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“What?” I asked, hoping that after all of this, I hadn’t accidentally fallen for a foot fetishist.
“I just never know what color your toenails are going to be,” he said, stroking my instep and kissing my ankle. “Will it be a prim pink? A contemplative cranberry? A playful plum?”
“My toes are like a mood ring. Good to know. Now, I believe you were kissing my ankle in a very pleasant manner. Feel free to continue,” I commanded, wiggling my freshly painted carpals.
“What is that?” he asked, staring with horror at the virulent shade of pulpy peach on my toenails.
“I had to mix three different shades to find a peach that would match Jolene’s bridesmaids’ dresses. I did an experimental test run to see if my body would tolerate the color.”
“Wow,” Gabriel mouthed silently.>I knew Gabriel was not evil. For that matter, neither was I. Vampires have the same capacity for good and evil that humans do. To be fair, people can lose some notions of etiquette when they’re no longer answering to the moral constraints of human society … and they thirst for human blood. The bottom line is that if you had evil leanings in life, you’re probably going to embrace them wholeheartedly once you’re undead. If you were a decent person, say a former librarian who loves America and puppies, you’re probably going to be an upstanding, almost vegetarian vampire.
It took Gabriel and me weeks to work through the weird feelings that followed his murdering Bud Mc-Elray. As a human, I’d never been in love. I’d been in deep, abiding like with several of my boyfriends, but I’d never had that feeling, that “Wow, this is a person I could spend the rest of my life with” feeling. And even though Gabriel was one of the few people I could spend the rest of my long, long life with, I couldn’t think of being with him as a permanent situation. He’d saved me. He’d killed for me. But I couldn’t accept that someone like him could be interested in me.
Gabriel was everything I was not. Sophisticated and complicated and able to color-coordinate a room like you wouldn’t believe. I craved him with a bone-deep lust I’d once reserved exclusively for Godiva truffles. I was fixated, not just in the physical sense—though that was an obvious, and occasionally distracting, bonus—but with what he thought, how he saw the world, how he saw me. It was addictive to see myself reflected in his liquid silver eyes as strong, beautiful, intelligent, interesting, though slightly exasperating. Even when we were together, all I could think about was the next time we could be together.
I needed order. I needed constancy. But being with Gabriel was like standing in the center of a swirling eddy, the dark water surrounding you, dizzying, powerful, and beautiful. But all the while, you can’t help but feel those churning walls closing in, threatening to crash in on you and crush you under their weight.
I couldn’t seem to find my footing in this relationship. It didn’t help that Gabriel kept leaving town on business trips like this current one, the third excursion in as many months. Now that he wasn’t keeping constant “Keep Jane alive and out of trouble” vigils, Gabriel was spending some time catching up with his various business interests. He was the proprietor of three radio stations in the Southeast, plus a hotel in Atlanta, a seafood restaurant in New Orleans, and a mini-golf course in Biloxi. And those were just the ventures in this country. I know it sounds like Tony Soprano’s investment portfolio, but to be fair, he had more than 100 years to diversify. Older vampires are heavily invested in human real estate, medical research, music, publishing, and media. It’s what has helped maintain our cover for two millennia. It’s not a conspiracy or anything, we’re just trying to keep you people from setting us on fire in our sleep. If we controlled everything, do you really think the Lifetime network would have had a vampire detective show?
So Gabriel floated in and out of my world, letting me think I could handle life without him, only to show up after a few weeks and make me crazy all over again. I was frequently left to wallow and wonder where he was and what he wasn’t telling me. I excelled at wallowing and wondering. If I called, it went to his voice mail. If he called, it was always just before dawn, as I was falling asleep and didn’t have the mental capacity to ask him much. This combined with a painfully active imagination led to scenarios that would have done that Lifetime show very proud.
And, of course, he had to come home from his latest trip on a Tuesday night to find me wearing my “housework” sweats and a dirty bandanna around my head.
“Have we discussed the ‘Call first’ rule?” I asked when I opened the door, suppressing a giddy smile.
Gabriel had been impossibly beautiful even in the harsh neon lights of Shenanigans that first night I met him. And now that I had sharp vampire vision, I could fully appreciate the leonine dreaminess that was my sire. There he stood, wearing his typical Johnny Cash full black, flowing dark locks curling at his collar. His full, soft lips quirked at my rude greeting, and a flicker of warmth reflected back at me in those clear, gray eyes. Despite our general resilience, he looked tired. There was the slightest hint of shadows under his eyes. And even for a vampire, he looked pretty pale.
“Hello, Gabriel, it’s lovely to see you?” he responded in a feminine voice that, frankly, sounded nothing like me. “I missed you terribly. How was Nashville?”
“Hello, Gabriel, it’s lovely to see you,” I parroted in an explicitly pleasant tone. “How was Nashville? Have we discussed the ‘Call first’ rule?”
“Can I come in?” he asked, hefting a foam cooler with his hip. A girl couldn’t help but appreciate the way those hips looked in black denim. I paused to give them the proper reverence.
I opened the door wider, then stopped him with a hand to the chest. “Wait. You have that ‘We have to talk’ look on your face, which usually means I’m going to be accused of something.”
“For once, no.” He advanced against my palm. I held him back. He pouted. “This is getting heavy.”
“You have superstrength,” I pointed out, grinning despite myself. “What’s in the cooler?”
“A present.” He opened the top and proudly displayed a dozen pint-sized plastic envelopes of blood packed in dry ice.
I cocked my head and studied him thoughtfully. “The next time you go shopping for me, take Andrea.”
He carried his burden into the kitchen, where he carefully stored his repellent treasures in the empty vegetable crisper.
“This is prime Red Cross–grade human donation,” he said. “Tested, screened, and cleared through a lab in the city.”
“That’s wonderful, but why did you bring it here?”
“Can’t I do something nice?” he asked, clearly offended.
I stared at him. “You might have started with a card and maybe worked your way up to human blood.”
“I worry about how you eat,” he said as he sifted through the pathetic contents of my fridge. “I want you to drink a pint of this every day.”
“I’ve told you that it makes me uncomfortable when you blur that daddy/boyfriend line, right?” I said. He held up half-empty bottles of Hershey’s syrup and Bailey’s Irish Cream. “That’s just for flavor!”
“I’m afraid that you’re becoming too accustomed to drinking synthetic blood, Jane,” he said. “It’s only a recent development, and production could stop with the turn of the political tide. And then where will you be?”
