Joe Vampire (20 page)

WORK/CAREER/JOB

HOBBIES/INTERESTS

FRIENDS/FAMILY/PETS

POP CULTURE

CURRENT EVENTS

CLIMATE CHANGE

There are no time limits on any of the levels, though it’s best to move on from compliments after a reasonable duration. You don’t want to come across as a kiss-ass right away. But there’s no reason you can’t linger on WORK/CAREER/JOB if there’s a lot to say before you move on to FRIENDS/FAMILY/PETS. It’s also no crime to skip down a level if you hit a dry spot at any of the in-between levels. And unless you want to look like you have no idea how to handle yourself on a date, it’s best to not move back up the beanstalk, so to speak. Return to a topic that, in all likelihood, has already been adequately covered, and you risk appearing desperate and underprepared. A move like that could end a date before the breadsticks even make it to the table.

You can tell I’ve thought about it a little.

But I’ve never had a chance to put the Cloud into action. 

Not being known for my relationship prowess, I wanted to have all my soldiers lined up for Chloe. So I spent a fair chunk of time on working this fool-proof plan for once we were on a deeper level. Reading it back, it looks a little overly thought out. 

If you feel the need to create a formula for “spontaneous flow”, you probably don’t have a proper grasp of the concept.   

A lot of rambling about dating here, I know. Maybe you can see where all of this is leading. 

I took Louise up on her offer to introduce me to Megan. 

I thought it was time to dip a toe in the social waters again while I had the whole assimilation thing going for me. Not ready to swim, per se, but a little wading shouldn’t have been beyond my capacity. And if she already Knew, then it would be one less thing to have to make excuses for. Plus: it would be a chance to take the Cloud for a test drive, since I wouldn’t be using it with Chloe as originally intended. 

Maintaining comfortable conversational transitions turned out to be the least of my concerns, by a long – and I do mean
loooooong
– shot.

But it didn’t start out as bad as all that. 

We found a restaurant halfway between her place and mine, non-Italian, since she and I both know the unappetizing aroma that garlic has for me. A first date has enough pressures without having to cope with the lingering smell of boiled crotch while you eat. We went with something more surf and turf instead – heavy on the turf, light on the surf. It was a happy compromise.

That’s really all I’m looking for anymore. 

Rather than fumbling our way toward each other, we agreed to meet there instead. I somehow reached the place first, thankful that the GPS on my phone got me there with only three wrong turns in total. To keep things interesting, we chose not to send each other photos of ourselves, but instead thought we’d describe in words how we felt we appeared to the outside world, and let each one figure out who the other was once we were there. My description of me was: 

Slightly tall, somewhat nice-looking, average build, average hair, average taste in clothes. And fangs.

Very honest; no exaggerated bullshit adjectives to disappoint her when reality showed me not to be as real-world studly as the text might have implied. And I knew hers was similar, and that the visual next to the words could very easily go either way. She described herself as: 

Semi-petite, dishwater hair, conservative dresser, eyes the color of sea foam. And the lips of a professional whistler.

At least she had the vampire aspects of me to fall back on, even if they were wanly hidden by my date wear. I, on the other hand, had so few puzzle pieces to work with that I honestly had no idea what to look for other than some dirty-blonde chick with big lips and green eyes. To make things safe, I pictured a younger version of Louise, but without all the wool. If I were wrong, so much the better; if I were right, no high hopes to be shot down in flames by the truth. 

I reiterate: I’m all about the middle ground these days.

As intently as I scrutinized every woman walking through the door, they all must have thought I was stalking them, or waiting to serve them a court summons. I’m surprised the hostess didn’t kick me out. Nobody seemed to fit the profile… not even the tall, slender, lovely sort-of catalog model-looking young lady who figured me out for who I was before I had a chance to do the same. 

She was no Louise. 

She was also not semi-petite; she was willowy and statuesque. She wasn’t dishwater blonde; she was sort of radiant. The whistling lips, though? Those were right on the money. But that was a very good thing. “Joe?” My mouth went all dry as I stood and shook her hand. “I could tell by the Ray Bans. I’m Megan.” She sort of looked me up and down, and the smell of her skin made me too fuzzy-headed to be self-conscious. “I almost didn’t spot you from your description… there’s really nothing average about you.” She smiled when she said it, which I took to mean she scaled me on the above average side rather than the below. 

That brought the rest of the self-consciousness through all at once.

I wanted to answer with some flattery of my own, but my language skills had switched off altogether. I sort of squeaked from the back of my throat, something like, “Me, too.” It made no sense, which was fine, I think, since it also came out sounding more like I had choked on my gum. 

“Are you okay? You seem sort of… uncomfortable.” 

My reply was so very unrelated to her question. “Weird about the polar bears losing their home to global warming, huh?” Shit! I had skipped over all the other topics and started at the bottom. That totally crapped up my word cloud. There was no way to go back and start over. 

“So tragic, I don’t know how we’ve let this happen to our planet, but I’m sure it won’t end well if we don’t do something about it soon.”

Whoa. Good save. 

It looked like someone had been working on a word cloud of her own.

POST 29

Getting (Un)Lucky

Megan and I had more in common that just music: 

•
She likes reading
; I’ve heard of books.

•
She’s studying fashion design
; I wear clothes.

•
She volunteers at an animal shelter
; I eat animals.

The similarities were uncanny. 

Actually, what we had instead of overlapping interests was a similar sense of humor, and a willingness to treat our blind date as a fun experiment rather than a stab at finding love. Not that the outing was lacking in romance. But it was only a first try, for both of us. She had put aside actual living in favor of grad school when an internship for a design house in New York came along and changed her plans completely. She’d tried balancing both for a while, which meant she was either at work or holed up in her apartment. It had been months since she’d had any fun, and she was just now figuring out how to balance her two worlds. She was ready to add some
life
back into her life.

See? We had so much in common it was frightening. 

What we didn’t share was a taste for Cabernet Sauvignon; that was hers alone. I can barely pronounce it, let alone bring myself to consider it a beverage. When the waiter brought a bottle and two glasses, I turned mine upside-down. “Not a wine drinker, huh?” Megan asked me. 

I couldn’t help remembering the sake effect. “Wine and I have a bit of a history together – a tainted history.”

Wrong words. She probably thought I was an alcoholic. 

“Maybe you just didn’t try the right stuff. You could give it another shot now.” Megan’s smile was hypnotic, and paired with her sea foam eyes I sort of melted into agreement. Wasn’t that what this whole night was about, anyway – giving things another shot?  So I went with it. She reached across the table and I sipped from her glass. The other diners probably puked up their crab legs at how cute we were, her feeding me wine while I clinked my nubby fangs on the rim, trying not to grimace when the dirty tang hit my tongue. “Maybe I should finish this with a straw.” I righted my glass and we split the rest of the bottle. Once or twice we interlocked our arms in that non-realistic way that people in movies do sometimes. 

So sweet, this Megan.

And there was no life-altering sake aftereffect, thank Dionysus… or whoever it is that governs drunk folk these days.

When we were both nicely wined-up and mellowed out, right before her lobster Thermidor and my Filet in the Raw arrived, the conversation veered toward the more personal. “Does it make you uncomfortable that I know about your… situation?” 

The ice having been well-broken by then, I wanted to answer honestly. “It does, a little. The fact that you didn’t shout it through the restaurant just now tells me you get how it is, though. Thanks for that.” 

She tilted her head… her honey-golden head… and her sea green eyes went all serious. “Can I ask you something a little deeper?” Uh oh. “How does it feel? To be how you are?” To be how I am? 

How exactly am I? 

Her question didn’t offend me. I just wasn’t sure what all she wanted to know. “You mean, how it is for me to be a lonely thirty-two year-old vampire trying to get on with his life? Or a half-drunk dude on a date with the most interesting girl he’s met in a long time, hoping he doesn’t make an ass of himself and blow the whole thing before dessert?” I made her laugh – a genuine, wine-scented laugh. I was used to making women yell, or cry, or douse my belongings in alcohol and threaten to set them on fire. Making one laugh was quite a step up from the norm. 

“That was pretty vague, wasn’t it? What I meant was what does the vampire part feel like? Does it feel painful, or powerful? Or is it just kind of numb?” 

Wow. Those were deep questions. And detailed answers were more than I was willing to give away on a first date. Megan seemed pretty sensitive to the whole vampire deal, and she was much,
much
hotter than either she or Louise had made her out to be. But I have standards. 

Not many, but I have them.

And as I still haven’t nailed down for myself what this whole vampire situation really feels like, I gave as little an answer as I could without totally putting her off. “All of that. It feels like all of that.” She smiled. And she didn’t push it any further.

And when we walked to the parking lot, neither of us really wanted things to end. We sort of hemmed and hawed and made talk so small it almost didn’t exist. We were way beyond word clouds by then. I told her it would be fun to do this again sometime, and as I opened her car door she put the moves on me.

I know. I could hardly believe it myself. 

“Listen, there’s a party that’s probably picking up just about now, not too far from here… a friend of mine is having a housewarming thing. Do you want to go?” 

“Umm… yeah. I do.” More than I’ve wanted anything in a long time.

So we ran into a grocery store nearby and grabbed another bottle of wine as a housewarming gift (apparently that’s something you’re supposed to do) and I followed her to the place. It was in full swing, and the house was duly warmed by the time we arrived. She introduced me to her friend, and to their friends, and no one said a word – or uttered a thought – about vampires. A nice change of pace, to be among people and feel like a part of the group. The host had her hands full, so we wandered about on a self-guided tour of the digs. We peeked into the bathrooms. We nosed around in the library-slash-office. We glanced in the master bedroom.

And we locked the door in the guest room and started snogging the hell out of each other.

The wine packed way less punch than the sake had, but it still made my head spin a little – a good spin, when paired with the sexual charge of my hand climbing from Megan’s ass to the warm skin beneath her sweater. She shivered when my flesh touched hers, and I remembered how cold I must feel. So I halted. “Keep going,” she whispered. “It’s okay.” 

It was like she knew she was deflowering the vampire part of me. 

The smell of her neck was as dizzying as the wine. Actually, I think I could smell the wine in her blood coming through every time her pulse jumped. We fell on the bed, and things intensified. Things heated up.

Things hardened. 

Not just things in the lower regions of my anatomy. Things up high, too. 

Right around the fang area. 

Now I not only had the challenge of having her not be creeped out that my hard-on was rubbing against her leg whether she – or I – wanted it to. I also had to figure out how to keep from slicing open her lip or skewering her tongue with my savage teeth. I pulled back a little, just to make sure I was being careful with it all. “Don’t stop. I want you.” She locked her legs around mine. 

“I want you, too,” I told her, in the lamest, most porntastic voice I could. “Just thinking about protection.”

All kinds of protection.

“I don’t need protection. Just suck me, Joe.”

Wow. 

Green light:
go
. 

Wait. Was there an
s
at the beginning of that second word, or an
f?
It had come out in sort of a breathy whisper, so I couldn’t tell right away. “Sorry… what was that?”