Thirsty

Chapter 4

Lorenzo stumbled downstairs on Sunday night to find Maggie and Rachel on the couch, settled in for their weekly appointment with whatever prestige program had caught their interest of late.

The sun had just set and he was still a little groggy, so it took him a few seconds to notice that they weren’t alone: Charlie was sitting in the wingback armchair next to the couch.

“Charlie?” he said stupidly, blinking the last remnants of sleep out of his eyes.

Charlie turned to glance at him, a grin lighting up his face.

Those round, chubby cheeks of his should have made him look cherubic or innocent, but the effect was spoiled by his sharp eyes, slight stubble, and the wicked edge to his smile.

Lorenzo suddenly wished he’d pulled on something nicer than his coffin clothes. “What are you doing here?”

Charlie nodded at his roommates. “Maggie and Rachel invited me over to watch Shōgun.”

“But . . . why?” Lorenzo asked.

“He’s cool,” Maggie said, as if this were obvious and not a sign of staggeringly poor taste on her part. “And he wanted to talk more for his thesis thing.”

Lorenzo scowled at her. “You shouldn’t indulge him.”

“Shut up,” Rachel said. “It’s starting.”

Lorenzo grumbled at the lot of them and wandered into the kitchen. In the fridge he found only pig’s blood—he needed to do some shopping—but it was all he had, so he took a swig out of the paper cup and grimaced at the stale taste.

When he put it back in the fridge and closed the door, Charlie was standing there. Because Lorenzo was a stealthy creature of the night, he only jumped a little. “Jesus.”

“Guess what,” Charlie said with a blinding smile.

“No thank you,” Lorenzo muttered.

“I got you a plumber!” Charlie said, handing Lorenzo a post-it note with some details scribbled on it. “His Yelp reviews are excellent, and he was very nice on the phone. He’ll be here Tuesday night, ten p.m.”

“Why did you not check with me before scheduling him?” Lorenzo groused, staring down at the note. “I could be busy Tuesday night.”

“Are you?”

He hesitated, then said, “No,” and slid the note into his pocket.

“Great,” Charlie said, beaming at him like the cat that’d caught the canary. “So. You know what this means . . .”

Lorenzo avoided his teasing smile. “Aren’t you here to watch your,” he said, waving vaguely, “samurai program?”

“That’s one reason,” Charlie said, pinning him with a pleased, expectant stare.

It was strange being the focus of Charlie’s attention, when five years ago he’d barely shown Lorenzo more than dismissive scorn.

This Charlie, the one who seemed brimming with enthusiasm to track down and entrap Lorenzo at every turn, was unsettling.

The force of his interest made Lorenzo feel like he might fidget out of his skin.

He needed to spend more time brainstorming a plot to wreak his revenge on Charlie, since that was the only reason he’d agreed to help him in the first place.

It had seemed like such an obvious idea when he’d first encountered Charlie in that coffee shop, and at the time he’d been sure that the details of the revenge plan would simply come to him with time.

After all, he had plenty of long nights to brood on the cruelties of life and all of the discontent that Charlie had brought him; surely something would come of it.

But with each passing day, Charlie seemed to be getting more and more out of their arrangement, while Lorenzo’s true agenda was sputtering on air. He needed to seriously rededicate himself to the task. He’d simply have to harness the darkness within.

In the meantime, though, he knew he’d been backed into a corner. Lorenzo sighed. “Fine. I am a creature of my word—I will fulfill my end of the bargain.” Before Charlie’s smug expression could manifest itself in words, he added: “I will answer one question.”

Charlie’s jaw dropped satisfyingly. “What? One question?”

Lorenzo opened the fridge, took the pig’s blood out again, and set it on the counter along with a bowl from the cupboard. “I never said how many questions you would get in exchange for each errand.”

By now Charlie had recovered, suppressing a smile as if he were amused by Lorenzo’s attempts to stymie him. “Well, I did do more than one errand,” he said, leaning against the countertop. “And, technically, if you count each item of dry cleaning separately—”

“Which I won’t.”

“I think I should get . . . ten questions,” Charlie said.

Lorenzo grabbed a block of cream cheese from the fridge and stared Charlie down. After a suitably dramatic pause, he offered: “Three.”

“Eight.”

Lorenzo unwrapped the cream cheese block, dumped it into the bowl, and poured the blood over it. “Maybe we should forget the whole thing.”

“Oh, come on,” Charlie said amiably. “You wouldn’t do that to me after I ran all over town for you. Not if you’re a creature of your word.” Lorenzo couldn’t tell if he was flattered or insulted by the way Charlie had deepened his voice to mimic his.

“You did two things.”

Charlie bit his lips. “I’ll get Rachel and Maggie in here. They’ll beat you up.”

“I’m not scared of them,” Lorenzo said.

Charlie smiled at him; a small, fond smile, as if he was enjoying their banter no matter where it led. Lorenzo was suddenly seized with the urge to get the entire thing over with as quickly as possible.

“Five questions,” he said, stirring his dinner.

“Seven.”

Lorenzo rolled his eyes. “Fine.”

“Great,” Charlie said. He got out a notepad and pen while Lorenzo put his bowl in the microwave and grabbed a bag of tortilla chips from the pantry.

“You really want to do this right now?” Lorenzo asked, grasping for one last excuse. “You won’t miss your show?”

“I’ll watch it later,” Charlie said, clicking his pen with an air of deep satisfaction. He glanced at the microwave as it whirred and said, “So—I guess I don’t need to ask, but . . . you can eat human food?”

“Yes.”

“That’s interesting,” he said, scribbling as he wrote. “I thought maybe anything other than blood would be toxic to vampires or something.”

Lorenzo shrugged. “It makes my stomach hurt. But sometimes, you know, it’s worth it.”

Charlie grinned. “I get that.” As Lorenzo took the bowl out of the microwave, he added, “Is that . . . human blood?”

“Pig.”

“Hmm,” Charlie said. He eyed Lorenzo, a hum of excitement beneath his contemplative stare. “But you do . . . also . . .”

He hesitated. Lorenzo waited him out. After a moment, Charlie looked back up at Lorenzo and asked, “You drink people blood?”

Lorenzo’s throat prickled uncomfortably. “Not for a while.”

“Why not?”

“This way is easier,” he said. “You can buy it in a shop, and there’s no risk of hurting anyone.”

Holding Lorenzo’s eye, Charlie asked, “Which one tastes better?”

Lorenzo swallowed a bite of extremely bland pig’s blood, and did not look at the fluttering of Charlie’s jugular. “I should think,” he said, “that would be obvious.”

“Hmm,” Charlie said. He didn’t write anything down, and when Lorenzo looked back after busying himself with his food for a moment, Charlie was still studying him.

“Two questions left,” Lorenzo prodded him.

Charlie blinked. “Wait, what? A bunch of those were follow-ups, that doesn’t count.” He glanced down at his notebook and flipped through the pages, muttering, “We’re still on the general topic of food, I have so many more . . .”

Lorenzo shrugged unrepentantly.

“Okay, give me—three more questions,” Charlie said.

He sighed. “Fine.”

“Thank you,” Charlie said, and then paused as he tried to narrow down his ideas. “Um . . . okay, well . . . Okay. When it comes to dating, do you mostly date vampires or humans? Or—werewolves or leprechauns or, y’know”—he gestured, like yadda yadda yadda—“whoever.”

“Mostly humans. But, most people are human, so.”

“So it doesn’t matter to you?” Charlie said. “You don’t have a supernatural type?”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “You’re not looking to date only humans or only vampires? And—these are follow-ups, to be clear, not new questions.”

“No.”

“No, they’re not follow-ups?”

“No,” Lorenzo said, “it doesn’t matter to me what species someone is.”

“Really,” Charlie said.

“It is as David Rose has said,” Lorenzo said. “I enjoy the wine, not the bottle.”

Charlie’s lips quirked in a small, surprised smile. “You watched Schitt’s Creek.”

“We’re not all stuck in the past, you know,” Lorenzo said with just a touch of irritation. “I have a television and a computer.”

Charlie dropped his notebook on the counter as he leaned closer to Lorenzo, looking lost in thought.

“Is it so weird having those things—watching streaming video and prestige TV with your roommates—when you grew up with like . . . like you were saying, shepherds and conquerors and being a literal pirate?”

“I wasn’t a pirate,” Lorenzo muttered.

“I mean, sometimes I think about the fact that I used to watch DVDs when I was a kid and I’m like, whoa, I’m old,” Charlie continued.

“But you—I mean, the world must have changed so much in your lifetime. Is that . . . what is that like?” He laughed a little.

“Can you even explain it to a dumb human like me?”

“It is . . . odd sometimes,” Lorenzo said. “But also . . .”

Charlie leaned toward him, his eyes wide. “What?”

“These new things—TV, streaming, the internet—yes, they’re strange at times.

But they’re also just machines.” He shook his head.

“You humans make so much out of change and progress and evolution, but really, things are just as they’ve always been.

The world is . . .” He sighed. “You ask me about—about food, and love, and sex. The same things people always think about. The things they crave.”

A slow grin spread across Charlie’s face. “I didn’t ask you about sex,” he said. “Yet.”

Lorenzo’s heart didn’t beat anymore, so there was no way it could thump all the way up in his throat. “But since you mentioned it,” Charlie continued.

“Yes?” he asked warily.

Whatever Charlie had been ramping up to, it made him hesitate. Lorenzo desperately wished he could read Charlie’s question from his face, but he couldn’t. Finally, he asked, “Is it dangerous for a human to have sex with a vampire?”

There was nothing alive in Lorenzo’s chest anymore, but something in there fluttered. “Not really.”

“Not really?”

“I chipped a tooth once when a woman headbutted me.”

“You know what I mean,” Charlie said impatiently.

“No, it’s not dangerous,” Lorenzo said. His blood didn’t pump anymore, so there was no way it could thrum so close to his skin, making him feel flushed and unsteady as he looked down into Charlie’s eager eyes.

“No more than sex between humans can be dangerous. At least, from what I remember of sex between humans.”

“But what about . . .” Charlie pressed.

“What?” Lorenzo asked.

“Do you . . .” he trailed off, and then asked, “Do you feed from humans during sex?”

Lorenzo’s mouth went dry. Charlie kept going, his voice low. “I mean, that’s part of it, right? . . . Biting?”

Lorenzo pushed away from the counter. “You’re out of questions.”

Charlie gasped. “Oh, come on.”

“No,” Lorenzo said, walking away. “We had a deal at seven, and I was more than generous. Good day.”

“Wait,” Charlie said, following him out into the living room. “Give me more errands to do.”

Rachel squawked as they both strode past the TV. “Hey! Lorenzo, get your human out of the way.”

“No,” Lorenzo said to both of them.

“Please,” Charlie said. “This was so helpful, but I need more!”

Lorenzo ignored his entreaties. He needed more time to think, to regroup—he couldn’t just send Charlie off on some new lark, knowing that he would return in a day or two with more questions, more jokes, and more curiosity about Lorenzo. He needed a plan.

“Lorenzo,” Charlie was calling after him. “Come on, I’ll do more of your dry cleaning, or—you can tell me if the plumber doesn’t work out, or—”

Lorenzo turned around at the base of the stairs, gripping the rail. “Our business is done,” he said firmly.

“But I need more,” Charlie said, looking crestfallen.

“You’re not gonna help him anymore?” Maggie asked.

Rachel shhed them all. “I can’t hear Yabushige-sama!”

“This was a silly idea in the first place,” Lorenzo said, trying to buy himself time. “But I have held up my end of the bargain. Now we’re done.”

“Oh, come on,” Charlie said. “There’s gotta be more I can do for you. Never being able to go out during the daylight—I mean—that must make things difficult—”

Maggie perked up. “Ooh, what about your driver’s license?”

Lorenzo turned his head slowly to glare at her. Rachel stood up, shut off the TV, and stormed away to her room in a huff.

After her door slammed, Charlie asked Maggie, “What was that about his driver’s license?”

“The DMV’s only open during daylight hours,” Maggie explained. “Which I personally think is discriminatory against vampires and other nocturnal-only creatures, but—tell that to Congress.”

“And you need a license?” Charlie asked Lorenzo.

“I have a driver’s license,” he said.

“Yeah, but he hasn’t gotten it renewed since like the 1970s,” Maggie said. To Charlie, she added, “His picture is amazing.”

“I’ll help you renew your license!” Charlie said eagerly.

“You can’t,” Lorenzo snapped. “They have rules. You cannot apply for another person, I must go myself. In person. And I cannot.”

“I’ll find a way,” Charlie said.

“No, you won’t.”

Charlie took a step toward him and tossed his chin back. “If I do—if I can figure out how to get you a new driver’s license somehow—then you answer all of my questions,” he said. “No limits, no weaseling out.”

“Weaseling?” Lorenzo demanded, his tone making clear what he thought of Charlie’s twenty-first century vocabulary.

“You have to be my full guide to the supernatural,” Charlie pressed. “Get me everything I need. For my thesis.”

Lorenzo narrowed his eyes at him. He’d needed a stalling tactic, and this would work nicely. Arranging a plumber was one thing, but circumventing byzantine government regulations would take Charlie weeks, if he could manage it at all. “You will never succeed,” he said.

“Do we have a deal?” Charlie asked, holding a hand out. “I want your word.”

His neck wasn’t the only place that Lorenzo could see Charlie’s pulse; it beat in his wrist too, the skin there so thin and delicate that his veins seemed to be blooming outward, ripe and ready. He stared at Charlie’s palm, caught between too many competing desires.

“How about this,” he said, when Lorenzo continued to simply stare at him. “If I fail, I’ll leave you alone forever.”

“Deal,” Lorenzo said.

He shook Charlie’s hand briefly. Humans’ skin always felt searing hot to him, their blood roaring so swiftly just beneath. Lorenzo reminded himself of this when the phantom warmth of Charlie’s palm lingered on his fingertips even after he’d turned his back.