I inhaled slowly through my nose, exhaled through my mouth. Tried to shake off the tension before reading another line. The egg-faced monster on the breakfast plate — it had to be a coincidence. Surely I'd just been lightheaded from thirst, from Mark's nearness — had written nonsense without realizing it, then forgotten. A perfectly reasonable explanation.
I kept telling myself that, delaying the inevitable. A foolish habit of the eternal — ignoring time altogether. But unlike most of my kind, I did have a deadline looming before me — the manuscript's due date, and a shared vacation with Mark that I refused to spend glued to my screen.
Annoyed at my own hesitation, I finally began reading, skimming paragraph after paragraph, eager to confirm that what I'd written was nothing more than midnight delirium — the product of hunger and a foul mood.
But by the time I reached the end of the page and replayed our breakfast conversation in my head, the resemblance between the two clenched my stomach into a tight, icy knot.
All right. No panic.
Let's assume I simply knew Mark's habits so well that I could reproduce his speech patterns with ease. I was a writer, after all — slipping into someone else's skin, crafting vivid characters with familiar gestures, nervous tics, and favorite filler words was second nature to me. So when I'd written the book's version of Mark — with double the motivation and twice the charm — it only made sense that he turned out so perfectly recognizable. As for breakfast being an uncanny copy of our own? Pure coincidence. Nothing worth obsessing over.
Having defended myself before the quiet court of intuition, I began reading the next passage. Strangely enough, after breakfast the heroine — much like me — went to the library to work. Paragraph by paragraph, the text pulsed with thoughts and memories that were unmistakably mine, fragments of long-ago days etched too deeply to fade. I highlighted those lines in yellow, planning to edit or perhaps delete them later. Who would want to read a tedious chain of recollections barely connected to the present story anyway? Then again, maybe it was one of those novels — where everything only makes sense in the end.
Slipping into the role of my own stern inner editor, I kept reading until I reached the scene set in the library — the point where the story finally began to diverge from reality.
In the actual room, I was utterly alone. But on the page, a stranger appeared — a girl with long chestnut hair. The difference between the two worlds made me exhale with an almost sinful pleasure, feeling the weight of unease slide off my shoulders. I wasn't some kind of oracle, after all, predicting chance encounters before they happened.
The girl in the story acted oddly nervous. Without so much as glancing at the heroine, she walked straight to the shelves and pulled out several books, moving with such confidence it was as if she'd spent weeks there conducting some private research. Muttering under her breath, she barely managed to carry her heavy load — at least a dozen volumes — to an empty table. Then she spread them out in haste, flipping through a few with the precision of someone who already knew exactly which pages held what she sought. At last, she sat down, fished her phone from the back pocket of her jeans, and began checking something against her notes, worrying her lower lip between her teeth.
As I read the girl's restless motions, I tried to make sense of her purpose. Why had I written her? What did she mean to the story between Mark and me? Had I, in some fleeting fit of poor judgment, decided to throw in a cliché love triangle just to highlight the strength of our relationship — one with a winner obvious from the very first page? After all, any rival could easily have her neck snapped and be forgotten by the next chapter.
I snorted and read on. But the further I went, the more questions I had about what this story even was. Why was there nothing about me or Mark at all? Making a note in the margin, I scrolled to the end of the chapter, looking for a turning point, a moment of revelation — but all I found was a fragment of dialogue between the girl and some unknown man. A man? Since when had there been another man?
How fevered must my mind have been last night, to have turned the library into the hottest social hub of the glamping resort?
I labeled the whole thing for what it was — blood-thirsted midnight delirium — and finally felt at peace. At first, I'd tried to find meaning in what I'd written, but with each new paragraph, it became clearer: there was none. Not every draft deserves to live. Sometimes, a sketch is just a failed attempt to catch the spark of an idea — one that dies before it ever catches flame.
Without a shred of regret, I closed the file, dragged it to the trash bin in the lower corner of the screen. Double click. Empty Trash. Gone — vanished into Lethe.
And with that, I could finally discard the nonsense from my mind as well.
Savoring the small freedom, I rose from the table and walked to the window. On either side of the sheer lace curtain hung emerald drapes, their folds frozen mid-sway like waves caught in still water. I let my fingertips glide across their surface; they sank into the plush velvet. The fabric carried a faint scent of rosewater and orange zest. My palms found the edge of the drape, and I slipped between velvet and lace, leaning closer to the window. The heavy cloth brushed my back and hair in a slow, intimate caress, and I inhaled the blend of floral sweetness and citrus bite.
I wondered if that fragrance came from some expensive perfume — or simply a well-chosen detergent.
Dirty traces of long-ago rain streaked the glass, clear and distinct in the daylight. Like a web of rivers, they fractured the forest beyond the window into a puzzle of uneven, senseless fragments. The branches of tall pines swayed in the wind, giving the illusion that the forest itself was breathing.
I breathed in time with it. Inhale after inhale, I dissolved into the serenity of the day.
Now there was nothing left to worry about. The text on my computer had been nothing more than midnight delirium.
The quiet peace of the moment was broken by the dull echo of footsteps in the corridor. Someone was walking quickly, gathering speed — drawing closer. The old floorboards creaked beneath their weight, a thin, whining sound that followed each step like a chorus of small, anxious dogs. I hadn't realized I'd frozen in place, listening. A slick thought darted through my mind, but I shook my head sharply. No — it couldn't be. Where had this strange paranoia come from?
An ancient instinct clawed at the edges of my awareness, trying to reach me, but I stubbornly refused to believe it.
One step. Then another. And another. Someone had entered the library. Without noticing me, they hurried toward the shelves. The voice — unmistakably female — murmured something under her breath, quick, low, words meant only for her own ears.
I swallowed hard. After a moment's hesitation, I managed to draw the curtain aside just enough to see the intruder from my hiding place. Chestnut hair fell over her tense shoulders. Even from a distance, I could tell how taut she was — a single vibrating string ready to snap. Her slender fingers flicked through pages with a sharp, rhythmic sound, like the crack of a whip. Page after page turned before she could even glance at the last. She was searching for something — desperately, hopelessly.
The girl snapped one volume shut, shoved it back on the shelf, and reached for another. Her fingertips fluttered faster and faster over the creamy pages, growing more frantic with every failed attempt.
When she closed yet another book, a long, frustrated moan escaped her lips, and she threw her face toward the ceiling as if pleading with whatever god might be watching — what have I done to deserve this?
No one answered her.
Pulling book after book from the shelves, she built a small tower of hefty tomes, then hugged them against her chest and staggered backward toward the nearest table. With a loud thud, she dropped them and resumed her feverish study. From time to time she would pause, trace the lines of text with a pointed finger as though that might somehow speed up the search, click her tongue in irritation, and move on again. Her hair fell like a curtain, hiding her face; she was bent so low over the table it was almost painful to watch. The longer she searched, the more restless and impatient her movements became.
Carefully, on the balls of my feet, I stepped out from my hiding place, hoping to get closer — to see what books she'd chosen. If her sudden appearance in the library had, at first, made me shiver with horror and recall the uncanny parallels to the now-deleted text on my laptop, then this was my chance to break the spell. I could prove to myself that the story hadn't predicted a thing — least of all my curiosity, or any possible conversation with this girl. Breaking the cycle was simple: all I had to do was do the opposite of what the text had described. And that, precisely, was my plan.
But as I drew nearer, an unpleasant scent hit me, and I wrinkled my nose. Beneath the faint trace of apple shampoo and a neutral deodorant, there was another — one I knew too well, one I loathed. The smell of wet dog.
I lifted my wrist to my face and inhaled through my nose, trying to drown the scent with my own perfume. I didn't know a single vampire who could stand the stench of those reeking creatures humans loved to keep as pets. If only mortals understood how violently our kind recoiled at even the thought of those four-legged beasts — kin, in a way, to our oldest natural enemies — they would have long since abandoned garlic and crucifixes as protection, and simply adopted beagles, chihuahuas, or any other breed from their endless assortment.
Perhaps, once upon a time, they had known. After all, humans wouldn't have spent centuries breeding over two hundred kinds of dogs just to make sure every idiot could find a face he thought was cute — would they?