Right. I wish.
I met him in a bar. Like most other people there, I was looking for something to drink. I noticed Darren, who’d already had more than a few, was leaning against the bar, alone, and looked like easy pickings. Also, from the back, the other thing I noticed about him was the four-inch rip just below the left back pocket of his jeans. That, and his lack of underwear.
I leaned against the bar next to him and ordered a round. When the bartender slid a fresh Corona in front of him, Darren turned to me with a dopey, tipsy grin and lifted the bottle in a silent toast. This was going to be easy.
*
Drinking someone’s blood without killing them is delicate, tricky, but not impossible. It’s like two people pulling on opposite ends of a string. As long as you feel resistance coming from the other end, it’s okay to keep going. Once you start to feel the other side start to slacken, though, you have to stop.
If you can. Like I said, it’s tricky.
I make a point of trying not to kill them. Most of the time, I go for the ones who are really drunk or really strung out. (The latter can give the blood an odd flavor; it’s an acquired taste.) Once, I drank from a woman three hours after she ate a lot of magic mushrooms, and even I tripped for a little bit.
Every once in a while, you find someone who gets off on it. There’s one guy—I don’t know his name—who won’t let me drink unless I fuck him, and he makes me wait to drink until he comes. It sounds like the sort of thing I should pay for, but I think he’d be willing to pay me to do him, too (though I don’t think I was the only vampire he was spreading his legs for).
The thing that’s nice about that is not just the blood or the piece of ass. It’s that I don’t have to pretend. He knows what I am, and I don’t have to pretend to care who he is beyond that exchange. All I have to do is make sure he doesn’t die.
Sometimes I tell people the truth. They ask what I do for a living and I say, “I’m a vampire.” Usually they laugh, come back with something like, “Yeah, right,” or if they’re especially creative, “So how long have you been a lawyer, then?” Telling them the truth, I’ve discovered, makes any necessary lie a little easier to hide. I tell them I’m in investments and omit the fact that I’ve been compounding interest for over a hundred years.
*
By the time we left the bar, Darren wasn’t in any shape to ask questions. Unfortunately, he wasn’t in any shape to tell me where he lived, either. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem—just prop him against a wall, have a little drink, and then let him sleep it off in a bus shelter or on a park bench and wonder the next morning just how much he’d had to drink the night before.
Instead, I took him home. To my place. Which I’d never done before.
We vampires have a gravitational pull. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s as basic to me as sight or smell. If I want someone near me, I just have to look at them and imagine it happening, and it will.
In Darren’s case, the attraction worked in reverse. I was drawn to him. He glowed, his magnetic appeal was as massive as the sun all of a sudden, and it wasn’t just the beer or the rip in his jeans or the smile. It wasn’t the conversation either, because he couldn’t put a subject and a verb together to save his life by the time I got him undressed and into bed.
And then I watched him sleep all night.
The next morning, when he finally woke up, I was still sitting in the chair by the bed, still watching him. I gestured toward a glass of water and a pill bottle on the nightstand.
“You probably have a headache.”
He ran a hand through his hair and sat up, smiling. “I never get hangovers.” He glanced under the covers. “Did we…?”
I shook my head. “You were
really
drunk.”
“Oh.” He looked around, maybe trying to find his clothes. I pointed to them, neatly folded on the dresser, but out of his reach.
“Would you like to get dressed?”
“Maybe in a minute. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember your name.”
“Michael.”
“Well, thank you for respecting my virtue last night, Michael. Where did we meet?”
“At the Loading Zone.”
“And what do you do in life as we know it?”
“I’m a vampire.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?” I nodded. He leaned forward. “Let me see your teeth.”
He made room for me to sit next to him on the bed. I tilted my head back a little and opened my mouth wide enough for him to see the canines. He leaned closer, then reached up toward my mouth.
“You mind?” he asked. I shrugged, and he gently grasped one of the canines between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a little jiggle.
“Well, it’s either real or some very expensive fetish dental work,” he said. We were now sitting with our faces only a few inches apart, and when he lowered his hand, I felt his breath against my cheek. I had no breath for him to feel. His hand grazed my throat on the way down. Fingers skidded across the buttons of my shirt until they came to rest on my thigh.
“I guess I should thank you for respecting more than my virtue last night,” he said.
I swallowed. Was this what nervousness felt like? I’d forgotten.
“Why aren’t you afraid of me?” I asked.
“Because you’re not going to kill me,” he said. “Why are you afraid of me?”
I almost laughed. “I’m not afraid.”
He smiled. “You’re a very bad liar,” he said, and lifted his hand to my chest.
And my heart beat.
A vampire’s heart only beats after he’s fed, and then only for a short time. But this time it kept beating as he pushed me backward onto the bed and crawled on top of me. This naked and perhaps still drunk man should not have had any of the control in this situation, but I was powerless beneath him as he slowly and deliberately removed my clothes, and for the next hour he made my heart beat in ways it hadn’t in decades.
Blood is like a magnet. It’s the most powerful force of attraction to a vampire. Like a law of physics, we must obey its pull. Darren, though, had the ability to rewrite the laws of physics. Whenever I fucked the nameless blood donor, my focus was always on the drink that came when he did. Darren made me remember what an equally strong imperative the sex drive can be. Thoughts of blood and drinking fell away from my mind as he lowered himself onto me. Thoughts disappeared, period. If I needed oxygen, I would have been breathless by the time he came.
“If it weren’t for the whole blood-sucking thing,” he said, rolling over onto his back, “I would highly recommend everyone get a vampire lover.”
“Details, details,” I said, but I could feel the hunger rising in me. There were spare units in the fridge for cases like this, but drinking cold, old blood was worse than flat soda or a tepid martini. It was more like drinking sour milk.
“Does that mean I won’t see you again after this?” I asked.
The words were out before I knew I’d said them. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at me skeptically. Skeptical is a difficult look to pull off while naked and messy, but he gave it his best shot.
“Let’s leave aside the question of why I would want to see you again. Why would you want to see me?”
I turned my gaze back toward the ceiling. “I don’t know, but there it is.”
He hmm’d noncommittally and hoisted himself out of bed. “Do you mind if I take a shower? I might be able to think more clearly without the spunk drying on my belly.”
*
Suddenly I was no longer at the top of the food chain. You know how tigers and lions never look like they have any fear in the world? That’s what it’s like for a vampire. You don’t worry about something eating you when you’re faster, stronger, and smarter than every other species on the menu.
At least that was how I felt until Darren zigzagged onto the list of specials. He was right that I wasn’t going to kill him, but I had no idea why. He was ripe for the picking, and he wasn’t afraid. I’d met others who weren’t afraid, the people who gave themselves to it willingly, but underneath their bravado was always an awareness of the danger. Darren, if he felt he was in danger, never let it show. And I would have seen it. I would have smelled the slightest elevation in his adrenaline, I would have detected the slightest of flinches when I touched him.
And I couldn’t keep my hands off him. I wanted to touch him as often and as much as I could. He’d barely get through the doorway before I’d start pulling at the waistband of his pants, lifting up his shirt. It wasn’t even because he was beautiful, though certainly he was that. Still, the soft blond hair had a cowlick that never stayed down and his nose was crooked. He was fit, but he didn’t look as if he’d just walked off a runway.
So why could I not stay away?
What we had over the next couple months was less of a relationship and more of an obsession, at least for me. I knew very little about him and his life—where he lived, what he did for a living, how old he was. If he wanted to ask me any of the standard Barbara Walters questions—how old were you when you were made, how old are you now, how did that make you
feel
—he kept them to himself. We never went out. We stayed in and fucked in just about every room of the house. He fell asleep after that and I drank a lot of bottled blood and watched him sleep.
I miss sleep sometimes. Other times, I wonder if I’m asleep right now and the only time I was awake was when Darren was alive.
*
“Where have you been?” I asked when he finally showed up at my door. Three days had passed since I’d last seen him. He shut the door and I pulled him toward me, his answer lost in my kiss. As I slipped my hands under his shirt, my heart began to beat. The drum of it thudded in my ears, the sensation like an electric current to my chest. It was a wonder he didn’t feel it, didn’t hear it. I hadn’t told him about this strange effect he had on me, and perhaps I should have. But it seemed like the one thing too strange that might make him realize the insanity he was in right now.
“Maybe I should give you my phone number,” he said, once I finally allowed him to come up for air.
“That might be a good idea.”
His hands began tracing a similar path beneath my shirt as well, and soon there was no more thought of talking and I pulled him to the floor, right there in the front hall, not for the first time.
Our routines were very physical—fuck, eat, sleep. While he showered, I had a drink, then I made him something to eat. There was actual food in my kitchen for the first time, and the meals I made him were simple. I’d never learned to cook when I was alive—it was a less enlightened time, and men weren’t expected to know that sort of thing.
As he ate the steak I had made for him—it tended toward the rare side—he also told me about his recent visits to the doctor, the strange pain he’d been experiencing, the battery of tests, the biopsy, and finally the diagnosis. As timing would have it, while he relayed his death sentence, my heartbeat began to slow—after it fell to once every fifteen seconds, it was finished.
“Is there anything to be done?” I asked.
He smiled and shrugged. “You could pass the steak sauce.”
That was the way he was. I was tempted to rail at him for not taking his predicament seriously, but what else could he do? And how seriously would he take criticism from someone who never had to stare into the abyss looming below him now?
I passed him the A.1. and he finished his steak. A yawn and a kiss later, he said he was exhausted and wouldn’t mind going to sleep. I lay in bed next to him, my arms wrapped around him as if that could protect him from any intruder, until he finally fell asleep. Then I gently untangled myself and withdrew to the armchair at the end of the bed. For the rest of the night, I watched him sleep.
You can tell a lot about a person from the way they fall asleep. The conscious mind moves back into the shadows, and the ego loosens its grip. The changes in a person’s face or a body posture are no longer an act of will, but are more a reflection of the person’s true nature.
Darren was not afraid. He slept the heavy, restful slumber of someone at peace. He lay on his back and stirred very litle. His left arm was flung across the bed, while his right rested beneath his head and the pillow.
Quietly, I slid my chair closer and placed my hand in the center of his chest. I closed my eyes and listened as, in time with his breathing, my heart began beating again.
*
For someone at peace with his fate, Darren’s decline was frighteningly swift. He came to see me at home only one more time—he barely ate and went to sleep almost immeditately. Taking any sort of liberties with his body would have seemed like a violation. He was on a leave of absence from work while he underwent chemo and rested at home, but he couldn’t bring himself to take a leave of absence from me, he said.
When I took him in my arms, he smelled dark and earthy, as if he were already buried in the ground. In spite of that, as he fell asleep against me, his head lying on my chest, I wondered if he could hear my heart beating.
Three days later I got the call from Darren’s roommate, whom I hadn’t known existed before now, to tell me Darren was in the hospital.
I hate hospitals. Usually, I only go into them when I’m desperately hungry. They don’t smell right. It’s like opening the refrigerator door three days after everything inside has spoiled.