you sleep through the worst of it, you drink water when you think of it, you order something soft, and three days later it's over and nobody ever has to hear about any of it. That system worked. He'd been running that system for years and he had no notes on it.
The problem was that this time the system had a six-foot-three girl inside it, a few feet away on the other side of a door, on her phone, eating his fish.
Not that nobody was doing anything. That somebody was here, and wasn't.
He was going to tell her that. He started assembling it, and it was going to be short, and it was going to land.
The headache took it apart faster than he could build it.
He went under with about half of it standing.
✦ ✦ ✦
It took three days.
By the third evening he could stand up without the room having an opinion about it, and he could breathe through his nose in one direction, and the heat behind his face had packed up and gone. Tomorrow he'd be fine.
That wasn't optimism. He'd been through the week and there was no room in it for anything else.
The page was four days late.
Four days. He said it to himself a few times to see whether it would stop sounding bad, and it didn't. He'd been late before. Everybody's late. And the readers had been fine about it, which was the actual problem. Nobody had complained, and the ones who'd said anything had been kind about it.
He'd rather have had the yelling. You can plan around yelling. Nobody announces the day they stop being loyal; they just stop, quietly, in ones, and you find out about it a month later in a number.
So the page got finished tomorrow. That was decided.
The second thing was food, and the second thing was worse.
He'd bought a week. He had carried a week up two flights of stairs with a fever and put a sack of rice back on a shelf to make it fit in his hands, and he had thought about it as a week the entire time.
It went in three days.
He opened the mini fridge on the third evening out of something like scientific curiosity, and there was nothing in it. The bags on the floor were bags. The potatoes were gone, and the potatoes had been raw, and they had been potatoes.
Seven days of food in three days: 7 ÷ 3 = 2.33. She ate 2.33 times what he'd planned for.
His spreadsheet had her at eight steaks a meal, three meals a day. That was eighteen pounds of meat a day. He'd known eight was low.
Eighteen pounds × 2.33 is about forty-two pounds a day. Almost nineteen steaks a meal.
Forty-two pounds of sirloin at $14.36: $603.12 a day. Times 30.4 days:
ItemPer monthHer food$18,334.85His payout$10,186.42Her food alone was 1.8 times what he made.
And the stove hadn't been touched.
He checked that twice, because it seemed important. Three days, and the stove looked exactly the way it had looked on the morning he went shopping. A stove only manages that when nobody has gone near it.
So: a week of groceries in three days, none of it heated.
Which meant one of two things, and he couldn't tell which. She couldn't cook. Or she could and didn't see why she would.
Meanwhile he'd been living on soup. He'd ordered it four separate times, single portions, from the cheapest place that delivered, and eaten it sitting up in bed. In three days, the only cooked food that had entered this apartment was cooked food he had personally paid a stranger to carry to his door.
Then the third thing, which wasn't logistics.
She hadn't done anything.
Not badly. Not wrong. Nothing. She'd been here the whole time, she was always here, she had nowhere else to be, and she had spent three days on her phone in positions that would have hospitalized a person, and eaten everything he owned, and gone on doing that at a steady rate about six feet from a guy who couldn't stand up.
He didn't want a nurse. He'd have turned one down. It was the idling he couldn't get past.
(Luna:In her defense: she didn't know what you're supposed to do for a sick person, and by the second day it was too awkward to ask.
And honestly, she'd been hoping he'd stay in bed for good. She'd met him a few days ago and he'd already gotten sick, which was a bad sign. And a guy in bed is easy to supervise.
As for the food: yes, she'd eaten everything. He was supposed to feed her. This whole mess was his fault.)
✦ ✦ ✦
They crossed paths on the third evening. In an apartment that size that takes some arranging.
"Hey," Josh said. "You're going shopping with me tomorrow."
"Isn't that your job?"
"So what's your job?" He waited. "What's more important than this?"
"I'm more important." She didn't look up. "Just for existing."
Josh sighed.
"Bro. I'm just asking you to carry your own food. I'll pay. You just have to carry."
"You're making a woman do physical stuff?" She put the phone down on her chest. "Men these days. Hmph."
"Since when are you a woman? Stop playing victim. Just carry your own weight."
"How dare you call a woman heavy."
She came up off the mattress, and her shoulders started to change shape.
"Just shut your bitch ass up," Josh snapped. "I'm asking you to come shopping with me tomorrow. That's it."
Luna shut her mouth.
Her shoulders went back to normal.
(Luna:He'd sworn at her. People didn't swear about small things. So it wasn't a small thing.)
"Fine," she said.
She left. He heard the door.
She was back in under five minutes, and she didn't say anything coming in, and she didn't say anything crossing the room, and then she got onto the bed and lay down next to him.
No comment. No negotiation. She just did it.
✦ ✦ ✦
Normally this would have made him hard instantly. A girl. In his bed. On purpose. Awake.
But three days of fever had left him with nothing. His dick tried anyway. It got about halfway, gave up, and he ignored it.
The bed was a single. It had been a tight fit for one guy and a laptop. With both of them on it something had to give, and what gave was the arrangement: Luna worked an arm under and around and settled in behind him.
Spooning. She was spooning him.
That did it. He went fully hard, immediately, and there was no ignoring it.
So he lay there with his back to her, praying with real sincerity that she wouldn't find out.
And underneath the praying, quietly, he was having a very good time.
It was unfamiliar, and it was nice, and it kept being nice.
The height difference helped. He was fairly sure the height difference was doing most of the work, six-three against five-six, that was just geometry, and he was pleased with the theory right until he remembered she could extend her torso whenever she felt like it and had presumably not needed a height difference at any point in a life he could not begin to measure.
His phone went off on the desk.
He got an arm out and reached it, which was harder than it had any right to be. Message from his landlord.
MESSAGES · Landlord · nowKeep the noise down.
Josh read it twice.
Josh lay in his single bed with six foot three of shapeshifter wrapped around him from behind, holding the phone up where he could see it, fever mostly gone, hard-on very much not.
Then the second one came in.
MESSAGES · Landlord · nowA couple shouting? Hey, did you finally got a girl?
He didn't reply to that. Not now.