Raina sighed. “I think it’s pretty safe to say that the chances of me finding a date anywhere in the next few years are slim to none.”
“Bullshit. You’re hot.”
“Says you.”
“Yeah, says me,” Brenna countered. “You’re cute as hell, you know it, and you always try to hide it.”
“How?”
“By dressing like a librarian,” she said, gesturing to her friend’s businesslike but semi-gothic outfit – modest-length skirt, long-sleeved silk blouse, thigh-high stockings, and low-heeled dress shoes, all black.
“There’s nothing wrong with the way I dress. I have to look presentable for my clients.”
“You’re dressing yourself down because you don’t want to show off what you’ve got.”
“Dressing down? You make it sound like I’m wearing pajama pants, a dirty T-shirt, and bunny slippers.”
“Well … no offense, my sweet, but it’s not exactly a flirty outfit.”
“Well … some guys like the understated look.” Raina shook her head. “Besides, it’s not like anybody’s interested in anything that I have to offer for looks, anyhow.”
“I’ve always been interested.”
“Besides you, I mean.”
“What, my opinion doesn’t count, anymore?”
“You’re biased.”
“I’m not biased, I’m bisexual … but that’s beside the point.”
“Friends can’t tell friends they’re hot. It’s not a fair call,” Raina insisted. “It’s like a mother telling her daughter that she’s pretty. It’s not an objective opinion.”
“Okay, you want a second opinion? Watch this.” Brenna flagged down the blonde bartender that was already returning with a fresh stein of beer. “Hey, can I ask you something personal, dear?”
The blue-eyed blonde gave a perky nod. “Sure!”
“You promise not to get offended?”
“Offended? Hell no! Shit, the things some of these guys ask me here…”
Brenna put an arm around Raina’s shoulders and gestured theatrically. “Would you go gay for my friend, here?”
For a second, the bartender only gave a blank deer-in-the-headlights stare. “Do what?”
“Hypothetically speaking, if you were looking to get with another woman, wouldn’t you want to get your freak on with someone like my pretty friend here?” she persisted as Raina hid her face with her hands, groaning.
The petite blonde looked at Raina for a moment, almost appearing to seriously ponder the question, before declaring, “Oh, hell yeah! She’s a cutie! I mean, c’mon! Look at her! I’d be all over that in a second!” And then, after a second or two passed and her smile faltered just a bit, she asked, “Why? I mean, she’s not really…?”
“No, no, for the last time, no! I am not gay!” Raina cried, throwing her hands in the air. “Just because I’m not married and I don’t have a boyfriend right now doesn’t automatically mean I’m into chicks, okay? Jesus!”
“Oh, good,” said the blonde, sounding almost relieved, “because, um … neither am I.” And she stood there for a moment, awkwardly wringing her hands, then spun on her heel and immediately decided she needed to be elsewhere. Raina and Brenna watched her abrupt departure, glanced at one another, and broke out laughing.
“Please, don’t ever do that to me again,” Raina said after awhile.
“Aw, c’mon. What’s with all the homophobia here?”
“Homophobia?”
“Yeah, y’know … queer fear,” Brenna elaborated.
“I know what it means. I don’t have a fear of queers.”
“You’re afraid of me.”
“You’re not queer.”
“Queerer than you,” she insisted with a nod and a genuine, fang-baring grin, “regardless of which definition of ‘queer’ you prefer.”
“Yeah, well … as a human, I have good reason to be afraid of you.”
Brenna frowned. “You’re not gonna go playing the race card on me now, are you?”
“Sorry, but you know it’s true.”
“What, that you’re afraid of me?”
Raina hesitated. “Look, you know it’s not that I don’t trust you, but…”
“What? You’re seriously afraid of me?” Brenna interrupted, appearing genuinely shocked. “When did this happen? What changed? What did I do?”
“Don’t. Please, just don’t go there with me right now,” Raina said, picking up her drink again. “Let’s just play nice and get buzzed like normal folks, okay?”
Brenna clinked her beer stein to Raina’s glass and they both took a long sip, with Raina taking in more than Brenna, for once. Brenna set her mug down and laid a hand upon her friend’s shoulder.
“If this is about your parents, then…”
Raina silenced her with a raised hand, hesitating to reply as she swallowed. “Not in public.”
“Fine, not now,” she surrendered, “but we are so going to hit that topic later on tonight.”
“Not if I get drunk enough, we won’t.”
“The more, the better. Alcohol is like a truth serum with you. Every time you get plastered, the shit that you wind up confessing to me at random gets more and more interesting.”
“Or depressing,” Raina added.
“Only the stuff about your parents.”
“Brenna,” Raina said in a low, warning tone.
“Okay, okay…”
After a few moments, Raina relieved the awkward pause by adding, “Whatever I say when we’re drinking won’t do you any good if you can’t remember it the next morning, anyway.”
Brenna laughed. “See, that’s the thing. You’ve told me lots of things when you’re drunk that you never would have told me sober, but I’m sure you don’t even remember half of them. I can never get drunk enough to black out unless I’m really, really trying. I can drink any of you humans under the table two times over, and you know it.”
“Yeah, you’ve proven it a few times.”
“And no offense, my sweet, but you are never gonna live down what happened last Halloween.”
Feeling her jaw tighten slightly, Raina thought, Great, she would have to bring that up again, wouldn’t she? As usual, she aimed to abruptly steer the conversation away before it could get too uncomfortable. She hadn’t had an especially bad night in awhile, and she wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible.
“Yeah, well … hey, at least I wasn’t driving.” Raina patted her friend’s hand. “Y’know, you’re the perfect designated driver. You can match me drink-for-drink, and even if I’m totally gone, you’re still safe to drive.”
“Behold, the beauty of being a bat, my sweet,” she replied with an elegant, open-armed gesture.
There was almost a full minute of silence between them as the boisterous ambience of the sports bar covered what would have been an otherwise awkward moment. Brenna leaned back and stretched a bit, holding her arms overhead. Raina watched out of the corner of her eye, fully expecting her friend’s ample breasts to come free of the black lace-up, strapless corset she wore. Somehow, they remained in place discreetly, and the nearby men were spared a free show. Obviously sensing their gaze, she arched her back a bit more, almost deliberately posing in such a way that the risk of exposure seemed inevitable. Cleavage, but no nipples for the boys tonight – there was a fifteen-dollar cover charge for the privilege of that sight when she was on the clock at the club two streets west.
After awhile, Raina finally sighed, “I still can’t believe I did that.”
Brenna turned towards her again after giving a flirty smile to one of the gawkers at the pool table across the room. “What?”
“Last Halloween.”
“You mean when you started kissing on everyone?” Brenna gladly reminded her. “Including me?”
“Not so much that.” Actually, she hadn’t remembered kissing Brenna at all that night … nor did she remember much of anything else.
“What?”
“Hooking up with Steve. And in your bed, of all places.”
“Hey, now. What’s wrong with my bed? It’s a nice setup. I paid damn good money for it.”
“Isn’t there some kind of rule of general household etiquette that says it’s not okay to do it on your friend’s bed?”
Brenna laughed, combing her fingers through her waist-long, shiny black hair. “Nah, I was cool about it. I didn’t care. It’s not like you stained the sheets or anything.”
“You mean you checked?”
“Not exactly, no. Then again, the designs on my sheets hide just about everything, so even if you did, I never saw it. Like I said, no big deal.”
“But … you were there when it happened!”
“Well, duh! I wasn’t going to just drop you off at your place and hope nothing bad happened to you. I wanted to make sure you were in a safe environment. Plus, I didn’t want to risk the chance you’d pass out and choke to death on your own vomit.”
“How … lovely,” Raina responded, wrinkling her nose with disgust. “But that’s not the point. I mean, you were there. There’s only half of a wall between the bed and the sofa in that apartment of yours.”
“Yeah, and even I had to have a smoke when you two were done,” she giggled. “Honestly, though, I was outside on the balcony the whole time. I probably smoked half a pack while I was out there.”
“The balcony right outside the bedroom?”
“No, the one on the other side!” she insisted, starting to sound a bit offended. “God! What, did you think I could just stand out there on the patio looking in and just watch?”
“Well, as much as you’re always hitting on me, why wouldn’t you?”
“Because then I would’ve had to join in, and that would’ve totally crossed the line.”
“Not that I would’ve remembered if you had, anyway,” she confessed, feeling more embarrassed by the memory every time her friend kept resurrecting it. “Seriously, I was so messed up, my memory of that entire night isn’t even a blur. It’s just flat out gone. One minute we were here in the bar, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up next to some random guy and making a mad dash to the bathroom to puke my guts out.”
“Lightweight,” Brenna teased her with a nudge of her elbow. “At least you didn’t barf on my bed or the floor.”
Taking her eyeglasses off for a moment to blow a loose eyelash from one of the lenses, Raina once again fought the urge to admit that it wasn’t the hangover that caused her nausea, but the sudden overwhelming panic attack she’d suffered. She had never slept with a stranger before that night. She considered herself a borderline neurotic when it came to her fears of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Finding herself half-naked next to a man whose name she didn’t even know, her skirt and blouse stained, the mild soreness below that she did not recall having earned, and … well, it was a wonder she hadn’t had an aneurysm from the crazed fit of sobbing she’d fallen into as she’d sat there upon the floor, locked in Brenna’s bathroom. Even if the guy hadn’t been such a jerk by taking off immediately and never calling her, she was sure that any man would have been scared away after hearing her bawl like that.
Putting her glasses back on, she forced herself to meet Brenna’s beautiful emerald-green eyes for a moment. “Why didn’t you stop me?”
“From throwing up?”
“From sleeping with Steve.”
“What, was I supposed to go in there and try to wake you up while he was humping away?” Brenna asked with a laugh. She quickly saw the disapproval in Raina’s stare, and her humor wilted. “Okay, okay … bad joke.”
“Very bad.”
Brenna paused for a moment, visibly feeling pushed into a mode of seriousness that she rarely showed. She idly wiped her thumb up and down the side of the large mug of beer, clearing away the condensation that had formed upon it. It took her long enough to say anything that, for a moment, Raina almost became angered by her reluctance. The events of that night had been a very touchy subject between them for the past few months, to say the least.
“Look … you know how much I like you. And it’s no secret that I like you more than just as a friend. I know you’re sick of hearing it, and I know I tease the hell out of you about it, but … that’s just how I am, and I can’t change it.”
“You weren’t bisexual before the Change.”
“Actually, I was. I didn’t date girls, but I’d fooled around a bit. I even had a threesome with a married couple once. I mean, yeah, the Change always seems to turn every other human into a raging sex fiend in one way or another,” she said, “but that’s beside the point. The fact of the matter is, Raina … you’re my best friend. I mean … my best friend. And you know I’d never do anything that I ever thought might hurt you. But that night, I … I almost went a little bit too far.”
Raina eyed her almost suspiciously. She’d never heard Brenna speak anything at all about that last Halloween that didn’t involve teasing her, or making some manner of a lewd reference. Moreover, she’d very rarely heard Brenna speak so frankly about the nature of their friendship. Things had always been a little … weird … between them, to say the least. But Raina always had regarded it as more of a bonus than a bone of contention. The human-vampire relationship they had was strange enough, but the sexual tension was actually more of a reassurance than an irritant to Raina. She felt far less threatened by Brenna for the fact that there was an allusion to love between them, rather than the possibility that her friend might ever entertain the dark fantasy of tearing fangs into her flesh and drinking her life away. As long as she knew that Brenna truly cared for her, Raina felt that she would be less likely to give in to any random urges of bloodlust … although she wasn’t so sure about her friend’s ability to keep her sexual lust in check. After all, homophobia was a lesser issue than worrying about being seen as food.
Digging her clove cigars and lighter out of her own purse in anticipation of an outside smoke break, Brenna admitted, “It was totally my fault you got drunk, for starters. I was pushing drinks on you that night because … well … I just wanted to get you shitfaced. Not just tipsy, not a little crazy, but straight up shit-faced. Y’know … just for fun.”
“You’ve seen me get drunk plenty of times.”
“Not that drunk! You were so hosed, I was kinda scared you’d get alcohol poisoning,” Brenna said with wide eyes. She paused. “Anyway, I … well, I didn’t exactly set out to get you laid with Steve that night, either, but … well, I knew the guy was clean, I knew he wasn’t a serial killer, and he just happened to show up at the perfect time.”
“So, you set me up with one of your ex-boyfriends, and…”
“Look, you needed to get laid in a very, very bad way, my sweet,” she explained. “Steve was just about the first guy I’ve seen that you didn’t push away when he started hitting on you.”
“That’s because I was completely wasted.”
“Not when I introduced you to him, you weren’t. He started talking to you by the pool table before I ever knew he was even there. And, yeah, I did kind of coach him a little bit whenever you were in the restroom, but the two of you were totally hitting it off. You wanted him. You can’t deny that. You wanted him because he had something you needed.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” she groaned, rolling her eyes, “he had a penis.”
Brenna laughed, giving her shoulder a playful swat. “C’mon, what he had was a dose of self-esteem! I swear, I’ve never seen you happier and smiling so much than when you were talking with him that night.”
“And nothing boosts a girl’s self-esteem like a drunken one-night stand,” Raina quipped bitterly as she again turned and looked up to the televisions. “It was bad enough that I was all paranoid about turning up pregnant or diseased after that, but the guy totally acted like he didn’t know me at all the next time I saw him.”
“I know the guy was an asshole in that sense, but c’mon. The point is, you’re only single because you want to be. It
’s not like the only reason he went for you was because you looked like an easy target.”
“Can’t get much easier than a Plain Jane that’s loaded full of Jaeger bombers and Everclear-soaked cherries,” Raina sighed, watching some random basketball game on the screen with total disinterest. She gulped almost a fourth of her drink as she attempted to drown the resurgent memories of last autumn. After a moment, she added, “If I really wanted to be single right now, then I wouldn’t give a damn about the fact that I can’t get a date to save my life. Instead of being depressed about being alone, I’d actually be happy about it.”
Brenna turned in her seat to lean close enough to murmur into Raina’s ear. “Look, you’re only single because you’re always playing hard to get. Do you really need me to sit here and point out the fact that three different guys have been checking you out all night long?” Raina began to turn her head, but Brenna stopped her with an arm around her shoulders that pulled her closer. “Don’t look. One’s at the other end of the bar, and the other two are playing pool in the back corner.”
“Give me a break. You’re the long-legged vampire with the pretty eyes and the huge rack, remember? They’re checking you out,” Raina insisted.
“Okay, then explain why their eyes were following you when you walked out awhile ago to go suck that chick’s blood.”
She sighed and shook her head, gesturing to herself almost angrily. “Look at me! I mean, seriously. What do I have going for me? Nerdy glasses, small boobs, a crooked spine, a belly that’s growing like I’m pregnant, and an ass that’s getting wider every minute while my metabolism is coming to a screeching halt.” She picked up her drink and gestured to it. “Of course, this stuff isn’t exactly making me skinnier, but it’s cheaper than Prozac, so…”
The Darkest Colors Page 2
