Real Vampires Don't Sparkle (20 page)

“Do you?”

“Don’t smirk at me,” Matheus said.

The woman in the matched shirt waved to her friends, then walked toward them, ducking under the waving arms of the man in the black hat.

“I’m not smirking,” said Quin. “This is my interested face.”

“That’s your amused condescension face.”

“Matheus?” The woman in the matched shirt hovered next to Matheus, her hand raised halfway to his shoulder. She jerked it away as he turned, letting her arm fall to her side. She smiled, sweet and hesitant, lips trembling as though they had stage fright.

“Eleanor?” Matheus said, trying to picture the woman in front of him in a pink cardigan and headband.

Eleanor’s smile steadied as she moved closer.

“Oh, my God, Matheus, what are you doing here?” Eleanor was short, nearly a foot shorter than Matheus, and curvy. She had the features of Renaissance painting, pretty in a vague, doughy sort of way. She used to talk about her dog a lot, Matheus remembered.

“Shopping,” he said, holding up the mass of bags.

Eleanor faltered. She flushed, one hand reaching up to fiddle with her necklace.

“I mean, you disappeared. No one knew what happened to you,” she said. She blushed, adding, “I tried your phone, but it had been disconnected.”

“I, uh, decided on a new path,” Matheus said. Talking to Eleanor always made him think of swimming in treacle. She worked as the receptionist at his old job, before Quin and the theft and his unheralded death. Matheus resisted the urge to take a step backward, as though she knew just by looking at him. He made a point of breathing at regular intervals. Eleanor frowned at him; maybe he’d gone overboard with the breathing. “Um,” he said.

Quin moved closer to Matheus, standing behind him, an atom’s width away from touching. The crowd dissipated around them. Quin’s cologne danced on the edges of the air. He could lean back so easily, rest against Quin’s chest, feel his arms wind around his waist, solid and shielding and—

—
ohGodshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutup
!

“Matheus?”

“What!” Matheus yelled.

Eleanor’s mouth fell into a perfect O.

“Sorry. What did you say?” Matheus knew Quin was grinning behind him.

“I said, you left with telling anybody,” said Eleanor.

“Yeah, things changed, er, suddenly,” Matheus said, mentally thumping his inner voice with a sledgehammer. “Weren’t you here with some people? I don’t want to keep you.”

“Oh, I’m meeting them at the restaurant.”

“Oh. Good.”

It has to be the connection
, Matheus thought. Because he did not find Quin attractive, and he definitely did not find him safe.

Eleanor looked up at him, sliding the charm of her necklace back and forth along the silver chain. Matheus didn’t know what she wanted him to say. He wanted to tell her to go away, but thought that might make her cry, ratcheting the awkwardness up to International Space Station heights.

“I didn’t think anyone would notice,” he said with a small shrug.

“I noticed,” said Eleanor.

In the park, Winona Ryder screamed. Several of the students howled or made catcalls at the screen. The projection leaked over the edges of the screen onto the apartment building behind it. Matheus imagined watching the lights shift over the walls, never realizing a bit of movie-land had seeped in. He sighed. Eleanor waited with this look of
concern
that made Matheus want to push her into the river. He felt bad about thinking that, because Eleanor was, essentially, a nice person, and it wasn’t her fault that nice people whipped Matheus into a homicidal froth.

“Well,” he said. “Sorry if I worried you.”

“Sunshine,” Quin said, his voice deeper than normal.

Matheus jumped, dropping half of his bags.

“Right,” he said, with one hand frantically scooping up the clothes that spilled while waving at Quin with the other. “This is Quin. He’s….” He paused, then coughed, straightening up. “Anyway, this is Eleanor. We used to work together.”

“Lovely to meet you,” Quin said, reaching around Matheus to take Eleanor’s hand. His fingers lingered against her wrist before he withdrew.

A hot blush rose up Eleanor’s collarbone. She looked at Matheus, a tiny wrinkle forming between her eyebrows.

“Sunshine, we don’t have much time before the shoe store closes.”

Matheus frowned.

“I have shoes,” he said.

“You need new ones.”

Eleanor split a look between the two of them. The wrinkle grew deeper. Her necklace charm zigzagged back and forth with a scratching beat straight out of a dubstep remix.

“So, you’re okay, then?” she asked.

Okay?
Matheus thought. He was a walking, talking corpse forced into designer clothing. Okay was not the word that came to mind.

“Sure, okay,” he said.

“He just wanted to try new things,” Quin said, giving Eleanor a wide smile.

Her eyes widened as Matheus’ narrowed. Quin’s smile was open and innocent and as fake as the tits on a stripper. He looked like a choirboy and an Eagle Scout rolled into one. For the first time since Matheus had met him, Quin looked genuinely human. Matheus’ nerves writhed.

“I see,” said Eleanor. “You, er, had to leave work for that?” Her blush rose up her neck and captured her cheeks, set on conquering skin all the way up to her hairline. She avoided Matheus’ eyes.

“Oh, he keeps busy,” said Quin with another quick grin.

Matheus stared at him.

“That’s…nice,” Eleanor stammered.

Matheus stared at her instead. He was missing something.

Quin leaned toward him, placing his mouth next to Matheus’ ear. He wrapped a hand around Matheus’ arm, digging into the soft flesh inside his elbow.

“I’ll wait for you at the corner,” he said in low whisper that crawled through Matheus’ ear canal to his amygdala. “Get rid of your little admirer before I decide I want a snack.”

Giving Eleanor a nod, Quin strolled away, walking in a way that bordered pornographic.

Matheus watched him leave with envy. If he had let Quin eat Eleanor, he’d be able to walk away, too. Albeit with less hip-swinging. Quin didn’t even have hips, but he managed to swing them nevertheless.

“I should go,” Matheus said, trying to inch away. “Quin gets cranky if he’s denied shoes.”

“Are you happy?” Eleanor asked. She blinked up at Matheus, doing her best to gnaw off her lower lip. She was quite pretty.

Matheus tried to remember if she had a boyfriend. He rarely paid attention to anything she said. Ignoring ninety percent of all conversations was his secret to maintaining civil relationships with his coworkers. They hadn’t been close. Eleanor bruised too easily for him to be comfortable. Sarcasm escaped her, and irony lived in a foreign country. Besides, she liked to print out pictures of adorable puppies and share them around the office.

“I suppose,” Matheus said. He didn’t think he’d ever considered himself
happy.
He thought the people who consistently described themselves as happy either took a lot heavy drugs or belonged in a room with padded walls. Matheus subscribed to the theory that life consisted of a long string of miseries, tolerated only because the alternative was worse.

“Take care of yourself.” Eleanor dropped her necklace, wrapping her arms around Matheus’ middle and squeezing.

“Urk,” said Matheus. Eleanor felt warm and soft, and smelled like steak flavored with rosewater. The double pulse of her heart teased at Matheus’ nerves. He wiggled, the bags banging together, but Eleanor refused to be dislodged. A couple of passersby gave them strange looks. Saliva built up in Matheus’ mouth. Ten seconds more and he’d perform his own reenactment of
Dracula
.

Matheus yanked an arm free and shoved Eleanor away.

She staggered back a couple of steps, shock and hurt mingled on her face.

“Sorry,” said Matheus. “I’m not really a hug kind of person. So, uh, bye.”

He stared at the pavement as he hurried away, nearly missing Eleanor’s soft, “Goodbye.”

Quin waited by the main gate to the park, his head resting back against one of the tall brick pillars that marked the entrance.

Matheus slowed as he approached, trying to see Quin from Eleanor’s perspective. He was very tall. Woman liked tall men, right? Maybe that explained the blushing and necklace fiddling.

“Aw,” said Quin, looking over Matheus’ shoulder. “You broke her delicate little heart.”

Matheus glanced back at Eleanor. She walked in the direction her friends had gone, ponytail bobbing with each step.

“What are you talking about?” Matheus asked. “What was that act back there?”

Quin reached up, plucking a leaf off one of the oak trees that lined the gate on either side of the entrance. One of the branches dipped low, growing over the brick. Orange and yellow leaves littered the ground, the few that managed to escape the maintenance crew. Quin shredded the one he held along the veins threaded through the leaf. He smiled, lips curving up a fraction.

“You are incredibly oblivious, Sunshine,” he said.

“About what?” Matheus asked.

Quin pushed himself away from the pillar. Matheus followed him around the edge of the park, heading into a neighborhood made up of apartment buildings and bland government offices. Matheus was not aware of any shoe stores in the area, but he assumed Quin had some specialty cobbler who accepted only first-borns as payment.

“I was wrong. Apparently, someone would miss you. Of course, if I had known about your adorable wee crush—”

“On Eleanor?” Matheus gaped at him. “You’re a lunatic.”

Quin arched an eyebrow at him.

“Well, she likes you,” he said. “It looked like she’d been nursing a passion for a while.”

“That’s…. Really?”

“Two words. Incredibly oblivious.”

They crossed against the light, Matheus jogging a little to keep up with Quin. The handles of the bags cut into his palms. There was a subway stop around the corner. Matheus couldn’t picture Quin crammed in with all the other commuters, but he began to wonder if Quin actually walked everywhere. The city was on the smaller side, but Matheus didn’t want to walk from end to the other, even without the sixty pounds of clothing.

“She never said anything,” Matheus said. “She smiled at me a lot, but Eleanor’s that kind of person. She smiled at everyone. Always wanted everyone to get along.”

“They do say opposites attract,” said Quin in a bright, jangly voice.

“Not for me.”

Quin stopped at the next intersection, pressing the crosswalk button as a stretch Hummer rolled by, its drunken inhabitants whooing out the windows. He rolled his eyes, at Matheus or the Hummer, or both.

The tiny man lit up as a beeping started, signaling the change in the traffic lights. Quin began walking, talking to Matheus over his shoulder.

“Yes,” he said. “Two stubborn, sarcastic, angry people would have an excellent relationship.”

Matheus grinned, broadly, suddenly.

Quin tripped over the curb, catching himself on the lamppost. He stared at Matheus.

“It might not be the most stable,” Matheus said, over his shoulder as he kept walking. “But it’d definitely be interesting.”

“Sunshine, you have hidden depths,” said Quin, catching up with Matheus.

“And you are never going to plunder them. So don’t go getting your hopes up. Or anything else.”

Quin laughed.

“You’re right. That poor girl would be all wrong for you.”

“Glad you agree,” said Matheus. “Now, let’s go meet some tall, temperamental supermodels with severe emotional issues.”

“You could have just said supermodels,” Quin said. “The rest is redundant.”

“Don’t knock the profession of my wife-to-be. I’m sure many supermodels are lovely, rational people.”

Quin laughed again. He pointed Matheus down a cross street, emerging onto one of the main roads through the city. The sidewalks were nearly as wide as the street itself, lined with slender trees recently planted during the former mayor’s desperate campaign to remain in office.

The Liberal Arts building of Matheus’ old college sat about half a mile up the street. Bayhill didn’t have a campus; its properties sprawled over the city. One semester, Matheus left the LA building at ten, sprinted to catch the 10:03 a.m. bus to Kent Station, then switched to the 1214 train to get across town in time for his next class at 10:25 a.m. He didn’t miss those days.