Chapter 13 Elijah
Elijah
Everyone having now taken a turn at spin the bottle to humour my lack of experience, the party moves back to the living room, where there will be chatting and drinking and more of the diverting music playing from two matching speakers.
Devi yells about another round of shots, and Molly escapes down the hall to the bathroom.
I want to talk to her–I always want to talk to Molly–I want to ask her if she liked the sweet bread I saw her eating, want to ask her if she’d consider playing the game again but this time just with me because I might be addicted to the scent of her, the sight of her in that dress, and I want to taste her lips so, so badly.
‘Dude,’ Dylan says, thumping my bicep with his hand. ‘You like guys?’
‘Hm?’ I ask, confounded by where the question came from when my mind is solely on one blonde woman, so much so that I think it may have only ever been waiting to think of her for as many hundreds of years as I’ve lived.
‘You kissed Luke like you’ve done it before,’ Dylan clarifies. ‘Like I’ve kissed a man before?’
Dylan nods.
‘Of course I’ve kissed a man,’ I say. ‘I’ve kissed lots of men, Dylan, I’m four hundred years old.’
‘Immortality makes you bisexual?’
‘Well, I don’t know about that, but I think it helps,’ I say. I don’t know many vampires that haven’t been intimate with people of all genders, at least once, in their long existences.
Dylan nods, his arms crossed over his chest as he considers. After ten years of friendship, I’m shocked we haven’t covered these grounds before.
I narrow my eyes at him. ‘Though, I thought you were certain that Luke didn’t like guys.’
‘He doesn’t,’ Dylan says too quickly, but he’s watching Luke, who’s laughing in the kitchen. I keep quiet, a soft smile pulling up my lips.
Down the hall, the bathroom door opens, but instead of returning to the party, I watch Molly duck back into Devi’s room.
I shouldn’t go to her. If she wanted to hang out with me, she would have said so, or made any amount of interest in me apparent.
But my every impulse tonight has been to orbit around her like she’s the very sun, and maybe she is.
I pat Dylan on the shoulder, leaving him to stew about his human colleague as I walk to Devi’s room, steeling myself before pushing the door open.
Molly isn’t inside–not on the floor or the bed or the love-seat with the crooked leg. The window is open, though, and when I step further inside, I see that she’s sitting on a small balcony, a quilt wrapped around her shoulders.
I take a deep breath, not because I need to, but because it’s always steadied me, even when scents were overwhelming after I was changed.
I knock on the windowsill to get her attention. When she looks back at me, she nods in greeting.
‘May I join you?’
Molly scootches over on the balcony, giving me room to join her.
The space isn’t very large, but sitting we can see through the gaps in the wrought-iron railing to the street below.
Across the street, there’s a corner store, a burger restaurant, a dry cleaner, and rows of apartment windows lit up, revealing the people inside.
I sit across from Molly, my legs too long to fit in the small space without our bodies touching. My ankle presses against her shin, my other foot brushing her hip through the quilt.
We sit in the relative quiet for a moment.
Even at night, the city is still so loud. It’s nothing like the evenings I would sit outside the estate, when the hum was of insects and creatures, my wind chime singing with the breeze, not the mechanical noise of the city.
‘Your friend is nice,’ she says. ‘I like him.’
‘Me too,’ I agree. ‘He’s done a lot for me.’
‘Small world that he works with Luke,’ she remarks casually. It reminds me of what Luke said, about how she was close to marrying his brother, only for his brother to mess it up. ‘And my ex fiancé.’
Sitting with her, little blonde curls lit up orange from the string lights inside Devi’s bedroom window, I’ve never been so thankful for the idiocy of Luke’s brother and every other person that’s lost her.
‘That’s right. How long’s it been since you and he were together?’
She looks away and stretches her arms in front of her, her shoulders rising briefly to her ears before deflating in a huff. ‘Three years now.’
‘Dylan’s mentioned him to me,’ I say. Molly raises her eyebrows. ‘Said that he, what was it? Sucks ass?’
Molly’s eyes light up with a surprised laugh.
‘He does! He totally sucks,’ she agrees. It feels good to sit with her like this, the night air cold enough to create white puffs in front of her face when she laughs.
‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Or maybe sorry that he… sucked.’
‘Yeah, me too.’ Molly chews on her upper lip for a moment then shrugs.
‘He–Matt is his name, Matty–he said he would probably never be cut out for monogamy and insisted it shouldn’t be such an issue, but I just…
’ Molly pulls the blanket up over her shoulders again and exhales.
‘I grew up watching and reading all these great love stories. Every Sunday we would watch a movie as a family, usually a rom-com, and I fell in love with storytelling and with love. I wanted that for me.’
Molly is impossible to look away from; radiant in a way that is as propulsive as it is maddening. Like if I look away from her, she’ll disappear.
‘It’s reasonable to want that for yourself. And not so impossible to find.’
‘Love?’ she asks and I nod. ‘You must not be on the apps.’
I laugh, thinking of the horror stories I’ve heard from Dylan about modern dating.
But I’ve been alive for almost four centuries and have seen countless people find love in unexpected places.
It’s a persistent force, one that often finds the person instead of the other way around, sometimes more than once in a human lifetime.
Love will find Molly. I have no doubt about this.
‘What about you?’ she asks.
‘Do I want love?’ I clarify and she nods. I close my mouth, thinking it through. I’ve had no shortage of loves in my lifetime–short-lived relationships, longer ones, a few decades in the eighteen hundreds when one of my mother’s vampire blind dates went well.
And then, Ada.
She was human and so very alive. Despite the many loves I’d found, I never loved someone quite like I loved Ada.
She was a maid for the hotel where I took up residence in the early twentieth century.
She had silken brown hair plaited over her shoulder, and she quietly sang out of key while she cleaned at night after the patrons had retired for the evening.
When she discovered that I was a vampire, she was not afraid.
I adored her.
My family urged me not to mix with humans more than necessary–it wasn’t safe, it would only lead to heartbreak, it was irresponsible, but I didn’t listen. Couldn’t, not when she was so guileless and funny.
I still wince to think of her fate–how she trusted that we would be together forever, how her transition didn’t take. Not all people are fit to be vampires. Ada didn’t survive the transition. My family was right, and I couldn’t take their pitying looks, the I told yous spat from my brother.
I’ve rotted at my family estate since.
Until now, I suppose. Gregory would probably haul me back home by force, nailing me into a coffin, if he knew how I’m spending my time, who I’m spending it with.
‘I do crave love,’ I say finally. ‘I haven’t been looking for it. It’s difficult when you’ve been hurt before.’
‘Yeah,’ Molly whispers.
‘It was the right choice for you, I think. Holding out for someone that makes you feel known. There’s a practical aspect to loving someone, to choosing them every day even when you don’t want to.
In those times, there must be a hope or certainly that you’ll return to that loving feeling again someday, and a choice to stick it out. ’
The quiet after I speak goes on for so long that I begin to think I’ve said something insensitive, but then Molly laughs, a slight sound.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
‘Just that I didn’t have waxing poetic with you about love on my bingo card for the weekend.’
‘I’m full of surprises,’ I say.
‘You are,’ she agrees, earnest. As she looks out at the building across the street, I study her profile, the slope of her nose and pout of her lips, a curl that hangs over her ears.
I wonder if her hair is softer than I imagine, how it would feel between my fingers.
I want to know what her lips might feel like against my own, but the knowledge would consume me, I know.
I don’t believe I’d ever be free of thinking of her. ‘Molly,’ I start, but I don’t know how to continue. She looks at me and doesn’t glance away even as I stare intently into her eyes. ‘I hope you find it. The love you’ve wanted.’
Her cheeks flush darker in that way that is so endearing to me, so very mortal.
‘Thanks,’ she says, voice so low a human might have missed it.
Her gaze drops to my mouth, and I wonder if she’s thinking about my lips like I am hers, or if I’ll be wholly alone in my unwieldy obsession forever.
I lean closer, I don’t mean to, but then she leans closer, too, and it surprises me. We move, inch for inch, her eyes on my mouth, mine drinking her in, until we must tilt our heads to not collide.
Slowly, like she might bolt if I move too quickly, I raise my hand to her face, brush my fingertips over those pink cheeks. Her inhale stutters, and it emboldens me to slide my hand between strands of golden curls, indeed softer than my mind conjured.
I give her a questioning look and her soft nod is the permission I need to lower my mouth to hers. It’s consuming, warming my entire body from one point of contact. It is as if, all at once, lightning flows through my bones for the first time in a century.
Molly’s own hand finds its way to my bicep, then slides to my upper shoulder, squeezing before slipping back behind my neck. Her warm skin directly touching mine makes me let out a little moan, and Molly deepens the kiss in response, parting her lips and brushing her tongue against mine.
She sits up on her knees, repositioning herself kneeling between my legs, and I know I haven’t kissed in a hundred years, but why does this feel like I’ve never kissed anyone at all?
The mechanics of it are the same, my body and hands and mouth are the same as they’ve been for four centuries, but every part of me feels new.
I press my tongue into her mouth and she lets out a soft sound that has an igniting effect, lighting me on fire and turning my movements feverish.
I pull her closer to me, arm wrapping around her waist to pull her tighter against my front, and she’s eager to follow.
One of her arms twines around my shoulders and everywhere she touches feels electric, like maybe I’ve never been touched before.
‘Molly,’ I breathe against her lips, as if I can’t believe she’s real and in my arms. I can’t.
‘Yes, Elijah?’ she says in between kisses.
‘I thought you didn’t like me very much.’
‘I don’t,’ she says, but she’s pressing hot, open mouth kisses down the column of my throat, making me feel like I’m lying down outside in the middle of a thunderstorm.
As her hands roam over my torso and her lips move down my neck, I can feel my cock stiffening in my trousers–an insistent need making itself known between us.
I usher her mouth back to mine, our kissing growing more frantic, my lips more insistent, speaking to a long-neglected need in me. I press my mouth to her jaw, then down the side of her neck and she exhales, arching her chest against me to get closer.
I feel her heartbeat beneath her skin, thumping wildly, and I inhale deeply, her scent so sweet and fresh–citrus trees ripe in the morning–and I know with a certainty that her blood would taste as sweet as she smells.
It’s been years and years since I last fed directly from a human, and my skin is electrified at the thought of tasting Molly–having her body against mine and drinking from her. My fangs descend while I kiss her skin like a madman, and I jerk back so quickly that she gasps.
I can’t stay here, else she’ll see. Else I’ll kiss her again, I’ll try to work more delicious sounds out of her and she’ll see my inhuman teeth, long and pointed, crowding my mouth and making my lips look swollen.
It takes more restraint than I’ve had to show in decades, but I gently, urgently remove Molly from astride my lap and stand up. Lips plump, she looks up at me with confusion and perhaps betrayal in her eyes, and it guts me.
I can’t help it, though, I must leave.
I say nothing as I retreat through the window, leaving my coat behind as I flee. I don’t take stock of the rest of the party-goers’ reactions if they have them; I focus on one foot in front of the other, out of the apartment, out of the building, and down the street until I’m at the train station.
Once I’m safely on the subway towards home, I squeeze shut my eyes, imagining Molly alone on the balcony, goosebumps on her skin from the cold, rejection lacing her features.
Someone bumps my shoulder, startling me, but it’s just a group of people in various states of undress, much like at the party I just escaped from.
‘Good costume, dude,’ a man dressed like a frog says. ‘The teeth look good.’
I cover my teeth with my lips, and nod my thanks. The car shakes, I hold a metal bar for balance, and I think of yellow curls while the train tunnels us further through the city.
Letter from Evangeline Thorne to Elijah Thorne, postmarked 18 October 2026
My dear brother,
Dylan told me where to send my correspondence since you can’t be bothered to pick up a phone and tell your sister that you’ve moved. I would say I’m disappointed, but you never did have a phone in that house, you luddite.
I’m writing to tell you that I’m coming to visit the city. Needing a break from my research and seeing my darling baby brother is just what the doctor ordered.
I hope you’ve been making some new friends in that big loud city. Isn’t it wonderful? A bit overwhelming–all that life–no? I’ve worried about you, E.
Please do write.
I’ll see you soon.
Yours,
Jellie