After Dark (The Vampire Next Door Book 2) (3 page)

“I’m saying you can have me, take me, kill me, as long as it won’t hurt. I just want to end it.” She finally let go, broke down and cried miserably.

“There’s something you don’t understand.” He spoke more softly. “Slaughterhouses. We get it from slaughterhouses. It’s from animals. It’s not always fresh, but…. Damn it. I can’t kill you.” He almost laughed, but stopped himself. “I can’t.”

“Why not? I’m here. I’ll let you. I want to die.”

“Because it’s wrong. That’s why. It’s just not ethical.”

“Well,” she sniffed, trying to breathe between sobs. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Look, what happened anyway? Have a fight with the boyfriend? Lost a job? Whatever it is—”

“I’ve felt this way a long time.”

“Well. I can’t take your life, even if that’s what you really want. What’s your name anyway?”

“Laura.”

“Just Laura?”

“Laura Rivers.” Her voice was more steady as she struggled to calm herself. “I shouldn’t have bothered you then. I’ll just go. And I won’t tell anyone about you.”

“Hold on. Wait a minute. I can’t just let you go. I can’t just let you walk out of here so you can leap off a bridge or something stupid like that.”

“Actually.” She rose up from where she sat and continued toward the door. “I tried to get up the nerve to leap into a tiger pit at the zoo. But it didn’t work. I’m too cowardly.”

“Wait a minute.” He took hold of her arm before she could reach the door. “If I let you go and something happens to you—”

“It won’t matter. It’s my life’s goal. Let me go, then.” She looked down at the extreme paleness of the flesh of his white hand. His grip was like cold steel.

“Not if you’re going to kill yourself.”

“Why would you care?”

“I don’t know. Come back in and sit down, so I can keep an eye on you, and make sure you don’t self-destruct.” He pulled her away from the door. “No. I really don’t know why I care. I don’t know. I really should not, and it shouldn’t matter to me what you do to yourself. But I do care, and it does matter.”

“Let go!” she snapped.

“What will you do? Yell ‘help, someone’s trying to kill me’?”

Laura shook free of him and reluctantly drifted back onto the couch she woke up on; she sunk into the worn out cushions and stared at the floor. “I really thought you would help me.”

“I don’t know who you are, but I live in eternal darkness and still I find a way, every night, I find some small way to enjoy what little I’ve got in this world. What is so terrible that you’d rather die —?”

And so then she slowly began to tell him, tell him everything. It didn’t matter to her if someone knew. Perhaps by dawn she would be allowed to leave and never see him again.

“Everything was all set for me in my life, my so-called life. Everything, every little detail, was very well taken care of, always.”

Since she was a little girl she was sent to the best schools, wore the best clothing, and she was only allowed to have the best friends: children from families of similar backgrounds, similar backgrounds of power and wealth and privilege. She was sent to a convent school in Europe that she did not choose, only to return home to find that her father had arranged a marriage for her without her knowledge. She did not know the young man well; she had met him only twice. She figured it was basically just part of another one of her father’s business schemes. The young man’s father would invest in her father’s company, and the marriage would help to hide that the young man was gay. Maybe most people these days did not care about people’s personal lives, but such things meant a great deal to the type of people her father did business with. By then she had her fill of it all. Her stepmother had already picked out the wedding gown, chosen the church, and the honeymoon was arranged for.

Instead she left home, taking the money her grandfather left for her.

She attended an inexpensive state college to become a grade school teacher. She had always liked art, and thought of becoming an art teacher, believing that she would enjoy the children.

She never really fit in well at the state college. Many of the people there were from working class families. They spoke differently, had different interests, different worries, different values. They dressed differently; they did not carry themselves in the same way as the people she had grown up with.

And the worst awakening for her was that she found people in this new world she landed herself in could just do things for themselves. When her roommate at the dorm rewired a desk lamp with frayed wiring she was stunned beyond belief to watch. She did not even realize such a quick easy repair could be done.
No, Laura. Look, it’s easy. See? Just skin the wires with a knife, wrap the new one into the old one here, then wrap it up nice with this black tape. My dad the electrician, he showed me this
. People fixed their own cars, ironed and laundered their own clothes, sewed torn underwear, cleaned their own apartments. “I know it’s silly, but I felt like an idiot. And I still do. I mean, I don’t ever fit in. I didn’t fit in with my family, and I don’t fit in too well with people in the real world, either.”

Eventually she managed to pass her courses and go on to secure a position in a local public school. She started her career and grew hopeful that she could eventually learn to blend in; to function, become a part of what she thought must be normal society.

But the children paid no attention to her. They threw their crayons when she turned her back to write on the blackboard, they wrote bad words on their drawing papers, and started fistfights during class with one another.

It grew worse. She could not control them. They viewed her class as their playtime. The boys fought in class and last week one received a black eye. His parents called the school in a rage and complained about her lack of control in the classroom and demanded she be fired. She returned home crying.

The children knew she was fragile and they did everything they could to exploit it. Twice she walked out of the classroom in tears, once even running to the ladies’ room to vomit out of nervousness. And always, where ever she was, she could see and hear her father, hear his voice, see him standing over her, ‘I told you that you can do nothing on your own. See what a fool you always make of yourself.’ And he was right. She had been a fool to think she could get by on her own and fit in with other people. She was somehow half, or less, a person. She was weak, fragile, lacking in brightness and capability. She tried to do her own laundry once, with disastrous results. And she discovered she could not cook. She burned everything, once even setting fire to the small kitchenette in her apartment. She was afraid to learn to drive.

“I don’t know. Maybe my father was right. I’m somehow less capable than other people, or something. A normal person could handle little kids, balance a checkbook, and cook a decent meal.”

“I don’t cook either, lady.”

“So, you. You’re a—”

“Go on, say it. I don’t care.”

“Well.” She struggled to remain polite. “You don’t really have to cook. Oh, why tell all this anyway? I’m just sick of failing at everything I do. My father was right. I don’t belong anywhere. He told me I’d never make it on my own. And I can’t. But I can’t go home, either. I’m just so sick of taking his orders.”

“But you just started doing things for yourself, Laura. Give yourself a chance.”

“What?”

“I bet you never did laundry before, right?” The vampire asked. Did he have a name? She wondered. Yes. Probably an odd sounding one.

“B-but,” she stammered as she struggled to look away from the two deep black pools of his dark eyes. “But, there’s nothing to it. The maids did all the household work about our estate, and… Well, they’re not well educated, I mean, they didn’t even speak English, and they did okay with their work.”

“You had a maid? Okay. So, there’s the trouble then.” He sounded quite definite. “Look. What are you? Twenty two?”

She gazed down at the dusty wooden floor and was silent.

“Okay, look, separate the whites from the dyed fabrics, then be sure the cotton stuff isn’t in hot water, okay? Step Three, after it’s washed, put it in the dryer.”

She smiled sadly, almost laughed weakly. It had been a long time since she felt herself smile.

“And! Don’t forget the fabric softener. Okay?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t even be here.”

“Hey, the place is a dump but it’s better than six feet under, right?”

She sighed, “I don’t know where I should be right now. I don’t even know if I should even be talking with you, I mean. I mean, you’re a...”

“So?” he hissed, almost sounding suddenly irritated.

“Well, I did come here to…. Here I am, telling you my life story, I don’t even know your name, or if you have a name.”

“We have names,” he growled. “We do our own laundry. And it’s Rick, by the way.”

“Yes. All right, I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’m sorry I came here like this. I just can’t face it anymore. I cannot. My life is all wrong. I don’t know, maybe I’m cursed. I just decided that the only way to deal with this is to end it all. I just don’t feel like I belong anywhere. I didn’t ever feel like I could fit in, like I belong nowhere. I don’t even think I know who I am,” a tear glided down her face. She quickly brushed it away. “I mean, I know two things about myself, my name, and that I’m not really good at anything.”

“You’re damn good at sketching,” he said absently, as if he weren’t really listening very seriously to much of her monologue.

“What?”

“Because I found your sketch pad. Look,” and he came closer; his words sounded cold. “Kids these days are really just rotten. Period. Outside on the streets they are all just shooting up dope into their arms, shooting each other dead. I see it all night long. They cannot appreciate art. Today, they don’t even read. They don’t even know how, and they don’t care. That’s all.”

“B-but they’re just ten years old.”

“Yeah, sure. And at eleven they’re gonna be in the lineup at the police station.”

She laughed suddenly, sarcastically. “I’m supposed to awaken their young minds, build their future,” echoing the words of the college professor who lectured on child psychology.

“No! Look. You don’t get it, do you? Kids today, they do not want to create anything, or exert themselves. The world is different now. They want to sink into television oblivion, sell and use drugs, play with big grown up weapons, wear gang colors, let their little useless brains go to waste. That’s all they really want. I see it on the streets all night long, every night. They even scare the shit out of people like us! No kidding.”

“B-but it’s little kids. Why can’t I handle them?” she repeated, as if she hadn’t been listening. She continued to stare down at the dusty pine wooden floor below her feet. “You know, I just believe a normal person would be able to handle them better. A normal person would just be able to do things right, just be capable of doing normal things.”

“Look, you are new at this! It sounds as if you are new at everything. Laundry, cooking, dealing with life, everything. Here’s a tip. Go through the motions, and your head will eventually catch up.”

Suddenly she looked up, eyes wide, and wet. “I still can’t believe I am having this conversation with...”

“Yeah. Don’t worry. We have conversations. And we also do laundry. Now, honey, why don’t you stay here a while? So I can watch you and—”

“Aren’t you going to set up bars on the windows first?” her voice was tired. And sad.

“No. I’ll just run out and catch you when you jump, okay?”

She talked for hours and he listened with patience until she finally slept on the couch. He put a blanket over her and she startled and looked up. “You need your rest.” He turned out the light and whispered softly, “and sometimes it’s okay to forget the fabric softener.”

“W-what?”

“Go to sleep.”

When she was finally quiet he let himself out the door and went to his car.

“Well, if that’s all it was about. Okay, I’ll tell him,” Lina sighed. It was nearly dawn and Alex was already asleep and so she would have to wait until evening to tell him everything was once again under control. “Rick, it’s getting bright out. Want to stay here?” Lina bent to pick up her poodle; she turned to gaze warily out the window.

“No. I should go back. Make sure she’s okay. The kid’s in one piece, so far. Hope I don’t get back to find her hanging from my ceiling fan, or to see that she’s just torched my dump of a place.”

“Who is that?” She stared out the window.

“What’s out there that’s so interesting all of a sudden?” Rick went to the window to look.

It was Sky. And she was followed by a tall, deeply tanned muscular young man with long, flowing golden hair. He wore pale blue tights, which were extremely close to his body, and belted at the waist, no shirt. Around his neck hung a strange gold medallion on a thick golden chain, and also there was a large pointed quartz crystal on a long black leather cord hanging below the medallion. On his feet were blue boots of a spandex like material with thin soles. He walked behind her as she went to get her morning paper; he gazed curiously around the neighborhood, and smiled.