The Eternal Kiss: Vampire Tales of Blood and Desire

It made him wonder about this new Penny. It was Thursday, and Miles wondered if Penny would go to that diner and keep their date despite the fact that she had told him to go away. He wondered if that was where she usually hung out.

He ducked into the alley and fed.

He found that when he thought about Penny, he thought about his other life, before he was turned. The life where he went to sock hops and learned to drive his dad’s car on Saturday afternoons. The life where he was team captain of the debate club and ran the projector at the cinema three times a week. The life where he had long make-out sessions with the other girl named Penny, the one who loved rock-and-roll as much as he did.

It made him lonely for the boy he used to be. It made him nostalgic for being alive. Now he was seventy- eight years old and a vampire. This new Penny made him feel human for the first time since he was turned.

* * *

He fed at the park again three weeks later. When he was done, he went to the water fountain and cleaned the bits of skin out of his teeth. While there, he noticed the ceramic pig.

It was swinging.

He decided that before he went home, he would go see if Penny was hanging out at the 24-hour diner. He would just go look.

She was there.

He stood in the shadows across the street. He watched her through the window of the place. She was reading a book. She looked happy, turning the pages and occasionally lifting the coffee cup to her mouth. He watched her for half an hour, feeling peaceful. He said her name.

“Penny.”

He knew that she couldn’t actually hear him, but it was at that moment that she happened to look out the window in his general direction. He stepped back, deeper into the shadows. He always wore dark clothing, so he blended in well, and he knew that she hadn’t seen him. When he composed himself, he noticed that the glasses she wore now were round, ugly and ill-suited to her face. He was unsettled.

He released himself to bat form and flew away.

He thought he would go home. That was what he should have done. But instead he found himself standing naked in front of that Goodwill store, staring at the vintage cat-eye glasses.

He punched the window till it smashed and then turned into a bat, grabbed the pair of glasses with his mouth and flew away.

When he got home, he dropped the glasses on his night table, turned back to human form, and lay on the bed. He stared at the glasses. He knew what he would do. He would go to the diner, and he would give them to Penny.

For five nights, he staked-out the diner, waiting in the shadows until at last she showed up. She wore a tight-fitting rainbow skirt with a Victorian-looking white shirt. She had a big bag of books. And she was wearing those round, ugly glasses. She kept pushing them up the bridge of her nose.

“Penny,” Miles stepped out of the shadows as she put her hand on the door of the diner.

She cocked her ear. He said her name again. This time she turned around.

They stood there looking at each other.

If he were alive, his heart would have been beating wildly. He did not know what to say. Words had escaped him. It was Penny who spoke first.

“I’m sorry I was an ass when I met you,” she said. “I got scared.”

It was not what he expected her to say. He expected a shove. Or a scream. Or something dramatic. Instead, she pulled the door open and motioned for him to come inside.

She invited him in.

Miles stepped into the diner. It had not changed much in sixty years. They slid into a corner booth and the waitress, as old as time in a brown uniform, handed them two menus. Her nametag said Stella. He watched her as she went back to the counter and leaned on it in a certain way. From the way she stood, he remembered that he had been in glee club with her. He looked at his menu for something he could eat.

“What are you going to get?” Penny asked.

“I don’t know,” Miles said. “I don’t really eat this.”

“Do you have money?” she asked.

“Yes,” Miles said.

“Good. Then I’m getting the cheeseburger deluxe,” Penny said. “You can pretend to eat my French fries.”

She signaled Stella, the waitress, who brought over two glasses of water and took their order. Miles ordered a black coffee. He figured that he could make it look as though it were being drunk by using napkins and spilling some. Over the years, he had become a master of looking as though he were still human.

“So,” Penny said. “What made you come find me?”

“I wanted to give you this,” Miles said. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the glasses, placed them on the table and slid them across to her with his finger.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “These are beautiful.”

She put them on, and Miles thought that they suited her really well. She looked pretty. She took them off.

“Can’t see with them. I’ll have to get my lenses put in,” she said. “Thank you.”

She reached across to him and put her hand on his. Then she took her hand away.

“Wow, you really are cold,” she said.

“I’m dead,” Miles said.

“Right,” she said. “I knew that.”

She looked at him seriously. Miles poured a little of his coffee into the saucer.

“So, I actually was hoping you would come by,” Penny said. “I thought maybe I’d put you off.”

“I was taking a chance,” Miles said. “You did say you’d rat me out.”

“I know, I know,” Penny said. “I was hoping that you’d know that I didn’t mean it.”

“I wasn’t sure,” Miles said.

“I didn’t. And I’m glad you came, because I wanted to ask you something.”

“You wanted to ask me something?”

Miles felt that it was the other way around. He wanted to ask her something. He wanted to ask her how it was that she could make him feel as though he had a pulse. How she could make him see the colors—that for him were beyond the spectrum already—seem even brighter. How she could make him remember tiny little details from when he was a living, breathing being.

“Yes,” she said.

“What?” Miles asked.

“I want to paint you.”

“Paint me?” Miles asked. “You want me to sit for a portrait?”

He had sat once for a portrait with his older brother when he was seven years old. The portrait had hung in his Grandmother’s house.

“Not exactly sit,” Penny said. “I want to follow you one night and do a lot of sketches as you do your vampire thing. Then I will make a bunch of art based on that.”

“Out of the question,” Miles said.

Stella arrived with the deluxe cheeseburger. She placed it on the table and gave Miles a sideways look, as though she were struggling to place him. He turned his face away from her.

“Anything else for you kids?” Stella asked.

Miles and Penny shook their heads, and Stella gave Miles one more hard stare before she walked back over to her station beside the counter.

“Why not?” Penny said. “You won’t eat me, will you?”

“No,” Miles said. “I won’t.”

He would never drink her blood. He couldn’t. To him she was something more precious than food. She was life. His life. She was the thing that had made him feel something again. He would not do anything to put her in jeopardy.