Page 5 of Unwavering
“You get your own!” I finished, relieved because one way or another, this discussion was almost over, and also because I had the moral high ground. I almost never had the moral high ground. I was a vampire, for Christ’s sake.
“Thoseareour own!” This punctuated with another flurry of rage hammering. Our poor door! If it buckled under the stress, we’d get a new one for half price. You’ve heard of cut cards? Get ten haircuts at the same place, the eleventh is free? We have bed cards. “I bought two of them from Walgreen’s just before Christmas and I bought three more from Target last month.” Thud-thud. Kick. “Want to see the receipts?”
“Oh. I mean, no.” Huh. “So...youdon’twant more oven mitts.” A peculiar movement caught my eye and I turned to look. My husband was lying face-down on our bed, shoulders shaking with what I hoped was a fit of the giggles. “But youdowant half a dozen heating pads, all purchased by you?”
“Yes! Jesus,finally.”
“Ha!” I was now directly in front of the door; I was about to chastise thehellout of the door. The door would not know what hit it. (None of our doors knew what hit them.) “Trick question, we haveeightheating pads in here!” I’d have mimed a mic drop, but it wasn’t 2010. Takethat, locked bedroom door!
Then the door got demanding: “Give. Me. My. Heating pads.”
“You may have half ofoneheating pad.”
“Half?” The door wasn’t too keen on that, given how it was shuddering in its frame again.Yikes, hope Marc put on shoes for this.
“Darling, for the love of...” Sinclair, his giggle fit apparently under control, had gone into the bathroom and emerged burdened with heating pads, trailing cords like they were tails. “There are mere hours left of our special day. Give him the pads and then give yourself to me.”
All right, two things wrong with that. One, I was pretty sure I still had the high ground. Two,heshould be giving himself tome.It was only—
“Agreed,” he said at once. “Take me. Have me. As long as one of us does something to the other one of us.Soon.”
Well then. I reached out, unlocked the door, swung it wide open. “You win, whiners.”
“I don’t think the plural is fair,” Will said mildly, peeking over Marc’s shoulder. He was a writer, and they’re the worst when it comes to nit-picking language.
“Jeez, Betsy, maybe a robe next time before we’re subjected to...” Marc made a vague gesture toward my mostly-naked self. “All of that.”
“So avert your zombie gaze,” I snapped. “You weren’t exactly invited up here, y’know.”
“What’s that got to do with anything? I hadn’t known you a month the first time I saw you naked. In the kitchen, no less! How does someone with your money never have a robe at hand? It’s so tacky and helloooooo, Sinclair.”
My mostly-naked husband handed off the pile of pads. “Here. With our compliments. And so begone.”
I stuck a finger under Marc’s nose and his green eyed gaze managed to shift from Sinclair to me. When he wasn’t being shrill, Marc was actually great-looking: short black hair, vivid green peepers, about six feet tall, and he looked competent AF in faded hospital scrubs. His sweetie, Will, was cute, too, in a slender blond mild-mannered way. For a guy who sat in front of a computer all day when he wasn’t chatting up ghosts, he was in good shape, with lean lines and placid blue eyes. He smelled like clean laundry and was helpful and nice...an example to zombies everywhere.
Now that I thought about it, there were only two zombies in the world, and they both looked terrific. They were a credit to their species! (Right? Species?) Instead of the movie stereotype of rotting corpses stumbling around yearning for brains to slurp, Will and Marc were only one or two minutes dead. Maybe just seconds dead. And instead of devouring brains on the half shell, they needed intellectual challenges to “live”. And they’d remain that way—seconds dead, still warm—as long as they didn’t stray too far from my side. So there were gonna be zombies living here for a long, long time.
In my younger days (three years ago) when I was a naïve waif, that would have been a deal-breaker the size of Alaska. But I’d had to adjust my thinking on a number of issues since I woke up dead. Betsy Taylor: vampire queen, ruler of Hell, stereotype shatterer.
(I really don’t get enough credit for the amazing shit I do.)
And none of it was relevant. So back to the subject at hand: the handing off of the heating pads and the banishing of the zombies. “You got off lucky, pal!”
“I’m pretty sure that’s a lie,” Marc said, still averting his gaze from my nudeness while trying not to openly drool at Sinclair’s.
“Nobody’s getting off,” Will piped up. “We’re taking it slow.”
“Yes,” my husband sighed. “Quite right. No one is getting off.”
“Spare me the grotesque detail of your zombie sexual shenanigans.”
“But that’s my point,” Will continued. “There aren’t any, because—“
“Keep up, Will, the topic is heating pads, which you came looking for, and now have, and we didn’t have to give you shit, but we did.” Again: not enough credit for the nice things I do. “Why d’you want so many?”
“The same reason you do,” Marc replied. He’d finally torn his gaze from Sinclair’s splendid flank and was winding cords so he could dart off with his horde of heating pads without tripping. “While we’re only in the very earliest stage of autolysis, we still can’t regulate our cell temperature without outside assistance.”
I just looked at him, then blinked slowly, like an undead owl.
