by Am Hudson
I looked at the jeans, then his face, to see if he was serious.
He laughed, hanging them over his shoulder. “I was joking, Ara.”
“You better have been.” I rolled over and snuggled into the blankets. “But I can sew, you know.”
“Good,” he said, walking his bare butt to the bathroom. “Then you better get to work, wife. You have beds to make and floors to mop as well.”
My jaw dropped with insult, and David just laughed again as he closed the bathroom door.
Chapter Six
Once last night’s vomit could finally be flushed down, and when the water flowed freely through the pipes, the chimney had been repaired and the new mattress brought home and laid in place, David and I took a plate of sandwiches out to the lake and spent the afternoon on the old picnic rug under the golden autumn sun. There was still plenty to do back at the house just to make it liveable, but neither of us made any effort to move. I knew David’s hesitation was because he felt safe here in this little bubble that had formed around us while we talked; he’d opened up about a lot of things and I don’t think he was finished. This strong, closed-off guy didn’t want to be alone in his circle of worries and fears anymore; he wanted to let me in—he always had. He just had to feel safe to do so. Which is why there was also no way I would get up and break the magic. If he was happy to keep talking, I would stay here until it snowed on me.
“I don’t really understand,” I said, propping my hands under me to sit up. I slid back a few inches to lean my back on the rock, my thighs right beside David’s face. “How can you not know how to be normal?”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve lived a normal human life, Ara,” he said, tucking one arm behind his head. “After all I’ve been through—starting from my days as a council leader to finding and then practically obsessing over you, then fighting for a way for us to be together, right up to becoming King and then losing you—I’ve lost a lot of myself; crossed paths with the vampire so many times I’m not sure now who rules supreme.”
I considered him for a moment—the golden streaks in his dark brown hair; the way the sun reached down from the sky as if to simply touch his beauty, magnifying it instead—and wondered how on earth he could be so sweet-looking yet so damn evil. “Are you saying you’re not sure if you’re good anymore?”
His mouth opened with a breathy laugh. “No. I’m saying that the vampire seems to be dying.” He rolled slightly and looked up at me. “If I no longer enjoy stalking and hunting and torturing, then… I don’t know who I am anymore, or what I’m even interested in.”
I very slowly drew my knee to my chest, trying to hide a smile behind it. I liked this version of him. But at the same time, I wanted to say just the right thing to make everything better. If a hundred-and-something year old vampire didn’t have any answers, though, what good could I do? “What were you interested in before you met me?”
“In what very little spare time I used to get as a council leader…?” I watched him as his mind ticked, his eyes clearly flashing over the past. “When we were younger, Jason and I loved baseball—playing it, not so much watching. And we’d occasionally, when we weren’t at odds, go out for a game now and then. Other than that, all I really ever did was read books… or listen to music,” he added, like music was an afterthought.
“Well, see?” I tapped him with the back of my wrist. “You have interests. I mean, music is one. Books…”
“I suppose,” he cut in gently. “But those things are just a part of my… makeup, you might say. They’re not hobbies.”
I reached down and took his hand off his belly to hold it. “It’s just going to take time. After that spell Morg put on you and after all the hell we’ve been through, you won’t feel whole again for a long time. And I don’t think you should try to. I just think maybe we should try to find at least one reason to smile every day and, eventually, it will become a habit and, eventually after that, we’ll just turn around one day when we’re doing something random and realise that we feel whole again.”
He squeezed my hand, and when I looked up from it to his green eyes, they were smiling.
“What?” I asked nervously.
“You just surprise me sometimes, that’s all.”
“How so?”
He laid his head back down on the underside of his arm and smiled up at the sky. “Because you couldn’t be more right. I can feel it in my bones that I just need distance from our past—just need to come to the point where it’s not so raw and fresh in my thoughts—and only time passing can do that.”
“Right, but you can distract yourself while you’re letting it pass. The sooner you stop thinking about everything, the quicker you can forget.”
“Okay, so we need a distraction.”
“Yes. But what?”
He pressed his lips together in thought. “Well, we can only have so much sex before we need a break—”
“Says you.”
He laughed. “We could read to each other,” he suggested, then his shoulders dropped in disappointment. “But we don’t share the same tastes in literature.”
“I’d be willing to hear any story read by you,” I offered. “Besides, a different genre might bring something new to my life. Who knows?”
“Perhaps.”
“And,” I said carefully, “maybe if I read to you from my preferred genre, you might find a new connection to something, too. It’s always good to try new things.”
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Okay, so that’s one thing. What else can we do?”
“Well, we don’t have electricity, so I can’t kick your ass on Halo—like we used to do.”
He laughed loudly then. “I forgot about that.”
“That’s because you lost, and then locked that memory away in the Vault of No Return.”
He laughed again. “I could get a generator.”
“I think you should do that,” I said, and my mind wandered back to the house, seeing it in the daylight that brightly illuminated all the things that were wrong with it. “What about renovations—aside from the necessary ones? We could get all domestic, you know—pick out curtains.”
I was kind of joking, but when David sat up and dropped his arms over his knees, studying my face like a new idea was forming, I suddenly got the feeling that we’d be taking another trip into town for some new paint.
“I don’t know the first thing about fixing up a house,” he said. “But perhaps that’s where we could start our reading journey together.”
“Home improvement books?” I screwed my nose up. “Not the genre I had in mind.”
“I know. But it’s boring and so normal it just might bring us back from the dark depths of the supernatural world.”
I nodded to myself. He was right. So right that I started thinking about rugs and matching pillowcases.
***
Calming elevator music played in the background, echoing around the tops of red metal shelves miles into the sky. We stood facing the tightly-packed paint-can stairway, glancing sideways at each other every now and then.
“Primer?” I said. “I think my dad used this first when he painted our house.”
“This is all very different to the days when the toughest choice was the colour.”
“And when was that?” I chuckled. “When the only two choices were white and white?”
His eyes sparkled as he smiled; they always seemed to sparkle in a different way when the laughter was as a result of something I’d said. If he laughed at a book or joke, it wasn’t as warm a smile as when he laughed at me. I liked that.
He reached up and drew a pamphlet from a plastic pocket on the front of the shelf, and flipped it over to read the back. “Well, I know we need to sand the old paint off first, then we need to—”
“Can I help you folks with something?” a man said.
David and I turned around to the open face of a very tanne
d man wearing a blue shirt with a badge on the pocket that said “Doug”.
He raised his brows expectantly at us when neither spoke, and then his eyes moved to my belly. “Painting the nursery, are we?”
“The entire house.” David put the pamphlet back and transformed into the friendly, human version of himself. It’d been so long since I’d seen this version that my heart skipped a beat and my cheeks went hot seeing that sweet smile.
“Right.” Doug clapped his hands once. “Then we have a big job to do, do we?”
“I would say that’s a fair assessment,” David said flatly.
“So what colour are we looking for?”
I signalled David with my eyes as Doug led us to the help desk. If that man said ‘we’ one more time, I would be forced to slap his overly-tanned chops, and it would take a vampire to hold me back.
“White,” David said, taking my hand and squeezing it authoritatively, as if to say ‘Don’t you dare slap him’.
“And for the inside?” The man typed something on his computer. “Are we painting the inside?”
David’s grip tightened on my hand. “Yes.”
“Do we know a colour?”
I squeezed David’s hand this time, when he thought, Red. Blue. Yellow. We know many colours.
Instead he said, “Purple.”
That woke me up, and it reset the man, too.
“Ara?” David turned to me. “What colour would you like our house to be inside?”
“Uh…” My eyes drifted to the wall of colour swatches behind me. “Can I have some time to think about it?”
“Of course. You go take a look over there, and I’ll find out what else we need to buy.” David aimed me in the right direction and gave me a gentle nudge.
Before I walked away, I offered him ‘the look’. Be nice, I thought.
He just grinned malevolently, and the look of the bad-ass vampire behind those eyes made my mouth water.
As I perused the pale greens and ambers and yellows, I listened slightly to Doug’s very informative lecture, in case I needed to save the man. The conversation went well, right up to the word ‘primer’, but after that Doug started speaking in a foreign tongue.
I glanced back and, sure enough, David looked just as confused as me.
He did at least catch on though, after a minute, and when he tried to tell Doug he understood and just wanted to buy the products and get out of here, the man kept going—repeating things he’d already told him.
The Council Leader, the King, the hundred-year-old vampire, stood there and wore the condescension for a moment, but his jaw slowly set tighter and tighter, and his hands bunched into fists by his jeans pockets.
“And I suppose we’ll be purchasing a packet of condoms with the can of nursery paint, will we?” Doug slapped David on the back, and my jaw dropped.
As the shock of the insult lilted away it left behind fear—for Doug’s life. David was at least seventy years older than that clerk, but he was being treated like a nineteen-year-old boy that got his high school girlfriend pregnant. Accidentally.
I leaned back on the shelf and folded my arms, waiting to see his reaction.
He just laughed softly, though, wagging a finger at Doug. “That’s funny. Real funny.”
“Ah, it’s all in fun.” Doug slapped him again and moved behind the counter. “And, we are able to pay for all this stuff, aren’t we?”
David puffed his lips up in a very forced smile, and nodded a few times—to himself.
“Good, good.” Doug handed David a bit of paper with a friendly smile. “Did we need anything else before we ring this up?”
“Now that you mention it, I think we do, don’t we, Ara?” David turned at the shoulder and looked back at me.
I nodded, not really sure if we did or didn’t.
“Perhaps I can help then?” Doug offered.
“You know, you’ve been a great help, but—” David leaned a little closer; I strained my ears to hear what he was saying, but Jenny called for Janet over the PA then and even my vampire ears couldn’t make out what David said.
He walked away from Doug, slapping his back affectionately, and came to stand beside me, folding his arms and leaning on the shelf in the same way I was. “Found a colour yet?”
“Um. This one.” I held it up for him.
He clearly didn’t agree, but accepted it without saying so.
“Ready to go shop for pillows then?” He plucked the swatch from my fingers.
As we walked our shopping cart toward to the other counter to get the tint mixed, I looked back at our helpful clerk. “What did you say to Doug?”
“Oh.” He stopped walking, as though he’d forgotten about him, and held me in place by the arm. “Watch.”
I scrutinised his evil smile for a moment, then looked at Doug as he spotted a piece of gum on the floor. He walked around the counter, frowning at the gum, then put both hands on his knees, leaned right down and said, “Hello there. Do we need some help picking out some colours, do we?”
A burst of laughter folded me forward. “What is he doing?”
“Giving helpful advice, that’s all.”
“To a bit of gum?”
David shrugged. “Far as he’s concerned, it’s a very confused customer.”
I covered my mouth, laughing harder. “How long will he do that for?”
“Until he realises he’s not sure why he’s doing it.” He let go of my arm then and placed his hand on my back. “Come on. We’ll get some sanding paper and paint brushes while they mix the paint.”
***
David pushed the shopping cart while I threw random bits in from the shelves. The paint, brushes and anything we needed had been buried by all the things we wanted. I matched the bed cushions to the paint, and David picked up a stack of packing boxes for all the loose bits upstairs. By the time we reached the stationary section—to stock up on pens and a new journal for David—the cart was full, but my thoughts were nowhere near lost in the mundane world of renovating. I was still floating around up there in the supernatural world—wondering how David did what he did to Doug, and if I could do that.
“You can do things you haven’t told me about,” I said, not really meaning to say it.
David looked up from the book blurb he was reading. “Huh?”
“What you did to Doug—” I nodded back in that direction. “You could never do that before, could you?”
He shook his head and put the book back on the shelf.
“How come you haven’t told me about it?”
“There’s quite a few things you don’t know.”
“Will you tell me about them?” I asked softly. “I mean, did you plan to keep it from me, or—”
“Of course I’ll tell you.” He drew me close to him and kissed my head. “There just hasn’t really been time.”
“Okay,” I whispered, satisfied, and moved out from his arms to grab a calligraphy set.
We walked along for a moment longer, adding a stapler and a roll of sticky tape to the cart, but despite the fact that we were out in public, I didn’t really feel like waiting until we got home to talk about his skills. “My powers haven’t really developed.”
“I know,” he said, without looking at me. “But mine only have because I already had the foundations there—with mind reading.”
I nodded solemnly. “You said you could teach me to instil fear—using the mind. Do you think maybe you could coach me with the telekinesis as well?”
His head whipped up quickly, and after studying my eager eyes for a moment, he smiled. “Really?”
“What do you mean really?”
“You’d want me to help you?”
My face contorted in confusion. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because… Mike was your teacher. Then Jason, and I just thought that—”
“You felt like I asked them because I didn’t want you?”
“Or didn’t trust me—didn’t think I was capab
le.”
Of course. It all sunk in then. Mike was my BFF; Jason was always more powerful than David; of course he felt inadequate—perhaps hurt that they were helping his wife—and he wasn’t. But he was half right. I didn’t think he had anything to teach me back then because, in truth, Jason was more powerful, and Mike was better at getting through to me—dealing with my tantrums and moods.
“I’m sorry.” I hooked my arm around his waist and gave him a squeeze. “That’s all I can say, because you’re half right. But I’m sorry I made you feel useless.”
“You’re forgiven.” He hugged me back. “And I would be more than happy to help you with your powers, my love.”
His arms felt so good around me. I breathed him in deeply and let it out slowly, holding on just a little bit longer than he did. When I finally let him go, he reached down and cupped my cheek, shaking his head.
“What?” I said.
“I don’t think I tell you often enough how beautiful you are.”
My lashes folded bashfully over my eyes.
“When you do that—” He smoothed his thumb over my lashes, “—even when your eyes are closing, I can still see the blue through your lashes.”
I smiled. “I wonder if our daughter will have blue eyes.”
“I hope she does,” he said, picturing her little baby face, so soft and pale, with a pair of big, bright blue eyes looking up at him.
I shook his thought out of my head. Talking about her, imagining her, thinking about her like a real thing, for the first time ever, made me feel unsteady—because her life was not yet a promise. It worried me to think about it all if there was still a chance we might lose her.
“I hope she has your eyes,” I said, ending the conversation.
“You’re right. That would be better.” David took the cart and started walking again. “At least then when she’s naughty, I’ll have a hope in hell of disciplining her.”
I laughed, but it stopped in a groan as we reached the front of the store and I saw the line going from the service counter all the way to the paint section. “Great.”
