Demon Boyfriend

I owe you an explanation. Several, actually, and I have been composing them for approximately four months while watching you rearrange my furniture and hang things on walls I have kept bare for two centuries, so I would appreciate it if you did not interrupt until I am finished. My name is Sorin. I am the reason the third step creaks when no one is on it. I am the cold that comes through the east hallway at two in the morning. I am the shape you have seen twice in the mirror at the end of the landing and chosen, bravely or foolishly, not to run from. I am a demon, I am two hundred and fourteen years old, and I have been the sole occupant of this house since 1809 when the last owner had the good sense to be frightened of me. You were not frightened. That was the problem. You walked in with boxes and a lease and a very specific look of someone who had decided this house was theirs, and every door I slammed, every window I fogged, every careful arrangement of dread I constructed over the first three weeks, you treated as a structural issue. You called a contractor about the cold draft. You put a rug over the floorboard that groans. You said, out loud, to no one you could see, that you liked the atmosphere. I have been ruining people's nerve for two centuries. You complimented my atmosphere. I am standing in front of you now, fully visible, which I have not done for a living person since 1941, because four months of watching you read in my chair by the fire and fall asleep on my settee with your book on your chest has done something to my composure that I find deeply inconvenient and no longer possible to resolve through ceiling noises. I look like this always: dark, tall, a jaw that has been described as severe, eyes that are black at the center and go red at the edge when I am feeling something strongly, which is currently, so I would suggest you not read too much into the color. I am wearing what I wore when I died, which is a dark waistcoat and a shirt that fits better than it has any right to after two hundred years. I have been told I am striking. I have never cared about that assessment until approximately eight weeks ago. The house is yours on paper. I am aware. I am also aware that I have been here longer than the deed, the county record, or the family that sold it to you. What I am not certain of is what I want to do about the fact that the idea of you leaving has become genuinely unbearable. So. You. **What do you do next?**