She almost wanted to tell him, “Yes, please, yes, your bed—now and forever.” But she wasn’t Imogene. She didn’t have the balls to say something like that, and she wasn’t even sure what would happen once they got to his bed. Whatever had just happened in the bathroom had been good—real good—but was she ready for whatever came next?
He walked her past rows of shops filled with clothes she would never be able to pull off. A bunch of chubby tourists ate ice cream outside the local creamery. There was a shoe store with a pair of stilettos covered in crystals. Ian paused outside the Tube Dude shop. Tube Dudes were big, metal statues of stick figures, all smiling, doing any number of things: holding a mailbox, waving, fishing—but always smiling. Ian posed by one, and Celia laughed when she realized he kind of looked like a Tube Dude: lanky, tall, with an unshakable grin.
“You’re my Tube Dude,” she said, and he gave her a hug.
They ended up walking away from all the shops and tourists until they made it to a waterfront park overlooking the harbor that separated St. Arthur’s from Lazaret. The city lights reflected off the harbor water, and she smelled the comforting scent of sea creatures and seafood.
Ian leaned his elbows on the edge of the boardwalk that poked like a pinkie finger into the water. “Do you know anything about astronomy?”
She stood next to him and leaned against his shoulder. “Nope.”
“Me neither.”
“You know every answer on Jeopardy!, but you don’t know about constellations?”
“Must have skipped that class at school.”
“How many nights have you spent on beaches under the stars?”
“Several,” he said. “But I wasn’t usually looking at the stars.”
Celia wasn’t dense. She knew what he was saying, which made her think: God, how many women has he been with? How experienced is he? Based on what she knew of him from Ralph, Ian Hasselback had been a world-class champion surfer until the shark attack. Women liked champions and surfers and men who looked like Ian.
All of a sudden, Celia felt really nervous and twitchy, which was probably why she blurted out, “I’ve never had an orgasm.”
His brow furrowed. “What?”
“I’ve never had an orgasm.”
He turned to face her, one arm still resting on the boardwalk bannister. He looked like he might cry. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Well. It’s not like genocide or jokes about disabled people,” she said.
He drummed his fingertips. “Do you want an orgasm?”
She shrugged. “I think so.”
He stood tall and posed like Superman. “Do you want me to give you one?”
She thought about all the times he’d made her feel like she was about to pee—or the times when she felt like there was something on fire between her legs. No one but Ian had ever done that to her before, so she said, “Sure.” She thought Dr. Savage would be proud.
Ian took her hand and started walking.
“Where are we going?”
“Home.”
“Wait, you’re going to give me an orgasm right now?”
“Well, not right now. We’re in a park.”
“Oh,” she said. Luckily, she had super human speed. Otherwise, she never would have been able to keep up with the pace of Ian’s long legs. She considered kicking off her heels, but Imogene would have killed her.
By the time they got to the car, Ian was practically carrying her. She giggled. “Ian!” He didn’t even open the passenger side door. He just lifted her into the convertible and slid into the driver’s seat like a runner into home base.
If she thought Ian was a conscientious driver, she was wrong. He drove like a maniac back to the Sleeping Gull Apartments, which made her laugh. She kept her hand on his knee for the ride.
They made it back in record time. Even Imogene would have been impressed. Ian carried Celia like his new bride from the car to her front door, which he kicked open. Imogene had her sunglasses poised on the end of her nose. She chewed absentmindedly on the top of an empty blood bag and watched The Lost Boys on TV.
“What are you doing home already?” she asked.
“I’m going to give Celia her first orgasm.”
Imogene pushed her sunglasses up on her head and actually looked interested. “Can I watch?”
“No.”
“Typical.” She flipped her sunglasses back down. “I’m gonna hang out with Heidi.” She clomp-clomped in her big old boots onto Celia’s front porch, and Ian used his foot to slam the door behind her.
With her hair hanging loose over her shoulders and her dress, again, about to fall off, Ian carried Celia to the bedroom and plopped her down on the edge of her bed. She giggled as he took off his suit jacket and threw it on the floor, then knelt between her legs and put his huge hands on the outside of her thighs. The way he carried her, touched her, he made her feel small. No one ever made her feel small, but with Ian, Celia felt like a forest sprite.
He looked up at her and smiled. “Hell-oh.”
She realized what he was looking at and covered her fangs. She chuckled behind the palm of her hand.
“I think she’s excited.”
She nodded.
“Lie down,” he said.
She started lying back, but he stood up.
“Wait, wait.” He pulled a pillow from the top of her bed and put it behind her head. He used his fingers to brush hair off her forehead and kissed her nose, which made her giggle some more.
He was right, Celia was excited. She felt like a little kid on Christmas morning, about to open her last present only to find a pony inside.
Ian resumed his position on the floor between her legs. That’s when it started.
Celia had her eyes closed, so she couldn’t be sure what exactly Ian did down there. She experienced the occasional sensation of having to pee, but then she remembered she couldn’t pee, so she didn’t have to worry about that. In fact, after the initial couple seconds, Celia didn’t worry about a damn thing.
Her mind was empty. If there was such a thing as negative thought process (and there might have been; she did know Ralph), she experienced it. There were vague images, like the time she glanced down and put her hand in Ian’s hair. There was the flash of his bright blue eyes. Other than that, it was all a lot like her first bite: black out, blotto, gone.
Things went from “it started” to “it happened” pretty damn fast. By then, she had one of her hands woven between Ian’s fingers. His other hand was…busy. She was reminded of the way the ocean felt at night: the power of it, the way it threw her around, the way it made her feel free. Orgasms were kind of like that for Celia—only better.
She closed her eyes tight. She felt her whole body stiffen, and Ian’s mouth…his mouth…
She was disappointed when he pulled away. She wondered if she’d done something wrong, so she sat up to find him on his back on her bedroom floor. He held the hand she’d been holding in front of his face. His adorable smile wrinkles were turned down in a grimace.
Then, she noticed his pinkie was at a ninety-degree angle.
“I think I need to go to the hospital.” He groaned.
An hour later, Celia was still in her annoying corset-top dress, sitting next to Imogene (in sunglasses) and Heidi (in her robe) in the waiting room at the Admiral Key Urgent Care. The place smelled like gauze and stale, sickly blood. Celia stared straight ahead, silent.
Then, all of a sudden, Imogene let out a massive guffaw she must have been holding in since they’d hopped in her car back at the Sleeping Gull. “You broke his finger coming?”
“He’s gonna break up with me.” She felt her bottom lip quiver.
Imogene kept laughing, couldn’t seem to stop. “If he hasn’t broken up with you already because of…” She slapped her knee. “He’s not going to break up with you over a broken pinkie.”
“I’ve done much worse to my ex-husbands.” Heidi nodded. Her wig was crooked.
“And we’re not even sleeping together yet,” Celia whispered.
“You’re not?” Heidi shrieked. “If I were thirty years younger, I woulda hit that as soon as he moved in!”
Celia sighed. “Heidi, can you give me and Imogene a second?”
She stood up and retied her cat puke robe before stepping toward the rack of out-of-date magazines.
“How am I ever going to have sex with him?” Celia hissed. “I’m going to kill him. Squeeze him to death with my thighs or something.”
“Turn him into one of us.” Imogene shrugged.
“What? No. We’ve never even discussed that. No.” She smoothed the skirt of her dress. “Dr. Savage says humans and vampires can have healthy, fulfilling relationships.”
“Your therapist sounds so annoying.”
Celia sighed.
“How was it?”
Celia made an indecent noise, which made Heidi glance back at them with her over-plucked eyebrows lowered. “Amazing. I wasted twenty-three years of my life not doing that.”
“Yeah. I found mine in ninth grade in the back of a station wagon. Haven’t really stopped since.”
“I want to have sex with him.”
“Duh,” Imogene muttered. “Just don’t have your hands on anything important when you…” She started laughing again.
The door from the sick people area opened, and there was Ian. He was still in his dress shirt (untucked) and slacks (slightly wrinkled). His black hair was wild, as usual, but perhaps more so from Celia’s earlier tugs. In his left hand, he held an orange prescription bottle. He had an amused look on his face as he held up his right hand to showcase his metal-encased pinkie finger.
“Oh my God.” Celia stood up. “Are you gonna break up with me?”
He smiled. “No, but I’m probably going to tie you to the bed next time.”
Imogene sucked air in loudly through her nose, and Heidi put her hand on her chest and went, “Oh!”
Ian popped the top off the orange bottle, tossed a pill into his mouth, and chewed. “Vicodin,” he explained. “Used to get it all the time for surf injuries. Home?”
Imogene drove them all back to Sleeping Gull, she and Heidi in the front seat. Ian kept his arm around Celia in the back, and he looked awfully pleased for a guy with a broken bone. Maybe it was the painkillers. They got dropped off. Imogene said she was hungry, but when Heidi asked if she was headed to Denny’s in Lazaret, Imogene just laughed and sped off in her nifty convertible.
Back at Celia’s place, alone, Ian fell down on her couch and stretched his long legs across the coffee table. He rested his eyes. She thought he was asleep until he said, “Don’t you need to feed, sweetie?”
The pet name almost made Celia pass out cold.
She headed to her bedroom where she happily put on her beat up yoga pants and a turquoise t-shirt. She went to the kitchen and poured Ian a glass of water before grabbing herself a bag of A-positive. She settled next to him, and he leaned his head against her shoulder.
“So that was a first date,” he muttered.
She glanced at his hand and remembered what he did for a living. “Can you play video games like that?”
He waved his right hand, played an invisible piano. “My ring finger will work overtime.”
Celia opened her bag of blood and took a little sip. “Thanks for…” She chuckled. “Everything.”
“You’re welcome.” He sniffed and nuzzled closer to her. “Movie?” he asked.
She didn’t want to get up, so she picked up the remote and scanned the channels. She left it on a Mythbusters marathon and wanted to tell the whole world she’d busted a myth of her own: perfect boyfriends did exist.
Chapter Fourteen
Imogene had raised an interesting point in the Urgent Care lobby, so Celia decided to enlist the help of her therapist who knew more than Imogene—or at least used fewer cuss words to communicate, which made her sound more intelligent.
Dr. Savage had her perfect brown hair loose around her shoulders that night. It fell in perfect ringlets around her perfect cheekbones. She had turtle shell glasses on, green slacks, and a cream-colored silk shirt. Despite all Celia had with Ian, the way Dr. Savage looked still made her feel bad about herself.
“How are things with Ian?” She sipped what smelled like chamomile tea with a blood chaser.
“I need to talk to you about that.”
“Yes.” Her lips were tinted slightly red. She was alert, awake, glowing—not like their last meeting when she looked unsteady and tired.
“I broke his finger,” Celia said.
“How?”
“In bed.”
“Okay.” Dr. Savage nodded and wrote something down, probably, “What an idiot.”
“You have a human boyfriend, right?”
Dr. Savage looked over her smarty-pants glasses. “You know I don’t discuss my personal life, Celia.”
“Yeah, well, okay, but see, I want to have sex with Ian, but I’m afraid I might break him.” She curled her fingers into knots but didn’t move because she was in no mood for a couch fart. “And he needs to have sex. Soon.”
“What makes you say that, Celia?”
She thought back to the time Ian said he was dating a girl solely for the sex because he needed a “fix.” Then, she thought about how he’d been working a lot, broken pinkie and all. She thought about the way he seemed tense the past couple days—a lot of weird finger-tapping and knee-shaking.
“Celia?”
“Look, I just know he needs to get laid. He deserves to get laid, but what if I break his hip or something? That’s why Imogene said I should turn him.”
“Celia Merkin!” Dr. Savage yelled at her. She actually yelled, and she looked murderous.
“I’m not going to.” Celia shook her head. “It never even occurred to me. I don’t even really know how, and I wouldn’t do that to Ian—unless he asked, I guess.”
Dr. Savage uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “Let’s get something clear.”
Celia nodded.
“Turning a human is much easier than you think, which is why we practice safe blood use.”
“Safe blood use?”
“If a human has been bitten by a vampire in the span of up to two to three days and then ingests the blood of a vampire, that human has a very good chance of turning. If the blood exchange is immediate, there’s no question, but it’s that two-to-three day period that can be dangerous.”
“But I don’t, like, bleed on him.”
Dr. Savage blinked her long lashes at her, slowly. “I’m just trying to make things clear so that you and Ian don’t make a mistake.”
“So you’re not…you’ve never thought about turning your boyfriend?”
“My boyfriend is not relevant to your treatment, Celia, but maybe someday when he reaches my own human age. It’s not necessary, though. I truly believe humans and vampires can have fulfilling and happy relationships.”
“Yeah,” Celia said, “until your human dies. Don’t you want to spend the rest of your life with the guy you love?”
She pointed her pen at Celia. “You and Ian are still in the honeymoon phase. You have no right to make those kinds of calls yet, for him or you.”
Celia slouched; the couch farted. “So what about sex? How am I supposed to have sex with Ian and not shatter his spine?”
“Are you still using the Ralph technique?”
“I don’t want to use it in bed with Ian!”
Dr. Savage gave her the gift of an annoyed sigh. “Not to its full extent, but you might have to a little, just to calm yourself down.” She paused. “And try not to hold onto anything when you orgasm.”
“No shit.”
Celia went home irritated and decided a swim in the ocean was just the ticket.
She found Ian in his apartment working overtime on some big gaming project for some big nerd company in New York.
When Ian talked to Celia about his job, she usually just stared
at him and daydreamed about his pecs because when he talked about his job, he spoke a different language: gamer language, which was almost as bad as the surfer lingo he tossed at Ralph when he visited Happy Gas. Almost.
She stood in his bedroom door and watched his non-broken right ring finger do the work of his metal-wrapped pinkie. “Hey.”
“Hey.” He didn’t look up at her.
“I’m going to go swimming.” She paused. “Will you come make sure I don’t drown?”
He smiled at his computer screen. “Yeah, gimme a second, okay?”
“Okay.” She sat in his living room. A blank space lingered where a normal person would have a TV, because apparently the video games Ian mastered for work were all computer-based. Bike magazines were on the table by her knee, and the fresh, piney scent of good weed and woodsy BO embraced her.
Ian held her hand as they walked down to the beach, and she peeled down to her bra and undies. She took his hand and pulled him toward the crashing, black waves, but as usual, he stopped as soon as his toes hit water.
She smiled up at him. “I could protect you from monsters, you know.”
He smiled back but shook his head.
The water was getting warmer by the day. Sweltering Florida summer would arrive soon, along with nights that never cooled and the smell of citronella. More tourists. More traffic. She could worry about that mess later. For the time being, Celia was in the ocean, and the ocean never disappointed her. She was surprised to run into some dolphins. They poked and prodded at her like she was a beach ball. She pet their rubbery skin until they realized she wasn’t food and went spinning, scattering away. Celia glanced back at the beach and caught Ian grinning full bore, his eyes trailing after the silver, moonlit tails of their neighborhood porpoises.
When she got back to the beach, she wrapped him in her wet embrace.
“Now, I’m gonna be sticky,” he said into her hair.
“We’ll take a shower.”
He looked down at her with his hands on her lower back. “Yeah?”
She wasn’t nervous as she walked Ian back to his apartment; she just wasn’t sure what the hell she was going to do with him once she got him in the shower. Her experience with man parts was admittedly limited, but she’d seen Ian’s and felt it through fabric before, so…yeah, she was still totally clueless. If Ian was as laid back about sex as he was about everything else—even his vampire girlfriend—she felt she would be fine, especially when she thought about that “nuh” sound he made in the restaurant bathroom on their first date. That noise alone was enough to make her want to grab him and do whatever women did to make men happy.
Bite Somebody Page 14
