Page 71 of Heathens

“No, it’s… it’s okay.”

This is the first vulnerable thing he’s really shared with me and I don’t really know how to reciprocate. I’m not good at this stuff. I’ve spent so long bottling up my grief that it’s just fucking hard to pull it back out and lay it on the table. It’s like reopening a wound that I was praying would stay closed. I nestle into the natural discomfort of trying to figure out what to say, but he speaks up first.

“Tell me more about you. What was life like before all of this?”

Here it comes, the conversation I always dread having. I stare at him as he swirls his steak in a pool of butter and blood before popping it into his mouth. I’m not sure how much information to give him, and I’m not sure if I’m going to cry.

“What do you want to know?” I ask.

“Everything.”

“That’ll be a lot.”

“I’ve got all the time in the world,” he replies. “And we have all night.”

Mild suspicion takes root in my stomach, but I take another sip of wine and bury it. What could he possibly do with something as useless as my past?

“Well, um… I got my PhD young, while I was raising my son.”

“That must have been hard,” Dominic replies.

I blink, not really expecting this kind of conversation from him. Really, I just kind of expected to be mauled and fucked against the wall the second I got into this penthouse.

“In a lot of ways, yeah. But my husband helped to step in and raise Charlie.” I clear my throat. “I lost them both five years ago.”

Dominic’s eyes soften, the icy exterior around him melting, and his body slumps a little.

“I’m sorry.”

I shake my head. My mother always said I was made of tough stuff, but I never really knew what that meant. Ignoring my feelings? Drinking and fucking them away? If that’s the ‘tough stuff’ she was talking about, I think I might be fucked.

“Everyone’s lost people. It’s kind of what binds us all together in this shitshow.”

One of the worst parts of grief is sharing it with someone and not knowing what they’ll do with it. It feels like handing out the most delicate part of yourself and having to trust they’ll treat it with care.

“5 years, so it was the virus?” He asks, resting his knife and fork at the side of his plate.His expression is soft, yet pained, concerned eyes shining in the candlelight beneath dark and furrowed brows.

I can tell that he thinks I’m going to blame him somehow, but the plague wasn’t the fault of the vampires, no matter how much they fucked us afterwards.

“My son got infected first, and then my husband. I lost them within a few days of each other. Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t get infected too,” I whisper.

I feel guilty every single day, but I never say it out loud because everyone around me feels the same goddamn way. We all wonder why we survived. The virus has something like a 90% mortality rate. It could be transmitted via body fluids – blood, saliva, stuff like that. Most of the people who became infected were covered in open wounds, and there was no way to stop it from spreading. Even changing someone’s bed linens was a risk. By the time we found out that vampire blood could be used as an inoculant, nearly everything was already gone.

“I remember when they started to quarantine the infected. They kept them behind big plastic sheets in the hospitals for days while they degenerated.” As I’m reliving it all, a wave of grief swallows me and tears gather at the corners of my eyes. It’s been five fucking years since I verbalized this. “It looked like a fucking war zone. If you came to see family, you had to wear a hazmat suit. But when Sam saw Charlie, he took his helmet off, and–”

I have to stop, covering my mouth with one hand to keep myself from bursting into tears.

“I wish I–” Dominic’s voice drops to barely a whisper. “I’m sorry, Sofie.”

“Well, it was great for you guys,” I reply as I dab my eyes with a napkin.

He rubs his chest as if something inside of it hurts. Is it his guilt? Or mine? Is this the first real sit-down conversation he’s had with a human? Am I finally seeing the real Dominic Duncan, or is this all an act?

“Wethoughtit was going to be great,“ he replies. “I don’t think we considered what exactly we were walking into. We have a delicate relationship, humans and vampires. A lion relies on its prey for food, right? If there’s no food left, they have to move on. But what if something just…” He snaps his fingers. “If you take away every single source of food for that pride? They’d wander and wander and wander, looking for something to eat until they died.”

“Or they ate each other,” I pop a piece of steak into my mouth, chewing dramatically.

“It does happen,” he sighs, picking up his utensils and slicing off another thin piece of steak.

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