He doesn’t reply, but merely continues to gaze at me. Suddenly, and I know this sounds strange, but I get a ticklish feeling in my head, like fingers running gently over my brain. A moment later an image enters my mind, of me with nothing more than my underwear on, sitting astride Ethan on my bed. He’s topless and his golden blond hair hangs over his face. His hand brushes over my thigh and his lips press against my neck, then his fangs extend and softly graze my skin. I feel a shameful heat rush over me, and I blush, embarrassed for having thought of such a thing. But when I look at Ethan again he has a satisfied grin on his face, and immediately I know that he somehow planted the image in my head.
“How did you do that?” I demand.
“It’s a special talent of mine,” he replies, not even bothering to deny it.
“But…” I say, flustered. “I thought you couldn’t use your abilities on me, I thought I was immune.”
“You are. But very few vampires can do this. It’s a strength of mine, and it seems that with a little extra concentration, I can make you see things too.”
“That’s not very nice Ethan. It was horrible in fact, I could feel you in there, as though your fingers were trying to pry their way inside.”
“You could only feel my efforts to enter because your mind is so much more difficult to crack than a normal human’s. It wasn’t all so horrid was it? You liked what you saw, enjoyed what you felt…”
I’m still blushing. “Please just stop.” I almost beg. I hate to admit it, and it just goes to show that I have not been with many men in my time, because that image of me and Ethan together is probably one of the most erotic moments of my life, and it wasn’t even real. How pathetic.
I take a few steps backward and sit down on a barstool. Ethan is by my side in no more than a second.
“You have not been touched like that in a long time, have you?” he strokes my arm gently.
I yank it out of his reach. “That is absolutely none of your business.” I snap at him.
“Yes. I apologise. I should not have spoken to you in that way, and I should not have violated the privacy of your mind,” says Ethan, with all the chivalry of a medieval knight in armour. I’m having a difficult time trying to keep up with his ever changing personalities. Although, I suppose a man could develop quite a few in a life as long as Ethan’s has been.
“Just don’t do it again,” I say on a sigh.
“Your wish is my command,” he replies, though I scarcely believe him since he did promise to quit the efforts at seduction before and he didn’t.
“Now, may I have the pleasure of driving you home?”
“I think I’d prefer to walk,” I tell him, feeling the need for some time alone to process things in my mind.
“Then I will walk with you.”
“I want to be alone, but thank you for the offer.”
At that, Ethan studies me for a moment, then replies, “Of co
urse,” and he walks me to the door.
“I’ll be seeing you Tegan,” he calls as I walk away from Crimson.
Full dark descends on the city as I walk in the direction of my apartment. The journey will take a while by foot, but I’m in the mood for the exercise and the air. As I turn the corner at the end of the street the oddest thing occurs. I hear some kind of off-beat piano playing an unfamiliar and antiquated tune. The sort of number you’d see a flapper girl dancing the Charleston to in old black and white footage from the twenties.
The melody is faint and all too soon it disappears. A shiver runs over me but I shake it off. I look about but there aren’t any buildings nearby from which the music might have drifted, only shops that have closed up for the evening. Under any other circumstances I might have immediately forgotten about the strange piano music, but there is something about its presence that chills me to my very core.
My subconscious is screaming at me to get moving quickly, that this music is a sign of danger. So I walk along swiftly and soon traffic sounds pollute my ears and my feelings of unease slip away. But then I find myself studying the characters that pass me by and speculating as to whether they might be vampires.
A group of men and women standing outside a run down building eye me up and down as I pass. Yeah, maybe I should have taken Ethan up on his offer of a lift. The problem with walking home in this city, particularly at night, is that no matter how cleverly you plan your route, you’re always a couple minutes away from a shithole. Glitzy five star hotels are soon succeeded by dismal grey blocks of council flats.
This makes me think about Matthew, and whether or not this city that is so full of grey made him feel depressed. And now that I’m thinking of him, the man I lost, it is difficult to stop. The air feels as though it’s been sucked from my lungs with a hoover, and there’s pins and needles stuck in my heart. I feel a powerful need to take the box of Matthew’s things out from their hiding place at the bottom of my wardrobe and look at them again. It’s not a very healthy habit, but I can’t seem to find the strength to stop. Or to get rid of these remnants of the short time I had with him.
Every time I miss him I shut myself away in my bedroom and lose myself in the only things I have left of him. A scarf. His book of poems and song lyrics. A packet of unused guitar strings. A broken guitar string. The plectrum he caught at a Metallica concert. A battered copy of Animal Farm. A plain silver ring. And lastly, his suicide note. These things all seem so trivial and unimportant when listed like that. The random pieces of his broken life.
Matthew’s mum came and took everything else soon after he died, we didn’t say much to each other. The look on her face, though, it spoke volumes. A thousand words were communicated in one single glance. She truly believed that somehow I was the one who drove him to do it. I’ll never be able to wash that look from my memory, it drives me to re-live every moment we spent together, questioning my actions, wondering if I incited his self-destruction.
When I get home my inner scrutiny is stopped dead in its tracks, because there is clearly a strange man sitting in my apartment. Well, maybe not so strange, because although I don’t know him personally, I recognise him immediately. It’s the slayer I convinced Ethan to leave alive on Friday night. It was only yesterday, and yet, it seems like it happened a long, long time ago. He’s sitting casually at my kitchen table peeling the skin off an apple with a pocket knife, a red apple that he has quite obviously appropriated from my fruit bowl, might I add.
The slayer’s demeanour is laid back, he appears as comfortable as he would be sitting in the kitchen of his own home. His body language and countenance informs me that he feels he has every right in the world to be in my apartment. He actually has the gall to take his time popping a neatly cut slice of apple into his mouth before deigning to turn around and look at me.