The Thirst Within

by Johi Jenkins

  But it’s not them, it’s Corben, and he knows where I am, and he’s right outside. And I’m not ready yet to confront him. To see him knowing he’s a vampire. That he made Thierry. That he has a problem with me dating Thierry. That he’s hated me all along.

  I take a deep breath, pick up my bag and leave the safety of the airport. I’m terrified and I can’t really explain why.

  I strain to see him in the lane designated for picking up arrivals. There are two parallel roads in front of Arrivals, divided by a stretch of concrete like a median. They both go in the same direction, but the one closest to me is designated for taxis only, while the far one past the median is for regular traffic. Corben should be in the far lanes like a regular person.

  So I’m looking across the taxi lane towards the regular cars lane, searching for him, when he’s suddenly next to me by the airport sliding doors. I jump a little, but thankfully not that much that he’d notice. Then I remember he’s a vampire, and he probably did notice. Crap.

  Without a warning, he takes my duffel bag. Somehow his fingers don’t touch mine. He’s wearing jeans and a long sleeve sweater that fits him oh-so-deliciously over his chest, and I’m instantly jealous. I’m covered in a winter jacket because it’s freaking cold and windy. Damn it damn it damn it. Why does he have to be so goddamn imposing? I’m overwhelmed and assaulted by warring feelings of fear and attraction.

  “Hello, Tori,” he says, bowing slightly.

  My heart beats fast, reacting to his voice. It’s strange, because I’m afraid of him, but I’m also curious about him. Curse my shallowness—I hate to admit it, but I’m attracted to him, but only because I think he’s the most beautiful creature that I’ll ever meet in my life. I don’t exactly like him, and he clearly doesn’t approve of me, but I can’t help but be fascinated by him.

  “Hello,” I say, barely above a whisper, which regular people wouldn’t be able to hear since it’s kind of loud outside. But he hears me alright, acknowledges, and starts walking forward.

  I notice that he walks a little ahead and to the side, maintaining a safe distance of about five feet or so from me. My eyes trace the edge of his sweater, the way it comes down from his broad shoulders and draws in at the waist. The fabric doesn’t exactly cling to him, but follows his shape loosely, and he still looks lovely. I blink to look away, and my eyes fall on some guy nearby that’s wearing a long black winter coat. This guy is safe and shapeless, the way we should all be in the winter. Vampires excluded, apparently.

  “Didn’t bother with a coat?” I hear myself saying.

  Whoa. I don’t know where the words come from. I’m so scared around him that I can’t possibly act normal, yet I ask the question like it’s okay to tease him. I assume it’s some ancient survival instinct that makes me talk to him, pretend to be friendly, so he doesn’t bite my head off.

  “I should have, shouldn’t I?” He says, turning his head a little towards me but not stopping. I think I see a little half smile, but I may have imagined it. He keeps walking to a black car with hazard lights on straight ahead of us. I feel a mixture of relief that he replied casually to my nonsense, and desire to jump in front of an approaching hotel shuttle van.

  I walk looking down at my feet, shielding my eyes from the wind. I wonder if there’s a driver inside the black car. I hope not. I don’t want to be alone with him in the backseat. Although, if there’s no driver in the car I’ll be really alone with him, all the way to his house. Wherever that is. It occurs to me that I don’t know where I’m going. And Thierry thinks a limo service is picking me up. But Corben could take me anywhere. Oh God oh God. I can’t think properly.

  By now we’re almost to the car and he stops and turns towards me. I almost run into him, but stop abruptly.

  “Tori. It’s okay.”

  My eyes widen. Holy shit, he can read my mind. He knows what I’m feeling; he can tell I’m a mess. Swallow me, ground. I’m looking up at him, and I can’t look away. I realize I’m trembling. I can’t look in his eyes, so I’m staring at his lips, and I really shouldn’t do that. My own lips part slightly.

  “Come on. It’s cold out here,” he says abruptly, not exactly unkindly, and turns to open the back door of the car for me. As he moves, I blink, and I’m finally free. And I’m so truly, awfully, totally embarrassed. I try to mumble thanks but nothing intelligible comes out, so I just get in the car. He closes the door behind me.

  He walks around to the back, pops open the trunk and stashes my bag inside. Then he gets inside and drives away in silence. I hate that he’s so polite all the goddamn time, even when he’s being mean. Too late I wish I’d kept my bag in the backseat with me. My purse is inside it, and I think I have tissues there that I’ll need because I may start crying.

  It only occurs to me that it hurts, so bad, when he doesn’t look at me or when he does things that show he doesn’t like me. I tell myself that it’s because I’m with Thierry—if you could call it being with Thierry, whatever it is that we do—and that I want his approval as Thierry’s only family. Maker, whatever.

  But I’m lying to myself. It hurts that he doesn’t like me because I want him to, I desperately want him to, and I don’t know why. Or rather, I don’t ever want to admit why. When he put me in the backseat as if he was my driver, not in the front seat like a friend, or an equal, or like a regular person, I wanted to get out and sit at the front, but of course I couldn’t move.

  Oh shit. He could be reading my mind right now. I force myself to think of something else—puppies, kittens, horses—but of course I’m still thinking about his actions and how much they hurt me.

  Now I feel a horribly familiar pressure in the bridge of my nose right before I feel it burning up, and my eyes well up with tears. Oh my God this is excruciating. I cower in the backseat so that he can’t see me in the rearview mirror.

  “Tori,” he says.

  I don’t answer—I can’t—and he doesn’t say anything else.

  “We’ll be there in ten minutes,” he says after a little while, probably giving me a heads up to keep it under control, because he totally knows I don’t have it under control.

  I notice something that sobers me up. I have the feeling that about ten or fifteen minutes have gone by, and he says we have ten more to go. Yet he showed up at the airport in less than fifteen minutes after I hung up with Thierry. Even if they had a superfast conversation that lasted only a few seconds, I still don’t know how he got to the airport so fast. He must have been speeding. Maybe it’s a vampire thing, and he likes to speed, but he’s not speeding now because he’s carrying a human.

  “Hey,” I start, in an attempt to pretend I’m normal and I didn’t freak out the entire time I’ve been with him. I sit up straight and catch his eyes in the rearview mirror. “How come….” But his eyes distract me and nothing comes out. I look down. Damn it, what the hell’s wrong with me! Why can’t I speak?

  “Yes?” Corben prompts me.

  I take a deep breath. Okay. Words. You put them together and sentences come out. I can do this. “How come… it only took you fifteen minutes to get to the airport, but it’ll take that much longer to get to your house?”

  “I didn’t come from my house,” he says simply.

  Oh. Of course. Why did I have to assume anything? He’ll think accusing him of speeding or something. Or that I’m nosy. And what’s up with his reply? I want to die. Right now.

  “I was nearby,” he adds out of the blue, a few seconds later when I don’t reply. “I don’t mind that you ask me questions.”

  Oh. Oh. He’s trying to make me feel better. Which means he knows how I feel. Which means… my suspicions are true. Oh no.

  “You can read my mind?” I ask him. I’m mortified exponentially, because when I think about him knowing how mortified I am, it’s just that much mortifying.

  “No,” he says, a little surprised at my question. “No, I can’t. And… even if I could read it, or somebody else could, you don’t have to be emba
rrassed, you know. Mind readers have already heard it all.”

  Oh, wow. That’s the most words he’s ever said to me, ever. I’m surprised, but still curious enough to ask him more.

  “But you can get glimpses of my mind or something?”

  “No, not even a glimpse.”

  “Then how could you tell I was embarrassed?” I ask him.

  “I….” He falters for a second. I must’ve caught him off guard. “I can hear your heartbeat, for one.”

  For one! Oh heavens, this is bad.

  “It speeds up when you’re agitated,” he explains.

  “And what’s another reason?” I ask, totally ignoring what he just said about hearing my agitated heart.

  “What makes you think there’s another reason?” I’m pretty sure, but I don’t know how I know, that he’s playing idiot and knows exactly what I mean.

  “You said ‘for one,’” I remind him.

  He pauses and looks at me over the rearview mirror. He’s debating to tell me, but he’s cautious.

  “I have a pretty good insight into what you feel. Not your thoughts,” he adds quickly. “I don’t know what you think. But emotions. Like if you’re happy, I can catch that. Or afraid….”

  Oh. He’s known the whole time I’ve been afraid of him! This crazy fear! I wish I could explain it. Or better yet, that I didn’t feel it. And how come Thierry never explained that to me? That he could sense my feelings, or whatever?

  I don’t really know how to reply to that, so I say, “That’s gotta be handy, I guess. You can see through poker faces; you can tell if people are lying, if they’re afraid.” I’m glossing over the fact that I know that he knows I’m afraid of him.

  He says, “Well, it doesn’t work like that. I can usually read people’s minds to tell if they’re lying. Reading feelings, that’s not with just anyone.”

  I remember Thierry saying that he wasn’t that good at reading minds. Corben makes it sound easy. “You say you can’t hear my thoughts… but you can read a lot of people’s. Is that right?” I ask, making sure I understand.

  “It is.”

  “But then you can read my feelings, whatever the difference is, yet you can’t with most people.” I just have to be the opposite of everyone else.

  “Uh… yes. For the most part,” he says.

  “For the most part which part?”

  “The part about reading your feelings. That part is true; I can do that.”

  I’m so confused. “And the other part? Not being able to read the feelings of most people…. You did just say that it wasn’t with just about anyone.”

  “I meant… it’s only with you.”

  “What?” Oh God.

  He’s uncomfortable, and a little irritated. “We’re here, Tori. I’ll tell you later, okay? If you still want to know.”

  No, he’s not irritated. He’s shy. Shy! That’s interesting.

  I have no idea where we are, but it looks like a residential neighborhood with regular houses mixed in with high rises. I was expecting a lonely, isolated castle with a huge basement where the murders take place. This house does look huge, but it’s surrounded by other houses and larger, taller buildings. The front patio is beautiful. It has to be professionally landscaped. Not that Corben couldn’t do it…. I just don’t see him tending it himself. The house sits on the corner of a lot, and there’s a park right across from the main entrance.

  This house is probably very expensive. Of course.

  Vampires.

  He drives the car to the back of the property through a paved driveway on the right edge of the house, which butts against the next neighbor house’s brick fence. The driveway passes under a freaking brick archway, above which there’s more house. We stop in front of a double garage. He presses a button and the garage door opens… revealing two more cars parked one in front of the other. How many cars does a person need? And this garage…. Really? I was under the impression that parking in the city was a big deal. And yet he has space to park four cars. Five, if you count the driveway.

  He picks up my bag from the trunk and I follow him inside the house. Once I arrive inside I rename it mansion instead of house in my head. This thing feels more like a castle than a house. So I shouldn’t disregard the murders in the basement idea. I mean, he’s a vampire. He eats people. And he has plenty getaway cars to drive and dispose of the bodies. Hell, I saw a lagoon in that park in front of the house. He could dig a hole at the bottom of the lagoon and bury the bodies there.

  We go up half a flight of stairs and then we’re in the main floor. The door we came through is off to the side of the main entry. As I take the scene before me, I have to scratch my head. A grand staircase dominates the entry hall; its railings and posts are polished dark wood. The foyer and everything I can see from where I stand, like Thierry’s house, is furnished with tasteful, antique-looking furniture, that harmonize with the staircase and gleaming hardwood floors. But this house is so big that the few pieces here or there look scarce. It doesn’t look bad, but it does look… lonely.

  “I’m afraid this place is not too homey,” Corben says, and it sounds a little apologetic. “I do have a real living room with a TV in the basement. Hardly anyone ever comes up here. But all the rooms on the second story are furnished and tended to, so you can pick any room you want—there are four bedrooms one flight up. They’re all livable.”

  “Maybe you can show me downstairs.”

  “Okay,” he says, and smiles briefly. His smile affects me way more than it should.

  But he’s moving, thank God, and I follow him.

  We take the main staircase one flight down, and then we’re in the basement… if you could call it that. This area alone is almost bigger than the house I grew up in. But at least it’s furnished more casually, giving the space a more relaxed feel.

  There are two bedrooms down here. Score. I open the door of the one right off the family room—oh, I see why he didn’t call it a family room, there’s no family here—and decide that I have everything I need down here. There’s a kitchen in the basement, although of course there’s got to be a bigger one upstairs. There’s a bathroom, a TV, and plenty of windows at the top of the half-buried walls, so there should be light in the morning. I walk to the bed, while Corben is still at the door, lie across it, and pass out.

  ***

  I have a vivid, troubled dream. While dreaming I don’t realize it’s a dream, but I feel like hours have gone by, and at some point I can’t take it anymore and I wake up. There are tears in my eyes, and my heart is beating fast. Within seconds Corben is outside my door, knocking.

  “Tori? Are you alright?”

  “I’m okay,” I say breathlessly.

  “Do you need anything?”

  “No.” What I need is a slap across the face to shake the dream away.

  “How about some water?”

  “I….” My throat feels dry. “Yes, please. I could use some.”

  “I’ll be right back,” he says through the closed door.

  I’m trembling. The dream was intense, but amazing. In the dream, I had been striving for years to be with my beloved, at least that’s what it felt like, and we were finally together. We were alone in a large house such as this, and it was our first night together. I felt the tension of my expectations, the sweetness of our victory, the passion of our embrace. But above all, the love that filled us both. The feelings were so powerful that I’m still experiencing them even now that I’m awake.

  But afterwards the dream changed; I was sick, and I was going to die. He was devastated, and that hurt me more than the fact that my life was ending. Dying I didn’t care for. It was his pain that woke me up. His suffering was unbearable to me.

  Corben returns and knocks on my door. It’s been only a few seconds since he left, and I haven’t really regained my voice, so I don’t answer him.

  He opens the door an inch or so. The door is unlocked, since I didn’t care to lock it last night. “Tori? I’m coming
in.”

  I sit up and wipe the tears from my eyes. He opens the door slowly, as if giving me a chance to tell him not to. I guess he takes my silence as affirmation because he comes in. In the low light that comes from the street outside, I see he’s holding a bottle of water and a glass, wearing drawstring pants and a white cotton shirt. His hair falls perfectly to his sides as though it weren’t three in the morning. Of course, he was probably very much awake. It’s not like he just woke up and threw a shirt over his head.

  I look down, away from him, because I’m emotionally conflicted.

  He approaches me and sets the water bottle and glass on the nightstand next to me. He turns on the bedside lamp, and I squint against the light. He pours water in the glass.

  “Here,” he says, and offers it to me.

  “Thank you,” I finally speak.

  I drink greedily, feeling the restorative effects of the water immediately.

  “How bad was your dream?” He asks me.

  “It was bad,” is all I say. The dream was terrible in so many levels. Even the beginning, which ignites my body again just thinking about it, was awful once I woke up. Because once I did I felt so guilty, thinking about the way it made me feel—as though I loved him.

  I loved Corben.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, I was going to die. I can still feel the physical pain; it was so real. The anxiety. The fear of the unknown.

  But worst of all was the anguish I felt for him—the pain of leaving him alone and suffering.

  I look up at Corben, hoping to clear my head—hoping to see him cold, distant as usual. But he’s looking at me like he’s really suffering. My heart aches for him, to take his hurt away. My arms yearn to comfort him. I could just stretch them and I’d reach him, where he stands there, so close to my bed.

  But I know I shouldn’t—I’m holding back because the desire battles with my reason—I know I love Thierry, although I can’t evoke that love right now. I can’t feel anything but this irrational longing for Corben, leftover from my stupid dream. A tear spills from my eye, a testament of my pain and frustration.