I don't want to talk about it.
Seriously. I really don't want to talk about how Jaime got turned into a vampire. Seeing the process is quite a different thing than having to go through it like I had and I was unconscious for all of it, so I really had no idea. Plus it's not something that comes up easily in conversation or just not at all, so until you have to do it yourself, you don't realize just how hard, and how fucked up of a process it is.
I had to make certain promises, compromises in order to have it done in the first place and Beatrice has promised to pull my intestines out with her bare hands and make me eat them if I go into any detail about the process. Since I really don;t want to A) have my intestines pulled out, or B) eat my own shit (she promised to make me eat my lower intestines) and C) talk about it at all, then I'm sorry, it's just something that's not going to happen.
If you want to know how to become a vampire, go out and find your own goddamn vampire and after you've eaten your own intestines and by virtue, your own shit, then maybe, just maybe you might find out. It gives new meaning to the term eat shit and die.
Turning was the easy part anyway, compared to what came after.
***
"I'm an asshole."
Claude grunted laughter from the other end of the phone and coughed ever-so-not-discreetly. "You don't say?" he responded, but then again what did I expect? I had kind of abandoned him inside Beatrice's vault for the past three days while I took care of Jaime. He had every right to call me an asshole, even if I was pre-empting him and calling myself an asshole.
"How the hell do you do it Claude? I call you and tell you I'm a vampire and you just took it in stride as if it was something people say to you all the time."
"Has it ever occurred to you that you were not the first vampire I'd met?"
I considered that for a moment then shook my head, even though Claude couldn't see me. "I really gotta ask you what it is you get up to on those times you disappear for weeks at a time. Did you really meet another vampire? Before me?"
"I could have. If I had, then I was probably a little too busy running away. How did you break the news to Jaime anyway?"
I sighed deeply and idly pushed open the door to the bathroom.
"Badly." The smell hit me all at once, an all-out assault on my senses and gag reflex, kicking me right in the back of the throat and the brain at the same time.
"Oh God—" I gasped, and that was a mistake as it caused me to actually breathe in that foul stench that was almost physical in it's being and goddammit, I could taste it, feel it in the back of my throat, coaxing my lunch to come back up, saying, hey there's a party up here, come and join the rest of the mess—
I have no idea how I managed to slam the door, and an even worse idea of how I didn't manage to vomit my guts out. I could be lying right now, and you wouldn't even know it, but that's okay. Let's just agree between you and me, right now, that I made it out of the door in a state of almost grace.
"You okay there dude?"
"I'll be fine. I just forgot how bad it is in the bathroom."
"How bad is it?
"I don't even want to think about it!"
"Look dude, you were doomed from the start. It doesn't matter what you had to say to Jaime. You could have been telling her she just won all of the money in the world ever and her reaction would have been the same, and you know why!"
He was right. I knew exactly why.
"Because it was me saying it."
I was right. I am an asshole.
Let's get that out of the way, because it's a fact. We already know how much of an idiot I am, but I think I want to be absolutely clear about the fact that I am an asshole.
Jaime's reaction to me and her escape had brought back a whole flood of memories and a sort of perspective that I had previously thought I had gained about our relationship. Or rather, lack of relationship.
See, I'd spent the past year and a half beating myself up about Jaime and slowly built a pedestal under her, raising her so high in my mind and memories that I had obscured some of the obvious truths of what being in a relationship with me was like. The actual relationship and the shit I had put her through, all of that had gotten buried because I just didn't want to remember it how it happened. It's something about how our brains work, and no matter how much we try to resist it, our brains will edit our memories until we're painting ourselves as the good guy, or in my case, the not-so-bad guy.
Jaime was terrified of me, but she had made a choice sometime over the past thirty-six months that she wasn't going to stick around to let me terrify her anymore, and that was important to her.
How do I know this?
She sent me a very detailed letter via Claude and it had crushed my soul. The letter laid bare her perspective on what our relationship had been, what it had meant to her and it illustrated exactly how deeply I had hurt and betrayed her. She had loved me with all of her soul and then I had gone and become someone else she didn't recognize, someone she didn't like at all. The person I had become had stolen her Bob from her and she hated me for it.
Reading that note, I had cringed and had been angry, feeling the righteous anger of the wronged, the kind of anger that is born out of embarrassment and the knowledge that you had fucked up royally and there was nothing you could do about it. You know what I'm talking about; it starts down deep and attacks you with a sense of desperation until you almost can't breathe properly over the thud, thud, thud of your offended heart.
I had done what I always did and lost myself in my drug of choice, rather than to live with that reality or even look it in the face.
The problem with that kind of forgetting is that when it returns, it brings some friends with it and they all want to kick you in the face.
"What do you think? Should I go after her?"
There was a long silence from Claude. I could almost hear him counting under his breath, then—
"ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT?"
"YES! YES I AM!" I yelled back. "It's kinda my thing, okay? I get into things, I try to do my best and somehow I still manage to fuck them up. So YES! I AM A FUCKING IDIOT!"
"If you go after her, she's going to kill you. If you don't go after her, I'm going to kill you... in an eventual kind of way and for a lot of other reasons, the least of which not being that there are three really scary vampires who are trying like hell to pry me out of the tin can you abandoned me to, so either way you're kinda fucked. You kinda laid a lot on her all at once, what the fuck did you expect?"
"How's that going anyway? The tin can situation?"
"Just swell, thanks for asking. And fuck DiGiorgno's man. They fucking lie in those ads. No fucking way you can confuse that shit for delivery."
Yes, Claude was still stuck in Beatrice's vampire-proof bunker and was still trying to come up with a plan to get the fuck out of it. He'd called me when the Gentlemen had shown up, not more than a little freaked out about how fucking scary they were even from the other side of the camera. It hadn't been at the best of times and something tells me he was still a little pissed off at me for having to hang up on him.
I pulled open the door, determined to go after Jaime.
Jaime was waiting for me.
"What did you do to my eyes?"
"Claude, I'm going to have to call you back." I said, and hung up. "Are you going to hit me?"
"I'm freaking the fuck out here Bob, so don't give me any shit. What happened to my eyes? Why are they blue?"
Terror.
That's what it was: terror. It was eating her up inside and she was desperately trying to hold it together and failing miserably, but who could blame her? I had been in the exact state a year ago and I still remembered how it felt, just with slightly less terror than what Jaime was feeling in that moment. The sad thing was knowing that there was nothing I could say that she wanted to hear. There was nothing I could say to make it all better, to not have happened.
"You're a vampire Jaime."
***
The way I met Jaime is actually a little embarrassing and its something that we've agreed to ever tell any clever little anecdotes about, but I'm going to break that agreement right now since it's my embarrassing story dammit, and I reserve the right to tell it any time I damn well want to.
I was masturbating to some porn on the internet and she walked in on me.
I was crashing on Louise's couch for a never-ending week and was well on my way into week six. The toughest thing about couch surfing isn't that you're not sure where you're going to be spending the night or even that the pull-out couch bed may not be the most comfortable. Hell no. I'd developed the ability to sleep on almost any surface, in any weird position. That, coupled with the fact that I could literally be asleep in five minutes, even in the middle of a tornado, made me the couch surfing champion of the world, at least as far as I was concerned. I wasn't abut to be picky about where I slept as long as it was warm and I had access to a shower somewhere. I followed basic Hitchhiker to the Galaxy rules and even brought my own towel along with me.
The most unfortunate thing about couch surfing is that you're about 100% likely to not be bringing any chicks back to the house to bang on said couch, since that would be extremely rude by any standard. Privacy was a huge issue since you wouldn't be getting any, having given up that right when you made the decision to be one step away from being homeless, so sex was definitely out. That of course left masturbation as the only viable option for relief from horniness, boredom or horniness brought on by boredom and the internet. Seriously, I have masturbated more times out of sheer boredom than anything else. Got a job search to get through, lots of resumes to send and already got my coffee sorted out? Time to toss one off to start the day! Carrying out a successful act of masturbation in the middle of someone else's living room requires a significant amount of planning and timing. So about one hour after Louise had left for the hospital and I had called or texted her to make sure she was there, I knew I had at least eight hours before she came back.
My biggest mistake was wearing headphones while wanking. I wanted the full experience of the moans right in my ears, for a more immersive experience, and this need was my undoing.
You have no idea how embarrassing it is to be caught in the act of masturbation until a strange gorgeous woman walks in on you as you are right on the brink and completely unable to stop yourself, so you simultaneously jump out of your skin and orgasm wildly and uncontrollably.
"Who the fuck are you?" I managed to finally gasp, still desperately trying to cover myself with my Don't Panic towel, a thousand stupid excuses going through my head, each one progressively more stupid than the last. It didn't help that Jaime was currently laughing her ass off, tears running down her face.
She actually turned to me, getting herself under a measure of control, but one look at me with the towel pulled around my waist, my poor erection tenting the towel, that was enough to set her off again. I tried to salvage the situation as best I could, talking over her laughter.
"I'm Bob by the way, in case you're interested..." God that sounded stupid, why did I have to sound so stupid? "...but you may already know that seeing as you're here with keys and clearly not breaking in."
She looked at me and giggled.
"Maybe you should go get cleaned up a little? You still got a little bit of cum on your hand there."
I was prepared to watch the last shreds of my dignity burn in front of my eyes, was in the act of mentally preparing for that but then I glanced down and all thoughts of embarrassment vanished from my head.
"Oh my God: did you get into an accident? Are you okay?"
Jaime's white jeans were covered in blood, sticky red matting the inside of her thighs starting from her crotch and just spreading out. The jeans were essentially ruined and even with Jaime trying to hide her crotch with her purse, there was no denying that something terrible had happened and from the look on her face, she already knew.
I had a flash of intuition as Jaime's face turned as red as it possibly could, and I knew that this accident was the one reason she had popped by the apartment. I kind of recognized her from some photos of her and Louise around the apartment, her nickname in my head being that of "the Hotness". I had been casually bugging Louise about when I would get to meet her hot friend in the photos ever since she'd agreed to let me crash on her couch, but I had never ever in anyone's life ever wanted to meet her like this, cock in my hand, blood pouring down her crotch.
Jaime's eyes pleaded with me to not see, erase the whole thing from my mind, please, just forget the whole incident and for the first time in my life I didn't open my mouth with a stupid comment.
"You want to go to the bathroom first? I think I've got this under control."
She snickered then, and there were tears of embarrassment in her eyes, but dammit, it was funny and she couldn't help herself. I cracked a smile and all of the tension left the room. In a moment, we were laughing like two idiots at our fucked up situation, and for some reason we couldn't stop.
And that's how I met the love of my life.
***
"Fuck you Bob. Vampires don't exist."
"Hey, I was as surprised as you are, believe me. But I'm not fucking with you here. Seriously, look at me. Really look at me."
And then for the first time in a very long time, Jaime really did look at me. The first thing she saw was my vampire-blue eyes, identical to hers and very much not like the dark brown eyes that she knew so well. Those alien eyes in my face opened her up to possibility and that was all I needed, for her to be listening.
"I've been a vampire for a year and no, I don't know everything there is about vampires. There's a whole society right here in this city that I don't even know how to begin to belong to, but there are a lot of us vampires. A lot more than I can even begin to know about and I'm so sorry that this whole thing happened, but I had to save you Jaime. I couldn't just let you die, not like that Jaime. You didn't deserve that and I could do something to help you, to save you. And I did. And now you're a vampire... just like me."
There was silence from Jaime for a long time while she processed all of this information. I just shut the fuck up and waited.
"Just like you huh?"
"Yeah. Just like me."
Jaime shook her head and looked me deep in the eye.
"Turn me back."
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