“Sure,” I said tightly. “Okay. I’ll just go rent them.”
I thought he might mutter some half-assed goodbye and hang up then, but of course he had to get in a final word. A final reminder of my shortcomings in his eyes.
“You need to be more careful about security. I mean... people coming onto your property like that? Breaking locks and getting into things?” He huffed, and I didn’t need to see his frown or rueful headshake in order to picture it, clear as day. “You’re going to come to a bad end one day, Zorah—just like your mother.”
“Uh-huh. Thanks for all your help, Dad,” I said around the tightness in my throat, and disconnected the call.
THREE
I STAYED IN BED for as long as I could get away with the following morning, hoping that the double dose of over-the-counter painkillers I’d taken would be enough to get me through the day. Unfortunately, while they might’ve taken the edge off a bit, it was pretty clear that the score was still Kitchen Floor—one; Zorah—zero.
I should’ve let them drag me to the ER yesterday so I could have gotten some decent pain meds. I should call into work and tell them what happened... except for the vampire part, obviously. My supervisor would probably let me take the night off, under the circumstances.
I didn’t, though. There were bills to pay. Power tools to rent. Lumber and hardware supplies to purchase.
Adulting, man. The struggle was real.
Instead, I stumbled down the stairs that seemed to get steeper every day, and took a very long, very hot shower. I aimed the cheap plastic detachable showerhead at the tight muscles of my neck and shoulders, the pulse of water on the massage setting going some way, in combination with all the ibuprofen I’d downed, toward making me feel human again.
What I needed, I decided, was a hot guy to rub my back with oil before and after every waitressing shift. Well, my back, along with several other areas that needed more attention than they were getting these days. I felt the familiar pull of frustrated sexual need, and eyed the pulsing showerhead speculatively for a moment.
But, no.
Irritated with myself, I put it back in the bracket and finished my routine—lather, shave, rinse. People with chronic health problems weren’t supposed to also be sex addicts. But I wasn’t a damned freak, no matter what my string of exes had to say on the matter.
Jesus, Zorah—what the hell is wrong with you?
You’re draining me dry, woman. It’s not natural.
No one wants to date a goddamned nympho, Zorah.
Either popular culture had lied to me, or I was a magnet for the only men on the planet who didn’t like horny women. So, yeah, maybe I was in the midst of a pretty long dry spell at the moment, but that didn’t mean I was doomed to marry my seven-in-one massaging showerhead quite yet. Especially on a day when I was already running late for my shift.
I worked cacao and shea butter conditioner into my hair, and then rubbed moisturizer over my body. At least I’d gotten a polite vampire yesterday, and he didn’t let me drop like a ton of bricks when he was done using my neck as a sippy cup. There wasn’t a bruise on me unless you counted the dark smudges of exhaustion under my eyes.
Hair, makeup, clothing. I stood before the bathroom mirror, giving myself a calculated onceover. Passable, I decided, though the tips tonight might be a bit on the thin side. Normally, I seemed to possess a talent for motivating the male customers, at least, to tip well. AJ’s City Broiler was a fairly upscale restaurant. The pay was shit, but with tips it was enough for me to stay afloat while still devoting time to my passion project, volunteering for the Missouri Mental Health Alliance.
At least my job allowed me to stay afloat as long as everything didn’t decide to break at once. I brought my push mower and the weed whip into the dining room to discourage anyone from taking advantage of the broken shed door while I was gone. I looked around, my eyes lighting on a straight-backed wooden chair. I jammed the chair sideways into the track of the patio door, spanning its width so that the door would catch against the wooden legs if someone tried to open it. That still left a gap of a couple of inches, but it wasn’t big enough for anyone to squeeze through.
House secured—for a given definition of secure, at least—I shoved my waitressing uniform in my backpack and headed for the bus stop. I did own a car, but apparently 168,000 miles was the limit of what a ’96 Honda Civic’s transmission could handle without making awful grinding noises and smelling like smoke whenever it was in second gear.
Who knew?
So, anyway, the Civic was in the shop while I tried to decide whether it made more sense to spend twenty-five hundred bucks on a new transmission or twenty-five hundred bucks on a different car. Since I didn’t have twenty-five hundred bucks for either of those things, I wasn’t in a huge hurry to make that particular call.
The bus ride was an extra forty minutes I could really have done without today, mostly because it was forty minutes where I had nothing to do but think. I’d done a fair job of avoiding just such a situation in the hours since what I had mentally labeled The Incident.
I felt like my reaction so far to The Incident was not exactly the paragon of mental health. Not that anyone had accused me recently of being a paragon of mental health. Or any other kind of health, for that matter. But feeling relieved by the revelation that vampires existed seemed... kind of strange? After all, it wasn’t like I was happy about the idea of my jugular being on tap.
Really? said a little subversive voice in my head. You seemed pretty into it at
