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Vincent Nightray hated Ada Vessalius. He hated her with a passion hot as the flames of the hell he was certain he was destined for. He hated her like the tides hated the moon, like the flowers hated the sun, like the sailors hated the stars. He hated her with every fiber of his being and then some; her very existence was disgusting to him, and he would be as happy as a prisoner in a pitch-black, empty cell if he never saw her again.
“Hey, Gil,” said Vincent. “Which shirt brings out my eyes better?”
“Which one?”
“Yeah.”
“No, which eye .”
“Ah.” Vincent paused. “Both. But if one…the red one, I suppose. She thinks it’s striking. Stop smiling, Gil, I’m not actually interested in this girl.”
“You’ve never asked me for clothing advice before,” said Gilbert. He stayed quiet as Vincent modeled each shirt option for him, and then said, “I can see your eyes in all of them.”
“See, this is why I don’t ask you for clothing advice.” Vincent eyed himself critically in the mirror. His current shirt was a black button-up with gold thread woven in the collar and cuffs, and it sparkled when he moved, and his gold eye seemed to sparkle with it, though the red one stood out like a spot of blood in his face. This, he decided, was sexy enough without looking like he was trying too hard, and so he returned to his closet. “Gil, what pants should I wear with this?”
“Well, don’t wear your boxers.”
“Gil.”
“I don’t know about clothes, Vince. Why not wear black pants?”
“Yes, but which shade of black? I can’t go clashing, Gil, I would die of humiliation.”
“Black clashes?” said Gilbert, who wore nothing but black and who was in the tenth consecutive year of his emo phase. “Where are you going, anyway?”
“The library,” said Vincent. “I’ve got an essay to get done…do you think charcoal would go well with this?”
“Vince, this is a library, not a symphony,” said Gilbert, who had not been to either in years.
“I dress to impress, brother darling.”
“What girl is it this time?” Gilbert sighed.
“I told you, this is not to impress a girl!” Vincent pulled on the charcoal pants and inspected himself in the mirror, twisting to make sure they accentuated his ass just enough. “Can’t I just want to look presentable in the library?”
“You mentioned a girl earlier. You said she thought your eyes were striking, and you wanted your shirt to bring them out.”
Vincent sighed, rolling his eyes. “That was—look, she’s not important to me at all.”
“Are you dressing up to impress the librarian, then?”
“Yes,” said Vincent, “exactly I am. I’m fucking everyone on campus, after all, including the geriatrics in charge of the library and I want to look as sexy as possible. Do these pants do good things for my butt?”
“You’re going on a date.”
“I am not, Gil—when was the last time you went on a date?”
The answer to this was never; some members of the Nightray family were convinced he was dating his boss’s niece, Alice Baskerville, who made up exactly half of his non-Nightray social life and did not even know that his name was Gilbert Nightray rather than Raven Baskerville, and when he was younger he had harbored a crush on his best friend, but—some things did not bear thinking about, and Vincent was not cruel enough to bring that up when they weren’t fighting.
“I’ve seen you go on enough that I know what it looks like,” Gilbert shot back. “I’m not that stupid.”
“You are,” said Vincent. “I’m just going to the library.”
Deciding the pants were acceptable, he slipped on a pair of low heels—also black and gold, to tie his outfit together, and headed over to his vanity.
“Gil, what shade of lipstick should I wear? Muted or bright red?”
“Neither, if it’s just the library,” Gilbert muttered. “...I think muted would look better with your outfit. Unless you have something with gold sparkles?”
“Gil, you’re a genius,” Vincent declared, diving into the vanity and pulling out a tube of lipstick, swiftly and steadily applying it before delving into the rest of his makeup.
“You look like you’re about to go on a date with a princess,” Gilbert told him.
“I am,” Vincent said absently and in a lovestruck manner, before shaking his head violently. “No—I’m just studying at the library, Gil, don’t read so much into things.”
“Vince…”
“See you tonight,” said Vincent.
“It is ten in the afternoon.”
“I have lunch and dinner plans,” Vincent said, almost sheepishly.
“Well, I’ll invite Alice over, then,” said Gilbert.
“Ugh,” said Vincent. “I’ll stay out until midnight!”
Were it not for the fact that Ada Vessalius was Oz Vessalius’s sister and thus shared the same grief that haunted Gilbert’s every breath, Alice Baskerville would have been his best friend. She was vibrant and cruel in equal measure, and they had bonded nearly a decade prior when she grabbed Gilbert, still in the fugue of grief that he would not emerge from for another three years, and dragged him out to help her egg the house of the man who had molested her twin sister. She had apparently then befriended a boy that the man kept locked in his basement, but Gilbert had never been able to muster up the motivation to visit him with Alice or do anything more involved than hurl eggs at his house and pretend this was Xai Vessalius’s property he was egging, and so, though Alice and Gilbert were close friends, he had never actually met her other close friend whom she lived with. There was a part of Gilbert that believed that reaching out to the rest of Alice’s social circle and becoming close would be a betrayal of Oz Vessalius, his first ever friend, who had died with Gilbert was fourteen, three months before he had met Alice, and so he avoided meeting new people whenever possible.
He did, however, have Alice over for dinner several nights a week. He loved to cook, and she loved to eat, and he’d always send her back with a box of leftovers for the drive back and another for her roommates, and, though Vincent found Alice intolerable, Gilbert sometimes thought that he might be getting close to being able to meet her other friends without breaking down completely at the mere thought of it.
“She won’t be here that long,” said Gilbert, but Vincent, who now had an excuse to stay out all night, was already grabbing his laptop, phone, wallet, and what appeared to be a container of ibuprofen, stuffing them in his pockets, and hurrying towards the door.
Once outside, Vincent pretended to himself that he wasn’t in any hurry and strolled leisurely down the stairs of their apartment building to the parking garage, at which point he realized that he’d left the keys to the car that he and his brother shared in the apartment. For a few moments, Vincent considered walking, or taking the bus, before he hurried back upstairs and into the apartment, where Gilbert was now lying facedown on their couch, working up the energy to invite Alice over (Vincent hated the young woman, but even he could admit that she was very good at pulling Gilbert out of his depressive slumps). Vincent grabbed the car keys, patted Gilbert on the head by way of a goodbye, and headed out again.
He arrived at the library exactly on time, having sped the entire way to make up for the time he’d lost in forgetting his keys, and headed inside, casually perusing the stalls for a few moments before settling himself at a table in a back corner with one other occupant, a young woman in a sundress with long, blonde hair.
“I hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long,” Vincent murmured as he settled himself down across from her.
“Oh, not at all,” said the young lady—Ada Vessalius—as she smiled over at him, and his heart began an impersonation of a helium balloon. “I had a lot of studying to do today, so I got here early.”
Vincent nodded, hating Ada, hating the way his heart felt lighter and day immediately brightened in her presence. He hated her beautiful smile and brilliant eyes, he hated her sweet, bubbly, endlessly loving and endlessly forgiving nature, he hated her occult interests, and, most of all, he hated that she loved him.
I hate her, he reminded himself as they began studying together, chatting about their classes and lives in general. I hate her, he reminded himself as he used her frustration at one of her assignments to lean in close to her and look at the book. I hate her, I hate her, I hate her whenever she smiled, whenever they worked together, whenever he got to hear her beautiful, throaty laugh.
If his lab partner, Xerxes Break, were to have witnessed this, he would have laughed and said, The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks, but Vincent had hit Break with his car two weeks ago and Break still wasn’t back on campus to mock him.
When it got close to noon, first Ada rose, gathering her things, and left to grab lunch, and when she returned with a coffee and a wrap, Vincent got up and bought his own food, careful to avoid anyone seeing him and Ada in the same place. After all, if either of their families knew about this, they would have lost their whole and entire shits.
If Vincent was a romantic, he would have thought they were a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. Seeing as he’d never experienced romantic love once in his life, however, he only compared them to Romeo and Juliet in that he hoped Ada would die, and then he could kill everyone who had a hand in her death and never think about her again.
And then perhaps kill himself, too. He hated Ada Vessalius so much that there was a part of him that did not think he could live without her.
This, Vincent reflected as he stood in line to order his sandwich and coffee, was why he did not believe in love, why he did not love Ada Vessalius. If he hated her, he did not need to worry about the passion which swept him away at the mere thought of her. If he hated her, he did not have to fear being as thoroughly crushed by her inevitable loss as his brother had been by the loss of her brother ten years prior.
So Vincent Nightray hated Ada Vessalius. He hated her, he hated her, he hated her. When he reached the counter and ordered a box of chocolates alongside his sandwich and coffee, he told himself it was in order to satisfy his sweet tooth, and when he gave it to her with a kiss on the cheek, he told himself that he simply wasn’t as hungry as he had thought he was when standing in line.
They ate lunch together, books and laptops set aside, and Ada told Vincent about a new occult ritual she’d been looking into—she was getting her degree in studies of the occult specifically, and couldn’t have been happier about it, though every story and artifact and book she had scared the shit out of Vincent. When he tuned her out, though, he found himself captivated by the way her eyes sparkled and by the size of her smile when she talked about her passions. She was truly beautiful—and he hated it, and he hated her. Why else would his heart feel like it was expanding in his chest?
By the time that conversation had finished, it was mid-afternoon, and Vincent and Ada sat as close as they dared to work on the homework for their single shared class, and after that was done, as the sun began to stain the horizon blood orange, Vincent stood, and packed up his things, and went to the car he shared with his brother—a shabby thing, nondescript, the sort of car you passed a million times a day and never noticed—and pulled up to the library entrance and waited, engine idling, adjusting his playlist to make sure that all of Ada’s favorite songs would come up once she was in the car. He hated her so much, after all, that he had made an entire playlist for her in hopes that she would zone out while listening to her favorite songs, and sing along to them softly in that terrible way of hers that always soothed his nerves, and not tell him about horrible occult things.
He hated her so much that he paused the music about midway through a song she liked a regular amount, and then queued up every song that he knew she loved, and then exited out of the clue, switched over to his map app, and unpaused the music as she hurried out towards his and Gilbert’s car and took her regular seat, shotgun, already adjusted to how she liked it, because Vincent hated her so much he knew exactly how she adjusted her seat.
Ada beamed at him when she got in the car, and said, “Oh, I love this song!”
Vincent smiled back at her, and said, “I’m glad,” though he knew it wasn’t one of her top favorites. I hate you, he thought. I hate that you’re so genuine. I hate how much you treasure everything I give you. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.
He pressed the start button on the map, and began driving. “I got us reservations at a good Italian place,” he said. “It isn’t so highbrow that we run the risk of running into anyone we know, but their food has incredible reviews, and I’ve heard it’s beautiful inside.”
“That sounds amazing,” said Ada with a smile, and Vincent felt like floating. His hatred really was getting the better of him today.
The restaurant was a forty-minute drive, and some of it was spent listening to Ada sing along to the music, and some of it was spent chatting about trivial things, and when they arrived Vincent thought that there might have been a legitimate issue with the GPS, since it did not feel like a forty minute drive at all.
But this was the restaurant that they had the reservation at, so Vincent decided that the traffic must have been especially good (for some reason, when he was driving with Ada, it always was, no matter how many cars were on the road—yet another reason he hated her), and parked the car and opened her door for her.
At the restaurant, they split two entrees, appetizers, and salads, and then ordered three desserts when Ada couldn’t choose, and at the end of the night, Vincent felt warm, sleepy, and content, and filled to the brim with hatred.
I love her so much, he thought, and then: no—wait—hate. I hate her so much. I don’t love her. I don’t love anyone or anything except for Gil, and the thought rung no more hollow than it always did.
The drive back to Ada’s own house seemed to fly by even faster—probably, thought Vincent, because it was no longer rush hour, though he hadn’t thought they’d been affected by traffic on the way to the restaurant, and he kissed her goodbye inside the car, and watched her go, beautiful, ethereal, inside.
Yes, Vincent Nightray hated Ada Vessalius. He hated her like the moon, like the sun, like the stars. He hated her like he hated his own selfish heart, and like he hated every beautiful thing in the world.
But he did not hate her like he hated himself. He could not be that cruel. He hated himself for his cruelty, for the fact that he had done nothing but drag his brother down all his life, and, most especially, for the fact that he could never, ever bring himself to let Ada Vessalius know how much he loved her.