Diary of an Alligator Queen

by Winter Reid

  Chapter Twelve

  An asparagus spear drowned in a puddle of sauce on my plate. I pushed it out with my fork. Jackson spoke but I didn’t hear him, concentrating on my churning stomach. I’d forced down a good portion of the meat but I thought I would rather die than touch the vegetables—an unusual position for a sometimes vegetarian. I took another drink of wine, bitter and dry.

  “Nadine?” he said, and I realized I had missed something important.

  “I’m sorry?” I smiled at him and hoped it was convincing.

  A deep frown glued itself to his lips. We still weren’t right; hadn’t been since the alligator attack. I couldn’t blame him for being angry but it felt like more than that… a wholesale rejection of what I was going through, like it would all just go away if we worked hard enough at ignoring it. He hadn’t mentioned setting me up with a psychologist again, and he hadn’t spent the night since before I got my boot off. Even our text messaging had waned to the point I’d go days without hearing from him.

  “I said, Remy wouldn’t let me look at your chart,” he repeated.

  “Remy?” I asked, confused.

  “Doctor Renfield,” he said.

  I blinked twice and laughed out loud. Jackson looked a heartbeat away from taking me in for a forty-eight-hour hold.

  “Like in Dracula,” I said, waving the subject away with my hand. “The guy who ate bugs.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Okay,” he said warily, and then shook his head. “Nadine, is there something you need to tell me?”

  I swallowed, a flush rising from my chest. “No,” I said, reaching for my glass again. “Nope.”

  He took the wine away before I could drink it.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, holding the glass back and up. “Because you can tell me anything, baby. Anything at all.”

  He was making it hard to breathe. My stomach went tight again.

  “I don’t think so,” I whispered, taking my glass back from him a little rougher than was necessary.

  “Because there’s only one reason I can think of that he wouldn’t let me see your blood work.”

  I choked mid-sip and he leaned in closer.

  “Baby,” he whispered, “are you pregnant?”

  I cackled, drawing attention from the table beside us. Jackson scowled.

  “No,” I said, working to control myself. “I’m not pregnant.”

  “All right.” He sat back, eyeing the waiter and giving him a nod. I assumed that meant we were ready for the check. I tossed back the rest of the wine. To be honest, I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there. In addition to my tummy troubles of late, I’d been suffering from a different kind of upset.

  I wasn’t prudish but Jackson and I had been together for a long time. As a result, my body had become accustomed to doing certain things in a certain order with a certain frequency. In the two weeks or so since I’d last seen my vampire, said body had rebelled, my dreams becoming so intense that I was waking up shaking, feeling like I’d tear my hair out if I couldn’t get something inside of me that didn’t run on triple As. That Jackson was not the subject of those dreams made it all the more imperative that he be the one to scratch my proverbial itch. Firstly, because I did love him, and second, because the actual subject of my dreams was inappropriate at best.

  I stared at Jackson like a damn stalker, studying the small muscles that moved in his jaw, the length of his fingers where he tapped them on the table—his doctor’s hands, sure and steady. Dark hairs were sprinkled across his knuckles and along the backs of his hands, which tapered to elegant wrists and strong forearms.

  I leaned toward him. “You want to get out of here?” I asked.

  “You don’t want dessert?”

  I shook my head. “I want to go home.” Or to the car. To the alley behind the restaurant.

  He caught on and smiled. “In a minute.”

  I squirmed in my seat. “Please?”

  The waiter came back, sliding a slice of chocolate cake in front of me. I looked twice at the diamond ring perched in a dollop of frosting on the top. There was a loud pop, and I jumped. The waiter poured champagne into two flutes and held one out to me. I didn’t take it so he set it discreetly on the table and scurried away.

  “Nadine.” Jackson stood up and came around to my side of the table, kneeling by my side. “Remember the day we met?”

  I stared at the ring, a princess cut stone. “I fell.”

  He nodded. “Down two flights of stairs.”

  White gold. No, platinum. At least two carats.

  “I threw up.”

  He smiled and picked up the ring, licking frosting off the band. “Cocktail olives and vodka all over my mother’s BMW on the way to the ER.”

  My hand was suddenly in his.

  “Baby, you’re a mess. The shit you’ve put me through in the last six months probably shaved a solid ten years off my life expectancy. If there’s one thing it’s made me realize, it’s that I can’t stand the thought of anything else happening to you. I don’t want any more alligator attacks. I don’t want any more nights at the hospital unless I’m working. I just want to keep you safe. Marry me.”

  There was a kind of quiet whining in my ears, a tingling feeling that spread up from my neck, staining my cheeks. A kind of blinding red rage that made it hard to see or think straight.

  I’d been waiting for his proposal for ten long years.

  Ten years. Otherwise known as a decade.

  Ten years of waiting up late for him. Of broken dates, study groups, and call schedules. I’d missed my only cousin’s wedding.

  Ten years of doing his laundry, dishes, and taxes.

  Ten years of loving and supporting him. Of being patient. Of not pushing while all my friends were having babies. Babies! Ten years and the whole time all I’d really needed to do to get here was have a near-death experience. Because let’s be clear, if I hadn’t almost died twice, the night would have ended the way Saturday nights typically did—ten minutes of sixty-nine and missionary style. No ring. No champagne or cake; just the status quo.

  Marriage had been my two, then four, and eventually ten-year plan, but I’d always counted on having a husband who wanted me so that we could share our life together, as opposed to simply wanting me to keep me from offing myself.

  In the same instant, another part of me realized that I blamed Jackson very much for what happened to me in January. I’d spent two days in a hole with a monster and Jackson hadn’t even known I was gone until they brought me into the emergency room. One could argue that if he’d married me years before, the way he should have, I would have been too fat and pregnant to run anymore at all, much less at dusk when I should have been home, cooking dinner.

  But even more than all of those things, something inside me knew and understood what was happening to me. I’d been trying to shush it for weeks, trying to mask it as simple trauma, but it broke out at last, full force—the stomach aches, the lust, the hearing and healing. This bizarre connection to a man who had traumatized me, not once, but twice—none of it was normal. It was all about as abnormal as you could get. Abnormal and getting worse.

  “You… asshole!” I shouted, leaping to my feet and grabbing my purse off the chair. It was stuck and I had to yank it a few times to free the strap. I stormed toward the exit, stumbling over the runner in the foyer.

  The air outside was warm and I swallowed it in gasps, putting my hand against the stone building to keep myself upright. I thought I might vomit, the buzzing sound in my head rising again.

  “Nadine!” Jackson rushed out of the restaurant, pulling up short when he saw me. “What the hell has gotten into you?!”

  “You waited for an alligator attack to ask me to marry you!”

  “So?”

  “So that means you were fine with the way things were!” I shrieked.

  His face took on that slightly superior, smug expression he sometimes used with ‘the help’. Jackson was old sou
thern money, what can I say. “I’ve never heard you complain before.”

  My eyes went wide. “I was trying not to push you! I assumed that you wanted the same thing I did. You were just waiting for the right time.” After college, after med school, after residency.

  “I wasn’t sure I wanted to get married,” he said. “It was just seeing you laid out like that. I realized how lost I’d be if anything ever happened to you.”

  I rubbed at my temples with my fingers. “Jackson, listen to yourself. You just admitted that the only reason you want to bind your life to mine is because you realized you’d be put out if I died.”

  He looked a little uncomfortable. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “After a ten-year relationship.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “And that doesn’t strike you as odd or wrong in any way?”

  He came closer, rubbing my bare arms with his hands. “Does it matter how we got here? Just let me take care of you.”

  I groaned. “Like you have for the last month? Give me your phone.”

  There was no denying the nervousness in his expression. “What do you want my phone for?”

  I jerked back a little. “Is there something you don’t want me to see?”

  “No, it’s not that,” he hedged, and my liar radar went nuts.

  “Look,” I pulled mine out of my purse and opened my texts, holding it up so he could see. “I haven’t heard from you since Monday but you want to take care of me? How are you going to do that?”

  “I thought we could move in together and you could stay home—”

  “And what? Clean house? Plan summer parties? I’m not your mother, Jackson. I love my job. I worked my ass off to get it. I wouldn’t just give it up.”

  “Well I don’t want a wife that works.”

  “Oh, God,” I moaned, bending over at the waist to collect myself. How had we not had this conversation before? Maybe I was too scared of the answers. I straightened up. He was staring at me like he was seeing me for the first time, too, and I knew it wasn’t just the alligator that pushed him to do this.

  I’d been changing, ever since those days I’d spent in the hole. He’d seen it, too, even if he hadn’t known or understood. I wasn’t his sweet, passive girl anymore. I was harder, rougher around the edges. More honest. More like I had been before we’d met. He was betting hard that a ring would fix that. I almost wished it would. Almost. I swallowed hard.

  “I don’t think…” It was too much work to push the words out. “I think maybe we need to stop seeing each other.”

  His face fell, shocked and horrified, and then I saw it. A faint flicker of relief. “If… if that’s what you really think.”

  I nodded but couldn’t speak. It was too surreal, like I was watching some other poor girl. Watching her life fall to pieces.

  He took a breath.

  “Okay then,” he said, too easily. He jiggled his keys in his pocket. “You need a ride home?”

  I shook my head.

  “Let me take you home, Nadine.”

  “No.”

  “Fine. Be stubborn.” Bending in, he planted a soft kiss on my cheek, wet where the tears ran. “Call me when you change your mind.”

  I wondered if he’d heard me at all.

  And then he left me there, standing alone on the sidewalk.

  I walked the whole way home.

  The vampire was waiting for me, squatting in the entranceway to my building.

  “You’re upset,” he said, frowning as I unlocked the door.

  “If that’s the extent of your vampire ESP, you’re in trouble,” I answered, my heels tapping the old tile floor as I walked to the stairs.

  “ESP?” He followed too close behind.

  I turned around when I got to my doorway.

  “I haven’t invited you in,” I said.

  “Superstition and folklore,” he answered.

  “Manners,” I said.

  He nodded and I left the door open behind me, keeping the lights off. I wasn’t sure why. He came inside, still a little closer than was comfortable. My hands were shaking.

  “Don’t stand so close to me,” I whispered, half-singing.

  “You shouldn’t be walking alone at night,” he said. “What happened to the man who was here?”

  I turned around to face him. “That’s none of your business, Mr. Misogyny.”

  “My business?” He looked confused.

  “It’s not your concern,” I clarified.

  “You look…” He reached out to finger the sleeve of my dress.

  “Like the marrying type? Don’t touch me.” I slapped his hand away. “What do you want here, anyway?”

  He shook his head. “I thought I knew, but I’m no longer entirely sure. This is unusual for me as well.”

  I narrowed my eyes and looked him over. Traces of twin shiners lingered where I’d cracked him with the paperweight and his nose was still a little swollen, but overall, he looked more human than I’d ever seen him. The beard was gone. So was most of his hair, cut close on the sides and left a little long on top. He wore dark jeans and a long-sleeved Arkansas Tech t-shirt. His hands and fingernails were clean.

  “Suddenly you wear clothes and speak in full sentences?”

  “I’d forgotten,” he said.

  “Forgotten what? Pants? Words? Or that it’s impolite to go around ripping girls’ throats out?”

  I felt light-headed from the wine, queasy and nauseous from dinner. The absolutely surreal nature of the conversation I was having hit me like an eighteen-wheeler. My stomach lurched and I rushed to the bathroom, retching prime rib into the bowl. My arms trembled as I braced myself and my torso shook, still heaving long after the food was gone. I collapsed back against the wall, hugging my knees to my chest.

  My vampire sat on the edge of the tub, watching me.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “I’m changing,” I whispered. “I can feel it.”

  He heard me, quiet as I was, nodding but saying nothing.

  I covered my eyes and laughed, ridiculous as it sounds. When I looked again, he was kneeling in front of me, so close I yelped in surprise.

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  “My spin brush,” I said. He didn’t move and I felt his uncertainty.

  “Help me up,” I amended and he hoisted me to my feet. I shuffled to the sink, scrubbing my teeth twice before I looked at my reflection. Good thing, too.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said. Even in the faint glow of my night-light, my eyes were red and swollen from Jackson, and I had ruptured nearly every capillary in my face with my vomiting. It looked as though I’d been standing downwind from a graffiti artist working in red. I traced a line down my chest with my finger.

  “Fuck,” I said again. A blue bruise rose on my skin, spreading across my breastbone where I had held too tight to the toilet. I saw black and felt the room dip and sway around me.

  “Come with me,” he said and took my hand, grounding me, dragging me into the living room. I stopped at my desk and yanked at the bottom drawer, pulling out the secret stash of candy canes I kept there through the year to see me through until Christmas. He shook his head when I offered him one, leading me over to the couch instead.

  I peeled the cellophane down, finding some measure of calm in the familiar crinkle before I stuck the end in my mouth, the peppermint smooth and hard and sweet. Sitting back against the cushions, I kicked off my shoes.

  “Tell me,” I said after a minute.

  “It’s difficult to put into words.”

  “Try.”

  He sighed. “It’s easiest to say you’re dying, but it’s not true.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  I watched him struggle for the term.

  “You’re… molting,” he said at last. “Shedding your humanness.”

  “To become?”

  “Like me.”

  “The undead,” I whispered in d
isgust.

  He laughed. The ass. “Far from it. There’s no death; just metamorphosis.”

  “Like a butterfly?” I twisted the fringe on a pillow around my fingers.

  “That’s a very pretty way to look at it,” he cautioned.

  “Well what’s an ugly way?”

  “You’ll need to drink living blood to survive.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s more than enough. I’m asking what else I can expect.”

  “You’ll be faster. Stronger. Your senses more acute. Better able to heal.”

  We sat quietly for a minute.

  “How long do I have left?” I asked.

  “It’s different for everyone. The last man I turned changed in about a year. He was larger than you, however.”

  “It’s already been six months,” I groaned. “How does it work?”

  “Work?”

  “Is it a virus? Some kind of infection? Can I take some kind of antibiotic?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Pissed, I rose off the couch. He grabbed my still-sore wrist. I yelped and slapped him. “You’re always fucking hurting me!”

  He didn’t say anything but he didn’t let go either, and then I started crying.

  I wept from the gut up, collapsing back down onto the cushion, convulsing with the force of my grief. It was like I’d been balancing on the tip of a pin and had finally fallen off. It was too much. All of it: Jackson, this man—my vampire, my life—which I had worked so hard for. My heart felt torn to pieces, cliché as that may sound.

  After a few minutes, I felt his hand rest awkwardly on my head, as if he meant to comfort but was unsure how to do it. I pushed his fingers away.

  “It’s your fault,” I said, making my voice as cold as I could manage.

  He said nothing but nodded slowly.

  I laughed again in that manic, Mad Hatter way. “That’s it?”

  “What do you want me to say?” he asked, shrugging.

  I felt the stew of life boil up inside me, the melee of emotions that accompanies the shocking—the hate and rage and lust and loneliness that take over when logic fails and the mind gives way to the hypothalamus, to the drives to breathe and fight and fuck. I sucked in air, afraid the feeling would swell too big and split my skin like overcooked sausage. Afraid I couldn’t tamp it down.