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“Dang you and your logic.” I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and took a deep, unnecessary breath. Andrea was the first human I’d ever fed from. It tends to bond gals for life. Andrea helped me bridge the gap from semi-social-phobic closet vampire to respectable undead citizen. Thrilled finally to have someone to take classes with after years of an empty social calendar, she enrolled us in yoga classes, ceramics classes, jewelry-making classes, even cake decorating, which we agreed later was a mistake. She’d basically become the girlfriend I’d always tried to make Zeb into. If I couldn’t talk to her about this, whom could I talk to?
I sighed. “He’s probably cheating on me. And I think he might have broken up with me … but without saying the actual words.”
Andrea chewed her plump bottom lip. “Gabriel is a pretty direct person. I’m sure he would have—”
“He said, ‘If you have to go, you have to go.’ And then he said, ‘This is for the best. This trip didn’t exactly work out as we’d hoped. I’ll call you.’” I caught the flash of horror cross her features. “See? You flinched! I knew it!”
“Let’s go back to the beginning. Why did you think Gabriel might be cheating on you? Not impressions or feelings, actual facts.”
I ticked the offenses off with my fingers. “Weird phone calls that he refused to take around me, manic behavior, constant changes in our hotel plans, notes at our hotels that he wouldn’t let me read. And what I could read wasn’t good. Lots of present-tense words. But I’m just being paranoid, right? I mean, there’s probably a rational explanation for all this, right? Like he’s an undead secret agent? That’s plausible, right?”
Andrea winced as she poured me an espresso in a tiny white demitasse. “Well … probably not. That’s all pretty suspicious stuff. When Mattias cheated on me, he had a lot of late ‘faculty meetings.’ He took calls from his ‘teaching assistant’ in another room.”
“Please stop using the quotation marks, I need this life lesson to be unvarnished and without ironic subtext.” Andrea pushed the fancy cup at me again. I considered claiming some sort of vampire aversion to the high-octane concoction, but Andrea was well aware that while we lack the digestive enzymes to digest solid food, we have no problems with most liquids. Sometimes it’s a pain that Andrea is so well informed.
I was not a big coffee drinker in life. Iced frappuccinos from Dairy Queen were about as adventurous as I got. But Andrea insisted that if I was going to sell coffee, I had to know what I was talking about. And now that the machinery was up and running, she was my self-appointed caffeine pusher.
“Do I have to?” Andrea shoved the cup at me with more force. I took a sip. “Gah! That’s awful! My cousin Muriel isn’t that bitter, and she has two gay ex-husbands … who now live together. Is that how it’s supposed to taste?”
“Sadly, yes. It’s an acquired taste,” Andrea admitted as she sipped her own coffee without making Edward G. Robinson faces. “So, invisible quotation marks aside, when Mattias cheated on me, he stopped taking me to familiar restaurants, because he’d started taking her to our places. It was new restaurants all the time. He was on edge. He accused me of being paranoid when I asked legitimate questions like ‘Why did you change your e-mail password?’ or ‘Where did you sleep yesterday?’”
I groaned. “I’m going to be miserable and alone for the rest of my long, long life.”
She shrugged. “Oh, it’s not so bad. We still have yoga on Thursday nights.”
“Oh, yeah, that will make up for the loss of companionship and sexual gratification.”
Andrea grinned salaciously. “Well, you never know what you might learn in yoga.”
“Perv.” I chucked a coffee filter at her.
Andrea finally gave me the full report on the break-in. She’d arrived early a few evenings back, expecting a delivery of comfy chairs for the reading nook, and found the front window bashed in. She called the cops, who were sadly familiar with the neighborhood, and they chalked it up to drug addicts, teenagers, or drug-addicted teenagers. Proving precisely why I hired her in the first place, Andrea had already filed the insurance paperwork, arranged for an antiques appraiser from Louisville to come by to estimate the damage to the books, and contacted a glass repairman to replace the front window the following afternoon.
“So, really, there was no reason for me to come home,” I said, awkwardly stuffing my hands into my pockets.
Andrea arched an eyebrow at me. “Yeah, I wish someone had thought to tell you that.”
3
In an undead relationship, it’s best not to focus on the “nots.” Not being able to have children. Not being able to legally marry. Instead, focus on what you can have, true long-term commitment.
—Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to
Less Destructive Relationships
I could smell that Jolene was pregnant, a new, soft, green sort of scent that hit me the moment she opened the creaking trailer door.
I put on my “ignoring my surroundings” smile, the one that said, “I do not see the huge streaks of rust lapping down the pink wall panels or the carpeting that may be Astroturf.” Zeb was overseeing a PTA meeting that night and had asked me to check in on his bride. She’d missed me, he said, and was a little put out that it had taken me three days to make it over to their place. Fortunately, I was carrying two recently reheated pot pies to win my way back into her good graces.
“Hey!” She beamed until she saw what I was holding. “Oh, no.”
“What?” Jolene loved Mama’s pot pies. For the last year, they were the only thing that kept her enormous appetite at bay when she visited my house. Since she and Zeb became my neighbors, I brought them over regularly for Jolene to snack on. And now, the mere presence of my foil-wrapped gift seemed to be turning Jolene a delightful shade of “bleh.”
“I’ll be fine,” she whimpered. “I’m just a little sensitive to smells right now. Hormones combined with werewolf nose make it so much worse. Zeb was brownin’ hamburger the other night, and I had to run out of the room to throw up twice. And I can’t eat the foods I usually love. I couldn’t get enough of your mama’s pot pies a few months ago, and now, just the thought of breakin’ the crust—” Jolene took a deep breath and pursed her lips.
“I’ll leave it outside,” I said. “You sit down.”
I went to the kitchen and managed to smack myself in the face with a half-attached cupboard door while I poured Jolene a glass of water. The trailer was snug, to say the least. The kitchen was what Jolene’s mother, Mimi, called a “two-butt model,” meaning no more than two butts could fit side by side between the stained faux-wood-grain counters at any one time.
