Finally, I found my voice.
“Do I know you? Who are you?” I practically shouted as the words rushed from my mouth.
It seemed that the fog lifted for just a second, and I caught a glimpse of something I wasn’t supposed to see. Then he smiled his stiff smile, turned and walked away.
7
I was nervous and trying to hide it from Lola, who wasn’t buying my act for a minute.
After our new friend had walked out of the bar, we sat for a couple of minutes in perfect silence, looked around, made eye contact with each other, and left the bar.
As we walked back to my apartment, I put on the face that I always had when I was hunting—nonchalance mixed with apathy—but my body felt shaky. Despite my best efforts I trembled.
Lola wasn’t saying anything, but I knew she wanted to. Her fear was palpable, and making me even more nervous.
We needed to do...something. I just wasn’t sure what.
When we arrived at my apartment and I put the key in the lock, I half expected to find Matt behind the door, sitting in the living room. Then remembered that, of course, he wouldn’t be there. I had been doing that all week.
We both entered the apartment, and I closed the door behind us.
It took us another minute before we began speaking to one another again.
“What was that?” Lola said, echoing my thoughts exactly.
“Well, he said he was a friend,” I said, letting my sarcasm fill in where other emotions wanted to pop up.
“Vic,” Lola said very slowly, “do you know him?”
I looked at her then with the terror that had blocked my throat all night, and I hoped I wasn’t adding to her fear. I didn’t want to tell her what I felt and knew, although what I knew wasn’t exactly concrete. It was just a vague cloud, but something that had been clinging to me since we left the bar.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but he gives me the strangest feeling.”
That was as honest as I could get, even though it wasn’t helpful for either of us.
“He called you Victoria. I’ve never known you as Victoria.”
“I know.”
That had been troubling me. It might just have been a mistake based on hearing people call me Vic, but there was something about the way he said it.
“When was the last time you went by Victoria?”
“When I was human.”
Something passed through us as I said the word “human,” a spark of energy that burst into a thousand tiny fireworks, filling the air between us. I had never said that word in reference to myself in front of Lola, and neither her to me.
Once again, she said the thing I was thinking.
“But that’s impossible.”
She was right, of course, but something was pulling on my intuition and I didn’t know what. I wanted to run back in my bedroom, shut the door and not come out for days until the feeling left me. I didn’t want to say the thing I had felt back at the bar and which I still felt now.
“He’s familiar to me. But I’ve never seen him before,” I said.
“Familiar in what way?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a sense I get.”
“Is this a seducer thing? Is your gift at work?”
My face perked up as I considered this, and I temporarily felt better considering this from the perspective of my gift.
“Yeah, it’s got to be.”
“So where does this leave us?”
“I don’t know.”
Lola got up suddenly.
“I’m going to ask around,” she said and made her way to the door.
As I watched her put her hand on the knob, I got the urge to ask her a question. From where, I wasn’t sure.
“Hey, Lola,” I said and she turned around. “Do you know your creator?”
The fireworks had returned, and this time it was the grand finale.
“Not really,” she said, and her eyes went to the floor for a second. “Why?”
“Just curious,” I said, and suddenly I could no longer keep up my nonchalance.
“Do you know yours?” Lola said, and for some reason the question surprised me.
I looked up at her, directly at her, and felt I had become almost entirely see-through. “No.”
Lola nodded. Looking slightly puzzled, she smiled at me gently and left.
After she was gone, in the silence of my apartment, I felt something that I was feeling more and more of these days, and which I wanted less and less.
Fear.
PART FOUR
1
I knew what I was going to do. And I was pretty sure I knew how to find him.
I couldn’t bear sitting by myself alone tonight, but that wasn’t the only reason to go and find Matt. It was also the right thing to do.
I got in my car, fully aware that he might tell me to go fuck myself and knowing he had good reason to do so.
Still, I would find him and apologize, and he could do whatever he wanted after that. He was no longer vulnerable and didn’t need me in the way that he first did, but I was still responsible for his existence as a vampire. I wouldn’t run away from that, no matter what our relationship was going forward.
And anyway, there was some kind of threat out there that I didn’t understand and wasn’t sure that anyone else did either. I at least owed him a warning.
When I stopped my car and got out, I instinctively looked for the beginning of the trail and allowed my night vision to lead me. Matt was probably used to his by now, the amazement of it already beginning to wear off. There was nothing like the first time.
I walked along, hearing the sounds I made and the sounds surrounding me amplified by my senses, and when I finally stepped out into the clearing I looked up and saw the sky for what seemed like the first time ever.
The stars were brightly lit against the dark backdrop of night, and instead of feeling like I was in my immortal cage, I felt the way I had when I had been human looking at the same night sky. Boundless, free, joyful. And then the feeling faded, and I was back in the clearing, alone and sheathed by darkness.
Matt was here. I could sense him. Not in a locater kind of way, but in another way that I didn’t completely understand.
I had always thought this was part of my seduction, but in this moment I began to doubt that.
I walked over to the edge of the drop-off, looking down at the river and hearing the water rush by. I didn’t see Matt, but that didn’t mean anything.
“Matt,” I called out, and my voice carried his name farther than what seemed possible. And suddenly he was standing next to me.
“Where did you come from?” I said.
“Over there,” he pointed to his left. “I heard someone coming and then saw it was you.”
“So you hid?” I said and managed a smile.
He nodded and also managed a smile.
I went to ask him “so what have you been up to?” and then caught myself as the small talk seemed entirely inappropriate given our last interaction. The pause between us was getting awkward, and finally I just settled on what I actually wanted to say.
“I’m sorry. I wanted to come find you.”
Apologies were not something I made often, and the way the words came out of my mouth—plainly and without much expressed emotion—made it sound a little fake, but it wasn’t.
Matt looked away, off toward the river, and picked leaves off a tree branch.
“It’s okay,” he said, but it didn’t look okay to me.
“You seem to have managed alright,” I said, mostly because I didn’t know what else to say, and my guilt at pushing him out had caught up to me.
“Yeah,” he said, but his tone said so much more.
He bent down and picked up a few rocks, and then he walked a few paces away from me and began throwing them into the water below. He tossed them up high and watched them splash in the middle of the slowly moving water.
This was going nowhere fast.
; I almost reached out to him, wanting to put my hand on his arm so he could feel my touch, and at the same time began to think of exactly the right words to smooth this all over, but something stopped me. In a manner completely foreign to me, I asked him a question.
“What do you want to say to me?”
He threw a few more rocks and didn’t turn around. My anger rose and came out with the words I said next.
“Come on, Matt. What is it?”
I knew I was provoking him. I wanted to. He turned back around.
“You left me alone to do this by myself,” he said. He was not yelling, but his voice was strained. “I killed some kid on the campus and then threw him over a bridge. I was so disgusted with myself I tried to kill a deer. Well, I didn’t try to, I actually did it, and then I tried to feed off it, and it was horrible. Not to mention it didn’t satiate me at all. So then I had to find someone else to feed on—that night. And there was this woman...”
He wasn’t angry at me. Well, he was. But he was also angry at something greater. And I had left him alone to go through that, just like I had had to. Maybe I couldn’t bear to watch. Maybe that’s why I had kicked him out.
Matt sort of crumpled next, squatting close to the ground, his hand running through his hair.
“I had to keep eating,” he said with much effort, “so I went into the financial district next, tried to find some greedy douchebag who I wouldn’t feel so bad leaving in a heap in some alley somewhere. And I guess that was better than some poor college kid, but then I thought about the family he probably had, and even if he was a douchebag, his kids probably loved him, depended on him at least. Hell, maybe even his wife loved him...” Matt said and then trailed off.
I knew what would happen next. Matt now had to kill to live.
Even if he stopped feeding and grew weaker and weaker, he wouldn’t die. He would simply fall unconscious, and even that wasn’t exactly the right word. He would be preserved in his weakened state, but the moment even a drop of blood passed through his lips, he would be animated again, alive and needing to feed.
From here on out, the rule was feed to live because even if you stopped feeding, you wouldn’t die.
“How do you do it?” Matt said, in barely a whisper, and this was the reality I had not wanted him to learn, though I knew he must. The question to the answer I did not want revealed because then he knew me and knew himself as he was now.
It was the reason I had never wanted him in the first place.
Any words that my mind was coming up with seemed horribly inadequate to express to Matt his new reality. And so I kept it simple.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I reached my hand down and hoped he would take it. When he did, I pulled him up, not with my strength, but with his. Despite my brain screaming “no,” I put my arms around his waist and my head against his chest. And he embraced me back.
Then I told him something that I had been told long ago.
“The emotions. They’ll fade.”
Although, even as I said it, I no longer believed it.
2
Matt and I stayed a while in the clearing. Mostly because we didn’t have anything else to do, but also because this now felt like our place.
It had always been my place, but it seemed to rightly belong to Matt now too.
He continued throwing rocks into the water, and for a while I just lay down in the grass on my back and watched the stars.
When I was human, I could remember going out at night on my family’s farm and doing the same. Maybe not lying down, but leaning over the fence, looking up at the sky and feeling ungrounded in a really pleasant way so that I almost had to hold on to the fence for dear life.
When I became a vampire, I stopped doing it. It seemed too silly then and reminded me of something I didn’t want to know.
Matt finally tired of rock throwing and came to sit down next to me on the grass. He propped himself up on his hands and threw his head back, his hair blowing gently in the wind behind him.
“Have you been staying here?” I asked.
“At night,” he said.
“And during the day?”
“That’s been a little trickier. I would go to my apartment during the day after my roommate had left for work and leave before he came back. In between times, I would hide out in the mall or in some cafe or just whatever indoor space I could find.”
I hadn’t thought about the fact that Matt was essentially leaving all the people in his life behind. When I was created, there was no one left for me to leave.
“Do you have a lot of family and friends?”
“Yeah. Well, my family doesn’t live here in the city. But I do have a lot of friends here, and a roommate.”
“Are they looking for you?”
He turned and looked at me, and I wasn’t sure whether his eyes had filled with tears or I was just seeing the reflection of the stars in them.
“Yeah,” he paused and his voice caught before he spoke again. “I ditched my phone. Couldn’t take it anymore.”
This was one of the hardest things to accept about being a newly created vampire. Everyone in your life had to go, for obvious reasons. You could stick around for a while if you really wanted to, but sooner or later it had to be done. I mean, for starters, you no longer aged.
“What did you do? I mean, about your family? Wait, how old are you? Like, in real time,” Matt asked, and I was actually relieved to talk about these things.
“Three hundred fourteen,” I said and smiled as Matt’s eyes got wide.
“Whoa,” he said, drawing the word out as long as he could. “You are honestly ancient.”
“No,” I said with all seriousness. “In vampire time, I’m young. So is Lola. We’ve only got a few centuries. Some vampires count their age in millennia.”
At the mention of millennia, something came over Matt’s face, and I realized that the comprehension of what eternity really was had just hit him, even if he didn’t fully understand with his mind.
“Wow,” he sort of whispered. Then he lay all the way down in the grass and put his hands behind his head. “So how old are you in human years?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Me too,” Matt said, like we had just met at a party and found out we had something in common. “Hmmm...so what about your family?”
“Well, when I was created, they were all killed.”
The crickets chirped in the silence, and I was grateful that at least they were talking.
“What...what happened?”
“The vampire that created me. He killed all of my family, and me he left to transform.”
Matt didn’t say anything but reached across the short distance between us and grabbed my hand, interlacing his fingers with mine. The sensation was comforting and I realized I hadn’t held anyone’s hand in a long time.
“So you didn’t have anyone to leave?” he asked, although the answer was obvious.
“No, I didn’t.”
And suddenly, the strange man from the bar earlier this evening popped into my mind, and I knew something then that didn’t seem possible, but had to be.
“I think...I think I saw him earlier tonight,” I said, and the sound of the words made the thought more real.
“Wait? Who?”
“My creator.”
I filled Matt in on what had happened with Lola and the strange man at the bar. I hadn’t wanted to say these things to Lola, but they were there in my mind the moment I saw him, I just didn’t know how it could be.
“One thing I don’t understand is that he doesn’t look the same. I mean, it’s been a long time, but I would know him. And yet, there’s something about him that’s unmistakably familiar. I know it’s him.”
“Hmmmm. What do you think he wants? Is he dangerous?” Matt asked, and at the same time pulled my hand, still within his, onto his chest. I could feel his heart beating.
“I don’t know and yes, I think he’s dangerous. But,
the other thing is that he’s not a vampire.”
I knew the question Matt wanted to ask, and I was grateful that he didn’t ask it. I didn’t know how I knew this was my creator, and yet I didn’t recognize him and he wasn’t a vampire. Not to mention, there weren’t supposed to be any other species besides human and vampire.
“None of this makes any sense,” I said and sat up, taking my hand back from Matt so I could lean on it. “I don’t understand how this is all possible.”
“Sounds like you are about to figure it out,” Matt said, and once again I could see the stars reflected in his eyes, but this time, I knew they weren’t tears.
3
Matt came back with me to my apartment when dawn arrived. I invited him to stay again, and I meant it. I hoped I wouldn’t freak out on him again.
We wasted no time when we got back. The attraction between us was palpable, and I felt more comfortable with the idea of having sex with him and the idea of him staying here with me. Like afterward, we could wake up together and eat breakfast and clean up the apartment and do random daily tasks and that would be okay. We could do both.
I think I kissed him first, but honestly, it didn’t matter. He shut the door and we were suddenly very close together. I kissed him like I was hungry but without feeling a need to feed. He kissed me back like he was hungry too.
I really didn’t care where in the apartment this was going to happen. He could have taken me over the kitchen table, frankly, and that would have been fine with me. Eventually, we did make it back to the bedroom and left the door open.
We were not moving slowly. As soon as we were in the room, Matt took off all his clothes in what seemed to me like one fell swoop. Like he was superman, or something, fresh from the phone booth.
I must have been taking off my clothes at the same time because the next thing I knew, we were both naked and pressed together. It sounds weird, but time was moving in a funny way for me.
I walked backward toward the bed with him following me. When we reached the bed he lowered his body onto mine, and the weight of him felt good.
Bored To Death Page 7
