Begin and End

October 31, 2008 on 2:07 am | In Dead End Streets Chapters |

I’m starting over today, David thought when he woke up from a long sleep. It was dark again—David had slipped into his natural sleep patterns, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to try to fix them. After all, he was a vampire. Maybe there could be a happy medium between what Rita was, and what his parents wanted him to be. It was eleven only eleven, not terribly late, so he called Gabby.

Mike picked up the phone. “Gabby there?” David asked.

“He is, but I don’t think he’s interested in talking right now.”

“Why not?”

“Well, he and Sprite have been locked in his room for about ten hours now…I don’t think they’re coming out any time soon either.”

“Oh,” David replied, momentarily taken aback. “Well, good for them. Don’t bother them. I’ll see him in school tomorrow.”

“But bothering him might be fun.”

“Goodbye, Mike.”

David hung up the phone. So his best friend was busy and he didn’t have a girlfriend. He was alone. Well, that was something he had to get used to.

Downstairs David’s parents were both still up, even though Adam and Teena had been put to bed. They were sitting together in companionable silence as his father watched TV and his mother read a book, both sitting close to each other on the sofa in the living room. “I left a message for Dr. Goldblume,” his mother told him without looking up. “We’ll try to get you in sometime next week. It’s a full moon coming up though, so I’m not sure. You know how things get down at the hospital during the full moon.”

“I know. Whenever is good. I don’t mind missing school.”

“I bet you don’t,” his father replied, this time looking at his son. “How is school?”

“It’s okay. You know. Boring. My grades are good.”

“Of course they are. What’s going on with that girl you were having trouble with?”

“No point even thinking about it,” David assured. “I’ve moved on. Plenty of women, and I have plenty of time.”

“Yes,” he said, returning his eyes to the television. “I guess you do.”

David crept into the kitchen for a packet of blood, heating it in the microwave and chugging it down quickly so he could just get out of the house and away from his family. He took off out the back door at a steady jog, breathing in the cold night air. It had been snowing. Nothing had stuck, but the air had a different smell to it right after a good snow. He wasn’t wearing a jacket or a coat, but the cold didn’t bother him. When he picked up speed to sprint across the neighborhood he didn’t break a sweat. There were some advantages to being a vampire. He slowed back down to a jog and then a walk as he approached Sanguis.

He could so easily stop and go inside, talk to Rita, but some things were better left alone, at least until David could think about it some more. She wanted him to be just like her and he couldn’t . Not then, probably not ever.

David picked up his pace again and kept running. Eventually he found himself running past Heather’s apartment building. He looked up at the various lit windows, but he wasn’t even sure which one was hers.

*****

After school on Monday David just wanted to sleep. He’d been up since eleven the night before. The last bell rang, and it told his body that it was bed time. Instead he drove to the Taco King near his house. They’d finally called him back for his interview.

The manager, Kim, was a plump woman with a harsh, short haircut and crooked teeth. “Well,” she told him, leaning back in her office chair while David sat in front of her. “We do need someone on night shift who isn’t an idiot. Are you an idiot?”

“I put my grades in with my application. I’m not an idiot.”

Kim put picked up his application and set it down again without reading it. “I knew some real idiots in high school that were still top of our class. Grades mean nothing. I got a C average in high school, and look where its gotten me!” She waved her hand at the cramped, burrito smelling office. “Hard work will save you long after you discover your GPA means bull. Anyway,” she continued. “I’m going to start you three days a week, from ten PM to five AM. Think you can handle that?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Don’t call me that. You’re not a ‘ma’am’ or a ‘sir’ until you’re thirty. I have four more months.”

“Okay.”

“If you stick around after a few weeks, I’ll see if I can scrounge up a few more hours for you. I can fire the other guy if you turn out to be half as competent.” She smiled, apparently looking forward to the prospect. “Sound good?”

“Yeah. Great.”

“Good. You start Thursday night. If you’re late, you’re fired.”

“I won’t be,” he assured.

He left the Taco King feeling accomplished and reassured. He had been worried about his vampirism getting in the way of the job, but Kim hadn’t even asked, even though he had checked the appropriate box under ‘species.’ (It was against the law to mark it ‘human’ if you were not.) Maybe things would start to look up. There had to be a first time for everything.

*****

“We need to break up.”

Heather stared at Adrian in disbelief as he spoke. “What?” She pulled his hands out from under her sweater. “What the hell do you mean we need to break up? What’s all this?” She pushed him away to button up her jeans, so hard that he knocked into the shelf of books behind him. It was lunch time and they had the library all to themselves. Not that it mattered. “I thought we were having fun.”

“Lots of fun,” Adrian agreed, looking miserable. “Too much. That’s why we need to break up. This isn’t a long-term thing, and it’s best if we break up now, before it hurts too much.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know, okay? You came to me looking for comfort because you were sad about David, and I said yes because I wanted to have you. That’s not a solid base to build happily ever after on.”

“Adrian, I never expected that. I just thought it could be fore a little while.”

“It was, and now it’s time to stop. Heather, I can’t just be with you. I’m an incubus. I need other girls too, and it isn’t fair for you to have to put up with that. I wouldn’t want to disrespect you that way.”

Heather stalked out of the stacks and found her bag, tossed aside and forgotten towards the front of the library. “So you’re rescuing me from yourself? You can’t do that! Don’t I get a say?”

Adrian followed her. “No. Heather. You don’t want me. Trust me, you don’t.”

“Why not? Why can’t I?”

“I cheated on you at the Halloween party.”

“What?”

“I wanted to have some fun—you weren’t there.”

“You just said you didn’t want to disrespect me, but you already had?”

“So I should have tacked ‘again’ onto my sentence. If it happened once, it will happen again. Not that there’s anything wrong with you—you’re a cubi’s dream come true. But if I can’t have access to you for some reason, I’ll take what I can get.”

“I can’t believe this,” she nearly screeched. “How could you cheat on me?”

“Incubus,” he shot back. “Everyone warned you.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

“I didn’t say it did. It was a shitty thing to do but I don’t even particularly feel bad about it. It’s just the way I am. I’m a demon, I’m supposed to be an asshole. So there. You can hate me, and now it’s over. Go, move on with your life.”

“I don’t hate you,” she replied even as she was walking towards the exit.

“That’s because you don’t love me. You’ll get over it. We both will.”

Heather turned back towards him at the doorway. “What the hell is wrong with the boys in this school?”

******

A/N:
Sorry for the shortness and lateness. It’s a day before Nanowrimo and I’m torn. I’m starting to get burnt out from DES, but I dont know what I want to write for nano either. I had a zombie idea, but the characters didnt want to cooperate. I have a novella that needs converted into a novel. I could do that too. I have a 1/2 finished story that could be re-worked to fit into the DESverse. I could do that for my nano…I’m just not sure.

This year is a great year for nano for me, since I’m only working 36 hour weeks and I’m not going to school, nor do I have a boyfriend to deal with this year…and bad because I have a 3,000 word a week obligation to DES.

I think I’m grumpy because its cold and my furnace is broken…I think I’m just going to torch this place and collect on the insurance money.