“So are you guys like, officially a couple now?” asked Luke as Liam helped me walk down to the kitchen for breakfast a couple of days later. I was still somehow weak - apparently I had lost a lot of blood when I’d gotten my head wound - but I had been trying my best to get up and walk around a little more in the last couple of days, with Liam dutifully by my side every step of the way. We’d been nearly inseparable since - he’d even slept in a chair in my room a couple of times. Now that we could both finally admit what was going on between us, it seemed that neither of us wanted to be too far apart from the other, especially until we figured out if we were still dealing with a demon.


    “We haven’t officially had that talk yet,” Liam said, subtly looking at me out of the corner of his eye.


    “Oh fuck that, you are,” Caitlin said. “Or at least you are, if what I heard when walking by your room the other night was accurate.” I blushed, not sure what she heard, but assuming it must have been one of the times when we were more, uh, lively. Not that we’d slept together yet - I definitely didn’t have energy for anything like that yet, but that didn’t mean that all other options were off the table. “Which is going to make my job significantly more difficult. Half of the fans want to date you, Liam, and you go and ruin the ‘maybe one of you could get the chance’ vibe that we’ve got going on? I don’t think our numbers will drop too bad, but I fully expect to get a ton of hate on the first video where that’s revealed.”


    “Then we don’t reveal it,” Liam said, depositing me into a chair and heading toward the open breakfast pizza that Catilin must have picked up. “It’s not like I’ve never had a girlfriend before, and we’ve never brought them up in videos to keep up this mystique that you want,” he said, using finger-quotes around the term “mystique.”


    Caitlin rolled her eyes, passing me an uneaten slice of pizza from her plate. “Yeah, but none of them were ever in videos before, either. The minute they see you together, fans are going to start noticing. Have you never seen any of those Dan and Phil compilations where people spend an hour analyzing a hand movement and trying to prove that it’s a sign that they’re dating?”


    “I have, and I’ve seen the ones of me and you, me and Circe, me and Liam, and all the other combinations. If they’re going to make it, let them make it. As long as we’re not obvious, the die-hard fans that want to date me won’t think anything about it.”


    He walked back over and handed me a plate with two more pieces of pizza. I shook my head and tried to hand it back to him. “That’s way too much,” I said.


    “You need to eat if you want to heal,” he said, lightly kissing the non-injured side of my head.


    “If you two keep up with the cutesy thing, the demon will for sure leave,” Luke joked through a mouthful of pizza. “If nothing else, I’ll puke it out.” Liam quickly kissed my cheek several times, and Luke made a fake gagging noise.


    “Speaking of,” I said loudly, trying to speak over Luke’s fake puking, “Liam said that you’ve been sleeping better?”


    Luke gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Basically anything is better than the amount I was sleeping before, which was practically nothing. Now it’s closer to four hours a night, which is significantly better in my opinion.”This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    I nodded my agreement. “Do you think Circe actually got the demon out?”


    “I want to think that,” Luke said, taking another huge bite so I had to struggle to understand him. “But it’s hard to say for sure. I think I felt something the night of the exorcism, but was it really the demon leaving, or was it heartburn from the oils she gave me?” He shrugged again. “It’s hard to tell because those oils do wreak havoc on your digestive system. But I couldn’t feel the demon before, either, so who knows? She sure thinks she did.”


    “She monitored him for an extra two days when you were in the hospital,” Caitlin defended. “And she didn’t notice any demonic activity, so she declared you safe.”


    I took a bite of the lukewarm breakfast pizza and chewed contemplatively for a moment. “So where’d the demon go, then?” I said finally.


    “What do you mean?” Liam said, his eyebrow arched in adorable confusion.


    “Well,” I said, taking another bite - it felt like it hadn’t been that long since Liam had snuck me a midnight snack, but I was ravenous. Maybe he was right about me needing more food to heal, I thought. “Demons aren’t the same as ghosts, but a lot of times, when a ghost possesses an object, it will leave the object for a while to say its goodbyes before they go into the light. And there’s no going into the light for demons.”


    “I assume it just went back to hell,” Caitlin said dismissively. “Isn’t that specifically what Circe was asking them to do?”


    “I suppose,” I said, sounding about as convinced as I felt. But there was no true way to know, I thought, since I couldn’t really see her, anyway. Luke had the one time, but otherwise, we’d only seen her in videos.


    “Speaking of,” Caitlin continued as though she had read my mind, “how much activity are you feeling up to?”


    “No, Cait,” Liam cut in before I could answer. “She’s supposed to be resting! She’s definitely not supposed to be going on a plane right now.”


    “I specifically never said anything about getting on a plane,” she said, grabbing her phone and starting to type. “But we need to start thinking about filming more content. Our audience is pretty understanding, but they’d be a lot more understanding if it was one of you two injured. If we delay videos for a newcomer, we’re going to start to lose some of our momentum.”


    Luke and Liam both looked over at me, concern clear in their eyes. I shrugged. “I could always just stay here by myself,” I offered. “You guys could jet off for a couple of days, film a quick video without me, and then I’ll help you put together the video when you get back.” Not that I was much help to them, and they both knew it, but at least then I could look through the footage and make sure I didn’t see the demon. Plus, if I was going to stick with this group for long (and, I thought, my eyes creeping over to Liam, hopefully I was going to be here for a while), I was going to have to learn how to help out with the videos at some point.


    “I don’t love the thought of leaving you home alone while you’re still healing,” Liam said after a second.


    “And I don’t love the thought of leaving you alone in case the demon jumped out of me and into my laptop or some shit,” Luke added.


    “I’ve lived by myself for plenty of years,” I argued. “And I’m healed enough that I can fend for myself for a couple of days. I’ve managed so far.”


    “Or,” Caitlin argued, raising her voice over mine, “we could go to a close area to investigate and she could come with. It’s not like there’s any shortage of haunted areas around LA. She can show off her new hairstyle, show her staples to prove why we’ve been away from filming for a bit, and walk in, claiming to see a ghost. Hell, we can even sit in the introduction room for a while.”


    I sighed. I didn’t particularly want to bring my wounded head into a dusty, old building, but I suppose there were worse possible suggestions. And, I had to agree with Caitlin to a certain extent - I didn’t want to weigh the group down and make us lose followers because I couldn’t sit in a chair for a few hours in the middle of the night. “I think I can make it through a ghost hunt, as long as I can sit through most of it. My sleep schedule’s fucked anyway.”


    “Excellent,” Caitlin said, a huge grin on her face, “because I’d already booked a couple of rooms for us, and I’m not sure how refundable they are.”


    “Rooms?” Luke asked.


    “Yep,” Caitlin said, turning her phone around so we could see the confirmation screen. “We’re going back to the Queen Mary.”