The Thirst Within

by Johi Jenkins

  “I’m….” His eyes close, and he hangs his head as if debating to tell me or not.

  I don’t say anything, but wait for him to tell me.

  His eyes open again, and they are unhappy, but determined. “I’m what you’d call a vampire, yes.” His voice is clear, his words deliberate.

  “And you drink human blood.”

  “Yes,” he admits.

  “That guy upstairs,” I begin. “He had it coming, didn’t he?”

  “Tori, can we not talk about this now?”

  “No, Thierry, I want to. Last week you said you’d explain. I’ve been waiting for so long to hear the truth. And it doesn’t scare me.” I edge closer to him, and I put my hands on his cheeks.

  He lets me, and slowly places his own hands over mine. “You’ve been waiting for a week, Tori. A week. That’s not ‘for so long.’”

  I’m not sure what he means, but likely it’s a vampire thing. He’s probably immortal and a week means nothing to him. “Hey, I’m the human here,” I say. “A week is a long time.”

  “Tori,” he says, clearly at a loss of what to do.

  He removes my hands from his face, and moves away from me. He paces up and down his room.

  “So,” I insist, “he deserved it, didn’t he?” Thierry’s a nice guy. He wouldn’t kill anyone just like that. This guy was probably a criminal.

  “He….” He looks up as if he could look through the ceiling. His gaze hardens. “He did.”

  “And he’s dead.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Can you drink from dead people?”

  He flinches somewhat at my direct questioning, but sighs wearily. “I drink… fresh blood. Like you eat fresh bread. But you could eat stale bread if you had nothing else and were really hungry.”

  “Do you get hungry or thirsty?”

  At this he laughs shortly, and stops pacing for a second. “I say hungry. To me it feels like I’m empty, and I feel it everywhere in my body. Other people say thirsty, because they feel more like a burning in their throats.”

  “By other people do you mean other vampires,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “Like Corben?”

  “Tori,” he complains. He’s gotten good at using my name to complain.

  “What? He’s a vampire too, isn’t he? And he’s probably the one that made you.”

  He looks at me and narrows his eyes, like he’s trying to read my mind. Can he read my mind?

  “Can you read minds?” I ask abruptly.

  He exhales in defeat. That lines up my next question, does he breathe?

  “No everyone’s, but yes, plenty of people’s,” he answers. “Not yours. I wish I could. What made you think that Corben is my maker?”

  I smile. Maker. He’s using vampire lingo with me. “Oh, c’mon. You act so weird around him. Like you respect him more than you would a little brother. That’s clear as day.”

  He’s speechless for a moment. Then he does a little shake of his head.

  “The person upstairs. I have to get rid of him,” he says, choosing to ignore my Corben comment.

  “How? What do you normally do?”

  “Not tonight, Tori,” he warns me. His tone is getting more and more serious. “I may tell you some other day. But first I have to call Corben.”

  I immediately become nervous. “Call Corben? Why?”

  “Well, as you so cleverly guessed, he is my maker. I’ll have to tell him that you… that you know. And then I have to deal with the guy upstairs. Can you please stay here for twenty minutes? Please?”

  “If you kiss me,” I say bravely. Bravely not for facing a vampire, but for facing rejection. I feel like he doesn’t want to kiss me. Like something’s changed between us.

  He just looks at me.

  “You’ve kissed me before,” I remind him.

  “Tori, it’s not safe,” he says.

  “What do you mean, not safe? If it’s dangerous how come you’ve kissed me before?”

  “Before, you didn’t know. Now you’re all, ‘it’s okay that you’re a vampire,’” he says, in one of his bad imitations of me. “So I’m afraid you’ll want to jump on me and, and…. I need a minute. Please? It’s just so… strange.” He grumbles when I don’t say anything and just sit there. I think I’m smiling at him. “You’re supposed to run away screaming and praying to Jesus to save you. I don’t understand you.”

  Now it’s my turn to laugh. “Is that what your ex-girlfriends did?”

  “Girlfriends? No. People. Men and women I knew that eventually found out what I am. Most of them people I interacted with daily for a few years. Classmates, coworkers. And… well, yeah, there was a girlfriend.”

  Oh. This bothers me a little bit. However, I try to pretend that it doesn’t. “It never occurred to her that you were different for a reason?” I ask him, lightly.

  “What do you mean? You knew I was different?” He asks me quickly, a little surprised.

  “Well, yeah, Thierry. You’re something else. I knew that when I met you.” It’s true. He was too perfect, and interested in me. Two concepts that don’t go hand in hand, unless there’s something supernatural going on.

  “But you didn’t know until today?”

  “I didn’t know you were a vampire until today, yes. But regardless, she should’ve known you were different.”

  “But I wasn’t. This girl I dated before I changed. She ran away screaming when I told her. I was a fool…. I thought that she’d be okay with this kind of life.”

  So he hasn’t dated anyone since he was human? Something about his manner of speaking, or the faraway look in his eyes, suggests to me that this happened a while ago. How long ago? For some reason—actually, for no reason at all—I assumed he’s only been a vampire for a few years and he’s really in his twenties. “Um, when did you change?”

  He does another one of those exasperated sighs and I remember I haven’t asked him if he needs to breathe. “About one hundred and eighty years ago.”

  Jesus Christ. “How old were you?”

  “I was twenty-six when I finally turned.”

  “Twenty-six? Gross!”

  “What’s wrong with that? I’m two hundred and eight years old today. That’s how old I really am.”

  “Yeah, but you’re stuck in twenty-six. That’s so old. That’s nine more than I am.”

  “No… I’m one hundred and ninety-one more than you,” he says pointedly.

  “I meant the age at which you’re stuck!”

  “Look at me, Tori,” he says unnecessarily, since I’m staring anyway. “You believed me when I told you I was twenty-one. I just happen to look younger, because the condition makes us firmer, inside and out. Our skin becomes smoother. And there’s not that much difference between twenty and twenty-six, once your skin looks younger.”

  “But telling me you’re twenty-one…. You lied to me.”

  “No,” he says defiantly. “I told you the age I tell everyone. That’s what it says in my current driver’s license. When I get a new one, I usually get it pretending I’m nineteen or twenty, so that I don’t have to change them as often. I’ll need a new one once I turn thirty. By then, I look too young.”

  “Yeah, I guess you don’t look twenty-six,” I agree. How he could wait until he’s thirty to change it is beyond me. I guess plain old denial, denial, denial. “I can’t believe you lied to me.”

  “Tori, we don’t go around saying we’re vampires!”

  “Not that! I mean about your age. Twenty-one. Yeah right.” Of all the things that can bother me, this is the one that stings.

  “Are you okay?” He asks, suddenly concerned.

  “Actually, I don’t feel so well.”

  He places a hand over my forehead.

  “Your temperature’s fine; just a little cold. Come here,” he says, and with that he scoops me up tenderly and takes me to his bathroom. While he holds me up with one arm he fumbles with the bathtub faucet with the other. I hear wate
r running.

  “Do you even use the bathroom?” I ask him.

  “You’re delirious,” he says, and he laughs quietly.

  “I’m serious,” I say, but now I notice that I do sound weird. Like I’m in shock, and I didn’t even know I was.

  “Yes, Tori, I use the restroom. I wash my hands and brush my teeth. I shower. When I’m feeling spontaneous I take a bubble bath. And I use the toilet.”

  “What? The toilet?” I say, and start laughing. “Do you eat?”

  “Not food. I consume blood. Where do you think it goes?”

  “Absorbed in your… body?”

  “I digest the plasma. And like every other living thing in the planet, I get rid of what’s already been processed.”

  Ew. I frown a little. “But how come? If you live off just blood? No solids?”

  “All that babies drink is milk, and they still go, don’t they?”

  “Gross!”

  “I’m going to set you down, now, Tori.”

  “Okay,” I say. He gingerly sets me down on my feet, but keeps his arms on my hips, holding me so that I don’t fall. I feel like I would fall if he lets me go.

  “You’re going to take a bath while I take care of my friend upstairs.”

  “You already took care of him,” I say, and I slide the edge of my flat palm over my neck in a sign of slicing someone’s throat. Or decapitation.

  “I really don’t know what to do with you,” he says, shaking his head. He guides me to the toilet and sets me on top of the closed lid. “Sit here while I prepare your bath.”

  “Okay,” I say obediently. “Do you breathe?”

  He tests the water temperature in the tub, and then he’s in and out of the linen-slash-secret door closet, carrying some sort of pearly beads. He throws these in the tub as it fills up. The bathroom is imbued with a sweet floral scent, like roses and something else. Lavender and mint, perhaps.

  He takes a deep breath. “I do breathe. I’m not sure how much oxygen I need, because I can hold my breath for a long, long time. But I breathe normally, I mean like you do, because I do use my sense of smell. Now please get undressed and get in the bathtub.” He reaches in and shuts off the water.

  “Undressed?” I’m bashful at last. He refuses to kiss me and yet he wants me to undress?

  “After I leave, Tori. I’ll be nearby, and I’ll be listening in. I didn’t fill the water all the way up, so that you don’t pass out and drown on me.”

  “Okay, Thierry.”

  “Promise me you won’t fill it up.”

  “I promise.” I lift my hand solemnly over my heart.

  “Thanks,” he says as he winks. He moves as if to leave, but stops. “Tori?”

  “Thierry?”

  “You’re amazing.” And before I can reply to him, he leaves out the secret closet door. When I look up the closet door is closed, and in the next second I hear the door closing upstairs. He’s fast.

  The bath looks and smells completely inviting. There’s satiny foam covering the water. I undress, take out the hair tie holding my ponytail, and rework my hair into a bun. Then I climb in the tub filled with the aromatic oils. Ah. The water just covers my nipples; the foam sits on my breasts. I briefly wonder if it’s chance, or if he’s really good at estimating the water level against my body volume. I shake my head; it’s totally chance. I want to add more water so that it at least reaches my shoulders, but I promised him I wouldn’t. Mmm. It feels divine. I could pass out here in this tub. As the tantalizing scents fill my nostrils, I let the scenes and revelations from the past hour slowly sink in.

  I broke into Thierry’s house. Thierry is a vampire. His brother Corben is also a vampire—and Thierry’s maker, no less. That explains the massive influence that Corben has over Thierry. Thierry referred to Corben as his younger brother, but Corben is probably older. They might not even be brothers; they could be “blood brothers” or some vampire thing like that; Corben just happens to look younger.

  Thierry is over two hundred years old.

  He can read people’s minds. I wonder if it’s true that he can’t read mine or if he only said it to make me feel better….

  I saw him drink blood. His lips were covered in some man’s blood. Oh God.

  I’ve kissed a vampire. He really is a vampire.

  A lot of little things now make sense, like how he always seems to show up right after I eat, so we never go out eating together, not since that first time. I only seem to hang out with him at night. Have I seen him out during the day? I can’t remember. There’s so much I don’t know about him. It freaks me out a little that he’s over two hundred years old. Does he see me as a child? He’s kissed me. But he’s never urged me to have sex. Can he have sex? With me? With other vampires?

  He didn’t kiss me tonight….

  My thoughts keep weaving in and out of the theme at hand. I’m in shock, yes, but I’m taking this all surprisingly without difficulty. I’m sure it’s because I’ve always, as far as I can remember, believed in the supernatural. When I was about eight years old, Nana Fran caught me watching a movie about vampires and werewolves. She must’ve thought it was inappropriate for young children, because she was quick to point out that the movie was make-believe and that the monsters weren’t real. I was upset because I remember wanting the vampires to be real. They were striking in appearance, and powerful; I wanted to be like the main character, a female vampire that kicked ass. And I’m pretty sure I had a girly crush on the lead guy.

  Then as I grew up I decided that they were probably real, and werewolves, fairies, angels, and aliens too; and that just like the aliens, they chose not to make contact.

  It probably had to do with surviving the accident that killed my parents. When the mind cannot explain, it invents. I still remember the man with the fire eyes that saved me, and wonder if he was a mythical creature. I’ve always thought of him as an angel. But now I wonder, was he something else? A vampire? Having had a glimpse of the supernatural world, my mind is open to new suggestions. The strange memory suddenly is rehashed with new possibilities.

  The combination of the quiet house, the fragrant oils and the warm water is absolutely relaxing. Before I even have formed an intelligent opinion, I fall asleep.

  ***

  I wake up to a hand on my forehead. I open my eyes expecting Corben. What? Oh—yeah, I was dreaming of Corben. Ew. Must’ve been a nightmare. But no, fortunately Corben is not the one touching me while I’m naked and passed out in a bathtub. It’s Thierry and he looks radiant. Then I remember he’s a vampire, and I smile widely. He’s still radiant.

  “Hey there, sleepyhead,” he says softly. “Thank you for not leaving. Or drowning.”

  “My pleasure.” I blink, and my eyes feel odd because I fell asleep wearing my contacts. However, they aren’t dry as they usually get when that happens, and I wonder how long have I been sleeping. The water’s still hot, and the foam still covers me. “How long were you gone?” I ask him. My fingers are pruney and it feels like a long time has passed, but it can’t have been that long if the water’s still this hot.

  “Only about fifteen minutes. Okay, let’s get you out of there.”

  “But I haven’t rinsed.” I actually feel like I could stay here another fifteen minutes. Or an hour.

  “Trust me, you don’t want to rinse that stuff off. Here, I brought you this robe.”

  A robe! My eyes light up like he just gave me a puppy. It’s the robe I had envisioned: white, super soft, sumptuous. Now I do want to get out and fall asleep in that. Thierry holds up the robe wide open, holding the arms out for me. He makes a show of turning his head the other way, and even raises the robe past his eyes so that he can’t see me.

  I stand up in the bathtub floor, and Thierry immediately wraps the robe around me, which is great because I’m feeling lightheaded again. He pats me down to soak up the excess moisture and the bubbles that cling to me, and I almost fall into him.

  “How are you feeling?” He asks m
e.

  “Wonderful. Sleepy.”

  “Okay, Tori. I’m going to take you home,” he says.

  Home! I forgot I had one. “No, don’t take me home,” I plead, as I climb over the tub.

  “But your guardians will be wondering where you are,” Thierry says sensibly.

  “I’m not sure that’s true.” I think of Uncle Roland, never around to begin with. He’s a good guy but definitely not a father figure; not to me, and not even to his stepdaughter. And June, I swear, if I came home knocked up one day, she’d be so happy because then she’d be able to marry me off to the baby daddy and get rid of me.

  “Here,” Thierry says, and hands me the pile of my clothes. “Put this on and meet me in the room outside.”

  “No! Don’t let go of me. What if I fall?”

  He shakes his head disapprovingly, but he smiles and looks so amazing that I want to kiss him. “Quit making this so hard on me, Tori. But sure, okay. Put your clothes on. I’ll just stand here and watch.”

  “What? No… turn around.”

  He rolls his eyes at me and turns around, one arm behind his back holding on to my shoulder.

  “Your family cares more than they let on,” Thierry says out of nowhere while I put my clothes back on.

  “How do you figure? Oooh. Have you read their minds?”

  “Yes, I have read their minds.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes. They’re pretty loud.” I make a confused face he can’t see, but before I can ask what he means, he adds, “Their brain activity is loud, I mean. I’m not even super good at reading minds. The older we get, the better we are. Right now I only can read the ones that are loud in their heads; they project more distinctly, so it’s not that hard.”

  “So you can read their minds because they’re loud? Is that the norm or….” I pause to put my shirt over my head, moving his hand away. “Okay, I’m done,” I announce.

  He turns to me and smiles. “You look radiant,” he says.

  “Thanks. So is it normal to hear people’s thoughts, or is it rare? Are the Harrises just so goddamn opinionated that they’re shouting in their heads all the time?”