Page 68 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
Nothing came the next day either. By day three, he worried. Vitalis-Barron hadn’t contacted him again, but he swore they had someone following him, the same brunette woman and her white sedan appeared in the distance at irregular intervals. Probably confirming that he was good on his word. But a lonely vampire in an empty house was a lot easier to quietly kill off than a human with blackmail material. After submitting a round of job applications and booking an appointment with a therapist—god had Vincent been right about the cost; he was going to be broke in a week if he didn’t find a position with good health benefits—Wes got a friend to take him to the house. He squinted at the living room windows as they drove slowly by, his heart in his throat.
Vincent sat at the couch, healthy and whole, the laptop from the office cradled between his folded legs.
Wes breathed out. It hurt, a subtle, constant ache in his chest that intertwined with his grief for his mother. But if Vincent was safe, then that was all Wes could ask for.
Even if the pharmaceutical company was keeping its distance from Vincent, only watching him in the same unobtrusive way they’d been keeping tabs on Wesley, it still irked Wes that they were there at all, their presence like a scab on a wound that wouldn’t heal. While he and Vincent tried to move on, the company was still running its experiments, destroying lives and tossing out the corpses. And no one was trying to stop them. No one even seemed to care.
Wes nailed his first interview with a boring cubicle position at a company he couldn’t remember the name of half the time. He accepted the job. The work was just as tedious as he’d imagined, but during his nine-to-five downtime he investigated everything from how to get a vampire relief organization reestablished in San Salud to which law programs included a specialization involving research misconduct. He still made time to game with Kendall a few nights a week while his friends were out. Giving up his childhood home hit him harder than he’d anticipated—and he’d anticipated a fair amount of emotional devastation—but at least it gave him something to talk about in therapy that didn’t involve vampires.
There were certainly still plenty of vampires to be had in their twice-weekly conversations, and even more anger and guilt and grief that Wes was slowly wrestling out of the attic in his soul, learning to let it live inside him instead of boxing it all up whenever it grew too much. It felt like running a marathon. But even marathons, his therapist reminded him, were run one step at a time.
Between the chaos of it all, he managed not to drown in how much he missed Vincent.
He sent the vampire a few casual messages to ask if he’d had any trouble with Vitalis-Barron and when he still received no response he drove by the house again like a stalker, parking across the street in his friend’s borrowed car until he caught Vincent pulling into the garage in the van. Safe, but alone. Wes stopped by his mother’s grave after. By the time he left, his bones creaked and his toes had gone numb in the night chill.
The rest of the month slipped by, and Vitalis-Barron’s haunting presence slowly vanished. Halloween passed in a blur of drinks and costumes that Wesley casually avoided. Then Dia de los Muertos followed with little fanfare outside his own small altar for his mother and an awkward phone call from her homophobic family in Texas, which only reconfirmed why he’d stopped visiting them in the first place. His friends made plans for a big Thanksgiving lunch and threatened to turn their office into a room to get him off the couch. He swore he’d find his own place soon. But looking for one felt much like his job search initially had. There was something he needed to do first.
Someone he still hadn’t, truly, let go of.
26
VINCENT
Four weeks ago, Vincent had woken to the darkness and the quiet. His blood thirst had returned, as well as an aching hunger in his gut. But he was safe in Wesley’s house—his own house, or their house, or something like that—surrounded by the scent of Wes and the comfort of a place that he belonged in.
At this time of night, the man was probably sleeping.
Vincent groaned and got up, blanket still wrapped around himself. As he passed the coffee table, the edge of the fabric glided over the top of the wooden surface, disrupting a set of sticky notes. They fluttered down around his feet. Vincent narrowed his eyes, the text a little hard to make out in the dim monochrome of his night vision. He flicked on the light. The warmth inside him dimmed a little.
He sat on the couch with his phone pressed to his lips, trying to sort through the chaos in his chest. What was he meant to say to this?Take your time; you did hurt me; I trust you anyways; please come back; I want you more than anything in the world? All of those things or none of them?
Finally, he gave up trying to sort through it with his head and decided just to video call Wes. Damn the time, damn his confusion, damn everything that had brought them to a place where Vincent was here and Wes wasn’t. So long as he could talk to Wesley, he could work this all out.
But he clicked the phone’s side button to no response. Dead, of course. Vincent plugged it in. Waiting for it to come back to life felt harder than anything they’d done in that research lab. Every time he held the button down and it didn’t start, he gave it another ten minutes. Another ten minutes. Another ten minutes.
The sun was pouring across the backyard and his stomach rumbling unhappily before Vincent finally conceded that the phone was dead. He tried not to panic. There had to be something in the house he wouldn’t feel bad selling to fund a new phone. So he did, purchasing a used model that was slightly better off than his old one, but only in the sense that it turned on while his old one didn’t.
He downloaded their chatting app, and hit theforgot your passwordlink, while cursing himself for having stored his passwords on the phone itself. It made him put in his email. He went to download the email app, and had to go through the password reset route for that too. The only available option was to text himself a temporary code. It took him three minutes of tapping his foot and rechecking his empty messages before he remembered that they’d made him get a new number with the new phone. By then he had panicked, just a little.
But it would be okay. Wesley would come back to check on him. To pick up stuff. Wesley would.
But Wesley didn’t.
And didn’t some more.
Vincent tried again. He contacted his email provider only to receive a series of bot responses, begged his phone service carrier to change his number back to no avail, looked through five-hundred different Wesley Garcia and Wesley Smith social media accounts anywhere there was even half a chance Wes might have one. Still nothing. And still, Wes didn’t come to check on him.
By the end of the second week, it started to dawn on Vincent that maybe Wesley had never actually wanted to return. Maybe that was why he’d left a letter instead of staying to talk it over with Vincent himself. This whole situation might have spiraled so far that now Wes couldn’t think of Vincent without reliving his mom’s death and the knowledge of her vampirism. And maybe, maybe being away from him had shown Wes that there were better partners out there. Easier ones, without the needs of a vampire or the creeping depression that kept reminding Vincent at every turn just how pitiful a boyfriend he would have made.
That was fine, he decided, three days and just as many hours of crying later. He didn’t need his heart, much less in one piece. He had the safety of his own home and bland-blooded neighbors to feed off of until he earned enough money to finally seek out the black-market, and he’d been perfectly fine alone up until this point. It didn’t mean anything that whenever he set off on his new food delivery job he found himself looking for Wesley on street corners and behind the windshields of cars, or that he’d sat at the Fishnettery more times than he felt comfortable affording, turning down offers of drinks so sharply that even the bartender had given him concerned looks.
He was fine—as fine as he would ever be.
And he had enough to preoccupy him. As it turned out, simply owning a house still cost monthly for insurance and taxes, water and electricity and internet, maintenance and a seemingly million other things. Even after he’d sold what he could and picked up his new delivery gig—which they’d only demanded his car registration and home address for—he still felt on edge every time he walked through the grocery store or stepped into a thrift shop, like one extra purchase might tear the whole façade down. He wondered if he would always feel like that. Maybe it was just a part of him now, the way his thirst for blood and allergy to garlic were. The way his love for Wesley always would be.
The thought didn’t make him feel better as he rolled over on the couch, somewhere between his second and third nap of the day. He checked the time on his new phone. Eleven AM. He’d been sleeping on and off for thirteen hours, but he had another five until the sun set and he could start accepting deliveries. Vincent groaned and dragged the blanket over his head.
Out front, the mailbox clanged.
