To be fair, Andrea had more experience that I did at dating the undead. When she was in college, her rare blood type caught the attention of a vampire professor, who convinced her to drop out, move in with him, and be his personal human wine cellar. A few years later, Andrea was unceremoniously booted by her fickle vampire lover, leaving her with no education, no job, and a family that refused to speak to her. She’d moved to the Hollow, where she worked part-time as a blood surrogate and, now, full-time as an employee of Specialty Books and a part-time dog-sitter.
In addition to her clerk duties, Dick and Andrea kept Fitz for me while I was out of town. As much as Jolene and Fitz loved to play, it can be confusing for weres to spend a lot of time with dogs. There are food-competition issues.
Fitz bounded into the store and nearly knocked me down with the weight of his hello kisses. Fitz is a pound find, the apparent result of a night of reckless passion between Scooby-Doo and a bean-bag chair. The only thing remotely dignified about him is that I named him after Mr.
Fitzwilliam Darcy fromPride and Prejudice.
Despite being the size of a small tank, Fitz wasn’t much of a daytime guard. Now that I’d had one of those “shock collar” invisible fences installed around the property to keep Fitz from bothering Jolene and Zeb, he mostly just enjoyed loping around the acreage, protecting the perimeter from roving bands of squirrels.
“Hello!” I squealed, scratching behind Fitz’s ears. “Oh, who’s a good boy? Did you miss me?”
Andrea and Dick stepped through the front door. A huge smile stretched across Andrea’s face.
Dick usually greeted me with a wildly inappropriate single entendre, but today he had an agenda.
“That dog,” he informed me as Fitz licked my neck, “is a menace.”
“Oh, he wasn’t a bother, were you?” Andrea cooed as Fitz rolled over for a belly rub. “Were you, buddy? No.”
“Are you wearing a golf shirt?” I asked, fingering the light blue material of Dick’s collared attire.
Dick seethed a moment before slapping my hand away. “He ate my favorite T-shirt!” He kissed Andrea’s temple and stalked off. “I’m going to go steal something.”
“Sorry,” I called after Dick, who continued to sulk as he went about gathering boxes for the trash. “The shirt will probably pass in a few days.” I turned to Andrea, who threw her arms around my neck. “He seems really pissed. When he said he was going to steal something, did he mean from me?”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Dick loves Fitz. He would ignore Fitz and scold him for getting up on the couch, but the minute I left the room, Dick was scratching his ears and babytalking to him worse than I do.”
“Dick was using baby talk?” I said, limping as I rounded the counter. “You’ve neutered him.
What’s next? Sweater vests?”
“So, what are you doing back?” she asked, squeezing me tight. “I told Zeb not to call you. The break-in wasn’t that bad.”
“Yes, I’m very glad to be back, and I missed you, too,” I responded in a flat voice, avoiding the question. “Keep this barrage of homecoming welcome going, and I won’t give you your presents.”
“Presents!” Andrea cried, clapping and hopping up and down.
“From the snottiest personalparfumeriein France.” I paused to hand her a little lavender gift bag.
“I have to tell you that the chemist was slightly unnerved that I was able to describe your natural scent in so much detail, but it was important to get the blend that would complement you.”
“I’ma little unnerved that you could describe my natural scent in such detail,” she admitted. “Did you get Dick what he asked for?”
“Yes, I got him shot glasses from every country we visited. And in every gift shop I entered, I was glared at and called a ‘horrible American,’” I said, rolling my eyes as I handed her the tinkling box of extremely embarrassing trinkets. “And I got him this!”
She squinted to read the wrinkled red T-shirt I was holding up. “It’s in Italian.”
“It says, ‘My friend went to Italy, and all I got was this stupid T-shirt,’” I said. “I thought I’d add some class to Dick’s T-shirt collection.”
“I just got rid of most of the tackier ones.” Andrea groaned.
“So … you framed my dog for T-shirt theft, huh?” I narrowed my eyes at her.
“If you were laundering a “Federal Bikini Inspector” T-shirt what would you do?”
“I would not use an innocent dog to mask my attempts at giving my boyfriend a makeover,” I told her.
“I’m not trying to change all of him,” she whispered, eyeing the back of the shop, where Dick was working. “Just the tackier T-shirts. And the ones with crusty armpits.”
Andrea eyed my hesitant gait as I rounded the counter. “Did you get a rash while you were traveling?”
“Mom, jeans, starch. I don’t want to talk about it.” I shuddered as I climbed onto one of the high, cushioned bar stools I’d ordered in a deep eggplant. “How do you guys do it? You make it look so easy. You’ve only been dating for a little while, and your personalities are so different.
Frankly, your googly-eyed happiness is starting to piss me off.”
“Well, to be honest, we had a little outside help,” she said, her tone a bit sheepish. She disappeared to the self-help section, then came back with a large pink book with pouty fangpuckered lips from the cover.
“Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less Destructive Relationships.” I read the title aloud. My eyes narrowed at her. “You read this crap?”
“We sell this crap, you hypocrite,” she said, her lips pinched into an expression that would have made Jenny proud. “Besides, there aren’t a lot of books out there for mortal women dating vampires. I think the psychiatric world at large believes that if you’re dating a vampire, you have other issues that need to be addressed before your relationship problems. But this was really helpful. It’s written for women who have recently been turned and are having a hard time adjusting to dating their undead peers. There’s lots of stuff about healthy expectations and boundaries and violent tendencies. So, do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
Andrea walked to the coffee bar. A few seconds later, the espresso machine roared to life.
“Right, because what would I know about being in a relationship with a much older vampire you may or may not be able to trust?”
“Dang you and your logic.” I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and took a deep, unnecessary breath. Andrea was the first human I’d ever fed from. It tends to bond gals for life.
Andrea helped me bridge the gap from semi-social-phobic closet vampire to respectable undead citizen. Thrilled finally to have someone to take classes with after years of an empty social calendar, she enrolled us in yoga classes, ceramics classes, jewelry-making classes, even cake decorating, which we agreed later was a mistake. She’d basically become the girlfriend I’d always tried to make Zeb into. If I couldn’t talk to her about this, whom could I talk to?
I sighed. “He’s probably cheating on me. And I think he might have broken up with me … but without saying the actual words.”
Andrea chewed her plump bottom lip. “Gabriel is a pretty direct person. I’m sure he would have—”
“He said, ‘If you have to go, you have to go.’ And then he said, ‘This is for the best. This trip didn’t exactly work out as we’d hoped. I’ll call you.’” I caught the flash of horror cross her features. “See? You flinched! I knew it!”
“Let’s go back to the beginning. Why did you think Gabriel might be cheating on you? Not impressions or feelings, actual facts.”
I ticked the offenses off with my fingers. “Weird phone calls that he refused to take around me, manic behavior, constant changes in our hotel plans, notes at our hotels that he wouldn’t let me read. And what I could read wasn’t good. Lots of present-tense words. But I’m just being paranoid, right? I mean, there’s probably a rational explanation for all this, right? Like he’s an undead secret agent? That’s plausible, right?”
Andrea winced as she poured me an espresso in a tiny white demitasse. “Well … probably not.
That’s all pretty suspicious stuff. When Mattias cheated on me, he had a lot of late ‘faculty meetings.’ He took calls from his ‘teaching assistant’ in another room.”
“Please stop using the quotation marks, I need this life lesson to be unvarnished and without ironic subtext.” Andrea pushed the fancy cup at me again. I considered claiming some sort of vampire aversion to the high-octane concoction, but Andrea was well aware that while we lack the digestive enzymes to digest solid food, we have no problems with most liquids. Sometimes it’s a pain that Andrea is so well informed.