mastershakeme

Thank you!!!

It happened on the fourteenth night. Not because Eli planned it. Not because the timing was strategic or the circumstances were optimal or he’d run some kind of cost-benefit analysis in his head and determined that tonight was the night to offer his blood to the vampire he’d been visiting in a basement for two weeks. It happened because Lucien’s hands were shaking worse than usual, and the shaking had been getting worse for days, and Eli had been watching the deterioration with the growing,

He went back the next night. He stood at the top of the stairs and looked down into the dark, and from somewhere below, the voice, less guarded than the night before, the edge of something that might have been warmth: “You came back.” Not a question. Eli went down the stairs. He sat on the bottom step, just outside the bars, with his phone flashlight pointed at the ceiling to give the room a dim, ambient glow. Lucien stayed on the far side of the cell, back against the wall,

I just hope it was an isolated opinion. But either way, I don't want to punish you guys because of it. So, I'll share what I have! I started this, now I finish it!

Thank you guys!!! Yes I'm recovering and it's not so bad. I'm just a giant baby!!!! I'm really nervous how this will all play out. I'm just gonna also sit back and watch haha 😂

Eli checked his phone. Fourteen percent. The flashlight had already eaten more of the battery than he expected while he worked out the mechanism in the floor, and he had no idea how far down the stairs went or what he was going to find at the bottom. He could spend the rest of the charge lighting every step, or save it for when he actually needed to see something. He turned the flashlight off and slipped the phone into his pocket. The chapel gave him enough light for the first few step

Finals ended on a Thursday. By Friday afternoon, the campus was half gone. By Saturday morning, it was a skeleton. Eli stood at the window seat at Caldwell and watched them leave. Cars pulled up to residence halls and parents emerged and trunks were loaded and the particular chaos of a university dismantling itself for three weeks played out across the quad in a series of hugs and slammed doors and the distant shouting of people who were going somewhere and were happy about it. He watc

He went back to the archives. Not because Nora asked him to. Because the folder was still in the drawer where she’d put it, and the drawer was unlocked, and Eli had spent the past week not thinking about a thin file with a student’s photograph and the words “low institutional visibility” and the flicker on Nora’s face, and the not-thinking had taken on the specific, pressurized quality of something that wanted to be thought about and was tired of waiting. It was a Wednesday afternoon.

November settled over Morrowgate like a second skin. The trees had finished turning and were giving up their leaves in earnest now, the campus paths littered with gold and copper that the groundskeepers swept into piles every morning and that the wind scattered every afternoon. The air had sharpened. Eli had started wearing his Goodwill jacket again, the one that wasn’t warm enough but was all he had, and then one Friday at Vesper House, James had handed him a coat. “It’s my backup,” James

The invitation was different this time. Same cream-colored stock, same handwriting, same wax seal with the crossed keys and the crescent moon. But the wording had changed. The Vesper Society formally requests the presence of Eli Mercer at the Rite of Induction. Friday, November 6th, 9 PM. The Chapel. Come as you are. Eli read it three times at his desk at Caldwell House, sitting on the window seat with his coffee going cold and the early November light coming through the glass at

Late October came in gold and copper and the smell of something burning, the groundskeepers clearing brush at the edges of campus, the smoke threading through the courtyards and making everything look slightly softer than it was. Eli had been a Vesper for six weeks. He still didn’t know exactly what that meant, and the not-knowing had stopped bothering him, which was either a sign that he was settling in or a sign that he’d stopped asking the right questions. He chose to believe the first o

He typed the text three times before he sent it. Saturday morning. The reception had been twelve hours ago and Eli had slept for maybe three of them, not because of the wine or the lateness but because his brain had spent the remaining hours replaying the evening in the specific, obsessive way it replayed anything that mattered: Miles’s speech, Kylie’s assessment, the sound of his own laugh when Adrien said the thing about the apple. He’d played that laugh back a dozen times, examining it f

He changed three times. This was not something Eli did. But tonight he stood in front of the narrow mirror on the back of his door and evaluated the difference between a gray sweater with a fraying collar and a black sweater with a small hole near the hem and decided that neither was acceptable and put on the Goodwill blazer over a white t-shirt and told himself he looked fine and did not believe it. The mirror gave him back what it always gave him: sandy hair that refused to stay where he

Eli Mercer never expected the Vesper Society to want him. But once they do, he finds something he’s never really had: friends, warmth, and a place where he feels chosen instead of useful. Then he discovers Lucien, a vampire imprisoned beneath the campus chapel and bled for generations to sustain the families behind Vesper’s power. The more Eli learns, the more impossible his new life becomes. Because freeing Lucien may mean destroying the first people who ever made Eli feel like he belonged.

The library basement smelled like dust and binding glue and the particular kind of silence that accumulated in places nobody visited. Eli liked it down here. He liked the metal shelving that ran in long rows from one cinder-block wall to the other, liked the fluorescent tubes that buzzed at a frequency just below hearing, liked the fact that in over a year of work-study he had never once encountered another person. Tuesday evening, mid-September. His sophomore year was entering its third we

Wow thank you 😍 I really wanted a happy/feel good story amongst all the other chaos. I might revisit the universe someday if the right idea comes along, but for now I’m happy to let them have their happily ever after ❤️

Back in July, Ben Coleman turned thirty, and nobody noticed. Tonight, on New Year's Eve, there were ten people in his apartment, and the noise was so loud he could feel it in his chest. Julian was at the stove making chicken marsala, their dish, the one they'd learned together in this kitchen with a twenty-two-dollar cast iron skillet and an argument about cheese. Ben was beside him grating parmesan with both hands gripping the block too hard, the way he always did, the way Julian had

i kind of love imagining this now 😭 ben getting older while julian stays physically the same, and their relationship just changing with it. ben’s hair going gray, moving a little slower, and julian eventually being the one reminding him to take his medicine and helping him with things ben used to do for everyone else. there’s something really sweet about ben spending his whole life taking care of people and finally growing old with someone who’s happy to take care of him. and by then sophie and grace would be grown, maybe with families of their own, so julian could become this weirdly permanent part of the family who remembers everybody when they were little 😂 i don’t think ben dying someday would mean julian’s life ends either. ben would have helped him build a whole life and family of his own by then. okay now i’ve made myself emotional over something that happens like fifty years after the book ends lol

lol i have thought about that too 😭 i don’t know if i want to answer it definitively because it’s way beyond the scope of this story, but julian potentially outliving ben does add a whole other layer to what “forever” means for them. for now i’m letting them enjoy the time they have ❤️

i really love the way you put this, especially julian “reprogramming” ben and the family 😂 that’s pretty much exactly what i was going for. ben didn’t need to stop loving or helping them, he needed to learn that they couldn’t run his life, and julian was the first person who really pushed him to see that. and i’m glad julian’s growth feels natural rather than performative. thank you for such a thoughtful comment ❤️

The retractions didn't stop the review. Tessa called Sunday evening, her voice careful, measured in the way it got when she was delivering news she wished she didn't have. "The family complaints have been noted as retracted. That's in the file. But the committee already pulled the raw data on Friday. The retractions weaken their case, but they don't close it. The data exists independently of the complaints." Julian sat on the couch and listened. Ben was beside him, phone on speaker, hi

Ben woke up on Saturday morning with Julian's arm across his chest and the knowledge that he had to leave. The bedroom was gray with early light. The window latch caught a thin line of sun, the same way it had every morning since Julian installed it, and Julian was beside him, still, warm, his face turned toward Ben's shoulder. Not sleeping. Resting. Being present in the particular way that Julian was present, with complete attention, even in the dark, even in the quiet, even when the world

I appreciate you reading even though you don't agree with the topic 😂 Next is gonna be vampires. I have no idea why I'm in this mood.

The apartment was dark, and Julian was afraid. Not the way humans were afraid, with adrenaline and the ancient machinery of fight or flight. His fear was architectural. It lived in the gap where data became feeling, where the numbers his system generated translated into something that had no number at all. The fear of subtraction. Of having pieces removed and not knowing they were missing. Ben's hand was in his. They were standing in the dark kitchen, and Julian could feel Ben's pulse

The second week was the best week of Ben's life, and he spent most of it waiting for it to end. Not because he wanted it to. Because he'd learned, over thirty years and one devastating breakup and a family that treated him like a utility, that good things came with expiration dates. The better something felt, the closer the end was. It was a law of his personal physics, as reliable as gravity, and the fact that he knew it was irrational didn't make it less true. But the week kept being