Midnight in Berlin by JL Merrow

he was lying on his side, staring at me. “Jeez, you want a picture or something?”
    Christoph smiled. Well, his mouth turned up some at the corners. “No need. I have an excellent memory for faces.” Then he rolled over onto his back and set about memorizing the cracks in the ceiling.
    Trying to ignore the way he unsettled me, I closed my eyes again, although I figured I wouldn’t be getting any sleep this century.

Chapter Nine
    I only know I slept because of the weird-ass dreams I had. Hell, maybe I was only half-asleep at that, because I know I spent most of my time trying to work out if I was dreaming stuff or if it was real. I dreamed I was back in the States, and I’d gotten a real job just like my mom always wanted. It’d been going great, and then this new guy started. His name was Christoph, and he had a face like a Halloween mask, but no one could see it except me.
    It pissed me the hell off. I cornered him about it in the washroom—I had him up against the wall, my hands around his throat. “Tell them what you look like,” I was shouting at him, but he just smiled at me.
    “Look in the mirror,” he said, and I did, and I saw I’d been wrong, it wasn’t Christoph who had the scars. It was me.
    When I woke up, I had to lie there for a minute, calming my breathing as I sorted out the facts from the crap my subconscious had thrown at me. I blinked at the ceiling, forcing my hands to stay by my sides and not check my face, because I knew it was unblemished, damn it. Then a flicker of motion caught the corner of my eye. I turned my head.
    It was Christoph. He was staring in the mirror above the sink, one hand tracing the ruined contours of his face. Something twisted inside me to see him. I didn’t like the feeling. Who the hell did he think he was, making me feel guilty over something that was all his fault? “You know, you were really hot, before,” I said a second before my brain caught up with just how much of a bastard I was being.
    Christoph looked up, and half smiled at me in the mirror. “But now, I think, I’ll be safe from your advances.”
    “Your loss,” I said because I couldn’t think of one single other thing to say. Apart from “sorry”, I guess, but that would’ve been like trying to mop up the Atlantic with a paper towel. I swung myself out of bed and dragged my sluggish body over to the window. It must have rained while I was sleeping, as the graffitied bricks of the wall opposite gleamed damply. The trash cans were just looming shadows in the spilling glow from the streetlight at the end of the alley. A faint reflection of my face in the glass was superimposed on the scene, but I didn’t feel much like focusing on it. Had I really just been that much of an asshole?
    “It’s natural that you’re angry with me,” Christoph said. He’d moved silently and was close behind me—I could feel the heat from his body searing through the damp air and smell the scent of him. Wood and musty clothes and half-healed flesh. I was suddenly ravenous, though I didn’t know what for, or why.
    “Perhaps you think the punishment was just,” he added.
    I whirled. “I didn’t ask that bastard to do that to you! I didn’t ask him to do anything to you!”
    “But you wished it, no?” Christoph didn’t give an inch, damn him, standing there right in my face. We were so close I could feel his breath on my skin, warming it.
    But the twist in my guts wouldn’t let me rest. “Fuck you! You turned me into a fucking monster! You don’t get to guilt trip me on top of that.” I stepped sideways, away from him and the window both, and flung myself back on the bed because there was no damn place else to go.
    Christoph stayed put. “You have no need to feel guilty,” he said into the space where I’d just been. “It was my mistake that led to this.”
    Bastard. Why did he always leave me off balance? Twisting my words, twisting my thoughts… “How did you get it?” I demanded. I figured