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“I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair/I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair/I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair/And send him on his way,” I sang excitedly. It was silly, perhaps, but I always felt unusually invigorated after an evening of live theatre—a reaction to the emotional currents running through the audience. The man who walked beside me had seen the effect before and found it amusing. “I love Rodgers and Hammerstein!” I added unnecessarily.
“Really? Is that what this display is called?” Damon teased. “I couldn’t tell if you really liked it. No, seriously.”
“Did you like it?” I inquired with curiosity. Surprisingly he had objected more to the tie I’d wanted him to wear than to the basic idea of attending the local theatre group’s performance of South Pacific; the tie was left behind on his bed, but he was at the show, and that was more important to me.
He so badly wanted to say something rude about it, I could tell. “It was, um… well worth the money,” Damon replied.
“You got the tickets for free.”
He smirked. “Okay, honestly I thought it was gonna be a lot worse,” he admitted. That was a compliment, Damon-style. “I thought I was gonna have to kill someone to get through it.”
His tone implied he hadn’t killed anyone. “Are you forgetting about intermission?” I asked dryly.
“That was just a feed-and-forget,” he reminded me, mock-defensive. “Besides, the guy was a d—k. I could hear him texting through the whole first half.”
“Theatre etiquette does need to be strictly enforced,” I agreed. “I see whole crews of vampire ushers swooping down on people who crinkle candy wrappers.”
Damon chuckled at that. His laugh always gave me a warm feeling inside—it was so rare that he laughed, a real, pleasant laugh, not one that was mean or fake. That was the eternal appeal of bad boys, wasn’t it? The idea that only one girl—you—could warm his heart, tame his wild nature, make him laugh. And a vampire was the ultimate bad boy.
Taming him wasn’t what I was after, though. I liked him just the way he was—tie or no tie.
We walked down the dark, deserted streets of town without speaking for a few minutes, and the silence was comfortable. This part of town was mainly quiet businesses, all of them closed, and the stillness helped me to calm down a little bit. It was warm for late fall and my light jacket was sufficient; Damon of course only wore his blazer for show.
“That’s a funny word, isn’t it?” I said suddenly. “Blazer. A blazer should be a really sexy leather jacket, or maybe an obscenely bright raincoat. Not a formal piece of clothing that grandpas wear.”
Damon seemed to find my entire speech unpredictable and amusing. “Are you calling me a grandpa?” he asked, pretending offense.
At over one hundred sixty years, he could have been a grandfather, many times over. “No, you look very nice,” I assured him, as he tended to be a little vain. “But grandpas do wear them.”
“They also wear suspenders,” he shot back, “but I gave those up when belt technology was finally perfected.”
I had to laugh at that, although it did set my mind racing about other items of clothing we take for granted that had to be invented at some point—pants, for instance. Or bras. I didn’t want to bore him with my obscure clothing trivia—though I suspected Damon wouldn’t mind discussing bras, possibly at length.
I decided to turn the topic back to the show. “Did you notice the part where—“ I saw his body language change and stopped walking, but in the blink of an eye he had vanished. “Damon?” There wasn’t exactly silence—somewhere I could hear something, maybe at the other end of the alley we’d been about to pass. It was faint and hard to describe, but I suspected I knew what had happened—there had been someone in that alley, maybe someone threatening, and now Damon was dealing with him. And by dealing with him, I meant drinking his blood, and possibly killing him.
There’s no use sugar-coating things when you’re friends with a vampire. It’s better to face the facts.
I stood alone on the sidewalk in the dark, a breeze starting to stir the air and make me shiver. A car drove by, businesslike and impersonal, and I wondered how I looked to the driver—lost? Vulnerable? Like the world’s worst hooker?
“Damon?” I called again. I didn’t want to be the stupid girl who attracted unwanted attention or distracted the protagonist by repeatedly shouting his name for no purpose. But there was the possibility he might’ve gotten rather caught up in his meal.
He appeared again beside me as suddenly as he had vanished. “What were you saying?” he asked casually, as though only a mere distraction had occurred. His smirk dared me to comment on his absence.
So I did, reaching out to touch a dark stain on his white shirt that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Are you alright?”
He caught my fingers before I could feel the wet cloth, his grip cool and firm. “Yes.” He steered me down the sidewalk along our original path, dropping my hand.
Interesting. Were we going to pretend nothing had just happened? Usually he wasn’t shy about mentioning his feeds.
“You shouldn’t walk home by yourself after dark,” he finally said about a block later. “There’s some shady characters in town.” Damon liked to put a double meaning behind all his words—so his serious warning was said lightly, with a knowing smirk that included himself in that group of shady characters, and with a lightning-fast jump to my other side that startled me.
“Well, I often do,” I reminded him. Between school activities, working at the pie shop, and studying at the library, I usually didn’t head home until ten pm or later.
“Well, call me next time,” he said, as if he were making fun of obnoxious teenagers. “I need an excuse to show off the ‘Vette.”
I smiled at him and he seemed to enjoy it for a second, then became uncomfortable and moved away to walk along the top of a bike rack, a balancing act that only someone like a vampire could pull off. He was worried about me, walking home alone. But he felt he had to cover it up somehow, make light of it. We’d had conversations before that were somewhat serious—so was it only this particular topic that he shied away from? Even more interesting.
I found it sweet. But I knew he would die (again) if I said anything.
“Well maybe I’ll take you up on that offer,” I finally said.
The next night I closed the pie shop at ten pm and started walking home, alone. I could’ve gotten a car, I suppose, but I’d never gotten the hang of driving them well, and the walking didn’t usually bother me. When the weather was bad I called a taxi, but otherwise I always walked. I had never had any trouble.
Until now, apparently, as something rattled a bottle nearby, then kicked a garbage can on the other side of the street. Hmm, who could move fast enough to do both those things without being seen?
“Damon?” I called into the darkness. A piece of paper skittered past me, but there was no breeze. A bottle shattered in the shadows a few feet away.
Hey, nothing says ‘mounting tension’ like littering, right?
“Damon.” Something whooshed behind me but when I turned around no one was there. There were other ways of detecting his presence, though. “You know, you don’t need to put on a full spray of cologne each day,” I said matter-of-factly into the darkness. “Don’t push the sprayer down all the way.” I looked around, but there was only the silent, still night. I shook my head and started to take a step forward, then ran smack into Damon. Which finally did startle me.
“I don’t wear spray cologne,” he informed me indignantly.
I started walking again, around him. “Well, try pouring a little on a cotton ball first, then dab where you want it to go,” I advised.
“Dab with a cotton ball?” he repeated, aghast. You would’ve thought I suggested something truly horrific. “I told you to call me,” he added with irritation, following me.
“When I was done with work? I didn’t know if you were serious or not,” I explained to him. “I didn’t want to bother you if you just said it to be nice.”
“I’m not nice,” he countered, as though he found the term insulting. I wondered what he thought walking me home every night counted as, then.
“Well, thank you for joining me,” I said pleasantly. “Even if you did try to scare the c—p out of me with your cheap horror movie stunts first.”
“I don’t understand how you’re still alive,” he judged blithely. “You have no survival instincts.”
“That’s because I have no natural predators,” I shot back cheekily. “I’ve become indolent, like a lion lounging on the savanna.”
“I would eat you,” Damon said matter-of-factly as we walked along. “I would eat a lion, too, but I think it’d be too much trouble.”
“Probably hard on the wardrobe,” I guessed. He gave me a sideways glance, as if assessing whether his reminder of his powers had made me uneasy. It hadn’t.
“People taste better anyway,” he went on. I wondered if he was disappointed by my lack of discomfort, or truly worried. “Stefan only feeds from squirrels and rabbits and whatever,” he added derisively. “They don’t give you the same kind of power that people do.”
“I wonder why that is,” I remarked curiously, trying to think. “Well, a squirrel I can see as being fairly ineffective. But I would think an animal that was a powerful physical predator, like a lion, would have more powerful blood, in a sense. Of course humans triumph in their mastery of technology, but I wouldn’t think that’d be reflected in their blood.”
“I think it’s because we used to be human,” Damon replied, in an unusually thoughtful tone. Then he lightened up. “If I was a vampire lion, I would probably like feeding on other lions best.”
I laughed at that. “Wow, a vampire lion. I have never had that thought before in my life!” I assured him appreciatively. “And now I can’t stop thinking about what other animals would be like as vampires.”
“A lot of animals routinely practice cannibalism,” he reminded me, “or at least won’t hesitate to kill and eat others of their species if given the chance.”
I heard the serious undercurrent in his tone. “You’re just doing what you have to, to survive,” I said, agreeing with the unspoken sentiment. I looked both ways down the deserted street, then started to cross. “I understand.”
Damon grabbed my arm to stop me. “No, you’re not supposed to understand!” he snapped, clearly frustrated. “I could kill you right now in a dozen different ways!” His tone was not so much menacing as indignant.
“Do you often think about different ways you could kill me?” I checked, looking up at him.
“Well, no, not you in particular,” he admitted. Obviously, I had not gotten his point.
“Good,” I noted. “So, unless you’re gonna kill me by watching a car hit me, can we get out of the middle of the road?”
“You’re more worried about getting hit by a car, than being attacked by a vampire?” he sputtered.
“Well, statistically speaking…”
“Fine,” Damon huffed. He took my arm and steered me across the street to the sidewalk. I didn’t want to laugh at his display of pettiness because I knew it would make him mad; but he was just so put out at his inability to inspire my fear, it was almost comical.
He was sullen for the next couple of blocks and I started to feel a little bad. He had gone out of his way to walk me home and I had basically called him ineffective as a protector. That wasn’t exactly what I had done, of course, but I could see he had interpreted it that way. I tried to think of a safe topic to re-engage him on—something about a mutual friend perhaps. He had dumped Caroline and didn’t seem to care what happened to her; he had a crush on Elena—maybe more—but she had chosen his brother over him. And mentioning Stefan would only sour the mood further unless I—ah, perfect!
“Did you hear Stefan got a detention?” I asked him.
Damon barked out a laugh. It was a mean laugh, but at least it was something. “Yeah, the little twerp. He probably wrote fifteen pages in his diary about the agony of being kept after school with the potheads and delinquents.”
It was a cheap move on my part to mention Stefan’s troubles, but Damon couldn’t resist an opportunity to put his brother down. I felt it was better than walking along in awkward silence, though. “Usually Mrs. Gellar fawns over him,” I agreed—not in a gossipy or mocking tone, just matter-of-fact. “I was really shocked. He wasn’t actually that late, but he was the third person to—“ We turned a corner and I stopped dead in my tracks.
Damon took another step before turning back to me. “What’s wrong?”
I tried to speak calmly. “Let’s cross the street here,” I told him.
“Your house is on this side,” he reminded me unhelpfully. “What’s wrong with you?” He looked around but clearly didn’t see anything alarming.
I took his arm and spoke in a low voice, my tone urgent. “Come on, let’s just—“
Damon turned his head as the animal I had seen moved back out of the shadows onto our path. My grip tightened on his arm; it might have been painful on a human. “A dog?” he asked in surprise. The scoffing in his tone barely registered with me. “Are you scared of a mangy stray dog?”
The creature turned toward us and his eyes caught the light of the street lamp, glowing a phosphorescent green-yellow like a hound of Hell. “Are you just acting like—“ Damon began suspiciously, but no doubt he could easily detect my increased pulse and breathing, and the clamminess of my skin when he put his hand over mine. “No, I guess you’re not,” he decided.
He turned toward the dog and snarled, a low, inhuman sound that sent the animal racing away from us with a whimper. Finally I was able to look at something besides the dog and I saw Damon’s face transformed for a moment—the skin around his eyes red with veins popping, fangs protruding from a mouth that seemed to open too widely like his jaw was unhinged.
It honestly didn’t bother me. Not like the dog had.
“There now, it’s gone,” he assured me, face back to normal. “Its survival instincts are better than—Okay, come on, let’s sit down.”
He caught me as I swayed, the blood rushing to my head making me dizzy and nauseous. He lowered me to the cold concrete and sat behind me, his legs on either side of mine and his arms around me; no matter which way I tipped he could catch me. “It’s okay, it’s gone, it’s not going to bother you,” he told me, in a surprisingly soothing tone.
I knew I was recovering when my mortification outweighed my nausea. I sighed with resignation.
“Not a big fan of dogs, huh?” Damon guessed in a lighter tone.
“I had a bad experience with a dog once,” I admitted. There was no point in being defensive or embarrassed, so I tried to let those feelings go—I envisioned them floating off into the night air like the steam from a newly-baked pie. “I don’t normally—“ I stopped and corrected myself. Damon waited patiently. “Dogs are very common animals. I don’t usually react like that. I wasn’t paying attention and it caught me by surprise.”
“Well, good thing you weren’t walking home alone, huh?” Damon pointed out, in a cocky tone. It occurred to me that this had actually been the perfect way to restore his good humor—I only wished I had staged it, instead of nearly giving myself a heart attack.
I turned a little so I could look at him, though it was awkward because our faces were so close in this position. I let a little sheepishness tinge my voice—it was okay to use it as long as I didn’t really feel it. “I’m sure the vampire lion would’ve done just as well.”
He smirked a little, almost involuntarily, and his gaze flickered down my face to my lips. My heartbeat started to speed up again.
Then he stood abruptly, pulling me up with him so quickly that I almost got dizzy again. “Come on, let’s get you home.”