The lecture Jonathan gave me that first month has proven true. We’re not regular people. I had to give up the idea of normalcy when I first lost my mind, but still, there’s always that fantasy lurking around in the background of our thoughts: women are supposed to crave this Cinderella thing where the story stops at the wedding and everyone just assumes it’s happily ever after. I only have to look at my own parents to know better. They were in love once, too, and what happened? He had her committed.
That might have been good fodder for the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but it doesn’t exactly fit the Disney model.
The worst thing is when something comes out of left field that takes me back to that night and it’s like it’s happening all over again. It happens at the most random moments, too; that’s the infuriating thing. He’ll mention something from his past, or I’ll ask a question about it, and he gets that look on his face that tells me I really don’t want to know, because it has to do with…him.
That’s another thing. If I were a normal wife I could hate the person who came between us, but there’s this strange connection among all of us and I can’t seem to shake this certainty that one day our fates will be so bound up together that any question of jealousy or blame will dissolve into something much bigger…and much more terrifying. Saving my life in Ovaska’s trap wasn’t just an act born out of remorse. None of us has any idea what it all means. I have no idea what’s coming but I know it’s just beginning.
I wouldn’t even be thinking about all of this tonight except for what happened earlier. We were in the suite like always at the end of the night’s work and had settled in with our laptops—I was checking my email; he was debugging something. I went over to his desk to get the power adapter for my computer, and my eyes fell on that silver pen in its groove, exactly where it’s been since the first night I entered this room. He uses it all the time, but it always goes back exactly where it was.
I picked it up, grinning. “If I move this two inches to the right will you freak out?”
There’s this face he makes that reminds me of Stitch from the Disney movie. It basically means “bite me,” but in a much cuter way. “If I went into the music room and stacked everything neatly, would you freak out?”
I stuck my tongue out at him then looked at the pen again, about to put it down when something occurred to me. “I don’t know your middle name,” I said. “How do I not know that?”
He shrugged, but something crossed his face that set off a quiet warning in my mind. “I don’t really use it for anything.”
“I didn’t think people back in your day had middle names.”
“We didn’t—they weren’t quite in fashion yet except among the nobility.”
“So you gave it to yourself,” I concluded, and read the engraving. “David L. Solomon, PhD. And L is for…”
He took a deep breath. I had absolutely no idea why this conversation was making him nervous. “Lennon.”
My eyebrow lifted. “I didn’t think you were into the Beatles.”
“I’m not.”
“Then what…” And suddenly, just like that, the knowledge dropped into my stomach like a stone. “Deven gave it to you, didn’t he.”
He lowered his eyes. “In a manner of speaking. It’s derived from Ó Lionáin, the Irish Gaelic for ‘dear one.’ Or ‘blackbird,’ depending on how you read it. After I left California I adopted the middle name as a way of holding on to what I’d lost. He has no idea. It’s a memorial, not wishful thinking—I swear.”
My chest felt constricted, and I was having trouble taking a full breath, but I closed my eyes for a second and ran through my grounding exercises. A moment later the pressure released and I felt okay again. That’s how it always happens. I wish I could anticipate it better, or better yet figure out a way to make it stop happening altogether.
I suppose it just takes time. You can’t rush the grieving process, and really, that’s what this is—I’ve lost the absolute unshakable faith that he’ll never hurt me, and while that’s a terrible loss, when I think about it rationally I know that it was an illusion to begin with. Anyone can hurt you, whether they mean to or not. I had the same idea most people have about soul mates, and I was going to have that idea demolished at some point…I just wish it had been a few decades from now and something a little gentler, like arguing over the thermostat or something.
When I opened my eyes he was staring at me, and this expression was like a puppy waiting to be kicked—I hate it when he looks like that. “I can change it,” he said quietly.
Whatever anger I was still feeling evaporated at the absurdity of that idea. “Of course not,” I told him. “I would never ask you to change who you are.”
“But if you did ask, I would.”
“I know.” I don’t like that either. As much as I don’t want to have all of this to deal with, I also don’t want to make the most powerful vampire in the South feel so weak. It reminds me of the way I used to feel when I’d hide in my bedroom listening to my parents fight. Granted, I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I still felt deeply ashamed, because even at eight years old I thought I should have been able to make it better.
After a moment, I said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
To say he looked panicked is probably the understatement of the century, but I waved my hand impatiently and added, “That’s not what I mean. Look, I know you still feel guilty, and I’m not saying I’d rather you were proud of what happened, but I’m really trying to get past all of this and it’s hard to do that when every mention of the subject turns you into such a mess. I know you don’t want to upset me. But I’m going to get upset. I’m entitled to that, aren’t I?”
“Of course you are!”
“The only way I’m going to get over it is to keep facing the badness until it stops feeling bad. It sucks, but you know what happens when I try to repress emotions.”
“Big green rage monster terrorizing the city,” he said with a sigh.
“Exactly. So you have to get over yourself so we can have conversations without walking on eggshells. Here, let’s do it right—” I put the pen back in its spot, crossed my legs in the desk chair, clasped my hands, and said, “My name is Miranda, and six months ago my husband fucked his ex boyfriend only three months after we got married. I’m dealing with it, but sometimes I get really pissed off at both of them and would kind of like to take a baseball bat to my husband’s Mac and replace the boyfriend’s eyeliner with a very fashionable blend of dog shit and sulfuric acid. Okay, now you go.”
At the last part, he couldn’t keep himself from laughing. “Well…okay.” He sat up straighter and said, “My name is David, and I lost my goddamned mind and fucked my ex boyfriend three months after I married my Queen. I feel a lot like a blend of dog shit and acid most of the time. I have no idea how to stop feeling like this, and the worst part is now my guilt is pissing her off as much as my actions did. I am therefore willing to go along with whatever idea she has to work our way through this, although I would prefer that idea not include my Mac and a baseball bat.”
“Very good. Feel better?”
He frowned, and I could see him making calculations in his head. “Maybe five percent.”
“It’s a start.” I got up from the chair and went to join him on the sofa; he closed his laptop and set it on the coffee table. I scooted back into the corner and took his hand, pulling him over into a position we often wound up in in this very spot: his head on my chest, my legs on either side of him with the outside one acting as an armrest. He says he likes it because he can drift off to the sound of my heartbeat.
“I love you,” he said with a sigh. “I wish I could…I don’t know.”
“You almost never say you don’t know something. I must be special.”
He lifted his head, giving me a milder version of the Stitch look. “You, my Lady, have completely undone years of relentless effort to regain my emotional control.” He half-smiled. “In fact I think you undid m
e standing in line at the grocery store.”
“I have yet to see you actually eat a Snickers.” I ran my hand through his hair. Both of us were silent for a moment before I said, “I try to imagine you back in the 1940s, all twitterpated over a boy, and the most I can figure out is that it had to have been loaded with drama and angst.”
“It was.” I knew he didn’t really want to talk about it, but to his credit, he seemed to take what I’d said to heart. “I was, as you say, twitterpated almost the minute we met, but nothing happened until Anna died. That was the catalyst for the drama and angst. And everything else.”
“You and Anna were basically friends with benefits, right?”
“I think if she had survived she would have been the kind of confidante Faith is now. Only with shagging.”
“So, tell me something…which do you think is better in bed, women or men?”
We’d gone from “Stitch” to “guilt ridden” to “kick the dog,” and now we had apparently arrived at “deer in headlights.” “Oh, God, are you really going to make me answer that?”
I couldn’t help it; I started giggling hysterically at the look on his face. “It’s not a land mine, I promise—I really am curious.”
He seemed suddenly exhausted by the whole conversation. “I can’t really answer that definitively,” he finally said. “This is total honesty even if it sounds cliché…I just don’t really care about the packaging, only about the person. For most of my life I’ve jumped onto anyone who struck my fancy without giving it much thought—though I suppose if we were going strictly by numbers, it would be women by a landslide.”
“Huh.” I nodded, digesting that. It was a completely truthful answer, and I could accept it. “So your experience is that sexuality is kind of…fluid.”
“Clearly-defined categories like ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ may apply to a large percentage of the population, but I also believe there a lot of people who would at least dabble a bit on both sides if it weren’t for the social stigma.”
“So how did you get around social stigma?”
He made a disgusted noise. “I ignored it. I’m not human—why should I live by the rules of the species I eat? But I was lucky, really…I didn’t even entertain the notion of sleeping with men until after I was a vampire, and I’ve always been strong enough not to fear for my safety. I didn’t have that much to lose. When you’re at the top of the food chain the view is very different. No one has ever had power over me…at least…not that kind.”
I nodded, considering all of that. “Not to mention, I suppose, that living for centuries means you eventually get bored doing the same old thing.”
He finally smiled, some of the weight of the last few minutes lifting. “You might find you’re not as straight as you think you are in a few decades.”
I laughed. “We’ll see about that. I don’t think I’d know what to do with a woman if you put one on a platter holding a sign that said ‘eat me.’”
“I said something very similar once,” he murmured, turning his face into my breast, his sleepy waves catching me around the edges and making me yawn. I rubbed his temple with my fingertips, then ran my hand through his hair again, like petting a particularly soft cat. “Then there was this stable boy, and well…it was all over.”
“Stable boy? Is that when you started liking horses so much?”
“Mmm. And redheads.”
“You and your redheads.”
“They’re like crack,” he admitted. “It’s a good thing the average number of redheads per capita is so low or I’d never have gotten anything else done.” He made a sound something like a chuckle. “You know, this would have been a good conversation to have before we got married.”
I reached up and flicked his ear. “Remind me to bring it up with my next husband.”
It was still an hour before dawn began to lighten the horizon, but I couldn’t imagine anything going wrong in that last hour; I relaxed, letting his weariness pull me, enjoying the warm weight of his body and the almost purr-like sound of his breathing.
I thought he was already out, but after a moment he asked, “Will you sing to me?”
I shifted so that I could rest my cheek against the top of his head. “Of course I will, baby.” I almost hated to ask, but the words came out before I could stop them: “Has anyone else ever sung you to sleep?”
Surprisingly, the question didn’t bother him. “No. Only you.”
I smiled. “Good…close your eyes.”
He obeyed, and I cast about in my mind for the right song. My voice was soft like a secret between us, the familiar words forming a half-whispered bridge from night to morning, the lyrics my way of reassuring him that yes, we were going to be fine, and we had plenty of time to figure things out.
“Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise…”
A Bit Touched
The general consensus in the entertainment world is that Miranda Grey is batcrap crazy.
Nobody says it out loud, but nobody really has to—spend one night around her and you don’t have to be told. There’s something about that woman that just isn’t normal.
You have to understand how significant it is for another musician to say that about somebody. We’re all at least a little crazy—you don’t become a performer because you’re an average person content with her lot in life. You don’t subject yourself to that kind of public scrutiny unless you’re either an egomaniac or a Zen master.
To this day I’m not sure which one she is.
When her people first approached mine about a collaboration, I jumped on the idea. Yeah, she’s insanely talented, and that voice of hers would give a choir of angels a massive hard-on. Yeah, she’s gorgeous—the thought of getting to stare at her for a few hours was a big part of the appeal, I admit. But more than anything else, I had to know. I had been hearing talk about this woman for over a year since she sort of exploded onto the national scene, and people I trust were telling me she’s some kind of freak.
That whole vampire rumor thing? That Rolling Stone interview might have put most people’s minds at ease, but people who’ve worked with her personally, who’ve made it past the security personnel who seem to be everywhere at once, aren’t as convinced as the rest of America.
I don’t think she’s a vampire—that’s just stupid. But now that I’ve met her can’t really say for sure what she is.
We did the vocals for the track in completely separate time zones. Long live the digital age. Our schedules wouldn’t match up, so we each went into our respective studios and took care of business. But given the success of her first two singles, which blew the roof off the Billboard charts, and my most recent which, while not quite as big a hit, still made quite a name for itself (complete with YouTube parodies), both of our managers were in agreement: there had to be a video.
That caused a stir I wasn’t expecting. I was cool with the idea—I’ve done plenty of them, after all. But that whole porphyria thing apparently makes her really weird about cameras—only certain kinds, at certain angles, and certain resolutions would be acceptable. My manager, April, gave me this helpless look like, “What the fuck am I supposed to say to these nutjobs?” and I shrugged.
“Give her whatever she wants,” I said. “If we go with the concept Andre had it won’t be that big a deal.”
The day of the shoot I had to be in Austin; with all her demands it was easier just to do it there. We wouldn’t be in much of the video together, if any, but Andre decided that if Miranda needed a particular camera setup, he’d rather just use it for the whole thing than just her scenes, to keep the filming consistent. Austin’s got a thriving film scene in addition to the music scene, so there were plenty of places and plenty of crew available.
I hate Texas. I’m used to the West Coast w
here it’s not the surface of Mercury for half the year. Texas is loaded with scary shit like brown recluses, cottonmouths, Republicans, and hurricanes. I’ll take an earthquake over Rick Perry any day. But Austin…well, it’s like this little oasis sprang up in the desert and all the fun people in the state made a beeline for it. It’s a sweet little city; it reminds me of Portland, but more like a cross between Portland and Purgatory, weather-wise.
My part of the video was pretty straightforward: I pretended to sing in front of my band, and they pretended to play. Standard stuff. There was going to be a narrative throughout the video, something about a woman leaving a bad relationship; the lyrics had a lot of references to infidelity so I assumed that would be involved.
By the time they were done with me I was exhausted and more than a little pissed off—no fault of theirs, the truth is I was fiending for a cigarette. Everyone but my manager thinks I quit; the story in the tabloids is that my mom’s struggle with lung cancer convinced me that cigarettes are the devil.
Well, they are the devil. But once you’ve sold your soul to them it’s kind of hard to get out of the deal. So I cut back, stopped smoking in public, and relied on April to stand guard and deflect inquiries when I slipped out back for a few minutes.
I left the set and headed for the studio’s alley doors, which required me to pass by the second half of the set just in time to see them wrapping up Miranda’s part of the proceedings.
The song had a lot of water imagery—courtesy of Miranda’s weird-ass metaphor-heavy lyrics—so they had her at a grand piano that stood on what looked like a street corner, and the entire time she played, a simulated downpour soaked her from her wild red hair to her shiny black boots. According to Andre the final effect would be just a tiny bit blurry, with diffuse light from the “street lamp” catching the rain and giving the whole scene a watercolored feel. My parts would be the foil for hers—sharper angles, a crisper picture, something having to do with the conflicting emotions in the song, love and betrayal.
Met by Midnight: Shadow World Stories and Scenes, Vol. 1 (The Shadow World) Page 13