by Winter Reid
“And the man you were with? Who was he?”
“I have no idea.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Oh fuck you, you puritan. How well do you know the people you murder?”
I recognized the way he moved his hand up my thigh, an echo of the scene he’d witnessed. I grabbed at my hem and slid it back down, blinking back tears. He wiped the stray ones away with his fingers.
“What if I hadn’t found you when I did? What would you have done with him?” he asked gently. “It would be one thing if you really wanted him, but—”
“You just left me there,” I whispered.
Meidias looked confused.
“When you—” I broke off, unsure how to finish. Kidnapped me? Abused me? Assaulted me? “When we met. You left me there.”
He sighed. “Nothing I can do will change that. I don’t have a rational explanation because there isn’t one. It was cruel and vicious.”
I sniffled. “You could lie to me.”
The corners of his mouth went up and he offered me his sleeve. I think he just meant for me to wipe my eyes on it but I wiped my nose, too.
“Because,” I started and my voice cracked, “there is nothing about this that doesn’t make me feel like some kind of stupid, anti-feminist, Stockholm syndrome sucker. You could lie to me so I don’t feel like I’m crazy for being with you. For wanting to be with you.”
“I was an animal—”
“I know you were,” I cut in.
“—until you.”
As had become my standard operating procedure in such moments, I pointed to my neck. The second scar he’d given me was still there—less noticeable, but shiny, pale, and ropey all the same.
He grunted and leaned in to kiss it. “Maybe still a little animal,” he whispered. “Would it make it better or worse if I told you I stayed and watched you? That I hid in the trees and waited to leave until help came?”
I shrugged.
“Because I didn’t stay, and I didn’t watch. I didn’t even think of it. Would it help if I said that by the time I left you, you were so damaged I should have killed you? That I would have killed you had I been in a better state of mind?”
When I didn’t answer, he put his fingers against my mouth and trailed them down my neck, hooking them into my neckline where his knuckles brushed my breasts.
“And if I told you I regretted what I’d done to you? That it didn’t move me to think I would be with you for centuries? Would that make you feel better? Would you rather none of this ever happened at all? That we never knew each other as anything but a ghost and a dream?”
I answered, but it was too low to make out clearly. He heard me though, just the same.
“Say it again,” he ordered.
“No,” I croaked.
He leaned in, kissing me behind the ear.
“So tell me then, my heart, what can I do to make it right for you? Because I can’t change what I’ve already done.”
I raised my chin and he pressed his mouth to the underside of my jaw.
“I don’t know,” I breathed.
“Should I take care of you?” He followed my pulse down my neck, resting his head against my collarbone. “Kill for you?”
I shifted in his lap, and he dropped his head to my breast. His hand came up to brush the swell of it, and he ran his thumb across my nipple. I arched back, his free hand flat against my back to anchor me. He leaned in and took the nipple into his mouth, sucking at it through my dress.
“Take me home?” I whispered, when he stopped to catch his breath. “Please.”
He smiled.
“What did you think about what you were doing to me?” I asked. “I mean at the time? When we were in the hole together?”
He exhaled like he’d been expecting the question.
“I didn’t think,” he answered. “When I remember that time, it’s scattered and frantic. I remember what you felt like, not what I thought of you.”
“Did you feel bad?”
“No. I felt hungry.” He ran his fingers over my hand. “And angry with you.”
“Angry?”
He nodded. “You fought so hard against me. I remember the sting your fingernails left behind. You kicking me over and over. And the way you screamed… you just wouldn’t stop.”
“I wonder why.”
His hand went to my scar. “I remember how you tasted when I bit you. The relief that came from drinking from you. The way your smell filled every inch of that hole. You were in my mouth. In my nose. In my hands… my vision. Like I was swimming in you.”
“Sounds great.”
He ignored me and ran his hand down my thigh. “I remember your legs. The feel of your skin, the muscle beneath. You were so powerful.”
“I didn’t feel powerful.”
“You saved my life. What could be more powerful than that?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A couple of weeks later, I woke up one afternoon looking like I’d taken a few good hits to the face; the upper lip to be precise. I moved my tongue through my mouth. My upper canines were loose in their sockets and I could taste the blood that seeped out when I wiggled them. Above each was a hard, hot knot in my gum. I flashed back to tenth grade when my wisdom teeth fought my molars. For days I’d looked like I was hoarding peanuts in my cheeks.
It had been a long time since I’d lost a tooth and I’d forgotten how obsessively you wiggle them; how the wiggling brings a strange combination of pain and relief. How it eases, however briefly, the constant itching in your gums. In the shower? Wiggle the teeth. Watching TV? Wiggle the teeth. Lost in a crying jag on the kitchen floor? Wiggle the teeth. It’s not like I could go to the dentist. I had a pretty good idea what was coming in after them.
After two hours, the pain was intolerable. There’s a reason babies teethe when they’re too little to remember it. I wanted to die.
I couldn’t go to Jackson. Not after the club. I thought I might be able to convince someone else in the ER to call something in for me but it was unlikely. I picked up the phone and used the backdoor number Jackson had given me years ago for emergencies.
“St. Vincent Regional Medical Center. ER.”
“Hi.” I said and thought for a minute.
“Hello?”
“Yeah. Hi, there. Is Dr. Renfield in?” My voice was funny, liked I’d stuffed my mouth with cotton.
“Who’s calling?”
“The girl who wrestles pit bulls.”
“Hold on.”
There were a few bars of instrumental music I vaguely remembered from the eighties, though it didn’t sound anything like it had when it hit the Top 40.
Ten minutes passed before someone picked up. “I thought I told you never to call here,” a man’s voice said.
I blinked. “Dr. Renfield?”
“Yeah. I’m just messin’ with you. Who’s this?”
“Nadine Levitt. I used to date Jackson.”
“The redhead?”
I winced.
“Kidding,” he said. “What can I do for you, darlin’?”
“I need some pain pills.”
He was quiet for a minute. “Wrestling pit bulls again?”
“You do remember.”
“I do but I’m not going to prescribe you pain pills over the phone just because you say you need them, sweetheart. I’m afraid you’ll have to come visit me in the flesh.”
I sighed. “Jackson isn’t there, is he?”
“Nope.”
“Is this gonna take hours?”
“You want the stinkin’ pills or not?”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“I’ll let them know you’re coming.”
The hospital lobby was hell, rank with sickness, death, and blood. I went to admitting and gave the woman my name. She popped right up out of her chair and led me through a door and down a series of empty hallways. We came out through a secret entrance to the suite of rooms that made up the emerge
ncy department.
“This way the patients in the waiting room don’t see you trotting in ahead of them,” she informed me, leading me over to the glassed-in nurse’s station. “Wait here.”
The woman poked her head in through a door at the side and spoke to a pretty blonde nurse in a pink scrub top. The lanyard around her neck was covered in pins and stickers, and her ID card said her name was Emmy. And Emmy the nurse did not look happy to see me.
“Come with me,” she ordered, coming out of the office and motioning for me to follow her into a small room down the hall. She pointed to a hospital bed and pulled the blood pressure monitor over. Her hands were small and quick and she tilted her head to the side to watch the numbers. I put her somewhere around twenty-one, twenty-two at the outside. She was fidgeting—tucking her hair behind her ears and playing with her ID badge. Finally, she blushed and the blood spread out in her cheeks. I gripped the edge of the cot a little tighter.
“You know, Jackson’s not in tonight,” she said, and straightened up, looking me square in the face.
Jackson. Not Dr. Cooper.
I pointed to my face. It didn’t look any better than it had a few hours ago. “I didn’t come here to see Jackson, honey.”
Emmy blinked her extra-long lashes. “I just think you should move on,” she said.
If he’d been nearby, she would have peed on him.
I tried to keep my voice level. “Don’t you think this is a little inappropriate?”
“You should know that he has. Moved on, I mean.”
Oh no. On an average day, I could have handled this shit with grace and dignity. Pain makes me cranky
“Sweets, Jackson can fuck every prom queen from here to Memphis if he wants to. I’m so far past moved on, I’m in a whole other country.”
She clenched her jaw and looked back at the pressure cuff, peeling apart the Velcro. Without speaking again, she took my temperature and pulse, recording everything on a computer next to the bed. Finally she moved toward the door, turning around at the last minute.
“You’re not like I thought you’d be,” she said.
“Better or worse?” I asked.
She shrugged and walked out.
“Get a ring,” I yelled at her back.
She gave me a quick, wide-eyed glance over her shoulder and nodded.
I leaned forward on the cot. “And watch out for his bitch mother.”
Emmy bolted, and Dr. Renfield strolled in right after she left. I assumed he overheard most of our conversation because he entered singing Dolly-style:
“Nadine. Na-dine. Nay-dine. Nay-dee-e-ine!”
“Funny,” I said.
He looked almost exactly the same as he had months earlier except his hair had grown out long enough he could pull the very back into a tiny ponytail. The rest still puffed out around his narrow face.
“Nadine the Alligator Queen.” He came up to stand right in front of me. “What new brand of trouble have you gotten into?”
I reached deep down into my soul for a good answer and lied my tuchus off.
“I was born with a third set of teeth.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not all of them. Just my upper canines.”
“I thought supernumerary teeth were typically incisors.”
I hadn’t known it was actually a thing. Raising a shoulder, I scrunched my nose up. “Search me.”
He pulled on a pair of purple gloves and reached into my mouth, running his fingers over the knots on my gums. He pressed harder and tears ran down my cheeks.
“Well, I’ll be damned. They didn’t take them out when you were little?”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. He passed me a tissue.
“They weren’t bothering me then. I didn’t even know they were there until I had x-rays in fourth grade.”
He nodded. “I wouldn’t mind doing some x-rays myself. I’ve never seen supernumerary teeth in person before.”
Yeah, no. “I left my job so this visit is coming out of my own pocket. I’d like it to cost as little as it can.”
“You know, darlin’, you should really see your dentist about this.”
I snorted. “You think I wanted to come here? I called Dr. Bowman’s office this morning. He’s out of town until tomorrow afternoon. I have an appointment but they wouldn’t give me anything.”
Renfield mumbled something about lazy specialists.
“I’m sorry?” I asked.
“They didn’t give you the number of whoever was covering for him?”
“Would I be here if they did?”
He smirked, pulling off the gloves off with a snap and taking out his prescription pad. “Don’t get smart with me, young lady. Ibuprofen, 800 milligrams every four hours, and Tylenol with codeine. This is strictly to get you through the night, understand. I’ll give you twenty pills, just in case. Stop at the grocery store and pick up some baby food and frozen peas.”
“Frozen peas?”
“Cheaper than an ice pack and infinitely reusable. Now get the hell out of here. I have real patients to see.”
“Thanks.” I took my prescriptions and hopped off the cot.
“Don’t mention it. Anything for the girl who took Cooper down a notch.”
I suddenly remembered what Jackson said at the restaurant.
“Dr. Renfield?” I called, following the back of his coat down the hall. “About Jackson—”
“I don’t get involved, honey.”
“No it’s nothing like that.” I reached out and grabbed his sleeve. “It’s just that before we broke up he said something.”
“I’m sure he said a lot of things.”
I shook my head. “He said you wouldn’t let him see my labs. After the alligator thing. I was wondering why.”
He raised his bushy eyebrows. “I can’t remember. Doctor/patient privilege I suppose.”
“Yeah but he was my doctor, too.”
“And he knew better than to pull that. He wasn’t your doctor for long.” Renfield winked, turning away again.
“He thought I might have been pregnant,” I said, loud enough I caught Emmy looking up from her computer.
Dr. Renfield shot her a glance and came back to me, bending his head close to mine.
“Honey,” he said, his smile full of mischief, “if you’d been pregnant I wouldn’t have told him, but I sure as hell would have told you.”
“Make it stop,” I begged, moving the half-thawed bag of frozen corn off my mouth so I could whine better.
Meidias smoothed my hair off my forehead and tucked it behind my ear. I’d woken up ten minutes earlier with my head on his thigh and the rest of my body curled up on the couch beside him, Olive perched on my butt.
“What do you want me to do?” He was watching an old western on cable with the sound way down. The light around us was celluloid blue. It danced on the walls and over me.
I ran my tongue over my teeth. They were looser. So loose they made wet, crunchy noises when I wiggled them. “Knock them out.”
He laughed.
“Please?” I sat up so I could see him.
He reached over, stroking the side of my face, his eyebrows drawn down. “You were on the floor.”
“So?” I’d taken the prescribed dose of each drug before leaving the pharmacy. Neither seemed to do much, so I’d taken a second hit of the narcotic when I’d gotten home, just in case my new vampire nature was getting in the way of the drugs. I’d gone to the bathroom, then back into the kitchen for my water. After that, things went fuzzy.
“Maybe you’ve had enough excitement for one night,” he offered.
“It hurts.”
“I know.” He rubbed my scalp.
“No, you don’t,” I argued. “You don’t remember.”
The side of his mouth twitched. “True, but I empathize.”
“Please?” I pulled away from him. “Please do this for me.”
“They’ll come out when they’re ready.”
&nb
sp; Tears streamed down my face. “But I’ve seen you knock out hundreds of fangs.”
“More like a dozen,” he said, “and I used a rock. I’m assuming you want to keep your other teeth.”
“I don’t even care anymore.”
“Taking those two out won’t stop the ones above them from hurting.”
“No but maybe they’ll come down faster.”
“I think that’s poor logic, my love. To a certain extent.” It was still a denial, but his face was softening, opening.
I put my arms around his neck and tucked my forehead in under his ear. “Please,” I whispered. “Before the drugs wear off.”
He sighed. “I don’t have any tools.”
“I do. I have pliers.”
He cursed under his breath. In Latin.
Ten minutes later, I sat in a kitchen chair with a towel around my neck. He’d shoved said chair all the way back against the wall so it wouldn’t move. My toolbox was on the table and he rummaged through it until he found what he was looking for, muttering profanity the whole time. I wouldn’t have called his final choice ‘needle-nose’ but they were thinner than your average pliers. Shorter, too. And they had rubberized tips. When it came to pliers, I had a pretty vast collection. My dad sent me tools for Chrismukkah on a regular basis, his yearly lamentation that my factory setting hadn’t included a penis.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” Meidias stood in front of me, waving the pliers for emphasis.
I nodded.
He leaned against my torso, using his weight to keep me in the chair. I opened my mouth wide and he put his free hand inside of it, pushing my head back against the wall and pulling my jaw down at the same time. He fit the pliers over my left canine, kissed me on the nose, wiggled the tooth around a bit, and then yanked.
I’m generally not a screamer, with the months since I’d met Meidias being the exception, but the sound that came out of my mouth in that moment could have stripped the paint off the cupboards. My ancient, deaf neighbor thumped her cane against the wall; this from the woman who watched television so loud you could hear it all the way to the corner store.
Meidias shifted, moving the pliers to my other tooth. I fought him like a nachzehrer.
