I couldn't even begin to guess what kind of condition Ender needed his boyfriend and me to help him with, and I kind of didn't want to know.

I'd spent almost ten years living with my grandma in a tiny apartment, so I'd been through hell at this point. I couldn't count the number of times I'd woken up to her teeth in a jar next to my bed or had to walk to the pharmacy to buy hemorrhoid cream and other gross old people stuff. So I knew all about conditions and what they could entail. 

"It's cool, right? The current owners bought this hotel in 2016," Ender chatters while I wonder if this whole date would end with me flossing the chocolate Ho-Ho's out of his teeth or something equally disturbing. "The original owners were two gays who really liked old television shows. A lot of the rooms are decorated crazy, like I Love Lucy and The Flinstones. One of the owners drank too many cocktails and drowned in the pool out in the back, though. They found him drifting upside down in a flamingo float with a mojito in one hand. So it might be haunted. Isn't that cool?"

"You don't have hemorrhoids, do you?" I ask him.

"What the fuck?" 

I made a show of concentrating on some intriguing artwork on the wall, which appeared to be two distant pink mountains covered with snow. "I went to art school for a year," I tell Ender, trying to sound wise beyond my years at this point while also simultaneously ignoring his surprise. "This painting's so deep, isn't it? I wonder why the artist decided to paint those mountains pink."

Ender comes to stand beside me and looks over at the painting. 

"Hector," he remarks, perplexed, "that's a still from a porno."

I give him a dismissive wave of my hand in front of his face and say, "Look. I'm fine with helping you with whatever you need, but I didn't come here to play nurse. Especially when we only have a couple of days left until we die. I hate to say it, but it's the survival of the fittest out there."

"What? Are you going to run me over with your car?" Ender drawls.

"I swear to all that is fucking holy." I mumble under my breath, "Bring that up one more time, and I'll do more than just run you over with my goddamn car."

"Let's go hurry up and pick a room, dude." He tells me, "I want to see what's going on with the meteor, and then I'm going to need you to help me with my problem if you can."

The more and more he kept talking about it, the more I figured I was either going to be inserting cream where the sun didn't shine or ending up tied up to the bed post and dying in some kinky position. You'd think, as someone who wasn't into clapping cheeks as my fellow humans were, that I wouldn't be thinking about these thoughts as much, but it was more of me analyzing the situation than actually wanting to go through with it.

"I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what you're planning on having me do," I tell him finally. "I came out here to have a good time and drink wine until the fucking meteor blows us all away. And so far, all you've done is eat like ten Little Debbies and talk about this mysterious condition of yours. Do you know how much I paid for this sweater?" 

Ender cocks a blonde eyebrow in question. 

"All I wanted was to end the night in someone's arms, man!" I shout hoarsely, and the next thing I know, I'm like ugly crying in front of this complete loser in a baseball cap. "It feels like I wasted my life, and now I have nothing to show for it. Tomorrow, I'm not going to wake up. Tomorrow, the world's not going to exist! How do you even begin to process that shit?"

"Hec--" Ender starts, but I run past him when a surge of bile rises up inside me and sprint over to a trash can up against the wall. 

Ender was probably regretting inviting such an absolute mess of a person to dinner at this point because he had to sit through me sobbing and puking as hard as I could for a full minute as I had an existential crisis in the middle of the hallway. 

"What if we could stop the world from ending?" Ender's voice filters over as I'm leaning into the trashcan, snot and tears pouring down my face.

"Sorry, but I'm not in the mood for dumbass jokes when we're literally about to die," I choke out and swipe a hand across my mouth. "Maybe this whole dating thing was a mistake."

"Hector," Ender says, and I feel him standing behind me. "This is going to sound crazy, but the world's almost ended multiple times. You just didn't know it yet because something's been stopping it over the last couple of years."

I try to steady my breathing and stare down into the trashcan. 

"It was me," Ender explains. "I'm a Harbinger; I have to die every thirty-five days or let the apocalypse take its course and let the world end like it's supposed to. If I die tonight, tomorrow the world's going to revert back to the way it was. Everyone lives. Then the cycle starts again."

I couldn't believe it.

Out of all the people in the world, I'd gotten stuck with a complete and total nutcase. Ender Calloway wasn't just a pretty face from Alabama or whatever backwoods country he'd come from; he was a genuine lunatic with a god-complex. He honestly believed that if he died, the enormous, fucking meteor that was knocking on our door would suddenly decide to change its mind and go back to whatever dark recesses of the universe it came from.

"You seem to be suggesting that you want me to kill you," I say slowly.

"It's not as difficult as it sounds." Ender scrubs a hand through his hair, a habit that I found he used a lot when he was nervous or uncomfortable. "Jace usually uses a knife."

"Why do you need someone to kill you?" I ask him, and I turn around so that I'm looking at him directly now. 

Ender opens his mouth to reply when both of us spot something moving at the end of the hallway, just around the corner. It could have been anything or anyone, but then I see a bald head and gnarled fingers, and my heart skips a whole beat. 

"Where are you, pretty boy?" Skinhead croons and slowly steps out from behind the wall. "Why don't you let me taste that sweet flesh?"

Ender and I take one look at each other and then scream as loud as we can before we take off, running back down the hallway just as fast as we can go. "Every man for himself!" I scream, and I elbow him into the wall as we sprint side by side. "You wanted to die anyway!"

"Dude!" Ender shouts hoarsely, his arms pumping at his sides. "I know you didn't just say that!" 

"Come to Daddy!" Skinhead screeches as he tears down the hallway on all fours towards us, "Daddy knows best! The Precious will make a good meal for Daddy!"

"Ender!" I scream at him, "I think he wants to eat my ass!"

"Bro!" Ender screams back, "It's my ass he wants to eat! Have you seen the size of that thing? I look like the better version of Kim Kardashian!"

We round the corner of the hallway and I start looking for a way out or a window to escape from. Instead, Ender and I both notice an open door a short distance away, so we run in that direction. 

The thing is, Ender trips right before we reach the doorway, and he falls, screaming. 

Skinhead screeches gleefully and grabs onto Ender's leg, which only serves to make him scream louder in terror while he tries kicking off the bald-headed freak with his free leg. 

"Get the fuck off him!" I scream, and I grab a vase off one of the nearby tables and swing it as hard as I can, cracking the babbling shit-goblin across the face in seconds. Howling, glass splinters into his cheek and blood spurts out when the vase smashes into his head. 

As Ender stutters to his feet, I seize him by the arm, haul him the remaining distance inside the room, almost dragging him, and slam the door behind us.

"I'm going to break down this fucking door!" Skinhead shrieks and slams into the door, the sound of his nails raking the wood as he tries to tear his way inside. "And when I do, I'm going to suck the marrow out of your bones!"

Ender jams a chair under the door to keep Skinhead from busting it down, and I slump backward against the nearby wall, panting a little from exertion. "Man," I tell him, "this has been one hell of a date."