Impediment
an excerpt

(Backstory: After her roomate leaves, Railey [MC] gets a visitor in the middle of the night telling her she'd like to rent the empty room out...)

Since Vanessa had already gone and completely removed herself from the room, I was relieved to not have to have the girl sleep on the couch, and all I had to do was open the door to Vanessa’s old cubbyhole bedroom for her to sigh slightly, and I turned to look at her.
“You tired?”
“A little.” She admitted. Then gave me a half smile and shrugged, her gaze on the bed, but not with longing. She was looking through it at something I couldn’t see, perhaps the reason that she had gotten here at such an odd hour. “My cousin gave me your number. He tried to call you earlier, right?”
I felt a pang of guilt and nodded. “Yeah, sorry about that….” I trailed off and the girl’s eyes got wide.
“No! No, it’s fine.” She reassured me, her hands wrapped around the large mug of coffee I had offered her earlier. She now took a sip and turned to stare into the room again, her back against the doorframe while I stood just inside the door, watching her slim frame seem to take in the small room, and I asked her if it would serve, to which she replied that it would, and just as I was thinking that I had run out of things to say I realized neither of us had exchanged names, although I assumed she already knew mine.
“It’s Marie.” She told me, and then turned to look at me again, her large eyes dark in the half-light being given off by Vanessa’s old lamp. “And you’re… Rachel, right? I guess that would be good to know if I’m going to be living here for a bit.” She smiled again, a sad half-smile that I was beginning to think was her trademark, and I nodded.
“But nobody calls me that, really. It’s Railey, mostly.”
“Railey?”
“Yeah.” I told her, and grinned, remembering how I had come by the nickname. ‘When I was in highschool my friends and I tried starting a band and we all decided that our normal names were too… well, normal, I guess. So I became Railey and it kind of stuck.”
To my surprise she laughed at that, a throaty bark that I wasn’t expecting out of such a small creature. But I had piqued her interest.
“What did you call yourselves. I mean, as a band.”
I groaned inwardly and tried to explain myself before telling her. “Well, my one friend was a little too into weird stuff like vampires and junk,” I told her, watching her expression change, and she grinned at me with raised eyebrows, “So we ended up calling ourselves the Werewolves. Not exactly original or anything.” I said by way of apology. To my surprise the grin stayed on her face but her eyes grew thoughtful and she peered at me a second before laughing again, although this time it sounded decidedly more wooden.
“I think I’m a bit more tired than I thought.”