A knock at his bedroom door dragged Nolan away from his class notes on estuarine wetlands, with great reluctance. He looked over his shoulder with a bleary-eyed glower to find Trent cracking the door open, poking in his head and one bare shoulder.
Nolan was beginning to wonder if his roommate actually owned any shirts.
“Hey, there’s a thing at the door, can you deal with it?” Trent asked. “I’m with Mel right now.”
“I’m busy,” Nolan replied. Trent was already gone, but the damage was done. Now that he wasn’t up to his eyeballs in marine ecology notes, he could register the muffled thuds. Someone was at the apartment door, knocking with increasing urgency. Grimacing, Nolan heaved himself away from his desk and went to answer it.
There wasn’t enough time to form expectations, but the pretty young woman fretting on his doorstep wasn’t exactly low on the list. Nolan swallowed a sigh. “Hi, Rosalie.”
“Is Trent here?” Rosalie Martin fidgeted, tucking blonde curls behind her ear, looking like she wanted to be there even less than Nolan wanted to see her. Her friend Grace Li stood at her shoulder, glaring at him over the rims of her glasses.
“It’s not a good time,” Nolan told her, trying not to cringe.
“Well tell him to make time,” she snapped. “Skipping three dates in a row and ignoring my texts is a dick move even for him.”
Nolan paused, letting her words sink in, turning them over until he was sure there really was just one conclusion to reach. “Please tell me he broke up with you.”
Rosalie jerked back, flipping from fretting to scowling in an instant. “Excuse me?”
Grace shut her eyes with a sigh. “Hate to say I told you so…”
“I’m really, really sorry,” Nolan said. “He’s been seeing someone new for at least a week—I thought he broke up with you first, or I’d have told you, I swear.”
High-pitched, tinkling laughter broke out behind him, followed by Trent’s frantic shushing. Rosalie’s face froze. Nolan longed to sink into the floor. He looked over his shoulder to find Trent’s new girlfriend (Mel?) standing in full view of the door, not even trying to hide, one hand barely covering her smile. She’d been in Trent’s room for hours by now, but she was dressed for the club, every part of her outfit shiny enough to catch the light from all angles. One flash from her sequined skirt had Nolan looking away, irritated.
“Who the hell is that, Trent?” Rosalie demanded, and Mel laughed again.
Trent stepped out, actually wearing a shirt for once, and shot a quick glare at Nolan before turning to Rosalie with a strained smile. “Hey, Rosiegirl, this isn’t a great time.”
“Oh, this isn’t a great time?” Rosalie shouldered past Nolan and stormed right up to him, furious. “When would be a good time, hm? Should I come back when you’re done fucking another girl? Because I can wait two minutes.”
As Grace slipped by Nolan to follow her, her eyes flickered to him and, for a split second, softened with sympathy. She jerked her head at him, and Nolan recognized the cue for what it was. He excused himself, slipping past Rosalie and Trent to make his escape. Mel barely looked at him, focused on the unfolding scene with a sparkle of amusement in her eyes.
“Hi!” she sang out. “You must be Rosalie. I’ve been so curious about you—Trent never talks about you.”
“Nobody’s talking to you,” Rosalie snapped.
“What the hell do you want to talk about?” Trent asked, irritated. “There’s nothing to talk about. We had fun, now we’re over. Move on. I have.”
“Don’t tell me to fucking ‘move on’ like you didn’t ghost me instead of breaking up, you spineless asshole!”
Mel leaned over to press her lips to Trent’s ear as if to whisper, but everyone in the room heard her murmur, “I can see why you got tired of her.”
“Don’t talk like he won’t get tired of you too,” Grace shot back.
“What do you even want from me?” Trent demanded. “Why are you here? What did you think was gonna happen?”
Rosalie’s rage had shifted, and now she looked close to tears. Nolan took a step forward to—do something. Anything. Break up the argument, get the girls out of the apartment, apologize again. But before he could, Mel’s melodious voice rang out again.
“Come back to bed, Trent,” she called out. “Let the little girl finish her tantrum outside.”
Rosalie went white with rage, but it was Grace who moved first, lashing out to slap Mel across the face. In the split second of stunned silence, Grace delivered a second slap to Trent’s face, then took Rosalie’s hand and pulled her out of the apartment.
He shouldn’t have said anything. When he saw the way the smile had frozen into rage on Mel’s face, he wanted to back away and hide in his room. But as Trent followed Rosalie and Grace out, cursing them out and slamming the door behind them, his anger and frustration boiled over. “I know you don’t care about my opinion. But you’re gonna lose him the same way you got him. You know that, right?”
The moment he spoke, the rage left Mel’s face. Like the flip of a switch, her expression returned to rosy-cheeked amusement. As her attention shifted to Nolan, he couldn’t decide whether to shudder and look away, or keep staring. Even contempt looked pretty on her.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “You think I’m like her?” Her eyes flickered toward the door, where Trent was doing up the locks. “Oh, no. When I take a man, I keep him.”
Nolan gave up and went to his room. When the sound of Trent and Melusine having violent sex leaked past his door, he popped his ear buds in and drowned them out.
The fallout was worse than expected, but probably not as bad as it could have been. Nolan cleaned the apartment door the first two times it was graffitied; when he came home to find it vandalized a third time, he gave up and left it as it was. A day later, when he fell for the burning paper bag trick and wasted an hour cleaning something horrible off his shoe, he decided to start looking for alternate housing. At some point Trent would do to Mel the same thing he’d done to Rosalie, and this would either happen all over again, or whatever revenge Mel came up with would be much worse.
Probably the second. The few times he actually looked Mel in the eye, he always saw something genuinely unsettling in them. Trent probably hadn’t noticed because he very rarely focused on any woman’s eyes.
Exam week provided a welcome reprieve. Nolan spent most of his time on campus, either taking his exams or going over notes in a quiet library study room. When he couldn’t avoid going home, he spent his time there either asleep or with earbuds in. Whatever mess was left, it was Trent’s problem, not his.
It was a good strategy, until he walked out of his last exam to find Rosalie standing outside, waiting for him, looking ready for a fight.
“What the hell did he say to Grace?” she demanded. Around them, Nolan’s now former classmates parted like a river around a rock. A few lingered to see if it was worth watching.
“What’s going on with Grace?”
“She went to your apartment to get some of my stuff,” Rosalie shot back. “Now she won’t talk to me. We were supposed to have lunch and she didn’t show. She won’t even read my texts!”
“I don’t… know?”
“The last time I saw her was right when she got back, and she was acting like she was on drugs!” Rosalie went on, and yeah, people were definitely watching. “Did he slip her something?”
“I’m sorry, I—I d—” Nolan’s tongue tripped over his teeth, and he paused to collect himself before continuing. “I have no idea what Trent is doing. I didn’t even know Grace came over. I’m trying to find somewhere else to live, and I’ve only gone back there to sleep.”
Rosalie’s shoulders slumped a little.
“I’m really sorry—”
“Yeah, I know,” Rosalie snapped, rubbing at her forehead with her palm. “Look, I know whatever it is, you’re not involved, you’re just the only one I can ask, okay?”
“I could ask him?” Nolan offered awkwardly. “He probably won’t tell me, but… I dunno, if Mel’s not there and I catch him drunk or high or something, he might let something slip.”
“Okay,” Rosalie said. “Let’s go.”
“I don’t know if—” Nolan glanced around at all the people pretending not to listen in, and the few openly staring, and landed upon the answer that would finish the conversation and get them out of there the fastest. “—okay, yeah, let’s go.”
Nolan led the way back to his car, where Rosalie took a picture of his license plate and sent it to someone before getting in with him. Keychains and other decorations rattled on her purse as she set it between them. One of them, Nolan noted, was a bottle of pepper spray.
“Is there anyone else you could call, about Grace?” he asked as he drove back to the apartment. “Like her other friends, or family?”
“Our other friends know even less than I do,” Rosalie said shortly. “Her aunt lives two hours away and hasn’t heard from her since yesterday.”
“Her parents?”
“Haven’t talked to her since her eighteenth birthday.”
Nolan hissed through his teeth.
Trent’s car wasn’t parked in its usual spot when Nolan pulled into the apartment complex. “I don’t think he’s here,” he said.
“I want to make sure,” Rosalie insisted, opening her door before Nolan had even pulled the key out of the ignition. “His car could be in the shop or something.”
The apartment was dark and silent when they entered; it was late enough in the evening that at least some lights would have been on, but not early enough for Trent to have gone to bed. Nolan took a quick look into Trent’s room to confirm, while Rosalie made a beeline for the bathroom.
“He’s not here,” Nolan said, ducking in to find Rosalie rummaging through the medicine cabinet. “What are you doing?”
“I want to know if he slipped Grace something, remember?”
“He wouldn’t keep his drugs in there,” Nolan told her. “They’re under the mattress—I’ll go check.”
The mattress turned up a bottle of Everclear and two plastic bags whose contents reconfirmed Nolan’s desire to find a new roommate, but no suspicious-looking pills or liquids. He gave a cursory look at the plastic storage organizer next to Trent’s bed, opening the drawers without reaching in.
A strange smell reached him as he turned to leave the room. He spent enough time near the bay to recognize it easily—but why would something in Trent’s room smell so much like the tide?
He followed it to the bed, then the skirt tangled with the rumpled bedsheets. Nolan picked it up gingerly between two fingers, and the smell of saltwater hit him full force. The fabric shimmered, almost iridescent in the dim light. He’d never paid close attention to what Mel wore, so he’d always assumed the shine came from sequins. Up close, they looked more like scales.
The sound of Rosalie’s voice brought him back to the present, and he hurried out to the living room. Rosalie paced between the hallway and the kitchen, phone to her ear. “Grace, you’re not making any sense, where are you?”
“Put it on speaker,” Nolan whispered.
Rosalie complied. “Grace, where are you? I can come get you.”
There was no answer, except for a faint rushing sound in the background, either wind or water. Then a voice, not Grace’s, began to sing. It told them that Grace was there, and safe, and happy, and they could be safe and happy too if they followed—
Nolan slapped the phone out of Rosalie’s hand, except that didn’t make the singing stop, so he had to lunge through the growing fog in his head to grab the phone and end the call himself.
“Hey—!” Rosalie broke off, blinking rapidly. She swayed on her feet, shook her head furiously, and stood steady. “What the hell was that?”
Nolan stood staring at the phone in his hand, Mel’s skirt still dangling in the other. The smell of the sea lingered, and the song was just beginning to fade from his mind. He swallowed, throat thick with dread.
“I think I know where Grace is.”
