by Steven Luna
The ice having been well-broken by then, I wanted to answer honestly. “It does, a little. The fact that you didn’t shout it through the restaurant just now tells me you get how it is, though. Thanks for that.”
She tilted her head… her honey-golden head… and her sea green eyes went all serious. “Can I ask you something a little deeper?” Uh oh. “How does it feel? To be how you are?” To be how I am?
How exactly am I?
Her question didn’t offend me. I just wasn’t sure what all she wanted to know. “You mean, how it is for me to be a lonely thirty-two year-old vampire trying to get on with his life? Or a half-drunk dude on a date with the most interesting girl he’s met in a long time, hoping he doesn’t make an ass of himself and blow the whole thing before dessert?” I made her laugh – a genuine, wine-scented laugh. I was used to making women yell, or cry, or douse my belongings in alcohol and threaten to set them on fire. Making one laugh was quite a step up from the norm.
“That was pretty vague, wasn’t it? What I meant was what does the vampire part feel like? Does it feel painful, or powerful? Or is it just kind of numb?”
Wow. Those were deep questions. And detailed answers were more than I was willing to give away on a first date. Megan seemed pretty sensitive to the whole vampire deal, and she was much, much hotter than either she or Louise had made her out to be. But I have standards.
Not many, but I have them.
And as I still haven’t nailed down for myself what this whole vampire situation really feels like, I gave as little an answer as I could without totally putting her off. “All of that. It feels like all of that.” She smiled. And she didn’t push it any further.
And when we walked to the parking lot, neither of us really wanted things to end. We sort of hemmed and hawed and made talk so small it almost didn’t exist. We were way beyond word clouds by then. I told her it would be fun to do this again sometime, and as I opened her car door she put the moves on me.
I know. I could hardly believe it myself.
“Listen, there’s a party that’s probably picking up just about now, not too far from here… a friend of mine is having a housewarming thing. Do you want to go?”
“Umm… yeah. I do.” More than I’ve wanted anything in a long time.
So we ran into a grocery store nearby and grabbed another bottle of wine as a housewarming gift (apparently that’s something you’re supposed to do) and I followed her to the place. It was in full swing, and the house was duly warmed by the time we arrived. She introduced me to her friend, and to their friends, and no one said a word – or uttered a thought – about vampires. A nice change of pace, to be among people and feel like a part of the group. The host had her hands full, so we wandered about on a self-guided tour of the digs. We peeked into the bathrooms. We nosed around in the library-slash-office. We glanced in the master bedroom.
And we locked the door in the guest room and started snogging the hell out of each other.
The wine packed way less punch than the sake had, but it still made my head spin a little – a good spin, when paired with the sexual charge of my hand climbing from Megan’s ass to the warm skin beneath her sweater. She shivered when my flesh touched hers, and I remembered how cold I must feel. So I halted. “Keep going,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”
It was like she knew she was deflowering the vampire part of me.
The smell of her neck was as dizzying as the wine. Actually, I think I could smell the wine in her blood coming through every time her pulse jumped. We fell on the bed, and things intensified. Things heated up.
Things hardened.
Not just things in the lower regions of my anatomy. Things up high, too.
Right around the fang area.
Now I not only had the challenge of having her not be creeped out that my hard-on was rubbing against her leg whether she – or I – wanted it to. I also had to figure out how to keep from slicing open her lip or skewering her tongue with my savage teeth. I pulled back a little, just to make sure I was being careful with it all. “Don’t stop. I want you.” She locked her legs around mine.
“I want you, too,” I told her, in the lamest, most porntastic voice I could. “Just thinking about protection.”
All kinds of protection.
“I don’t need protection. Just suck me, Joe.”
Wow.
Green light: go.
Wait. Was there an s at the beginning of that second word, or an f? It had come out in sort of a breathy whisper, so I couldn’t tell right away. “Sorry… what was that?”
“Suck me… ” She threw her head back and gave me a wide berth to her slender neck.
Seriously?
“It’s okay; you won’t hurt me. I’ve done this before.” At least she was reassuring. I looked down, and sure enough there were six pinkish dots, scars from her other vampire lovers, I guess. As if there weren’t enough thoughts about the sex swirling around in my mind, her thoughts came bursting out of her head and spilling into mine. Suck me, vampire boy… suck me… suck me.
Shit.
I was more than halfway to sexing someone I really liked, and who I thought really liked me, and then this. The vampire parts sort of seized control for a second, and I pushed my mouth against her neck, tempted to take her up on her request. My tongue flicked out and licked her skin, tasting the wine in her blood rising to the surface like liquid sugar. I was presented with the dual opportunity of getting laid and satiating my thirst for blood all in one super-hot intertwining, and I was seriously thinking about going for it. My crotch was ready to explode, and now my teeth were, too. I had one hand pulling down my zipper and the other caressing her tender throat, and was ready to dive in at both ends when the most intrusive thought that could ever have occurred showed up.
Louise.
My hard-on was a little less hard after that.
Her voice sounded in my head like a playlist of a single Louise-ism stuck on replay: They’re called sucker fuckers… they don’t have our best interests at heart. They’re like vampire groupies.
Yeah. Megan was one of those.
Everything sort of froze right where it was. I had to know for sure. “Are you… are we just doing this so you can have the whole vampire sex experience?”
Megan sat up. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” She was genuinely confused about it.
“No – I mean… no.” I wasn’t sure for a minute. It had undoubtedly been a long, dry season for me, and here was a hot woman who really seemed to want me, and whom my penis was certain I wanted in return. But I don’t think we wanted something equal from each other. “That’s not what I want, not to bite you. I wanted to… ” I would have finished the thought, but I was pretty sure the moment was over for us both. “You’re a sweet girl, Megan, but this isn’t going to work out. Sorry.” I zipped up and tucked in as I made for the front door, trying to conceal an erection and a wicked set of pumped-up eyeteeth.
I didn’t have enough hands.
I thought sexual insecurity had left me back in adolescence when I hooked up with Dionne. Then it made a smashing return appearance with the crazy ass whack-fest that was Aretha. And it sure cranked up to a new level of What the Hell? with Girl No. 3, even though that never resulted in so much as a hand shake. But this? This made those look like Sex by Numbers. I drove around for a few hours, just clearing my head and hoping my vampire fang equivalent of blue balls would eventually die down.
It didn’t.
My phone buzzed while I drove. It was a text from Megan:
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I thought we were on the same page. Good luck with everything. S:>{
A vampire emoticon. Beautiful. At least she had the decency to use actual words and leave in all the vowels. But I still took the whole messy incident as an insult, I guess.
I wouldn’t have minded at all being used for my dick, but I have all kinds of problems being used for my fangs.
Without really thinking about where I was going
, I headed to an all-night store called Sal’s. Hube and I used to hang there after practice, to split a six pack and talk shit about Lazer and his god complex. Maybe I was drawn to the comfort of a familiar place, or maybe I just went because I could get there on auto pilot. I don’t really know. What I do know is that they have a twenty-four hour deli counter with meats butchered fresh by Sal’s uncle every day. It was close to morning by then, and if anything was going to drown the sorrow of a date gone disastrous, I figured it would be some MGD and a slab of raw Angus.
Then Hube walked in as I was walking out.
The night turned out to be more than beer and beef could fix.
POST 30
That Joe and the Do-Gooder
If you’ve ever had a friendship go sour, then met up again by surprise with said friend while things were still in the crap stage, you know the feeling that comes with an unexpected reunion. The strange tension as you forget for a second that things aren’t kosher between the two of you, the odd way you instinctively start to pick up where you left off as if nothing ever happened. The gut churning befuddlement of wanting to hook your arm around his neck, ask him what’s up and head for the cooler to get your six-pack to split… just before your stupid, grudge-holding brain reminds you that this isn’t someone you do stuff like that with anymore.
That’s where I was.
It was all just one big ball of confusion.
“Hey, Joe.” Hube looked me straight in the Ray Bans. I was thrown off a little by his friendliness until I realized that I was the one who was ticked at him, and not the other way around. I guess I thought he’d be mad that I’d blown him off for so long. If he was, he hid it well.
“Hey, man.” I kept it sort of cold. Not hard to do considering my permanently lowered body temperature.
And my sustained bitterness.
“How are things?” he asked.
I know he wasn’t trying to make me uncomfortable, but it happened anyway. Here I was in my rumpled, pseudo-stylish date clothes, with my shirt half-untucked, fangs at full-staff, hiding my light-sensitive eyes behind a pair of shades, with wine stink still lingering around me like rancid aftershave. There was probably a stain on my pants, too, somewhere right around the crotch area, left behind by my still-deflating wood. I looked like I’d fallen off of a park bench coming down from a three-day drunk. He’d seen me in far worse condition, but still… it felt weird. I might have been imagining the disappointment in his eyes, but I don’t think so. “Things are… things. Y’know. Same ol’, same ol’.” There was no word cloud for this.
“You let the fangs grow in?” He motioned to my teeth.
I felt like I should cover them up, but I just left them there in all their glory. “Not on purpose. It just sort of… happened. Earlier tonight.”
“Oh.” He eyed my bags full of chops and cutlets. “That’s… a lot of beef. Are you feeling okay?”
This horrible rush of bitterness pushed through me, helped along by the Cabernet and the happenings of the evening, I’m sure. Here I was, one foot in each world, trying my damnedest to negotiate a decent life somewhere between my old self and my new self, holding on as much as I could to the man I used to be while not letting the creature I had been turned into take over every aspect of me. How could he ask something like that having watched my descent into vampiredom? Right before his eyes I’ve become even less than less-than, some hopeless sub-species that doesn’t get a real name or a page in the science books. I have no idea how long it will be until this hateful affliction totally mows me over, or what it will look like when it’s all said and done. And there’s Hube, not three feet in front of me, healthy and hearty and whole.
And human. All the way.
Everything I used to be, and everything I wanted to be again.
I don’t think I realized it until that moment, but God, I resented him.
That bottle deep inside that Louise is always trying to get me to open finally popped its cork. “Am I feeling okay? Are you fucking kidding me? No, I’m not feeling okay. I crave blood, Hube – real, live people blood, all the time. But rather than running out and neck-fucking transients or biting vampire groupies, I suck the juices out of raw animal flesh instead. Have you ever tried it to see what it’s like, maybe just to get an idea of what I go through every day? Don’t bother, because I can tell you exactly how it is: it’s fucking disgusting. I have ears that have grown into points, fucking fangs where my teeth used to be, and zero chance of carrying on a normal relationship with a woman – ever!” I couldn’t believe what I was saying, even while I was saying it. But I just kept going. “I’ve rearranged everything – my job, my habits, my entire fucking life, just to make sure my skin doesn’t burn off when I go outside. I use a power tool to grind my teeth down to nubs twice a day to keep from looking like a goddamned freak, and I can’t take these stupid glasses off for a minute without feeling like I’m going blind from a full-on assault by every speck of light in the whole fucking world.” I whipped off the Ray Bans. The fluorescent flicker in the store was excruciating, but I left them off and stared into his face so he could see what I look like now, jet black irises and all. He didn’t look away. “If I’m lucky I get three hours sleep a night; if I’m not lucky, I get none. I work a shit job for a shit company to pay for my nothing of a shit life, and I’m never going to do any better than this because I’m a fucking vampire! Ask me again in about a hundred years when all of This still has its dick up my ass. Maybe I’ll be feeling okay by then, but I’d have to guess my answer will still be the same.” He just stood there, letting me launch all over him. This was not like me at all when it came to Hube. We’ve had disagreements in the past, over some pretty stupid, small-potatoes stuff. Sometimes it was about girls; sometimes music. Twenty four years of friendship can’t be level all the time. But I’ve never talked to him like that before, like he wasn’t worth an ounce of respect from me.
And he just took it all.
And when I was done, all he said was, “What the hell has happened to you?” He didn’t even raise his voice.
“I think I just made it pretty clear.”
He shook his head. “No; all you did was tell me a bunch of shit I already know. I want to know what happened to you – to Joe.”
I didn’t know what else to tell him. “This is me now, Hube; all me. This is Joe.”
“No… no, it’s not. The Joe I’m talking about was going to give being a vampire his middle finger and tell it to sit the fuck back down because it isn’t any more important than anything else in his life; he didn’t want to feel sorry for himself because he had to put in a little extra effort to keep his shit under control. The Joe I’m talking about was determined not to become something he didn’t want to be, by whatever means necessary. He knew what he was in for, he was ready to face it head on, and he was damn sure not going to be taken under by something as crazy as this. But you’re not that Joe; I don’t know who you even are. It’s like that Joe just gave up and handed his balls over to the vampire without even putting up anything close to a fight.”
What? “I put up my fight, Hube! I’ve been putting up my fight every goddamned day since this happened! I told this shit to back the fuck off, and do you know what it did? It came at me twice as hard, twice as fast and kicking the crap out of me the whole way!” I put my glasses back on. “I fought it; I didn’t win. So I’m making the most of it now. Playing the cards I was dealt.”
Oh, shit.
That was Don’s line.
Hube just sighed. “So have you bitten anyone yet?”
He really went for the throat with that one – a fair shot, considering how I’d gone for his throat with everything else. But even as I read it coming out of his mind the second before he said it, I couldn’t believe he’d asked me that. So I fired back in kind. “No… but I’m getting awfully close.”
He shook his head. “You know what I think?”
“Can’t wait to hear it.”
“I think you’re af
raid of trying to kick this shit – really trying, not just doing it halfway like everything else you do. Things get a little rough for you, and you bolt. You’ve always been like this – with work, with the band. With women. With everything. If it doesn’t go your way all the time, you just throw up your hands and quit. That’s why there’s a permanent carpet dent in the shape of your ass under your coffee table.”
Wow. It made sense that he knew the absolute truth about me. But hell if I was going to admit it. “You haven’t been living my life; you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know you’re choosing to let this vampire thing define you; I know that’s really the last thing you want. And I know that you need help to fight it. You can’t do it all by yourself.”
Now I knew how patronized the homeless guy outside of Don’s place must have felt.
Fucking do-gooder.
“Yeah, well, I thought I had someone to help me. Turns out he wasn’t entirely trustworthy.”
I can be a real dick sometimes.
Hube didn’t let it faze him. “You’re right. I was wrong to tell Lazer, and I am sorry down to the bottom of my goddamned soul for it. Maybe you won’t believe this, but I bust my own ass over it every day, wishing I could take it all back. I’ve been trying to apologize, but you won’t let me. And I’m fucking right here, dude, right now. I’ll do anything it takes to help you get through this – anything. Somewhere under all the vampire shit, that Joe knows it’s true, even if This Joe doesn’t want to hear it.”
For a second I considered how not-that-bad what he’d done actually was: he told one person – one – and it was someone we both knew. Granted, Lazer was a total loser, and true, he may have blabbed about me to Iris, and maybe a few others who didn’t even know who I was, let alone care what I was. But it’s not like Hube had posted it on Craigslist. What I should have done at that point was let it drop, and spend the rest of the night reconnecting with the one true ally I had in the world.