Author: Molly Harper

“The offer, which you wouldn’t let me make, still stands.”

“Thank you. Anyway, when I could not lure people into these said appointments, my new boss told me all about the other stuff I could sell, including this antivampire snake oil. And then she told me that vampires are filthy, vicious creatures who are going to overthrow the human government in some bloody coup we’ve been planning for years.”

“I take it she didn’t know you were a vampire?” he said as I shook my head.

“Not only was I subjected to the general abuse that telemarketers receive—and, I now realize, deserve just the tiniest bit—but I got treated to my very first hate speech.”

“Oh, you’ll hear much worse over the years,” he said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and pressing me to his side. “I once had a drunk in a tavern tell me a delightful joke about two vampires, a priest, and a—”

“I don’t need to hear it,” I assured him. “Also, I’m pretty sure this is one of those stories that ends in ‘and then I ate him.’”

Gabriel shrugged but didn’t deny it. I laughed.

“You’re laughing. That’s always a good thing. Of course, you’re laughing at me, but I’m getting used to that,” he said.

I leaned my forehead against his. “You really need to.”

Gabriel pulled me onto his lap like a child woken by a nightmare. “Humans fear what they don’t understand. And I don’t believe that they will ever truly understand us. You will come across the stupid, the ignorant, the misinformed.”

“And I’m related to most of them,” I said, leaning my head against his shoulder.

“You will meet these people. And they will insult you. They may try to hurt you. You managed to escape the situation without lashing out or hurting anyone, despite your anger. You did escape without hurting anyone, right?”

“Yes,” I grumbled. “I may have made a rude gesture or two behind a closed door, though.”

“See? You left with your dignity intact, which is far better than I would have done at your age. I’m proud of you. Try not to take the things humans do so personally, Jane. You have to take the good with the bad.”

“And enjoy snacking on the bad?”

“Sometimes, yes.” He chuckled, playing with the buttons of my sweater. “Can I offer you the use of my shower?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “That is the most abrupt pickup line I’ve ever heard.”

Gabriel’s lips twisted into a half-smile, half-grimace that somehow communicated that he wasn’t just being playful and bantery.

“The smoke smell is that bad?” I cried. “I was only there for a few hours!”

“It is pungent,” he admitted. “But my nose is much more sensitive than the average man’s. And to make up for this insult, I will take you upstairs and wash you from head to toe.”

“Will there be bubbles?” I asked.

“Bubbles can be arranged.” He nodded solemnly, parting the buttons to toy with the Chinese finger trap that was my front-enclosure bra.

Gabriel peeled away my sweater. I was enjoying the novelty of being both topless and outdoors when an expression of revulsion skittered across his features. I looked down, checking my torso for any sort of disfiguring scars or moles I may have missed in the last two decades. “What?”

“It’s actually worse now,” he said, his nose wrinkling.

I choked out a shocked laugh. “Nice!”

“I can work around it,” he promised quickly, realizing he’d hurt my feelings. “I don’t need to breathe.”

“Thank you for your commitment to the task at hand.”

Gabriel went back to work with a determined air, stroking my skin as he pressed kisses along my throat. I tipped my head back. My bones seemed to become liquid as he rubbed slow circles over my spine. I looked down and saw him hesitating as he pressed his lips to my skin, as if the contact would sting. He was forcing himself to continue his path from my throat to my collarbone.

“You really shouldn’t have to try this hard,” I told him, pushing his hair back from his face. “But it’s very sweet.”

“I’m sorry. It seems to have taken up residence in your pores,” Gabriel said kindly.

“This is not the night to do this. Stinky is definitely not the note I want to start out on,” I said, sniffing my once-lucky-now-destined-for-burning sweater. “I’m going home and bathing in tomato juice. It worked when Fitz used a skunk as a chew toy last summer.”

“Stay a few moments,” he said, stroking my knees as I slipped the sweater back on. “I think I can tolerate your aromatic presence a while longer.”

“Gee, thanks,” I muttered. He kissed me softly, tracing the line of my mouth with his tongue before withdrawing and doing his best to hide his instinct to recoil.

“It was a valiant attempt,” I told him.

“It’s rather like licking an ashtray,” he said apologetically. “You don’t breathe. How did you get that much second-hand smoke in your mouth?”

“I talked constantly for four hours.”

“Tell me again why this job didn’t suit you?” he asked, making an undignified uhhff sound when I poked his stomach. “I’m sorry you had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Still, knowing you, you’ll turn it into some sort of learning experience.”

“Yes, I’ve learned I’m going to be a lot nicer to telemarketers from now on.” I sniffed as I snuggled into his chest.

“See? There’s a silver lining after all.”

We sat in silence and listened to frogs chirping on his front lawn. Gabriel was slowly but surely leaning his head away from me. After a minute or so, his face was as far away from me as his neck would allow.

“All right, all right,” I grumbled, getting to my feet. “I’ll go home and shower.”

“I’m sorry,” he assured me as he followed me to my car. “Otherwise, I find you irresistible.”

I glared at him halfheartedly as he leaned in for a kiss. Thinking twice when he was hit with my aura of nicotine, he reached out and shook my hand. I laughed.

“You’re laughing. That’s always a good sign,” he said again as I climbed into Big Bertha.

I kept laughing until I stopped at the end of Gabriel’s road. I looked into the rearview mirror and saw a girl with a glint in her eye and a goofy grin on her face.

“Oh, Jane. You’ve got it baaaad.”

14

Vampires can be territorial and possessive creatures. While it makes them passionate and exciting lovers, it can also make them terrifying ex-lovers.

—From The Guide for the Newly Undead

You know how people complain that Christmas has become too crass and commercial? Well, boo-hoo. Have you seen what humans have done to Halloween? It’s all “excuse to dress slutty” witch costumes, chainsaw serial-killer movie marathons, and life-size electronic dancing mummies. And let’s not even talk about how culturally insensitive the whole dang holiday is toward the undead. How would humans feel if we put inflatable versions of them on our lawns?

I didn’t take this all so personally until my first undead Halloween. Believe it or not, vampires tend to hole up on All Hallows Eve and refuse to come out until the last candy corn has been consumed. Part of it is the commercial resentment, but mostly, it’s the hope to avoid a bunch of drunk idiots doing their worst Transylvanian accent.

While explaining the various holiday pitfalls, Gabriel said he usually spent Halloween watching old movies, an incurable Hitchcock fan. And then he invited himself over to my house.

This may sound juvenile, but I was nervous. Then again, our first date involved me being interrogated, so I didn’t feel this was unwarranted. We were going to have the place to ourselves. Aunt Jettie had a date to go out with Grandpa Fred, walking the earth when the veil between the spirit world and reality was at its thinnest and all that.

It had taken some work, but I’d finally exorcised the offensive eau de Marlboro Man scent that clung to my skin for days after I left Greenfield Studios. I bathed in tomato juice, used four different types of clarifying shampoo, and invested in the economy pack of Listerine. I also took more care with my appearance than usual that night. I wore a gauzy green blouse and my “good” jeans. I’d actually bothered with earrings, a rare thing for me. And I was wearing makeup. Yes, I did own makeup, blush and powder and Chapstick. But not eyeliner. There was an incident in college. I had to wear an eye patch for two weeks.

I wanted my sire to see that when I wasn’t drunk or freaking out, I wasn’t a total gorgon. And I even wore cute black underwear, because you never knew.

The only real problem was entertainment. I didn’t think building an evening around “Come over and make out with me” was a good way to start a relationship. Then again, “Come over and play canasta” is just lame. My DVD collection did not include the old-fashioned thrillers Gabriel liked but rather an alarming number of romantic comedies that I didn’t want Gabriel to know I had seen, much less owned. And I never realized what a minefield Halloween television could be. Imagine my horror to find the channels crowded with the Blade trilogy and The Lost Boys. In terms of entertainment value, Lost Boys is a great movie. But it involves the unholy trinity that is Corey Feldman, Corey Haim, and Joel Schumacher, and therefore I cannot claim it as a suitable model for my lifestyle.

We finally settled on Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula, which, unfortunately, Gabriel seemed to think was a comedy. I think it was the combination of Keanu Reeves’s British accent and Gary Oldman’s elderly Count Dracula hairstyle. They’re just misleading.

“Why would he arrange his hair into buttocks on top of his head?” Gabriel laughed.

“You’re not the first person to ask that,” I told him.

He was just so darn cute when he laughed. The skin around his eyes crinkled. His face relaxed. It made him seem so alive, so normal, which in itself seemed weird.

“I never realized how funny Dracula could be,” he said. “Most vampires resent Stoker for the public-relations nightmare he visited on us all, but we secretly enjoy the story. It was the first time vampires were portrayed as sensual creatures, as opposed to mindless, reeking ghouls.”

“Mmmm, you know what book talk does to me,” I growled, stopping when I noticed how prim he looked, sitting in the exact center of my sofa with his back ramrod straight. He was sitting almost a foot away from me, with his hands at his sides. “Why are you sitting like that?”

“I know you have a problem with this on occasion, but I was talking just then.”

“Seriously, why are you sitting like that?” I asked, ignoring his grimace at being interrupted again.

“Because the furniture designers didn’t intend for us to sit on the back of the sofa?” he suggested.

“You are blatantly violating the rules of the couch date,” I said.

“Couch date?”

“When you spend an entire evening on the couch with an attractive person of the opposite sex, it’s called a couch date,” I said.

“I’ve never been on a couch date,” he admitted.

“Well, let me introduce you to the protocol.” I nudged him into the corner and laid his arm across the back of the sofa. “You sit here. I sit here. As the movie progresses, I will lean closer and closer. Eventually, I will be in this position.” I curled against his side with my head leaned against his shoulder. “You can use this to your advantage.”

“How?” he asked, clearly intrigued.

“You’ll figure it out,” I said, bringing his arm around me.

Did you know there at least nineteen different types of kissing? Open-mouthed and soft kisses that make your toes curl. Tiny, dry kisses peppering your jaw. Tongue. No tongue. And Gabriel knew all of them. Sometimes it paid to date a really old guy. He had a lot of experience. And the best part was that I didn’t have a thought in my head the entire time. OK, yeah, I did, but most of them were along the lines of “Mmmmm.” “Ohhhh.” And “Thank God I wore the black panties.”