Page 12 of Fangs with Benefits

I suppose that Gregory would say I shouldn’t try to form relationships with humans in the first place. I can practically hear his voice in my head scolding me for it. This is where we’ve always differed; he is more than content to spend the rest of his days with paranormal society, only interacting with humans when necessary.

But vampires have so seldom created anything moving or meaningful in my experience; I think that the nature of immortality makes creation difficult. The frailty of existence breeds innovation, whereas the surety that you’ll live forever creates apathy and an acute loneliness.

To put it in plain terms, a vampire could never have written Lost.

I’m halfway through my bottle of blood when I spot Molly walking back into the office, her hair now up in a clip instead of hanging over her shoulders. Her cheeks are flushed pink and I watch her throat bob in a swallow as she takes a drink of water. She turns to look at me, catching me staring, and I choke on the blood, nearly spitting some out.

I avert my gaze and clear my throat, pretending that I have been working in the time she’s been gone. My reflection in the blank computer screen stares incriminatingly back at me. When I glance back up at Molly, she’s out of sight, likely sitting now behind the half-wall of her desk space. Cubicle, she called it. I exhale and swipe my tongue across my teeth to make sure there’s no blood remaining there before unlocking the computer to get back to work.

Only, I’m not exactly clear on what work it is that I am supposed to be doing. She gave me a task, I know she did… something about modules? I don’t know how to get back to them, though. I click to another page, the website Molly showed me with the help tickets, and it displays four new requests, but I have no clue what any of the words mean.

Best thing for me to do is to wait for Molly to return and teach me more things. With enough of this I will surely learn something and be able to provide some sort of meaningful contribution to this company.

Right?

She does eventually return, but not for another two hours. I walked past her desk twice, and each time she was chewing on her bottom lip with her flat teeth, a crease between her eyebrows while she looked at her computer screen or at the little black notebook she keeps on her desk. That is what working looks like. I must practise her exact look of focus.

Just when I am about to get up to walk past her desk for a third time, Molly appears in my doorway, computer closed in the crook of her arm.

‘Did you get through the videos?’ she asks.

‘Not quite,’ I say. The modules. I do not confess that I couldn’t find them. Stupid, stupid man I am. Maybe I’ll ask Kenneth, just so I don’t have to see Molly looking at me like this again. With her nose scrunched and lips turned down, I am wilting. ‘Kenneth wanted to show me something and I got distracted.’

‘Well, do it by tomorrow end of day and you should be fine.’

‘Wonderful.’

Molly takes a big breath and drops her shoulders in a quick exhale before returning to her seat next to mine. Like yesterday, she smells stronger after lunch, like she’s been sweating, much like Dylan after his exercises. Only, when Dylan sweats, the dog smell only intensifies, to negative affect. The same cannot be said for Molly.

‘I’ll show you how to format and send the phishing tests next,’ she tells me.

She starts typing with those fast fingers onto her keyboard while I try to detangle why a tech company would need to deploy tests on the art of angling. I can think of no reason why any employee here should need to be proficient in catching marine life, or further, why we as a group would ever assess them on this.

‘You do that here?’ I ask, hoping she’ll offer more information.

‘Course,’ she says, then pauses. ‘What, you didn’t at your last company? We run at least three a quarter and assign the cyber security trainings to the ones who fail. Really standard stuff.’

I say nothing, only blink at Molly, who blinks back at me. Then, her face changes and suddenly it’s like she’s seeing me–actually seeing me–for the first time. It makes me squeamish, the way her brown eyes go wide, like she might have somehow intuited my supernatural identity after our hours together.

‘You don’t know what a phishing scam is,’ she says, not a question. Based on her astonishment, this discovery is maybe worse than if she found out I’m a vampire.

‘Sure I do.’ I do not.

She raises an eyebrow and waits. Fuck.

‘It’s, well, a common scam,’ I explain, hoping this is enough.

It’s not, and when I don’t go on, Molly laughs–a humourless sound. I wither beneath it.

‘All right, Elijah.’ Molly closes the various screens on her laptop until it shows just the cluttered background of icons. She slides it across the desktop to me; it’s like mine, but some of the letters on the keys are worn from use over time. ‘I need you to tell me what model this computer is.’

‘You—’ I press my lips together and look at the machine. She doesn’t wait for me to come up with something.

‘Tell me how much storage it has and how many gigabytes have already been used,’ she instructs. When I stare blankly she goes on. ‘No can do? No worries,’ she says, but I can tell there are indeed worries. ‘What’s the difference between software and hardware? What is RAM? Tell me how to check connection speed, or how to find an IP address.’

My shoulders are well near my ears now, tensed from her barrage of increasingly frustrated inquiries that I have no expertise to answer. My voice is unsteady when I try to speak.

‘Molly, I—’