Kissing Corpses by Amy Leigh Strickland

Gilchrist gets the bed. You get the floor,” he said as he threw my blankets to the floor and set clean sheets on the sofa for Geneva. “And tomorrow morning when I go to work, nobody gets in my way and slows me down. Got it?”
    “Thank you,” I said. Geneva had returned to the kitchen to wash dishes. I picked up my blanket and folded it neatly before setting it on the floor at the foot of the sofa. “Really. He would have killed me if I had stayed at home. Thank you.”
    Cody stared back at me and shook his head. “I just don't see why you didn't go to your family.”
    “Because he's smart enough to look up my family. He can't track an ex he's never heard of.”
    “Right.” Cody sat down on the couch. He picked up the remote and turned the TV to the Discovery Channel. They were showing reruns of A Haunting . I sat down next to him.
    We watched until the commercial, when I decided to break the tense but non-hostile atmosphere by trying to make conversation.
    “So how are you doing?” I asked. “Work going well?”
    Cody nodded. “Yeah. I'm up for a raise after my review. It's supposed to be next week but I hear they take their time and then do retro-pay on those things.”
    “Are you seeing someone?” I asked.
    “Yeah, I am,” he said. “Kristin. I met her at work. We went out Friday, actually. Probably should have called her, but then you showed up on my door.”
    “Went out for the first time Friday?”
    He nodded.
    “Oh.”
    “What's it to you? We've been broken-up for three months.”
    “I wish you'd stop snapping at me,” I said. “Really. If you've moved on you don't need to be yelling at me all the time.”
    “I am trying to move on, Kendall. But you being here doesn't help. I was finally able to go one day without thinking about you, and now you're in my house asking me to save you from some psycho vampire.”
    “I never wanted you out of my life completely,” I said. “I told you when we split that I wanted to be friends.”
    “Well, I don't,” he said. “I wanted to marry you. I'm not going to be happy being just your friend. And you don't want to be my friend. You just want to keep me around as an option.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Which is why you didn't want to marry me.”
    “I'm twenty-three, Cody,” I argued. “I didn't want to marry you because I'm twenty-three.”
    “Bullshit,” he snapped. “We dated for two years. The word 'love' was a regular part of our vocabulary. You practically lived here, but the moment I gave you a key and asked you to make it legitimate, you ran. Why? Not because you're twenty-three, but because if you moved in, if you agreed to marry me, then you wouldn't be available in case something better came along. And that's what it really boiled down to. You thought you could do better and now you're on the run from a vampire and I'm trying to move on with my life. I'm ready to find someone to settle down with. I'm moving on.”
    Ouch. I looked down at my hands, trying to imagine the beautiful ring that Cody had tried to give me that evening in August. How would it look on my finger. Had I made a mistake? I looked up at him. His eye contact was intense, but I couldn't tell if he was still angry.
    “Cody,” I said. “I'm sorry.”
    “I invested two years of my life into our relationship,” he said.
    I leaned closer. “What if we gave it a second shot?” I asked.
    Cody stood up. “No. Don't even try that, Kendall. You can get out of my house right now if you prefer. I'm done with that chapter of my life.”
    “You're not exactly being clear, here,” I said, standing up. “You're telling me that you wanted to marry me, but you don't want me back?”
    “Wanted. Past tense. I've moved on. I'm ready to find a woman to spend the rest of my life with and you clearly haven't grown-up at all these past two years. I'm going out with Kristin.”
    “One date and you've decided she's the one?”
    “No. But I stand more of a chance of finding happiness