Chapter 5
DOMINIC
“You lost, Riz. Fair and square.” Vyla holds out her hand with her palm facing up toward Rizlan when I emerge from the stockroom with a fresh jar of olives.
It’s quiet for a Sunday night, though the forecast said we’re supposed to get a few inches of snow before morning, so perhaps people of the town have chosen to hunker down in their homes.
Seems unlikely, considering how many residents could simply shift and fly here.
Rizlan shakes his head at Vyla. “Bullshit. We only heard three slurps. There was never a fourth.”
“What’s this bet about?” I ask Natalie, who’s smirking at her coworkers while mixing a Fuzzy Doug mocktail for Tilda, an elder werewolf and Mapletown’s only cab driver.
“Dead Fang Debbie just left,” she explains. “Vyla bet Riz they’d hear her slurp her pint of AB negative four times before the glass was empty. Riz bet on three. Now they’re arguing about what counts as a slurp.”
“Come on. That last sip.” She turns toward Natalie. “You heard it too, right? That was the fourth.”
Natalie holds up her hands in surrender, saying nothing.
“That was a gulp, not a slurp,” Riz clarifies.
Vyla slaps her palm on the bar. “Are you kidding me right now? Why even make the bet when you’re just going to weasel out of it? Her dead fang has a big-ass hole. That’s why she’s always slurping. It’s audible. There’s no mistaking that sound for anything else.”
As with most of their spats, I let their voices fade into the background, knowing they’ll either work it out or start throwing drink garnishes at each other until they get tired. That’s usually how it goes. They always clean up after themselves, at least.
“Are you excited for Lindsay’s visit?” I ask Natalie after she delivers Tilda’s drink.
She scrunches her forehead. “What visit?”
Dammit. Maybe they haven’t spoken since Halloween.
They might not even be on speaking terms, despite Lindsay’s grand gesture to bring Natalie and Winston back together.
I should’ve checked with Lindsay first. But since the cat’s out of the bag, I can’t exactly backtrack.
“She’s coming up this weekend. Saturday, I think. She didn’t tell you?”
Natalie pulls her phone from where she stashes it beneath the bar.
“That long-haired jabroni,” she says quietly, though the lack of malice in her tone eases the tension in my neck.
“I can’t believe I’m the last to hear about this.
” Her fingers fly across the phone in her hands, and when it buzzes a moment later, Natalie’s smile grows until it reaches her eyes.
“Okay, she’s been thoroughly scolded, and she says she’ll swing by here once she’s checked into the Pebblebrook Inn.”
Why is she texting Natalie back, but leaving me hanging?
It’s an embarrassing, needy thought that occurs to me, but I can’t tamp it down.
I texted her hours ago. Hours. It was a selfie I took yesterday morning, standing out in the cold with no shirt and a fuzzy yellow beanie while taking a sip of coffee from my Where do zombies go for a group dinner?
HeadQuarters mug––a gift from Vyla that I still smile at whenever I pull it from the cabinet.
It has a little cartoon of three zombies dressed up in fancy clothes that are predictably tattered, carrying utensils and drooling.
How does someone not react to a selfie like that? Honestly. It was easily in my all-time top five.
“Have you and Linds been texting?” Natalie asks. The way her voice lilts at the end tells me she’s intrigued, and I need to maintain a straight face or Natalie will be able to tell how hard I’m crushing on her best friend.
I keep my chin down and breathe slowly through my nose as I reply, “Uh, a little since Halloween. Not that much.”
“Oh yeah, Riz told me you took care of her that night. Thank you for that, by the way. Means a lot.”
It’s sweet that she thinks I did that as a favor to her, and not an opportunity to spend time with girl I’ve been searching for since I was sixteen. If she wants to give me credit, though, I’ll take it. “Yeah, my pleasure.”
The bar stays quiet until I lock up at midnight.
Snowflakes melt in my hair and on my jacket as soon as they land, making me long for Christmases from my childhood when Mamaw was still around.
We never got much snow accumulation in my small Tennessee town, but you’d never know that from the way she decorated.
It looked like the inside of Santa’s workshop.
She’d keep the windows open all night so it was cold enough to make hot cocoa.
We’d snuggle up with blankets and listen to Christmas tapes and pretend we lived somewhere close to the North Pole.
I miss her all the time, but so much more this time of year.
My phone dings as I settle into my couch, feet up on the coffee table.
Lindsay: Work sucked. You’ve gotta have a Mapletown story that’ll cheer me up, right?
Then she replies to my selfie.
Lindsay: You’re as ridiculous as those abs. Don’t ever let me inside your house because I will steal this mug.
The ache in my cheeks tells me my smile is wider than usual, which is not surprising. Lindsay seems to have that effect on me.
I tell her about Vyla and Riz’s bet, and poor Debbie with her dead fang.
The only dentist in town is her ex from over one hundred years ago, but she won’t take the portal to another town’s dentist either, so who knows. Maybe vampires are allergic to floss?
Lindsay: I hate going to the dentist. The grinding sound brings back horrible memories from when I had cavities as a kid. Why haven’t they developed silent dental tools?
We have cars that can drive themselves, yet dental tools are still as loud as goddamn lawnmowers?
Lindsay: Seriously!
Why did work suck?
She might not want to discuss it, but I’m eager to know, and since she brought it up, it seems like a topic that’s not off-limits.
Lindsay: One of my idiot coworkers asked me for a Thai food recommendation for a date he has this weekend.
I asked him why he assumed I’d know. He gestures at my face and says, “Because of your whole thing, obviously. Aren’t you Thai, or whatever?
” with a dismissive gesture. That happened during my first meeting of the day, and I had trouble focusing afterward.
I’ve worked with this guy for years. I know his kids’ names.
How old they are. I even went to his ex-wife’s baby shower before his eldest was born.
But to him, we all look the same and I’m just another face in the crowd.
That’s awful.
My urge to comfort her is strong, but the need to make her smile is stronger.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
I’m not sure how dark her sense of humor is, but based on her many drunken justifications for a Purge Night run by women, I’m guessing it’s somewhere between charcoal and onyx on the dark end of the spectrum.
Lindsay: Are you seriously parroting the world’s oldest joke right now?
Just answer the question.
I can practically hear her impatient sigh from here.
Lindsay: To get to the other side?
Yes, because your coworker’s lifeless body is twisted up on that side of the road, blood pooling beneath him, clearly a lost cause. But his eyes…well, those are intact, and the chicken notices they are currently unpecked. And the chicken simply can’t resist.
Lindsay responds with a GIF of a women spitting out her coffee with laughter.
Lindsay: Who knew the chicken had such sadistic urges?
Oh I did. The original version of that joke is much darker than most people think it is.
Lindsay: What do you mean?
“To get to the other side.” You could take that literally and assume the chicken is going for a nice midday stroll, waddle, whatever, but I’m thinking that poor chicken wanted to die.
Lindsay: JFC that’s dark.
The life of a chicken often is.
Lindsay: There’s no way the joke we all learned as children is about a suicidal chicken. There’s just crazy.
Is it? Weren’t we all kids when Disney twisted the story of Pocahontas into a romance?
Lindsay: Fuck. You’ve got me there.
My fat thumbs keep pressing the wrong letters in my reply, and I get fed up with it quickly.
Can I call you?
Lindsay: What are we, married? Do you need to discuss bills and childcare and groceries with me for some reason?
What in the hell? Lindsay is my age. How can she be this averse to phone calls?
Isn’t your arthritis making it hard to type?
Lindsay: RUDE. I’m in my early forties, which is basically late thirties, which means I still get carded when I buy booze.
I won’t deny she’s a smokeshow, but I ain’t buying this.
Liar.
What are you afraid of? I’m just a Brutish Bonehead, remember?
The three dots taunt me for several minutes, but then I’m rewarded with not only a call but a FaceTime request.
“Evenin’, beautiful,” I say as I answer.
She appears to be leaning against a modern, cushioned headboard and wearing a white V-neck shirt.
The screen cuts off just beneath her collarbone, and I wonder if she’s braless.
If her nipples are peaked and poking through the thin fabric.
Based on the lack of makeup and gold patches beneath her eyes, I’d guess there’s nothing separating her shirt from her skin.
My mouth waters at the image in my head.
“Happy now?” she asks with playful exasperation.
“Very.” I look at the clock on my nightstand. “Why are you up so late? Isn’t it a school night?”
She nods. “I had to finish the deck I’m working on for our upcoming board meeting. It’s still not done, but my eyes have stopped working for the night.”
I know she’s an important marketing person for a restaurant group, but beyond that, I’m clueless as to how she spends her time. “On a day when your coworkers aren’t acting like fools, do you enjoy what you do?”
Her lips purse as she looks off into the middle distance. “Yeah, I mean, I’m good at my job, so that makes it easy to like.”
That’s not what I asked, but I don’t point that out. “What about it makes you happy?”
“When a campaign I created delivers and the restaurant sees a boost in customers. They make more money, they have proof they can trust us with their vision, and I get a pat on the back. Everyone wins.”
She shifts the conversation from work to lighter topics: our favorite TV shows, books, which Green Day album is the best––it’s American Idiot, no matter how much Dookie defined their sound, I don’t care what she says––and before I know it, it’s three-thirty in the morning.
Once she yawns thrice in the span of as many minutes, I let her go.
There’s a pinch in my chest the moment her face disappears from the screen, but that’s okay.
I got to gaze into her different-colored eyes for almost three hours tonight.
At the end of the call, she thanked me for cheering her up, and that alone made me feel like I had won two prizes in my cereal box instead of just one.
I go to sleep thinking of her freckles, and the many shapes hidden inside them. She’ll be in Mapletown next weekend, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll get to be beside her for most of her trip.
I stopped believing in God once my heart stopped and my hunger for flesh became insatiable, but I’m thanking Him now for not timing her visit during my monthly rut.
Luckily, that will come the following week.
There’s no way to know where this thing with Lindsay will go, but being a human, I doubt she’d understand or accept the change in me that occurs every thirty days.
I plan on keeping that part of myself hidden for as long as I can.