Misty Rose: Nature
Chapter 10
So, like I said, the party needs its own bit, mostly because a lot happened. I mean… well, the party itself was pretty normal. Lots of young people dancing and talking and getting drunk and high. Usual lights and smoke machines and stuff. Lots of house and electronica. We rode Kaitlyn’s scooter there because it was way too far to walk and parked it near the door. One of the good things about her scooter was that we usually didn’t have to worry about parking. And no one was going to steal a piece of junk. We went in along with a few other girls we sort of knew.
Kaitlyn actually let me dress sort of normal this time, and I know what that sounds like. She’s honestly not that bad, I just get… bothered easy sometimes. And I had a lot bothering me. This was my first time going to a rave as a vampire, and I didn’t know how all it would go. So we went… more casual than attention-getting for me. Cute green top, short black skirt, nothing too daring, and my chunky boots because I didn’t feel like dodging anyone’s feet. I let her put my hair up in twintails, and we solved the dead girl face problem by doing a raver makeup look that covered up the problems with way more foundation than I’d use otherwise even when I was alive. Finished it all off with some bracelets and necklaces that would glow under blacklight. Kaitlyn wanted actual glowy things, but it turned out we were out of them. So, yeah, I looked like a raver girl, but not one of the crazy ones.
Kaitlyn… kind of went the opposite. Black and pink and fishnets and furry boots and vinyl and heavy makeup and frills and everything. I told her I thought she looked more like a goth, you know, one of the lolitas or something, but that’s the look she wanted, so she went with it. We locked our purses in the compartment in her scooter because she’d heard that maybe some of the people there weren’t totally trustworthy, and there wasn’t anyone keeping people from going in and out whenever. And it wasn’t like we were going to need any money for the bar because I didn’t drink… alcohol, and Kaitlyn…
Well, okay, normally I’m not Kaitlyn’s type. This didn’t come up at home, or really when we weren’t at parties, but… there’s something called a two-drink bisexual. Means a girl, and it’s always a girl, that doesn’t like other girls except when she’s had a couple of drinks, and then she’s all over other girls, usually because there’s guys there cheering her on. Get the idea? Well, that’s more or less not Kaitlyn. Like I said, Kaitlyn’s a natural bi, and at parties… she’d play that up to get guys to buy us drinks. And I say us because in that situation, I was her preferred Other Girl. She had a lot of reasons she’d say that was, but I think it was mostly because she’d know I’d get all flustered and shit, and I guess that was somehow more interesting to the kinds of guys she’d be getting to buy drinks. Or maybe because I was… safe, I guess. She knew I wouldn’t take the whole thing as anything except her scamming drinks out of guys that were too dumb and horny to know better. I think I’d seen Kaitlyn actually buy a drink at a party maybe twice since I met her, and both times were at more… relaxed parties than raves tended to be. End result was that we both didn’t need to pay for drinks, and we’d sometimes get more drunk than we’d intended and… sometimes there’d been stuff in the drinks the bartender didn’t put in there. Usually wasn’t a problem because one of us wouldn’t be drinking as much, but… the assholes that drug girls at parties had gotten us both a few times. And we weren’t always able to stick together and watch out for each other, so… yeah.
Anyway, I think Kaitlyn’d decided I was the watcher this time because she started in on her scam almost as soon as we got in the door. Wasn’t hard… couple of guys who were obviously already trashed found us right away, someone made a joke, and off she went. Kaitlyn only got more aggressive about the whole thing as she drank more, so… well, to be blunt, the first half hour was mostly me making out with a more and more drunk Kaitlyn on a couch someone had hauled in as part of setting everything up. It was… kind of different. Normally when she’d do this, I’d wind up pretty drunk too, so it sort of became a game. How many drinks could we scam, you know? But this time, she was doing all the drinking, and I’d manage to either spill the ones they bought for me, or “forget” about them, or Kaitlyn’d drink them. Which helped get her wasted faster. Probably also helped her ignore my being dead.
Thing is, I sort of expected that if I was doing this totally sober, I’d feel used. But I didn’t. I felt… bored. I was playing along, but it wasn’t exciting. Before the vampire thing, I’d at least get a little worked up. I mean, it’s kind of hard not to when you’re at least a little drunk and… okay, that’s wrong. It’s easy to not get turned on when you really don’t want it, even if you’re drunk. And there’d been a few times when I just really wasn’t in the mood for it, and Kaitlyn’d stop, or if I told her before, she didn’t even start it. So there was some kind of consent from me, and… well, I’d at least have some kind of reaction. But now… nothing. Maybe because technically I was dead.
So I whispered to Kaitlyn that I really wasn’t feeling it this time, and she whispered back that she understood and sorry and something too slurred to understand in a whisper, then rolled off me, snagged my latest “forgotten” drink in one hand and the cutest guy in our audience with the other and dragged him to the dance floor. I sort of made a show of straightening my clothes. Drunk Kaitlyn was handsy Kaitlyn, and she could handle more than you’d think someone her size could, but she’d still been drinking for both of us, and she stumbled a little on her way. I chatted with the other two guys a little, trying to keep an eye on Kaitlyn, but I lost her, so I made up some excuse and followed her.
I found her dancing with a completely different guy. The drink cup was gone, and the guy she’d dragged off was nowhere in sight. I tried to shout something to Kaitlyn, but the music was too loud. She just grinned and hugged me and pulled me over to dance. So I did.
And… that’d changed too. A lot of dancing is the music, yeah, but a lot is the movement, feeling your heart beating faster, and the effort and all the chemicals that get dumped into your brain. Endorphins? Something like that. All stuff that vampires don’t experience. We don’t get tired, we don’t get runner’s highs or endorphin rushes, and it’s like maybe we don’t get a lot of brain chemicals at all. I just… couldn’t lose myself in the music and the dancing. So it sort of felt like I was a dancing robot or something like that. Could do the motions, but the rest just wasn’t there. So I got bored again.
Meant I could pay more attention to what was going on around me, though, and that turned out to be a good thing, because one of the guys that’d been watching us before turned up with another drink which he handed to Kaitlyn. Something was… off about the guy. Couldn’t be sure what, but he seemed… too focused on getting Kaitlyn that drink. So I faked a stumble… no, honestly, I did a white girl flail and knocked the drink out of his hand. I didn’t know if he’d spiked it or not, but I figured Kaitlyn’d had enough to drink anyway and it’s better to be safe, you know?
Oh. White girl flail… basically, it’s any dance move that a girl does when she can’t actually dance, but add in some really stupid huge arm swings. I call it the white girl flail because it’s almost always white girls doing the flail, but I guess any girl who can’t dance could do it. Figured out going to parties with Kaitlyn that I had a natural talent for the white girl flail. Go figure.
Anyway, the guy looked pissed, but it was too loud for him to really say anything, and I just acted like I had no idea I’d dumped the drink on the floor. But after that, I just… didn’t really feel like fake dancing any more either, so I pulled Kaitlyn off the floor and over to the side. She’d obviously been enjoying herself, and was all tired and clingy and stuff, which was fine, but by that point I kind of felt like we should be looking at either calming down or going home. She kept trying to talk to me, but it was too loud to hear her. That was right about when I saw the other vampire.
Yeah. Don’t how I knew, and he was all the way on the other side of the dance floor, but I was sure he was a vampire too. Not one I recognized, and he seemed mostly human, but… still. Don’t think he recognized me, or what I was. Didn’t react to me, anyway. He was just standing off to one side of the dance floor, looking around with some drunk girl hanging off his arm. Sort of like I was.
Except my drunk girl had gone missing. Kaitlyn had let go of me to try to pull back her hair, and then I saw the other vampire, and then she was gone. I looked around, but I couldn’t see her and… I got to be honest, I kind of panicked. Kaitlyn was pretty wasted, and bad shit can happen to a girl if she gets separated from her friends at a rave. We both knew that personally, and I’d lost her. I jumped up and down a couple times, trying to see over the people taller than me, and thought I saw her heading towards the back of the warehouse. Which was away from the other vampire, but was also away from the door. I started heading that way, and I was probably a little rougher pushing people out of my way than I needed to be, but no one freaked out over it. Maybe they thought I really needed the bathroom. In any case, I managed to make my way towards where I saw her.
There really wasn’t a lot of places she could’ve gone. The bathrooms and stuff were over there, and someone had set up a bunch of couches and chairs and pillows for people to sit on. I could also smell… let’s just say… more things that ravers use to enjoy themselves. The kind you smoke. Some of the people sitting around were making out or otherwise not paying attention, but at least a few looked like they might have seen Kaitlyn. I bent over and tried to talk to one guy.
“HEY!” I yelled. “HAVE YOU SEEN MY FRIEND?”
“WHAT?” he yelled back.
“MY FRIEND! HAVE YOU SEEN HER?”
“NICE OUTFIT!”
“WHAT? IT’S REALLY LOUD!”
“WHAT?”
“HAVE YOU SEEN MY FRIEND! BLACK HAIR, DRESSED LIKE A GOTH!”
“WHAT?”
Yeah, that wasn’t going anywhere. But after a few more repeats of that sort of conversation, I found one guy that I guess hadn’t been on the dance floor because his ears still worked enough to hear me, and he’d seen someone dressed like Kaitlyn going towards the back rooms with a couple guys. I had to bring up how much skin Kaitlyn was showing than her hair or anything else, but at least he remembered. I thanked the guy and hurried towards the back because that did not sound good. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I found her, but… if she was there because she wanted to be, I was going to strongly suggest we go home, and she could yell at me for being a cock block.
Is that the slang? When a girl stops another girl from getting laid with a guy? Eh, whatever. I guess it was possible that Kaitlyn actually did mean to go make out or whatever with a couple guys at the same time, but I sort of doubted it. She could yell at me later.
Anyway, in the back there was the bathrooms and a few open doors. Looked like this was where the offices and whatever were when this place wasn’t hosting a rave. They’d been cleared out and were empty of people. But one door was closed. I went over to that door and listened, but I couldn’t hear anything. Or my ears were still shot. So I decided I’d just play the dumb blond walking in on her friend getting laid and opened the door.
“Hey, girl, what’re you…” I started. Then stopped. It was five guys, not two. They weren’t dressed like ravers, more like… wannabe gangstas or bros or… frat boys. Not that it mattered. I could smell that shitty body spray from the door. Two of them were holding Kaitlyn down on a couch because she was struggling to get away, and a third was messing with her clothes. Looked like he was having trouble, which wasn’t a surprise. After we’d… had a few bad experiences, Kaitlyn and I had started wearing these heavy tight black leather shorts under our skirts when we went to parties we weren’t sure of. They still looked nice enough, but they were a real bitch to get on, and a real bitch to take off, and that was good because they’d help against pretty much what was happening right then. Kaitlyn heard me and started fighting harder. She was crying. The last two were leaning against some kind of folding table, watching their friends. They all looked at me.
“WHAT THE FUCK IS GOIN’ ON?!” I screamed.
One of the guys who wasn’t actively getting my best friend ready to be raped sneered at me. “None of your business, bitch.”
“Really?” I said. “Did she ask you to hold her down like that, shithead?”
“Yeah,” one of the other guys said. “She likes it like this.”
“News to me. ’Cause it looks to me like you’re tryin’ to rape my best friend.”
The first guy took a couple steps towards me, making his hands into fists. “Sounds like you want some of this too, bitch. Fine by me.”
“You? Please, I wouldn’t fuck you if…”
“Grab her!” the second guy said.
Normally, I’d have been frozen by that point. Like I said, it took a shitload of bad things happening for me to try to defend myself. I couldn’t fight, and somehow running away didn’t usually happen first. I’d just… freeze up, like a trapped animal, or like a possum playing dead. But this time, the animal inside me wasn’t having it. It was… pissed at the guys for threatening me, and pissed at them for what they were going to do to Kaitlyn, and pissed at them because she was mine and the only one who could take her was me, and that last one was going to have to be looked at but right then I was too angry and I started seeing red around the edges of my vision. I wanted to tear those fuckers apart, but I waited. Just needed the first guy to be a bit closer… “Yeah? Just try it, asshole!” I said.
Then the first guy took another step and swung a fist at my face… and for the first time in my life, I didn’t crumple. I didn’t even move. I could sort of feel the hit, but it didn’t seem to matter, and I’m pretty sure the fucker broke a finger on my face. He sure started screaming, and was still screaming when I swung him around face first into the door, which also slammed the door shut so they couldn’t get away. “Didn’t expect that, did you?” I said and kicked him in the side.
As I turned back around, the second guy punched me in the boob. Any girl knows that’s a fucking sensitive area, and I felt that more than the first hit, but it also didn’t seem to matter. The pain just made me even more pissed off. Then he punched me again, in the other boob.
“OW!” I yelled. “FUCK! THAT FUCKIN’ HURT, ASSHOLE!”
I couldn’t fight them. I didn’t know how. So I didn’t. Instead, I picked up the table, which felt like it weighed nothing, and hit the fucker who punched me in the boobs hard enough with it that the table broke. He went down screaming, and I hit him again with what was left of the table. “NEVER BEEN HIT BY A TABLE, FUCKER?!” I yelled at him, which was a pretty stupid thing to yell, but it was like I wasn’t the one doing the yelling or something. At that point, the other three guys jumped up. One backed off, looking scared. The other two came at me. Fucker number three went for a punch to my stomach, which I didn’t bother dodging. I grabbed his arm and yanked hard, felt something pop, and he fell over. I kicked him in the head a couple of times.
While I was doing that, fucker number four got around behind me and got me in a bear hug. I dunno what he was thinking he’d do, but he got the same thing as the guy in the park. I grabbed one of his fingers and pulled it back until something snapped. He let go, and I stepped away, turned back and… didn’t so much kick him as put my foot on his stomach and push really hard. He went backwards, tripped over something, and landed on his ass. I followed him over and… Jesus, this even hurts me to think about… stomped down on his dick with my foot in my big, heavy chunky boot. Then I ground my foot into his crotch with all of my weight. “KEEP IT IN YOUR PANTS IF YOU DON’T WANT IT STOMPED!” I screamed at him, over his high-pitched squeals.
I turned back towards fucker number one by the door, because I heard him wrestling with the doorknob. Dumbass was trying to escape, but was too freaked out to figure out that he wouldn’t be able to open the door while he was leaning against it like that. “DON’T YOU FUCKIN’ RUN!” I yelled, and ran towards him. And right into him. I smashed him into the door with my body hard enough that the door cracked, and fucker number one went down and stayed down.
Fucker number two was trying to move again, but that stopped when I started kicking him. “DON’T… TRY… TO… RAPE… MY… FRIEND!” I yelled, kicking him with each word. Then I looked up, at the last guy, the only one who hadn’t tried to hurt me. He’d backed into the far corner, and from the smell of things, he’d pissed himself. He had his hands up, and I think he was begging for mercy or something. I couldn’t really make out what he was saying.
It didn’t matter. I walked over. Slowly, because the animal inside was… enjoying his fear. Then I grabbed one of his hands and twisted until he started screaming. Then I twisted harder. When he was on the ground like his friends, I kicked him until he stopped his noise. Then I leaned over and screamed right into his face, “YEAH! YOU JUST GOT BEAT BY A GIRL! WHO’S THE MAN NOW, FUCKER?” I stood up and looked around. All five of the assholes were unconscious, or in their own private world of pain. I felt… good. Alive. Like this was what I was supposed to be doing. But then the red around the edges of my vision faded, I was suddenly thirstier than I’d ever been. And here’s all these assholes just lying around with all that blood inside them.
I couldn’t help myself. I fed off of all of them. I somehow managed to stop myself with each before he was in danger. I think. The animal didn’t want to stop. It wanted me to kill them. But I didn’t. The animal had to settle for how by the time I got to the last guy, I was overfull and their blood was actually just pouring down my chin and all over them because I couldn’t drink any more. It tasted good. Better even, because I’d earned it. Taken it from defeated enemies. That kind of thing.
After that, well… I started being able to think again. I looked up from what I’d done, and over at Kaitlyn who… looked terrified. And I think that’s what snapped me out of whatever the hell had happened. Yeah, for just a split second, the animal wanted to take her, too. Thought I could… do whatever I wanted with her because she was mine by right. By blood spilled for her. But the look in the eyes of my best friend shocked me badly enough that it brought the animal up short and… I was able to… I don’t know, come back. Take back control. The animal didn’t like it, but fuck that asshole.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and started counting. I don’t… usually lose my temper. Or, well, I didn’t before the whole vampire thing, but the animal… yeah. Without it I was too soft to lose my temper. But that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Count to ten? I went farther than ten. Think I got to thirty before I felt calm enough to stop.
When I opened my eyes, Kaitlyn wasn’t staring at me anymore. She was kind of hunched over on the couch, crying again, but not so scared I guess. I felt like someone was trying to rip my heart out of my chest. I’d saved her, but… I’d also done all that bad stuff to humans. Right in front of her.
“Kaitlyn?” I asked, softly.
No response.
“Kaitlyn? Are you okay?”
Kaitlyn looked up at me, then seemed to focus on the lower part of my face. I suddenly remembered to wipe the blood off my chin, but probably just smeared it around. Then I looked down. Somehow, I’d also gotten blood all down my chest and the front of my top. Nothing I could do about that right now. I looked back over at Kaitlyn, who was at least looking at my eyes now.
“I’m sorry ‘bout all that,” I said. “I was tryin’ to save you…”
Kaitlyn looked back down at one of the guys I’d beaten the shit out of and started crying again. Not like movie crying, but those huge sobs that feel like they’re wrenching out of you. This was bad. Looked like I’d seriously traumatized her or something. But I was starting to realize we couldn’t stay here. Someone would come in eventually, or the fuckers’d wake up. Either way, we were fucked if we stayed. There wasn’t any way to explain all this shit.
“Okay, yeah,” I said. “Scary vampire chick goin’ crazy on some fuckers. I’m sorry.”
Kaitlyn kept sobbing. This was going to fucking suck.
“Look, Kaitlyn,” I said. “I know you prob’ly don’t trust me right now, but… we need to go.”
No response besides the crying.
“We need to go before someone sees this. Like, now.”
Kaitlyn looked at me again. “Are… they dead?” she managed to get out between sobs.
“No,” I said. “No one’s dead, but…”
“They should be dead.”
Damn. That sounded fucking cold, even with the crying. But I couldn’t blame her. It was just that we needed to get out of there. “Kaitlyn…” I said. “Look. Either we need to leave together, or I need to get out of here and you’ll hafta… explain this somehow. But we can’t both stay, okay?”
Kaitlyn looked at me. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
I nodded. “Okay. Can you walk? Did they hurt you?”
Kaitlyn shook her head.
“Good. Alright, um…” I thought for a moment. “Maybe I can…”
“Carry me,” Kaitlyn said.
“What?”
“Carry me. Please.”
That was strange. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“I just thought you… wouldn’t want the scary vampire chick to carry you…”
“Please.”
“Okay,” I said. “Um… piggyback okay with you? I don’t think I can carry you the other way.”
Kaitlyn just sniffed and held out her arms.
I walked over and… well, you know what a piggyback ride is. I got Kaitlyn onto my back and settled, then headed for the exit. I had to kick the fucker I’d slammed into the door out of the way, and I wasn’t very gentle about it, but Kaitlyn didn’t seem to mind. She reached down over my shoulder and turned the doorknob so I could back up, and we got the door open together.
Right outside the door was another girl. Pigtails, pink, pastel colors, basically a candy raver complete with candy necklaces and bracelets. She was right outside the door and… well, if my face looked like hers when I had resting dumb face going I understand why people thought I was stupid. She was frozen right in the doorway like she’d been listening and was too shocked to move. Kaitlyn sort of raised one leg and pushed the girl out of the way with her foot, which mostly caused the girl to fall on her ass, but it got her out of the way. I headed towards the exit with Kaitlyn on my back.
Good thing it was dark. Two girls, one with blood all down her face and chest, carrying the other with heavy makeup smeared by crying? Yeah. Most people didn’t notice, but we did get a few shocked looks. I’m pretty sure I got us out of there before anyone thought to take pictures. Or at least, before they could get pictures with our faces. Outside got us a few more shocked looks because it was actually brighter in the little parking lot. One of the people outside asked me if we were okay.
“We’re fine,” I said. “Just a little accident. I’m takin’ her home to sleep it off.”
“Okay,” the guy said. He didn’t sound convinced, but I headed towards Kaitlyn’s scooter before he could say anything else. I solved the problem of how to handle getting on the thing by just plopping us both down on the seat at the same time. Kaitlyn let go of my neck long enough to fish the keys out of her top and drop them into my hand. I drove us home. Kaitlyn was in no condition to drive. I really wasn’t either, but at least I was sober, and I got us back without running into anything.
Back at our apartment, I had to figure out how to get us inside. Kaitlyn didn’t seem willing to let go of me, so I just stood up and brought her with me. Her keyring had a door key on it too, so I left our purses in the scooter compartment and let us inside. I shut the door, turned on the lights, and sat down on the edge of her bed so she could let go. She didn’t. In fact, she held on tighter and sort of… pulled me backwards so I ended up half laying on top of her facing up with her arms and legs still around me. We laid there for a little while. It was actually pretty awkward.
“You’re gonna hafta let go sometime,” I said eventually.
Kaitlyn just grunted.
“At least let me wash the blood off.”
Kaitlyn sighed and unwrapped her arms and legs. I stood up, and she turned over, curling up on her side and sort of… just staring at nothing. I wanted to help, but the blood was getting sticky and sort of starting to smell. Vampires tend to notice that. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. Yeah, scary. I looked like something from a slasher movie, only with real blood. My top looked like it couldn’t be saved, too, which was annoying because I liked that top. But bloodstains are hard to get out, and that shade of green doesn’t bounce back very well. I sighed and pulled off my outfit, keeping the top aside so it wouldn’t stain anything else before I threw it out. My bra would go with it for pretty much the same reason, but that wasn’t such a big deal. I had more. I turned the water on nice and hot, hotter than humans can stand it because vampires don’t scald, and stepped into the shower.
It’s kind of a cliché that shit comes back to fuck with you when you’re in the shower. Mostly I think it just happens as an excuse to get some Hollywood starlet to do a shower scene in movies where it wouldn’t be appropriate. But after I’d washed off the blood… and watched it go down the drain… I realized a little later that more blood was washing off, and that I was crying. Good old vampire blood tears, right? But little by little, all the shit that happened came back to me. I remembered how it felt to hurt humans that badly, and how good it felt. How part of me wanted to break them, hear them scream and suffer, and keep doing it until they died. That wasn’t a part of me before. I wasn’t that kind of person. But now… part of me was. Yeah, it’d come out to protect Kaitlyn, but even that… well, I was going to need to figure out what the animal seemed to think about her, and I was pretty sure I’d have to ask Pops, because I had no clue what really happened. So, yeah, I was crying in the shower, but… somehow I got over it. More or less. Still had a lot of shit to deal with, but at least it wasn’t like some of the other times my life’s come back to bite me in the ass.
Maybe now that I was a vampire, I could bite back.
That was a weird thought, and I wasn’t sure where it came from. I was thinking about it when I shut off the water and stepped out of the shower, so I didn’t notice right away that Kaitlyn was leaning against the door frame watching me. I froze. Because of her being bisexual, one of the unwritten rules of the house was that we didn’t walk in on each other showering without asking first. It was a tiny little room, barely big enough for the shower and the vanity and the toilet, so she could have reached out and touched me. But she didn’t. She just stood there, looking at my face. Her own face was blank. Then she held up my bathrobe and handed it to me.
That was… kind of weird. But she just looked at me, then… turned away and went back to lay down on her bed. Didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to do, but even though vampires don’t catch colds, standing there naked and dripping water wasn’t a lot of fun, so I dried off and put on my robe. When I went back out into the other room, Kaitlyn had also changed into her robe, and it looked like she’d been trying to clean off her makeup with paper towels or something. She’d curled back up on her bed and wasn’t looking at me. I went and sat down on my own bed, then laid down on my back looking up at the ceiling. I was going to maybe think some about what’d happened, but… without saying anything, Kaitlyn got up off her bed and crawled into mine. She ended up sort of half laying on me, still sort of curled up but… curled up around me I guess with her head on my chest. I thought maybe it’d freak her out because… well, my heart didn’t beat anymore and I didn’t breathe. But if she wasn’t going to move, I wasn’t going to make her.
“Hey,” I said after a while. “Feelin’ any better?”
Kaitlyn didn’t respond right away. “I will.”
“Good.” Neither of us said anything for a while again. Not trying to be dramatic, but… it was kind of hard to not feel like something had changed between us. Like… she hadn’t really seen what me being a vampire really meant, and… I hadn’t really gotten through my head what it could mean, either. Freaking out like that, even if I was saving her… well, maybe I could pretend I was still human. Maybe I could do a pretty good job of fooling myself. But I wasn’t human, and knowing I could do things like what I did to those assholes was… not making me like myself. And Kaitlyn clinging to me like she was… I got to be honest, the animal sort of… perked up an ear, I guess. Like a cat that wasn’t totally asleep. And there was still some stuff I had to say, so…
“Um… I’m sorry about… goin’ crazy vampire chick like that,” I said. “I just…”
“You were protecting me, right?”
And… maybe Kaitlyn didn’t need to know the rest right now. I could wait on that, right? Let her recover before I… told her about the rest. About… how the animal saw her.
“Yeah…” I said. “Yeah, I was protectin’ you.”
Kaitlyn sort of squeezed me, then snuggled a bit closer. “Hold me. Please?”
“Um… you sure?”
“Yeah.”
I shifted around so I could get an arm under and around Kaitlyn, then sort of put my other arm over her as best I could. Yeah, total rom com, girl using guy as pillow cuddle position. Turns out it’s harder for the guy than it looks. Or I was doing it wrong because the only times I’d been involved in that sort of thing before now, I was the girl. Whatever. I could make it work.
“Okay…” I said. “I can just… hold you for a bit. If it’ll help.”
Wasn’t really able to think much about what happened. My brain kept going around in little circles, and never really went anywhere. Kaitlyn fell asleep. Very sweet, yeah? Except for me being a vampire. And because I was a vampire, I had to squirm real careful out from under her when I could feel dawn coming so I could go hide in the closet. Didn’t want to, but… also didn’t want to fry in the sun, and the curtains were open. Couldn’t reach them, and they didn’t block all the light anyway. I got to admit I started thinking about how this was just like how vampires have to… give up human things if they don’t want to get burned, but I passed out before that particular thought could depress me too much. So for once dawn was useful, yeah? Also kept me from feeling too bad for leaving Kaitlyn alone.
When I woke up the next night, Kaitlyn was curled up asleep in the closet next to me. So I didn’t feel quite so bad for having been dead all day after all.
