My Personal Demon

18:10

We start the day together. It no longer felt right to leave the bed without him, not when we slept in it together. And I do mean sleep in the most innocent sense.

He was a demon and I was a human. The prisoner and the widow. It was nothing more than a way to be a little less lonely, trapped in the way that we were in these endless gray days.

"How do you like your coffee?"

I finally plucked up the courage to ask him that innocent question.

"With a lot of cream," he said. "But that's because I don't normally drink coffee."

I raised a brow. He drank coffee on the first day that I met him.

"You must drink something else when you're in Hell," I reasoned. Maybe it was something stronger, fit for a demon punishing sinners in Hell.

"I like a piping hot cup of tea," he said.

I shake my head in disbelief. "You brew a pot of coffee every morning and you drink it with me. Do you really expect me to think that you like tea?"

He looked at me sheepishly. "Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't see why you like coffee so much. I've been drinking it with you trying to see if it magically starts to taste good, but it stays the same."

His words rendered me speechless. Had he only been drinking coffee for my benefit?

He holds up his cup, showing me the contents before taking a sip. "You can't ever go wrong with an English Breakfast."

I'd rather stick to my coffee. For someone who looked like Charles, he sure didn't act like him.

He wasn't fond of smoking unless there was someone to smoke with. While Charles was content going through a pack alone, the demon always preferred company, offering me a cigarette whenever he was bored. His eyes would light up during our conversations, briefly flashing that lamplit color before returning to Charles's blue eyes.

We were sitting in the backyard garden with a pack of Marlboros between us. There were fourteen cigs left in the box and seven more smoke-filled conversations before we'd find no point in smoking anymore.

"Why do you wear my husband's face?"

Maybe it was because I finally got comfortable with the demonic presence in my home, but he didn't scare me anymore. In the absence of his pranks, he rotated between cooking obsessively, cleaning diligently, and asking me questions about how the human world worked. He was a prisoner making the best of his situation and I couldn't help but admire the way he effortlessly kept himself busy.

"I thought it would be the face that scared you the least," he answered. "Clearly I was wrong."

"No, I see where you're coming from." If I had seen a stranger making breakfast that morning, I would've called the cops. "Is my husband the only man you can impersonate?"

He blows out more smoke, obscuring his face in the gray fog. "I can impersonate anyone that has stepped foot into this house, dead or alive. Beyond that, my magical abilities are limited."

"Show me." For some reason, I didn't fully believe that.

He tilted his head to the side. "Where do I start ..." His eyes flashed amber. "I got it! What do you know about the previous residents of the house?"

"The Robins?" They were a family of three that had moved to the South before we put down the deposit for the house. I never got to see them, save for a photograph of their daughter that they left behind. We tried to mail it to them, but the envelope was returned to our address. I told the demon as much and he smiled cryptically in response.