“Stay with me?” Mindy asked, unable to meet Lucia’s eyes while she felt like a little girl, asking to sleep in her mother’s bed after a scary dream.
“Yeah,” Lucia said, flicking open her bottle. “Of course.”
They lay beside each other like a TV Land married couple, Lucia even holding Mindy’s beer for her, tipping it to Mindy’s mouth with some preternatural awareness of when she wanted a sip. Which, it being beer, was rarely.
I wonder if Lucia can read my mind, Mindy thought.
I can totally read your mind, popped into her head.
It was a good thing Mindy hadn’t taken another sip yet. “You can read my mind?”
“Only just now,” Lucia replied. I think you have to be trying for it to work. Like holding down the button on a walkie-talkie.
Holding down the button, Mindy thought. That’s actually a good metaphor.
“Don’t think so surprised.”
“So is there like an echo when I think into your head…?”
Bitch, Lucia thought. Her eyes glowed with a playful dare. “Dude, let’s get you drunk. I wanna know what it’s like in the mind of a lightweight.”
I am not a lightweight.
One beer later, Mindy was asleep.
* * *
But not for long. Dreams of coming around that corner and there was something coming through the front door or inside the retirement home’s refrigerator. A shadow the color of blood. A darkness as deep as the depths of Lake Travis.
She woke up and there was Lucia, sitting cross-legged on her windowsill. She offered Mindy a reassuring smile. Mindy began, for no particular reason, to cry.
There wasn’t much to it. Lucia walked to the bed and sat beside her pillow and pulled Mindy’s head onto her lap, petting her hair with long, languid strokes of her hand. She didn’t say anything. Not that it would be alright or that it was okay or even something mindlessly calming like “shush.” She let Mindy cry into her jeans until something tense and coiled and so thick that it had filled up Mindy’s body was finally unwound, leaking out of her, leaving her empty. But with a kind of numbness, a strained and ragged calm. Still Lucia petted her hair.
She went back to sleep and dreamed of nothing at all.
When she woke next it was morning, an ungodly early aspect of morning that she tried hard to avoid whenever possible. The light was a pinched red glow, and Mindy saw that Lucia’s body makeup had run in places, leaving glimmers like veins of mineral within a rock. Lucia sat at the foot of her bed, leaning against the bedpost, legs parallel to Mindy’s.
Mindy’s nose was stuffy and her throat felt dry. She got up, went to the bathroom to blow her nose and splash her face with water and to pee, and when she came out Lucia had a glass of Sprite for her. Two ice cubes floating at the top.
“Thank you,” Mindy said, meaning it so hard she didn’t think it was possible for Lucia to catch all of it.
“You would’ve done the same for me,” Lucia said. “If I’d let you.”
Mindy hugged her impulsively, only wondering in the middle if Lucia would mind being touched, would feel awkward having her body against Mindy’s. And by then, it was all alright. Mindy pulled away and drank her Sprite.
“I wanna go back to bed,” Mindy said. “I’m still tired.”
Lucia nodded. “That’s normal. As normal as any of this is.”
“I want you to—” Mindy stopped, chastised herself for beginning to ask, chastised herself for stopping, chastised herself for not going through with it. “I want you to hold me. When I woke up, the scariest moment was thinking you were gone and—I just don’t want to think you’re gone. Not for a second.”
“Alright,” Lucia said.
* * *
Mindy woke up cold. Cold like the AC was on the fritz, cold like she was spending Christmas up north with her grandparents on the Great Lakes, where people actually froze to death. She opened her eyes and was surprised to find her breath not fogging the air in front of her. Her mind worked slowly, jumping from being cold to Lucia having left, then she looked and saw Lucia was still there. She was what was cold. It was like Mindy had been cuddled up to an ice cube.
Mindy untangled herself from Lucia, fleeing for the warmth of the comforter and trying not to wake her, but Lucia’s eyes snapped open. They focused on Mindy like she’d only been blinking. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Mindy said, but her teeth were chattering. “It’s cold. It’s you. The warmth from the blood—” Had worn off. Lucia pulled away from Mindy, seeing the goosebumps where they’d touched.
“Five seconds.” Lucia said it, then she sped off so fast the bedsheets held her shape for a moment. A ghost.
She came back in forty-five, moving so slow Mindy could actually see her legs moving instead of being one steady blur. She knelt down beside the bed, pressing a cup of hot chocolate into Mindy’s hands. The warmth of the mug instantly helped. Lucia was everywhere, pulling the covers up and wrapping them around Mindy, rubbing her hands together and stroking heat into Mindy’s body—Mindy stopped her before she could burn anything for warmth.
“It’s fine, El. I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. It’s blood. It has to cool off sometime.” Lucia had that new look in her eyes, that sadness she’d had ever since being attacked. Mindy felt ridiculously selfish, demanding to be pampered when Lucia was still so…alone “You can have some more if you want?”
“No. I should go.”
“Please don’t?” Mindy sipped her hot chocolate, finding little marshmallows in it. “We can do something together. Anything together. Just keep my mind occupied—whatever you want to do.”
Lucia grinned, and Mindy suddenly got all sorts of ideas about all the sorts of ideas Lucia might be having. It wasn’t any of them.
“Call Seb,” Lucia suggested. “I got him a present, and I want to see if he liked it.”
They started up Skype as Lucia wandered Mindy’s room, shamelessly going through her stuff. She opened a junk drawer and found a pocket Bible—a little leather-bound copy of the New Testament with a cross embossed on the front. Mindy had kept it because it reminded her of the Grail Diary in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. It tended to migrate out into the open whenever Mindy’s grandparents were visiting.
Lucia eyed it with a challenged look, then held her hand above it as the Skype feed resolved from a series of Tetris blocks into a collection of smaller, finer blocks. When Lucia tried to bring her hand down, it was like she had a magnet in her palm and the Bible was of the same polarity. The stream finally fixed itself, becoming Seb sitting at his desk, left hand propping up his chin. “Hello ladies! You want to see package?”
“Don’t,” Mindy said firmly to Lucia, who pouted and went back to pressing down on her right hand with her left. The Bible stubbornly resisted her, exerting a kind of force field that pushed her hand back. She tried wiggling her fingers.
“Go ahead,” Mindy said. Seb reached down to his feet, coming up with a paperback still in gift wrapping. No postage on it. Mindy guessed Lucia had delivered it the old-fashioned way. Through the torn wrapping, two things could be discerned. One was a sticker for Half-Price Books. The other was the title. Eating Delicious, Feeling Delicious: Bubba Sawyer’s BBQ Guide To A Whole New You.
“I worry about this,” Seb said, agreeably enough.
“Yeah,” Lucia put in. “Have you tried legumes? Legumes have a lot of protein. You should eat lots.”
“I am thinking you are also saying I should stay away from garlic?”
“Hey, it’s a peace offering. Not everything I do has an ulterior motive. And that apnea shit is nothing to fuck with.”
“No, I am not to be fucking with it. But I thinking I am still eating garlic, yes.”
“Okay, now you’re just…being hate speech. Great, ya got me doing it. If you offer me blood, I just don’t want to be rude and have to refuse it.”
“I am not offering you blood.”
/> “So, hate speech. You’re lucky Mindy isn’t reading you the Riot Act right now.”
“Is this rap song?”
There was a sudden commotion outside Seb’s room, picked up by Mindy’s tinny speakers. The door to his bedroom opened up and an elderly lady came in, her housecoat pulled tight around herself by blue-veined hands. Mrs. Ferguson of Seb’s host family. “Sebastian! What are you doing on there?” He turned the gain on his microphone down all the way before they could hear more.
“What are they saying?” Mindy wondered after a few moments.
Lucia said, in a fair approximation of Seb’s accent, “‘It’s not porn.’ She asked if it was porn,” Lucia explained. Then in an old-lady voice she said, “‘Then why is she dressed that way?’” Mrs. Ferguson was pointing at the screen. “I think she means you,” Lucia stage-whispered to Mindy.
Seb’s lips moved, and Lucia spoke for him, her words lagging an instant behind his mouth like they were in an old Godzilla movie. “‘This is just how American teenagers dress, it is your country, you should know. Can you please go? It is being a private conversation!’”
“‘Are they pedophiles? A lot of people online are pedophiles! Grown men pretending to be women! You have to be careful, Seb!’” Lucia channelled Mrs Ferguson again.
“‘I am being careful, Mrs. F, please be going, we’re about to do homework!’”
“‘The pancakes’re almost done!’” Lucia lip synced Mrs. F headed toward the door, casting a wary look over her shoulder at Lucia and Mindy.
Seb turned the gain back up. “I’ll be down in a minute, thanking you, Mrs. F.”
“Be careful,” Mrs. F instructed gravely as she closed the door behind her.
Lucia shrugged. “At least she closed the door.”
Seb faced them. “Have to go. Blueberry pancakes. Most important meal of the day.”
“Yeah, be careful,” Mindy told him. “We think we had a vampire last night, trying to get in or get me outside—something. Stay on your toes.”
Seb tapped his temple. “And to you. And come be seeing me around lunch, I’d like to talk about nurses.”
“Sure thing,” Lucia said. “And you excuse us, we have to go jerk off.”
Mindy Xed out of the window. “He’s never going to learn idioms if you keep fucking with him, y’know,” Mindy said..
“He was giving me attitude.”
Mindy shot up from her chair, relieved in a way to have the old frustration back. The push-pull with Lucia that so often ended up being worth it. “Oh my Christ, are you still mad at him for crushing on me?”
“No!”
“Because only one of you has saved me from a vampire.”
Lucia plopped herself down in Mindy’s office chair. “But what if he saves you from two vampires, huh?”
“I’ll still like you more.”
Lucia winced. “Yeah, but I’m not so easy to like. Lots of complications, lots of baggage. Him, he’s easy. You don’t realize, but if you did—I wouldn’t date me if I were you. I would date someone simple.”
“Well, I like a challenge.”
Kicking against the carpet, Lucia spun herself in place. “There’s challenging and then there’s impossible.”
“So don’t be impossible.” Mindy bit her lip. Wondering how far she should go. Remembering Lucia watching over her all night. “We can talk about it, you know.”
“You can talk with Seb too. After a fashion.”
“About the…” The kissing? “The sex.”
Lucia’s foot skipped on the ground. Turning her around. Facing her away. “It’s funny. I can talk all the shit in the world. I don’t care if people think I’m racist or homophobic or that I hate men. But when it comes to the things that really matter to me, I can’t say shit.”
“I don’t want you to say something you don’t mean or that you’re not comfortable saying… I just want you to be comfortable saying what you feel. You do feel something, right?”
“Of course I feel something. I didn’t just start kissing girls because they’re not boys—or not a vampire.” Lucia’s head drifted back, and Mindy could see something of her face, staring up at the ceiling. “I don’t want to say anything that would ruin this.”
“Ruin what? What do we have?”
“You.” Lucia turned just enough to look over her shoulder at Mindy. “Being my friend.”
Sitting down on the bed, Mindy stared at Lucia as the girl whirled around like a top, using her strength to spin herself so loud the chair whined. “So how far can you hear?” Mindy asked, curious. And something else.
“Never really measured it,” Lucia said like she was speaking through a fan. She stopped herself, forehead knitted, concentrating. “Guy in the house at the end of the street is watching porn.”
“You’re guessing.”
“It has a Lord of the Rings theme.”
“Okay, you can stop there.”
“Love to.” Lucia cracked her neck like she was turning off a radio.
“So you can hear someone in the other room no problem?”
“No problem whatsoever.”
“Like, if you were in my bedroom and I were in the shower…”
“I heard you moan,” Lucia interrupted. “And I wasn’t listening, I just heard.”
Oh. Oh God. Mindy felt like beating her head against the wall. Nice, Murphy. Real nice. Here they were building a relationship and Lucia had heard her jackin’ in the shower. Goddamn. Son of a bitch!
“I’m sorry—I was very tense and I needed a release. Really, I do that pretty much whenever I shower. I have a problem, I know. I wasn’t even thinking about you!”
“You weren’t?” Lucia asked, and the look she gave Mindy made her feel six inches tall.
Christ, now she was lying. “Okay, I did, I’m sorry! I really didn’t mean to sexualize you or anything, it just happened—”
“First time?” Lucia stood. Her manner was insistent.
Mindy didn’t even think about lying to her. “That first night, after the…after the lake? I had a dream you were standing over me. Where you were going to bite me, but you didn’t. When I woke up…”
“So when I don’t bite you, you touch yourself, and when I do bite you, you touch yourself.”
“I’m sorry, I am so sorry. I promise, from now on, I will only masturbate to pornography. I’ll buy some if I have to. Lucia—God, I can’t imagine how this makes you feel.”
“It makes me feel like fucking your goddamn brains out.”
All of a sudden, Mindy couldn’t breathe. It was like Lucia was in her head—making her think things. All the sex scenes she’d ever watched, all the fantasies that had ever heated her… They were flashing through her eyes like a life before dying, but she was seeing them with Lucia and…her. Plain old Mindy Murphy.
Lucia walked by. Her body sleek and strong. Nearly brushing against Mindy as she passed, but not. The brisk little hairs of her skin touching the brisk little hairs of Mindy’s. She ran a fingernail over the print-outs. It was short. Since when had her fingernails gotten so short?
“I phrased that bad.” Lucia’s voice was casual, slinky, grinning. It made it easy for Mindy’s mind to register them. They slipped right by her defenses. “Lately everything makes me feel like fucking your brains out. Or I just feel like fucking your brains out all the time.” She turned. Her eyes on Mindy. Burning black. “But I’m not really experienced at this lesbian stuff, and so, faced with a choice of binge-watching The L Word and learning that shit like a second language or just seducing you and figuring it out as I go, I’m gonna go with seducing you. I’m good at that.”
And she was kissing Mindy. Mindy was kissing Lucia back until the woman was away from her, leaving Mindy’s lips stinging. Half-charged.
“Here’s how it’s gonna play out,” Lucia said, her words ringing out boldly. “I’m gonna come on to you, while you do whatever’s next on the agenda, and when you’re so crazy turned on that you can’t stand it, we’
re gonna fuck. That sound okay?”
Mindy spoke so numbly, she almost wondered if she’d had a stroke. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Unless you want me to stop.” For a moment, Lucia’s voice was almost concerned, her eyes beseeching. “Do you want me to stop seducing you? I started already.”
“No. Don’t stop.”
Lucia seized her. Pulled her off her feet and into a bridegroom’s hold. It seemed an effort for Lucia to keep herself at normal speed as she effortlessly paraded Mindy up the stairs and into her room. As soon as Lucia dropped Mindy on the bed, she blurred and was on top of her before the bedsprings had finished bouncing.
They were kissing again. Lucia’s lips were cold, but they were burning her. Mindy was moaning, sighing, her hands ahead of her, prying at her own clothes to make way for Lucia’s body. She barely stopped herself before Lucia had all of her.
“Wait, wait, wait—”
Lucia was quick to pull away. She actually wrapped herself around a bedpost. “What is it? Did I do something wrong?” She sounded so worried, so instantly contrite, that Mindy just had to put her at ease. She caught Lucia with a hand on her cheek and Lucia unclenched.
“No, that was great. Perfect. I just need to check something before we—” Mindy laughed. “You really wanna…do that with me? The sex?”
“Yeah.” Lucia grinned and her teeth were all teeth. No fangs. “I want to do all the sex with you.”
“Because I might not be very good.”
“I’ll be good enough for both of us.”
Seeing the look in Lucia’s eyes—the relief, the love—Mindy felt her lips yearning to be met again. God, it was like trying to eat just one piece of chocolate. She quickly turned onto her stomach, not finding the desire any easier to bear just because Lucia was out of sight, and jerked open the drawers of her nightstand, traipsing through the scraps of a hundred half-finished projects for what she was looking for.
Lucia reached down to Mindy’s jeans, peeling their waistline away from Mindy’s lower back and hovering down to lick the crest of her spine. Mindy was shocked at how pornographic her moan sounded—going with the feel of Lucia’s cool saliva warming with her own body heat like a massaging lotion.
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 26