19. Ari
Ari
Iknow I shouldn’t have done it. I probably shouldn’t have terrified Yetty – even if it was kind of fun – and I certainly shouldn’t have burned our bridges with her sister. Kiki would actually have been helpful with the portraits.
But the way that girl was acting towards Brody got my back up.
The way she looked at him like he was nothing.
I’d wondered if Kiki was his ex, and with her incredible cheekbones, deep brown eyes and slender curves I could absolutely imagine she would be his type.
But the second I saw Yetty I knew she was the one who had broken his heart.
No one fucks with my friends. If there’s one thing I’m proud of in my life – and there aren’t many things, let’s be fair about it – it’s that I will always defend the people I love.
Not that I love Brody. But he is growing on me, despite being a human.
And I’m not about to let some upstart little girl who thinks she’s better than everyone else treat him like garbage.
“I guess we need to find a new artist though,” I tell Brody.
“Yeah,” he replies with a sigh as we head back towards my flat.
We walk in silence for a few minutes. “I’m sorry,” I say eventually. “I lost my temper and I shouldn’t have.”
Brody doesn’t reply for a moment and I sense he’s thinking about something. “Once upon a time I thought Yetty was the one. You know, the person I was going to spend my life with. But then today… well I realised she’s…” he trails off as he reaches for the right word.
“Kind of a bitch?” I offer him.
He laughs. “That isn’t what I was going to say. But yeah. Kind of a bitch.”
“You deserve someone who sees just what an amazing man you really are,” I tell him.
He blushes and the tips of his ears turn pink. I smile to myself.
Back at the flat, I make us tea and then settle in the armchair with my iPad to look for an artist who can produce the profile portraits for us.
Brody takes the sofa and tries to find other photos to pepper his fake profile with.
The things that make him him. I sneak the occasional looks at him as he makes his way through his camera reel, face a picture of absolute concentration, the tip of his tongue poking out the side of his mouth.
Ten minutes later he clears his throat to get my attention. “OK, I’ve found a few.” He seems nervous, like a playwright letting someone read their script for the first time. He hands me his phone. “You can scroll,” he tells me.
It’s an odd thing to say and he must notice the confusion on my face.
“You never scroll without permission,” he says, extremely seriously.
“Why not?” It feels like if someone hands you their phone with all their pictures on the screen it would be rude not to scroll.
He cocks his head slightly. “You don’t know that many humans do you?”
I shake my head. “If we’re being honest you’re pretty much the first human I’ve spent time with in the last couple of decades.”
He takes a deep breath as if he’s preparing to say something very important. “I know this isn’t a thing for vampires, but normies – some normies, anyway – like to take photos. Of themselves. Of each other.” He drags the words out as if this will aid my understanding. “Private photos.”
I make a face. “Given this is the second conversation we’ve had about dick-pics I feel that it’s a rather sad indictment of the normie population.”
“You wouldn’t be wrong there. I mean, I don’t have anything compromising. But I’m kind of rare if we’re honest.”
“You humans are such an odd species.” I can’t help but shake my head. Just when I thought I was starting to understand the normies a little, I discover something else about them. “But anyway, back to the pictures you chose.”
“OK. So the first one is the view from Haytor.”
“Because you like to walk up hills in the freezing rain?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Cool. Me too.” I flash him a smile. “Although obviously I don’t feel the cold so it’s probably far more pleasant for me.”
“I’m a little jealous.” He grins at me. I return my attention to his phone and scroll to the next picture.
“Bookcases.”
“It’s a shelfie,” he corrects. “I like to read all kinds of stuff: manga and sci-fi mainly, but I dabble in other genres. I have an Instagram account where I post short reviews and pictures.” He seems almost bashful and it’s kind of endearing.
I scroll to the next picture. It’s a pretty Devon village all decked out for Christmas.
“I adore the holidays,” he tells me. “Wrapping up warm, and mulled wine, and mince pies, and twinkly lights.”
“Umm… what is this?” I ask as I scroll to the next picture.
“That’s a paraglider,” he says. And he isn’t wrong; there is a glider and a helmet laid out on the ground.
“Because you paraglide?” I ask. It just doesn’t fit.
The rest of his photos show someone who likes the gentler things in life.
That’s the Brody I’ve come to know over the last few weeks.
Paragliding does not go with the man sitting in front of me drinking a cup of tea in a pair of figure hugging jeans and a nice cable knit sweater.
“Well…” he says and then breaks eye contact to stare at the coffee table. “I mean, I technically… My brother does.” He says the last sentence quickly.
“And so you’ve included it because…”
“I thought I might seem a bit dull,” he replies and I can tell from the look on his face that it’s a brutally honest answer.
“You’re not dull.”
“Yetty used to say I should try to be a bit more interesting.”
“Yetty is a fool. And I thought we agreed she was a bitch?”
“I…”
“You can’t take it back. She’s a bitch and she didn’t deserve you and she absolutely does not have the authority to tell you anything about yourself.”
“OK.”
“So no paraglider, OK?” He nods. I scroll to the next picture.
“This is my friends’ dog. She’s adorable and I love animals.”
I look more closely at the picture. “Hey, I recognise that dog.” It’s the one I met a few weeks ago by the canal, the one who greeted me instead of barking. The same warm feeling I felt that day floods my chest.
“Lily? She belongs to someone I used to work with. Small world.”
“The only problem is that generally vampires don’t like dogs. So perhaps a cat instead?” He makes a face. “You don’t like cats?”
“I do. I just don’t love them. They aren’t like dogs.”
Now that is something we can agree on.
He takes the phone back and scrolls for a few moments. “Aha. I knew I’d taken a picture of a cat at some point.” He turns the screen to show me. The cat is winding around his legs, its little face lifted towards the camera. I have to admit it is kind of cute.
The next day, Brody turns up on my doorsteps with bacon sandwiches and little pots of fruit salad.
“Bacon for energy, fruit because I don’t think either of us has eaten anything even remotely nutritious all week,” he tells me with a grin.
“Bacon is nutritious.”
“It’s not.”
“Well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”
We eat our breakfast and then I bring up the list of tasks we still have left to do. “We need a pitch line,” I tell him. “Like one perfect sentence that says exactly what Only Fangs is all about.
“The dating app for vampires,” he says in a grand voice.
“Lame.”
“It does what it says on the tin,” he replies.
“Yeah. But the tin is slightly smeared in shit.”
“Wow.” He places his hand over his heart like I’ve struck him with a mortal blow.
“This is important, Brody.”
“I know. I was just warming up the old pitch muscle.” He stands and stretches his shoulder by pulling one arm across his body. He switches sides and then cracks his neck.
“What about a pun?”
“This is a serious app,” I remind him.
“Everyone loves a pun.”
“They don’t.”
“They actually do,” he says and this earnest look crosses his face. It’s kind of adorable. “I remember that from university.”
“What did you study?”
“Computer science with a minor in marketing.”
“Impressive.” I’m only half joking.
“What about you?”
“What about me?” I ask.
“What did you study at university?” He asks the question like it’s legitimate. Like he’s actually being serious.
“I was born in eighteen-fifty-two.”
“I know.”
“Women didn’t go to university. The first degree awarded to a woman was in eighteen-seventy-eight and it was a momentous occasion.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t really have any idea do you? Do you know when I got my first bank account? When I was able to vote? How long ago do you think no-fault divorce came a thing, so a woman could just choose to leave? Or when it became illegal to rape your wife, because before that it didn’t actually count?”
“I… er… I don’t…” He opens and closes his mouth a few times like a fish.
“Sorry.” I say eventually. “That was probably a bit much and I apologise.”
“No. It’s me who should be apologising. I just… I never knew.”
“I know. And it’s not your fault. It’s just… I lived it. I’ve seen how much things have changed. And the change is brilliant, we’ve come so far and so quickly. But it still isn’t enough.”
“I think I understand a little more why the suffragettes wanted to burn it all to the ground,” he says softly. “I kind of wish I’d been there to help.” He grins.
“You would have been an asset,” I assure him, even though I doubt he would have had the stomach for it. But I think he would’ve made tea and offered gentle words of encouragement and all the ladies would have fallen in love with him. “Anyway, back to business. We have a pitch line to figure out.”
“Can we make a stake pun?” he asks.
“Like steak and chips?”
“No like stake through the heart.”
“Oh. Umm. I guess?” I make a face.
“Because the stakes have never been higher,” he says, a hint of hopefulness in his tone.
“Eternity is too long not to find love?”
“Vamp up your love life?”
“Fuck.” I stare at him for a moment. “That’s genius.”
“Really?” He blushes bright red.
“Really.”