“There are no weapons in my duffel bag,” said Potash. “I have a concealed gun on my person, which you will never see or touch. Everything else is stored off site.”
“It’s a one-bedroom apartment,” I said. “I have nowhere for you to sleep.”
“I sleep on the floor.”
“I don’t even—” I stopped suddenly, surprised by what he’d said. “I was expecting you to ask for the couch.”
“I prefer floors. I don’t actually own a bed, even at home.”
I sighed, running out of feasible plans to dissuade him. “You’re insane.”
“Then we should get along fine.”
“Sensitivity training,” I snarled. I closed my eyes, trying to think of the problems this would cause and searching for preemptive solutions. “I’m a vegetarian,” I said, “and rather militant about it. No meat of any kind in the house. You so much as order a pepperoni pizza, you eat it outside.”
“Does fish count?”
“Of course fish counts.”
“Some vegetarians don’t count fish.”
“I do,” I said. “I’m not protesting the American meat industry, I’m trying to not kill anything. Have you ever thought about your meat as an animal? Your teeth biting through the flesh of a living thing that somebody killed and put on a fire? No animals of any kind.”
Potash nodded. “Eggs?”
“Eggs are fine,” I said. I stared out the window, clenching my fist inside my coat pocket. “You can eat all the f—” I stopped and closed my eyes. My apartment was my haven; it was the one place I could go to be away from everyone. In Clayton we’d lived over my mother’s mortuary, so I’d had my own room and the embalming room as my private, silent sanctuaries. Now I had neither. We moved around the country, killing as we went, and all I had to keep myself stable was the knowledge that wherever we went I would always have a place to myself. I needed one.
Now I’d lost even that.
When we reached my apartment I showed Potash the living room: a single chair pointed at a TV.
“I thought you said you had a couch,” said Potash.
“I said I was expecting you to ask for a couch,” I answered. “I was kind of looking forward to telling you I didn’t have one. It’s not as weird as not owning a bed, though, so don’t point any fingers.” I left him to set up his own sleeping area and retreated to the kitchen, where I started making a salad. I wasn’t kidding about my vegetarianism—while I would gladly have made that my diet just to piss him off, I really did avoid meat and had for a few years. I’d come to embrace cooking as a “safe” hobby that helped me keep my mind off of other things. Now, raging at this home invasion, I chopped yellow peppers with my teeth clenched in fury, slicing tomatoes and shredding carrots and ripping chunks of lettuce with my bare hands. I covered the mass of vegetables with sunflower seeds and olive oil and sat down at the kitchen table with my mind still roiling. There was no wall between the meager kitchen and the tiny front room, so I watched Potash in angry silence as he finished his spartan preparations. Maybe if I burned the apartment down they’d let me be alone again. I was only halfway finished with my dinner when he stowed his bag in the corner and sat down across from me at the table.
“I eat alone,” I said.
“You used to do everything alone,” he responded. “Eating is one of many things that will have to change under this arrangement.”
“Or you could just go, and I can keep my routine the way I like it.”
Nathan or Ostler or Trujillo would have sighed, or shaken their heads, or given some outward expression of frustration. Potash only looked at me. “I have trouble believing that while our entire team is being hunted by monsters, putting your life in direct and immediate danger, you care more about your routine than your safety.”
“My routine is my safety,” I said. “I have a specific way of doing things. I have rules.”
“And what happens if you don’t follow them?”
I held myself as still as I could, focusing on the wall so no other images could enter my mind. “I’d rather not be forced into a demonstration.”
“I can buy my own food,” he said simply, “but you’ll have to go with me to the store, or this whole living arrangement is meaningless. We’re always together. It’s late now, so we can go tomorrow.”
“I can be out late,” I said, “I’m not a child.”
“No one ever says that but children.”
I pushed my salad away, suddenly sickened by the idea of food. The kitchen table was mostly covered in papers, and I gestured to them as calmly as I could. “This is where I study—another thing I do alone. I need to figure out how to kill Mary Gardner, so just … back off for a while, okay? Disappear.”
“You only have three rooms,” said Potash. “I either invade your bedroom, which I doubt you want, or I sit in the bathroom all night, or you see me out here.”