Chapter Six
There was a man above Luis, face shadowed. He had a hand on Luis’s neck, holding him down, smiling as Luis struggled. A scream was lodged in his throat, but his mouth wouldn’t move to let it free. His limbs were sluggish, heavy, and there wasn’t enough air.
The man’s teeth were white, so white, big square blocks filling his vision. Laughing at him.
“I just want a little taste,” the man said, and then he was bending down, those teeth against Luis’s neck and–
Luis jerked awake.
He gasped for air, pushing himself to sit up. Adrenaline raced through his veins. The dream and the memory of the bar drifted on the edges of his periphery, tangled up together.
But he wasn’t in a strange place, and Eric wasn’t there. He was in Julien and Karim’s guestroom. Safe. Because he’d stayed over, slept the night away, and now it was morning. He could tell by the sunlight peeking in the edges of the drawn curtains.
His phone on the bedside table confirmed it.
Sunday morning. Luis yawned and shifted, dropping his feet to the floor.
Noticeably, the dizziness and weakness of yesterday seemed to have abated.
He felt sore and stiff all over. It would be slow going, but he thought he had a chance at standing on his own today.
And he could probably drive home.
No, he was going to drive home.
He forced himself up and stayed there. He had a spare set of keys to the house, so he could lock up when he left.
That sounded like a plan. Go home, put this all behind him.
He remembered then, Julien’s brief mention of the ID Karim had gotten off of Eric. Julien had probably been about to broach the topic of reporting what happened to the police.
Because Luis should probably do that. Actually, he should’ve gone to the hospital and they could’ve tested him for drugs and it could’ve been a whole thing.
But he was a coward, then and now. He wasn’t going to do that. Luis just… didn’t want to go through the whole thing. He’d have to see Eric again if it went to court. And his mom would learn he’d been at a vampire bar and–
No.
Luis wanted to just put it behind him. Pretend it didn’t happen. Nothing had actually happened to him so–so he just wanted to move on.
Fifteen minutes later, Luis crept through the house with all his things and slipped quietly out the front door.
He didn’t have any messages from Julien or Karim, so he hoped it was okay he’d let himself out. The only things on his phone were the stacks and stacks of unread texts and voicemails from his mother, which he was also avoiding dealing with.
Luis’s car was still parked in the driveway where he’d left it on Friday. As he unlocked, his eyes caught on all the bright flowers in the yard. He turned back, realizing he’d never been here in the daytime. Never seen the house in sunlight.
It was beautiful, actually. The front was accented in sun-drenched shrubbery and beds of mixed flowers in full bloom.
One side of the house had trailing vines that were scaling up to the second story, and they were pocked with small yellow flowers.
The house was handsome at night, with well-placed lighting, but it had nothing on the daytime.
All these flowers, and neither Julien nor Karim ever saw them in their full glory. It seemed a shame.
Luis pulled out his phone and snapped a few photos. Maybe they’d want to know what it looked like. Or was that stupid? Surely they had someone who’d shown them daytime photos before. A landscaper or gardener. They didn’t need Luis for that.
Luis blew out a breath and got into his car.
Home. He needed to go home.
##
Luis took an egregiously long shower. He scrubbed days worth of grime off his skin and detangled the nest his hair had become. Then he lingered until the water ran cool.
His phone on the bathroom counter haunted him. If he didn’t handle it soon, his mother was likely to show up at his doorstep, and that was the last thing he needed right now.
Luis marched himself out of the shower when the water went completely cold, got dressed, and picked up his phone. It immediately started ringing with ‘Night on Bald Mountain,’ as if she knew.
Over the years Cassie had begged and pleaded with him to cut the umbilical cord. If only it were that easy. It had taken him into his thirties to do the one big thing and move out of her house. It had caused months of tantrums that were just now, over a year later, beginning to die down.
If Luis ever tried to cut her off, he had no idea how she’d take it. There’d be yelling, tears. She’d be at his door, making a scene. Working him over until he felt so guilty he just gave in.
He always gave in. On everything except moving back in with her. He’d managed to hold that position. Just barely. On the strength of Cassie’s backbone, really.
When the ringing finished, he took a fortifying breath and opened the text chain.
There were dozens of messages, all caps. The block of text that blurred together. Before he could chicken out, he tapped on his mother’s name to return her call.
“Luis José Vázquez.” She picked up on the second ring, voice loud and razor sharp. He pulled the phone away from his ear.
“Hola Mama,” he said.
“Where have you been?! I’ve been calling you.” She sounded angrier than even the time she’d caught him out back with a neighbor boy.
“Sorry, been busy with work.” She didn’t know he didn’t work weekends, and he’d kept his work schedule vague on purpose. The scoff across the line told him she wasn’t buying it.
“Too busy to give your mother a call back?” She shrieked. “And what if it’d been an emergency? I could have died, and what? My son was too busy!”
With her, it was never, ever an actual emergency.
“Work is important too Mama, you know how it is.” He had to tiptoe through this carefully.
If he fed her anxieties, they’d balloon up ten times worse with the attention.
If he apologized, she’d double down on his guilt.
She was like a dog with the scent of prey, sniffing out weaknesses, chasing it down until she could put her teeth into something of his that was tender and tearable.
When she got him, he agreed to do things he didn’t want to do, just to get her to stop. For two months after he moved out, he’d gone to church with her to placate the tantrums. He shuddered remembering it.
It had been a miserable two months listening to how God hated both vampires and gays. He’d listened to the sermons, the stories. Been made to smile and nod along to every bigoted, awful thing those people said so it wasn’t worse.
By the end, his mother hadn’t been placated either.
His mother sighed over the line as though he’d disappointed her. “It just seems like ever since you moved out…”
It always came back to this. Luis bit down on his anger. He imagined crunching down on his feelings with his molars, gnashing them down until they were nothing. Until he felt nothing. Until he could get through an entire phone call with her and not react, not fall into her traps.
She kept going, but the words blurred together, fading into the background. Luis collapsed on the bed, listening only for the gaps in her rant where he was expected to interject a sound that meant he was listening.
Beside him was his guitar, right where he’d left it Friday before he’d gone out. He ached to touch it, to play something to soothe himself.
Could he do that now? No. She’d hear it and he didn’t need to remind her that he was not just a lying, betrayer of a son, but he was also still into music. Still dreamed of being a musician.
As far as she knew, Luis had stopped ‘the music thing’ at thirteen when she’d caught him with Mikey’s guitar.
She’d almost smashed it, the guitar being the last straw in a laundry list of evidence that told her that her son was succumbing to evil, homosexual urges.
Luis didn’t quite understand how playing music was gay, but he’d been made to return it to Mikey and been banned from seeing him.
Only, she didn’t know that a year later when Mikey had fallen out of love with the guitar, he’d gifted it to Luis in secret, and Luis had stashed it at Cassie’s.
A big part of getting his own apartment was finally being able to play alone, in his own space. He’d even bought a new guitar to celebrate, his prized possession.
“Did you see that story in the news?” His mother asked, drawing his attention back. “They found the monster who’d been stalking those girls around Meeker Street. It was a vampire.”
He held in a sigh. His mother was going to play all the hits this morning.
“I looked it up; your apartment is only ten minutes from Meeker. Luis, maybe you should move back in. With your condition it can’t be safe to be near all that. You know there’s probably a whole den of those bloodsuckers nearby—”
“Is this the emergency you were calling me about?” The words slipped out, sharp.
There was a tense moment of silence. He could just picture his mother’s face, the way the corners of her mouth tilted down when he dared talk back. If they’d been in person she probably would’ve reached over and smacked him.
“It is,” she said slowly. “Is it a crime to want to make sure you’re safe?
There’s a killer running around and you don’t answer your phone for two days.
Am I not allowed to be concerned?” The volume was rising, her words coming out lashingly quick.
“What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t care?
Maybe that’s what you’d prefer, someone who just abandoned you like your father did, someone who doesn’t care where you are.
Is that what you want? You want me to abandon you?
” The question came with a touch of hysterics.
Against his will, the guilt seeped in.
“Mama, no.” Luis barely kept the apology out of the sentence. It was on the tip of his tongue.
She sniffled across the line, but he couldn’t tell if it was authentic or put on. “Then maybe you’ll stop ignoring my calls for days at a time. I love you and I just want to make sure you’re safe. I bent over backwards raising you, trying to make you into a good man–”
“I’m not ignoring–” Luis tried.
“I’m not stupid,” she cut him off. Then there was a loud, audible sigh. “Fine, you were busy with work,” she conceded, but it sounded like anything but a concession. “You work too hard, Luis. Are you eating? I can make some empanadillas and bring them over this afternoon.”
He’d left himself open for that one.
“No Mama, I’m fine. I’m eating. I’m fine.” He looked better than he had yesterday, but if she came over today, she’d definitely see something was off with him.
She hummed as though she didn’t believe him, but didn’t press the issue. “When are you coming over then? It’s been a month since I’ve seen you, it’s too long!”
Not long enough.
But Luis was in a losing battle. He wasn’t going to get off this phone call without giving her something.
If he didn’t go there, she’d come here. He needed to at least control when he saw her, and he always preferred if she didn’t come here.
He had to hide his personal things when she came over, and he was always nervous she’d still see the empty spaces and just know.
“How’s Wednesday morning?” Luis worked second shift every day except Friday, so the only times during the week he had available were early. He enjoyed the switch in schedule when he’d been offered it, because aside from making him less available to his mother, he’d always been a bit of a night owl.
“Wednesday is good.” Her tone went honey sweet. Luis hated that tone, it meant he’d given her what she wanted. “I’ll make all your favorites for breakfast.”
“Okay,” he said flatly.
She talked another twenty minutes, but it was passive, her updating him on the dramas of her neighbors and friends at church as if he cared.
José and Rachel were getting a divorce, the Harris family down the street were starting up their obnoxious front-yard vegetable garden again.
Luis pressed his face into the pillow and waited for it to be over.
Then, finally, she was wrapping up. She made another attempt to bring him food which Luis rebuffed, and then they exchanged I love yous. The words tasted like ash in his mouth.
“Answer next time I call,” she said warningly, “I get so worried.”
“I will Mama.”
Then the call was done. He dropped the phone beside him, drained.
Later, he’d have to get up and do the laundry, the dishes, maybe put in a grocery order for the coming week. Eventually, he’d have to look at what had happened on Friday and Saturday.
But for right now, he let all of that slip aside. He grabbed his phone and put on one of his favorite playlists and closed his eyes.
He wanted to pretend a little while longer that he hadn’t just introduced a bomb into his life by letting his vampire employers drink his blood.
By letting someone help him with his treatment in a way that had felt…
not the worst. Maybe even somewhat less terrible than the way his treatment normally went.
He wanted to pretend he hadn’t just jeopardized the one good thing he looked forward to every week.
But then he thought back to the way Karim had fought for him, the careful way Julien had carried him, and couldn’t regret it. They’d both helped him yesterday to eat and do his treatment, and neither of them had made him feel scared or bad about it.
Luis had never had anyone other than Cassie care about him before. His mother had never left any space for it to happen.
But it was clear that they both did. There was no other conclusion to draw.
Luis just wasn’t sure where that left them.