by Amira Rain
“But, yeah, it pretty much does, Chrissy, because I’m known for my strong feelings about people, and I’m never wrong. Like, you know how people say that you might develop some kind of supernatural powers at some point in your life, because your dad’s a vampire and your mom’s mom had some kind of powers? Well, maybe it’s the same with me, even though my mom was completely normal. Maybe just by having a vampire dad, I got some special psychic powers or something. Who knows, right? But all I know is that I’m pretty darn good at picking out people who are lying, hiding something, or being in any way sneaky. I first got this feeling with Carla, who almost made your mom kill your dad, and then I’ve had it with a couple of people since then, and I’ve turned out to be right about them. And now I have the same feeling about Jake and Paul.”
“You didn’t get any kind of funny feeling about Kevin, who my dad had to kick out of the farm.”
“Kevin wasn’t hiding anything. He was just an asshole.”
Knowing that she was right, but not wanting to admit it, I said nothing, and she began picking a blob of drying pond slime off her shoulder.
“Maybe I’m wrong about Paul and Jake, Chrissy. I hope I am. I don’t think I am, though, so I just want you to be careful, especially with your heart…because when you find out whatever it is that Jake and Paul are hiding—”
“But, Jen, just for argument’s sake…let’s just say that they are both hiding something. They can’t both be the spy. My dad said that his contact made it crystal clear that there was only one, and that he had this on good authority.”
“I didn’t say that both Jake and Paul are spies. I didn’t even say that absolutely for sure one of them is. I just said that they’re both hiding something. I only suspect that one of them is the spy because it just seems to make sense. What do I know, though? Maybe you, your dad, and everyone else is right, that my funny feelings are nothing, and that the spy is someone that we’ll never even suspect. I guess it’s possible. Heck, maybe the spy has already even left the farm. It could have been Kevin. Has your dad ever thought about that?”
I said yes. “He actually sent some kind of a surveillance team to go check up on Kevin, and they found him right back in the non-Warren-affiliated coven in Utah that he came from. So, it’s extremely doubtful that he was the spy.”
Jen shrugged, walking backward into deeper water. “Just watch your heart, Chrissy. That’s all I’m saying. And you can take my advice or leave it.”
With that, essentially ending our conversation, Jen fell backward and began doing the backstroke while the ducks came from all different parts of the pond to follow her.
Not long after this exchange, I began having the same brief flashes of suspicion about Paul that I’d been having about Jake. First, there was a brief, solo hunting trip. Then, while having a picnic in Sweetwater, I asked Paul to tell me more about his childhood growing up in a vampire family, and he simply said that it “hadn’t been great” before changing the subject. Immediately, alarm bells began going off in my mind, because my dad had said to make note of anyone who seemed reluctant to talk about their past. However, giving Jake’s behavior more thought over the course of eating my picnic lunch, I came to the conclusion that his response to what I’d asked him was probably perfectly natural from a psychological perspective. Clearly, his childhood hadn’t been pleasant for some reason, so it only stood to reason that he wouldn’t want to recall it or rehash it. And maybe he just doesn’t want to fill our date with negativity, either, I thought.
August rolled into September, and eight days after my dad’s announcement about the spy, he told me that he and his council members had developed a short list of spy suspects, and Jake and Paul weren’t on the list.
Having not even fully realized just how deeply paranoid I’d begin to feel, I heaved a sigh of relief. “Good. So, where do things go from here?”
My dad said that the vampires on the short list would, unbeknownst to them, be watched more closely by some of his most trusted council members from here on out. “What we’ve been doing is just keeping an eye on all the newcomers, but that’s been spreading our resources a little thin. Now we can focus on surveilling the newcomers who are actually most likely to require it. This way, we can have more hands on deck when small groups of Warrens are spotted near the farm, which has unfortunately been nearly all the time lately.”
Underscoring his point right then, his phone dinged with a text alert, and he looked at the screen, frowning, before pocketing his phone, telling me that he had to go. “More Warrens spotted just about a half-mile to the northeast, right by our property line. I think they’re testing us…trying to get a look at our forces before planning some kind of a larger attack.”
After giving me a kiss on the forehead, he all but flew out the from door, leaving me anxious about the Warrens. My anxiety about Jake and Paul, however, had lessened, at least about the slim possibility of one of them being the spy. This left me with anxiety only about which one of them I was ultimately going to “choose,” which was anxiety so intense that it could make me feel ill at times.
I knew I had to decide. I knew I couldn’t date both of them simultaneously forever, which, for all practical purposes, is what I’d been doing. Things may have started off like I wasn’t dating either of them and instead was just getting to know them both better, but at this point, I couldn’t deny that I basically had two boyfriends, which embarrassed me, just like I suspected it did Jake and Paul as well. I figured it probably didn’t do much for either of them in terms of masculine pride to have everyone on the farm thinking that I was “playing” them both, and that they were both putting up with it.
Once my dad had shut the front door behind him, I began trudging upstairs to go to bed, giving myself a deadline about Jake and Paul for the second time. I would decide between the two of them within twenty-four hours. And unlike the last deadline I’d given myself, which had been kind of interrupted by my dad’s spy announcement, this time I wasn’t going to lose my nerve and flake out. I knew that doing so, in the end, might cost me both of the guys that I’d grown to love.
Once on the upper floor of the house, I started down the hallway to my room, thinking that I needed some sort of a sign to help me decide. I needed something clear and definitive that my brain couldn’t argue with. As for where I thought this sign could possibly come from, I had no idea.
A few paces from my room, I paused, hearing what sounded like shrieks of joy coming from Jen’s bedroom. Reversing back down the hallway, I found her bedroom door an inch ajar, and I gave it a light knock, hoping she’d invite me in so that I wouldn’t have to go to my own room and be alone with my thoughts just yet.
“Jen?”
She didn’t answer, but additional muffled, wild shrieks of joy told me that she was in her master bathroom, which was really more like a good-sized spa room. At least thirty by thirty feet, it was all tiled in a shade of eggshell cream, with an enormous whirlpool bathtub about the size of an average outdoor jacuzzi tub in the same shade. In the opposite corner was a freestanding granite shower designed to look like a waterfall, with a cascade of water pouring from between two rocks when turned on. Adding to all this splendor, the bathroom was filled with so many exotic tropical plants that it was practically a jungle, although somewhat of an odd one, with numerous bamboo racks of plush, cream-colored towels all throughout the space.
After entering Jen’s room, I went over to the closed bathroom door and just listened for a few moments, not knowing what, exactly, she was doing in there, and wondering if I should interrupt her privacy or not. However, when I soon heard some quacking, followed by Jen loudly proclaiming that Johnathan was “such a good whirlpool swimmer,” I decided it was probably fine and went ahead and knocked.
Jen’s yelled response came a moment later. “Come in! I’m just swimming in my bathing suit in here! Wait, come in unless you’re my dad or Carol, though! In that case, don’t come in, because I have a little buddy in here with me, and I
just don’t feel like getting yelled at!”
I opened the door, closing it behind me, and made my way across the vast bathroom to the whirlpool tub, finding the scene to be exactly how I had imagined it. Clad in a neon yellow bathing suit, Jen was sitting up in the tub, swirling her hands in the water, while Johnathan swam against the current created by one of the whirlpool jets, which appeared to be set on the “gentle” setting so that it didn’t blow him away. Having used the whirlpool tub myself, I’d learned that the jets’ “maximum” setting could just about blow a full-grown human away, or at least leave a bruise.
Having a seat on a wooden dressing bench near the tub, I gave Jen a smile. “Having fun in here?”
Jen answered in the affirmative. “I’m just taking a nice, long swimming bath, because David said that I smell like pond scum. He still loves me and all that, but he just said it’s been getting difficult to hug me very tight, or for very long. Get this, too…he said he wants me to stop swimming in the pond altogether, but not even just because of the smell. He says it’s actually starting to become dangerous to my health, because according to him, the bacteria level in the pond is now probably like something close to raw sewage, which basically just means, like, a toilet full of pee and poo. He says that for the ducks, the bacteria isn’t really dangerous, but for me, it could make me really sick. I don’t know if I quite for real believe this, just because swimming in the pond is so fun, and I just don’t think that anything so fun could truly ever really be bad for me. But, even with that being a true fact, I still told David that I’ll stop swimming in the pond, at least most of the time, just because I want him to be happy, and not have to worry about me so much. We came to kind of an agreement that I can take a dip in the pond maybe like, twice a year.”
I said that sounded reasonable, and Jen nodded.
“Yup. So, now when I want to swim with Johnathan, I’ve got to take him in the whirlpool with me, with the water set on cool-ish lukewarm, so it doesn’t burn him. He loves it so far. Look how he fights to get back in.”
Getting up on her knees, Jen leaned over the tub and set him two or three feet outside the tub; and sure enough, he waddled forward, quacking furiously, and remained quacking for a few moments until Jen picked him up and put him back in the water. “See? He loves it. And look what else. I’m teaching him how to spell. I did a J for his name with the soap.”
Jen gestured to the tiled wall to her right, where she’d drawn a massive heart with a J inside. She’d used a soap called “pumpkin spice delight,” which she’d purchased several bars of a few days earlier to “help fall get started,” as she said. The soap itself was a deep, dark rust color, and when used to write on tile like Jen had done with it, the color even kind of resembled blood, grossly enough, especially when dripping down the wall from being splashed with water, how Jen’s artwork was currently doing.
Suddenly beginning to feel funny, I just looked at the heart, noticing how a particular splash of water had made a streak of color run at an angle from left to right, putting a strike through the letter J, just like a strike on a “no smoking” or “no loitering” sign or something.
No J, I thought. No Jake.
While Johnathan swam in the spa, Jen grabbed the bar of soap. “I’m even gonna do his whole name for him next.” With the bar of soap, Jen carefully printed Johnathan’s name beneath the giant heart, spelling it Jahnithinn. “There. Now he can look at that and learn how to spell his own name.”
I was barely paying any attention to how Jen had spelled his name, because I was still fixated on the heart above it. No J. No Jake.
Feeling more certain than I’d felt in weeks, I suddenly stood up from the wooden bench and began heading out of the bathroom. “Thanks, Jen. You just gave me the sign I was hoping for. I’ve gotta go do some thinking now.”
Thinking about how, specifically, I was going to break the news to Jake that I didn’t want to be with him anymore.
*
Now that I’d gotten my sign, it was all so clear. Even though I loved Jake and Paul both, there was just some deeper connection that I had with Paul that I didn’t have with Jake. Maybe my subconscious had known this all along, because now that I realized it, my choice seemed so easy. I was going to break up with Jake the next day, and this decision was the right one. I could just feel it deep in my soul.
Alone in my room, I cried, thinking about how I was going to hurt Jake when I told him. However, once I’d dried my eyes, I fell asleep almost immediately and enjoyed the best night of sleep I’d had in weeks, making me feel even more certain about the rightness of my decision when I woke up in the morning.
Coming down to the kitchen around nine, I found that everyone else had already left for the day except my dad, who’d just come home briefly to take a “vampire nap” and take a shower.
“And I’d better get to it now, sweetie, because I’m needed back out on patrol; so, have a good day.”
He gave me a kiss on the forehead and began striding out of the kitchen, but I asked him to please wait up.
“I just want to ask you something.”
Frowning a little, he glanced at the clock. “Is it something quick?”
I said yes. “I know everyone is going to be really busy today, patrolling for Warrens, but I just want to know if you can spare Jake and Paul at any time…maybe, specifically, two different times, because I want to talk to them both sometime today, but separately, in person, and in private.”
With his expression of slight impatience becoming replaced by one of understanding and maybe sympathy, my dad just looked at me for a long moment. “Have you made some sort of a decision?”
I said yes. “I don’t want to talk about it right now, though…not until I tell Jake and Paul. They should find out first.”
My dad said that was fine. “I can spare Jake at five…and Paul maybe at five-thirty. Will that give you enough time?”
I nodded. “Yes. Thank you, Dad.”
He gave me another kiss on the forehead and went upstairs, leaving me to text Jake, asking him if he could meet me at five, and Paul, asking him if he could meet me at five-thirty, adding to both texts that I’d already secured the time off with my dad. Both answered back quickly, saying yes.
While I worked a shift at the creamery, the day dragged, with every minute feeling like at least ten. However, when I got off work at four, the day got a little more interesting, if that was even the right word, when I received a text from Jen.
All the new ppl knoe abowt the spi. Idk whoo spilld the beens, and yer dad dos not knoe eether, but IT WAS NAT ME. I kept the seecret. Yer dad bileeves me.
Wondering if Jake and Paul might be somehow resentful that I had kept the secret from them, I raced home, worried, and texted my dad. Jen says everyone knows. Is it true?
My dad answered back a few minutes later. Yes. I should have known it’d be just a matter of time.
I asked him if it was also true that no one knew who’d “leaked” the info, and again, he said yes.
No clue who the secret-spiller was, and we may never know. Not even important now. Now we just have to look out for anyone acting strange or jumpy. Maybe the spy will even suddenly decide to leave the farm.
I answered by simply saying that I hoped so.
After running upstairs, I quickly showered, dressed, and dried my hair. When I made it back downstairs at five minutes to five, I saw Jake’s blue Mustang already in the driveway, and my stomach churned with dread. It was going to kill me to hurt him, but I had to do it. There was just simply no other way, since the certainty I’d felt about my decision the night before had only increased with each passing minute since then.
When I got into the car, Jake smiled, nearly cracking my heart in two.
“I thought maybe we’d make use of this unexpected date time to take a drive, and get away from all prying eyes here at the farm.”
Lately, Jake had been taking me out on drives, probably a little self-conscious to be seen with me unti
l I made up my mind about who I wanted to have an exclusive relationship with, I figured. I knew that Jake felt that some people on the farm were starting to think of him as a fool who was being “played,” whether it was true or not that people really thought this. It was how he’d started to feel, anyway. Although Paul had also started to seem a bit anxious for me to make a decision, this seemed to be less about what people thought about him, because he really didn’t seem to care, and more about him just wanting to have an exclusive relationship with me. Which certainly didn’t seem like too much to ask, I thought a bit guiltily.
In response to what Jake had said about making use of our time together to take a drive, I said that sounded fine, finding it impossible to return his smile.
Once we’d left the farm and were driving away from the direction of Sweetwater and the farm, east on US-12, which was a rural, two-lane highway, Jake glanced over at me. “You don’t look too happy. Are you worried about there being a Warren spy on the farm?”
It killed me that he obviously had no clue what was coming, no clue that I was about to break up with him.
I said no about the spy. “I mean…yes, I am worried about that, but I have something else on my mind today.”
“Well, what is it?”
Not wanting him to accidentally crash the car out of shock or something, I asked him if he could please pull over so we could talk. “Maybe on that one dirt service road between here and Quincy.”
Quincy was a tiny village with a single stoplight about a mile ahead, and about a half-mile before it was a narrow dirt service road that was apparently only there so that work trucks could reach a cell phone tower nearby. However, Jake and I had parked to just talk, hang out, and even kiss a little on this road several times, and we’d never seen any tower workers; so, I was pretty sure that the place would be perfect for a private talk.
In response to what I’d asked, Jake said sure, glancing over at me. “We can park on the dirt road. But what do you want to talk about?”