It Started With A Kiss

Part 2

I felt the initial touch of her teeth and a short sharp nip to my neck, thought nothing of it because she’d always been a nibbler, and then slapped her off me with a playful push saying, “Get off me you daft girl. For God’s sake you scared the shit out of me! I’ve watched enough Vampires for one night, thank you very much. I don’t need you to start with your nonsense!”

She hopped away laughing and smiling smugly back at me. Then she winked and skipped out the door saying, “Got you going there didn’t I? You big scaredy cat!”

“G’night Dad,” she yelled back through the door and headed upstairs, with a final “Sweet dreams,” to end the conversation.

It was September 12th 2011 and I was a recent arrival into the 60th of my years on this planet…

Today I get up to bright sunshine streaming through my open French doors and gaze out over the Mediterranean Sea. The water sparkles as only it can off the shore of Mallorca and the flashes of pure energy are tough on my eyes so early in the morning.

The noise of her running up the stairs must have startled me awake, and she clattered through the bedroom door screaming ‘Happy Birthday to You’ at the top of her lungs and diving onto the bed to begin jumping up and down as only a 12 year old girl can do to her Dad on his birthday.

It is July 7th 2111 and I am 160 years old. The thought gives me pause to smile and I grab her, turn her upside down so’s I can hold her by the ankles. I walk to the edge of the deck and threaten to drop her into the pool below.

“Don’t you dare,” she screamed. “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you? You’re just a big bully!”

But I did. I simply let go and off she went hitting the water with a whoop and a yell which was drowned out completely as she swallowed a lungful of the natural sea water we use in our pool.

The sun has no fear for us now. The orally ingested sun blocks of this 22nd Century have given us the protection and the freedom we must have always dreamed of as a race. Our lives are normal now and other than the fact that neither of us looks a day older, there are no tormentors or suspicious folks to bother us.

In the very early days, we chose our homes carefully and moved frequently around the world to make sure that our lives were unchallenged and people never got to notice this ageless old man and his beautiful, permanently young daughter.

There’s no unnecessary or unplanned killing for blood now either. We make blood right in our own kitchen, the way I might have brewed up a cup of coffee back in 2011. Blood transfusions and Red Cross blood drives – does that thought not just make you laugh? – are a thing of the distant past, although we were grateful enough for them in their day. We used to keep it in the fridge in V8 Juice bottles for reasons I thought sound at the time. We had to stop that practice though when my daughter had a friend sleep over who decided to make herself a Virgin Mary at two in the morning. God, I can still hear the screams to this day!

Still, they fed us well those wonderful ‘Red Crossers’ as my daughter used to call them. I don’t miss all the donations I made to them out of pure guilt though, so I suppose time had its payoffs eventually. Nowadays, when we do kill for blood we do it meticulously, planned well in advance and for the very best of reasons… sheer unadulterated profit.

She speaks over twenty languages fluently and I struggle to keep up with her with only ten under my belt. Age, you see, still has its drawbacks, but her mind is as smart as I could ever have imagined.

We have wealth beyond anything that was ever in my wildest dreams. My daughter’s paintings sell all over the world for lots of what we call ‘money credits,’ and have people queuing up at art shows in all the new major cities. It is the auctions though that have made us wealthier than Sotheby’s London Auction house ever was.