Page 13 of The Invisible Roommate

He’d fantasized about running away forty-one shows ago. He’d started making notes, withdrawing cash, buying nondescript luggage. Innocuous actions. Things he could easily write off as silly whims, totally unactionable plans.

Until that night. That night when, safely back in his hotel suite, he pulled out the nondescript luggage, threw the withdrawn cash into a fanny pack, and paged through his notes with a mind on enacting it all. Leave the wallet. Leave the passport. Leave the hotel without being spotted.

Before he knew it, he was garbed in a baseball cap, a scarf, and a sweater, standing in the grimy underground bus terminal of Port Authority, waiting on a 1 AM bus to take him far, far away.

7

Gerard’s fate hovered in an unseeable hand.

That journal, sold to the right outlet, could ruin his entire life.

Or maybe set me free, he thought momentarily.

No, he couldn’t chance it. His private thoughts and his identity weren’t for public consumption when every other part of him already was.

The anger from earlier bubbled back up and caused him to snap. “Reading my journal is a complete invasion of privacy!” He dashed toward the robe then jumped to snatch the journal back.

His invisible foe was far too quick. “You being here is a complete invasion of my space!”

“Your space? I’m the one who paid the rent for the month!” Gerard countered, attempting to throw his arms around the transparent person. The material of the robe was too slippery, and he’d misjudged Emory’s width.

“You’ve messed with my experiments, disorganized my papers, and set me off track to codify my discovery by weeks, if not months!” he snarled, clear across the room by then. He moved fast, but he moved clumsily, too, bumping into furniture as he went.

“Have you been … have you been in the apartment this whole time?” Gerard asked, catching his breath.

“Where else would I have been?” Emory spat.

Outside of his family, when was the last time someone had the gall to speak to Gerard like that? As soon as he became famous, everyone treated him like he was a king among men. Not that he wasn’t scared out of his mind by this invisible man, but he was sort of tickled, too, to be cut down to size a bit.

“You’ve been watching me eat and sleep and change for a week?” Gerard was newly skeeved. He’d suffered weird fans before, even had a stalker or two, but this was on another level. A hovering robe was arguing with him!

Emory hid the journal behind his back, blocking it from view. The opacity of the robe led Gerard to an unsettling realization. “Oh my God! Have you been naked this whole time?”

The silence spoke for itself.

“This is absolutely outlandish!” Gerard said, skin crawling. He ran across the room and dove for the journal. He wasn’t going to let this creep get away with blackmail.

Emory weaseled away but must not have realized the bed was right behind him. The robe did a roll, looking as if it were tumbling in a dryer. Emory’s glasses and the journal took to the air. Loose papers showered around them. The glasses skidded across the floor.

Concerned and baffled, Gerard asked, “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Emory huffed.

Gerard approached with caution, inconspicuously picking up discarded journal pages as he went. “Are you hurt?”

“I said,” Emory reiterated, “I’m fine.”

Helping the man who’d just tried to blackmail him seemed like a step too far, but still, he grabbed Emory’s glasses off the floor and held them out as an olive branch. He had a feeling the man could not see well—if at all—without them.

“What are we going to do about this?” Gerard asked, sitting down on the floor so he was at Emory’s level. He busied himself with stuffing the pages back into his journal while waiting for a response.

“We are not going to do anything. I’m going to post on social media that you’re on Iping Island so you will be forced to leave,” he said, bringing back some of the earlier bite to his voice.

Gerard couldn’t take Emory seriously after the tumbling act he’d just witnessed or … half witnessed? “Regina said you’re wanted by the authorities. If you post, I’ll tell everyone you’re still on the island, just invisible,” he countered.

“Who would believe you?” Emory asked, voice oozing smugness.

“There’s plenty of evidence scattered around this room,” he pointed out. “The police just didn’t know what they were looking at the first time around.”