Page 25 of Only Fangs

“Well, Matt and I will be more than happy to take some of the leftovers off your plate.”

“You boys are like gannets,” she replies with a smile. It’s the same conversation we have every time we’re here. Mum cooking too much, Matt and I offering to take some home, Mum calling us gannets. There is comfort in the familiar. “But at least then I’ll know you’re eating properly. Both of you.”

She’s always treated Matt as if he was one of us, just another child running around and getting under her feet.

Birthdays always follow a set pattern in the Jackson household, even if this year there was an attempt to inject the surprise element which appeared to entirely backfire.

First things first, everyone gets a drink. Ours is not a dry household and it is incredibly rare to see any of the Jackson clan without a beer or a wine when we all get together. I think it helps to alleviate some of the stress of putting us in the same room together. Not that we don’t like each other, it’s more that there are just so many of us and my brother and sisters are all extremely opinionated and not at all shy about defending themselves. Every conversation devolves into a debate and then a fact checking marathon and then sometimes – more often than not if we’re being honest – into some display of physical strength like an arm wrestle. Mum tried to get us to settle things with rock, paper, scissors when we were younger, but then Garrett ruined it by adding a fourth category, “sledgehammer”, which just caused another debate and so Dad stepped in and banned us from playing it anymore.

Once everyone has a drink we give gifts to the birthday boy or girl. At Christmas we’re an “open everything all at once” family, so everyone gets a pile and we all rip into our presents simultaneously. But birthdays are different. Birthday gifts have developed a reverence, a ritual. Each person spends a long time thinking about what to give and gifts are bestowed in turn, packages opened carefully, the contents ohh’ed and ahh’ed over and appropriate hugs of thanks changed, before moving to the next present and then the next. It was my baby sister Meredith – Merry for short – who started this tradition because her birthday is the day after Christmas and she was sick of no one giving a shit about her birthday gifts.

This year there’s been a break in tradition in that we’ve all clubbed together to get Nan something really special. Next month she’ll be going on a cruise, with a balcony room and all-inclusive drinks package thrown in. She’s been dreaming about going ever since Granddad passed three years ago and so all the Jackson kids – plus Matt of course – have been saving faithfully to make it a reality.

“You didn’t?” Nan asks as she holds the gift certificate my middle sister Kat made for her. It looks super fancy, all gold embossing and calligraphy.

“It’s a cruise, Betty,” my father tells her.

“Yes, thank you John. I got that.” Nan is my maternal grandmother and she’s always grumbled about Dad treating her like she’s a batty old lady. “But this is far too much,” she says, her eyes back on the gift certificate. “This must have cost you a fortune.”

Over the course of the next hour, Nan has far too much prosecco to celebrate her impending holiday. She’s a character when she’s sober, but Nan pissed is something else. “How’s that company you started working for. Only Fans, wasn’t it?” she asks, waving her wine glass – the nice champagne flutes having been abandoned for requiring too frequent top-ups – at me, even though I’m sitting right next to her.

I bite my cheek to stop myself from laughing at her faux pas. “It’s going well,” I reply, not bothering to correct her, I don’t want to be accused of mansplaining.

“You know Vera down the road?” Nan asks me.

I nod even though I have no idea who she’s talking about.

“Well, her granddaughter works for them too. She apparently does very well.” Nan pats my leg.

“Umm. Nan,” Kat says gently. “I don’t think Brody is working for the same company.”

“Such a handsome boy.” She touches my cheek. “Why not make some money while you’ve still got it.” She smiles a little lopsidedly at me. “I’d give it a go if I were ten years younger.”

Merry makes eye contact with me and refuses to look away. I try to hold it in but eventually all the Jackson siblings erupt into laughter.

“What?” asks Nan as she takes another swig of prosecco. “I would have made an absolute fortune.”

Chapter 15

Ari

Apparently the bank loan will take fourteen days to process, so we won’t know for a while if we’ve been successful. I hate waiting for things, it makes me anxious and too prone to imagining the worst.

“We need to keep busy,” Brody tells me in that overly enthusiastic way of his.

“But what’s the point if we don’t know what they’ll say?” We’re in my living room and I’m extra salty because I turned down a pain au chocolate – vampires metabolise human food differently but we still need to think about sugar content and not being too gluttonous – and now I’m hungry.

Brody finishes chewing his own pastry and part of me wants to kill him for eating in front of me even though I know that’s unfair and this situation is entirely of my own making. “Think about it like this,” he says. “If we work on Only Fangs and then we don’t get the funding, what have we lost?”

I open my mouth to speak but it was a rhetorical question so I let him carry on.

“Nothing.” He gives me this little shrug as if to say oops, but no harm. “But if we don’t work on Only Fangs and then we do get the funding? Well then we’ll be weeks behind and we’ll never catch up.”

“So we just carry on with blind hope that the bank will give us the loan?” I know I sound whiny but I can’t help myself.

Brody beams at me as if he can’t see my own reluctance. “Exactly.”

And so Brody and I spend the next week working hard on the app. My main focus is the marketing side, pulling together a whole load of research on who the target market is, how many vampires might be interested in the service, and how we can entice them to try it.