SERIOUSLY, ALWAYS YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL Chapter 18
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CHAPTER 18
JUSTIN’S POV:
I wake up from a weird dream. I am in total darkness. I can’t breathe. I feel quilted satin beneath me and beside me and it covers thick wood on the sides and even above me. Oh my god, I’m in a fucking coffin! Panicked, I begin to kick at it and claw at it and suddenly the top is flung open and the most beautiful blond man I have ever seen is towering over me, still wet from a shower, a towel wrapped around his waist. He is all hard muscle and perfect skin. My vision is so acute I can see the veins beneath his pale skin and I sit up, feeling a little dizzy.
“I was just coming to see if you were ever waking up,” he grumbles at me. “Look what you did to my box.” He fingers a flap of torn satin. “Don’t mess up my stuff.”
I climb out of the box and look around. It’s dark in the room outside this stairwell hideaway, but I can see perfectly well. I can see a spider web high up in a corner of the ceiling, and I can even hear it spinning an expansion to its housing.
Suddenly I double over as a cramp hits my gut like a sledgehammer. He looks at me and points towards a nearby bathroom. “Go on. Get it out, the last of your rotting food. This is not the fun part. But at least you’ll never go through such indignities again.”
I run to the bathroom and slam the door with such strength that it rattles and shimmies. The floodgates open and it is the longest and worst case of rampant diarrhea I’ve ever experienced. The cramps are hard and my bowels feel like they are tied in knots. It goes on until I feel I am crapping out my vital organs, and then, as quickly as it came upon me, it stops. There’s nothing left in me. And I experience a hunger like nothing before.
I find him upstairs, dressing, and I love him. Whoever he is, I adore him. I want him. I want to be him. I want to be with him. I want…I want… he gives me a glare.
“It’s just a stupor created by the making. It will pass.”
I walk up beside him, looking at our joint reflections in the oval mirror. I hardly recognize myself. The features are the same, the shock of yellow hair, but my skin is so translucently white and my eyes are a vivid shade of blue. When I smile, I see them, and that’s when I know. I have fangs. I have become a vampire. He is Eric. He made me what I am today and I love him for it.
ERIC’S POV:
Not only is he a newly minted vampire with severe maker adoration, but he’s a teenager with no life experiences to mellow him. This one truly is my child. It’s Brian’s fault. My infatuation with him allowed me to be vulnerable and to listen to his pleas. I feel the kid watching me as I dress.
“I’m so hungry,” he says. I nod towards the bottle of Tru Blood sitting on the bedside table.
“Drink.” He opens it, sniffs it, winces.
“It’s gross.”
“It’s food. Drink it.”
He gags on the first taste, but then drains the bottle in a couple gulps. “I’m still hungry.”
“There's more downstairs in the kitchen. Bring a few up here.”
He comes back with a six-pack. He drinks one, then another. “Enough for now,” I take the rest from him. “You don’t want to bloat up like a tic.”
“What exactly happened to me? It’s not clear in my mind.”
“I bit you, was feeding, and your friend, Brian, convinced me to turn you since it was very likely you were dying.”
“I don’t remember all that. Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. He took a fall and hurt his arm. Hospital, maybe.”
“I should check on him, but I feel so strange. Like I want to see the world through new eyes. Everything is so different! I feel strong and powerful.”
“Let me break it to you this way, kid. You are strong and powerful. But you go out in the sunlight, you die. Really die. Silver burns into your skin and silver chains restrain you. You are not immortal, you are just harder to kill now. That’s the preface to Vampires for Dummies.”
He laughs. “You’re wonderful.”
“Yeah, I’m all that and a side of fries. I think we should try to find Brian.”
I can tell by his face he wants to have those old familiar feelings for Brian come back, so he can feel normal again. It won’t happen. He may well recover some emotions for Brian, but he will never again feel normal. This is the new normal for him. Right now he is flooded with so many new sensations, he can hardly think of anything else. That and his inevitable maker/progeny crush on me. Tedious but inevitable.
“He can’t make me go home. I’m staying right here with you.”
Ya, definitely still a child. “That’s a discussion for later, let’s go.” I pause. “Wait, you have blood all over that shirt. Did you bring clothes?”
“Yeah. I left the suitcase in the car.”
“Go get it, change. No sense in drawing attention to ourselves.”
He changes and we take Pam’s SUV to the closest hospital. Brian has my car, at least I hope that’s where it is. When we get there, Justin is fascinated by everything as his heightened senses take it all in. A fluorescent light has new wonder for him. People’s voices seem uncomfortably loud. The hospital smells can be overpowering. He has not yet learned how to filter things in order to make it possible to endure. When they roll a bleeding accident victim past us he perks up like a hound after a rabbit. I shake my head and he sighs, disappointed. The woman at the desk is having trouble finding records related to Brian Kinney.
“Try it K-I instead of K-E,” Justin suggests. She finds him and we are directed to the fifth floor. Most people hate hospitals and hospital smells. Vampires love hospitals. The smell of blood and dying prey is like lilacs at dawn to us. Blood stored in plastic packages and kept in refrigerated cabinets is like a display of Godiva chocolates. I have to keep urging him past these diversions and finally we reach Brian’s room. A man in doctor’s scrubs is just leaving. “How is he?” I ask.
“Are you family?” He gives me a suspicious look. Our kind does look rather unearthly under harsh fluorescents.
“Friends.”
“I’m releasing him in the morning.”
“Why did he stay this long?”
“I can’t discuss his case with you, but feel free to ask him. He’s awake, off and on, but perhaps a little confused by the pain medication.”
I put a hand on his shoulder and glamour him. “You can tell me.”
“He suffered an anterior dislocation of the left humerus bone caused by a fall. We reduced the dislocation without surgery, but he was in a lot of pain, not making much sense and his blood pressure was high. I decided to introduce intravenous pain medication and keep him for twenty-four hours for observation. His blood pressure has returned to normal. By tomorrow morning, if there is no change, he can be released. His arm will be immobilized in a sling for a period of time, and I’ll prescribe a single run of hydrocodone to get him through the first few days. After that, Ibuprofen will be enough.”
I release him from my hold and go into the room, trailed by my new baby. Brian looks very pale in his little polka dot hospital gown. His left arm is in a sling and he sleeps. I don’t wake him. Instead, I sit in a chair by the window and motion Justin over to me. “Let him rest,” I say quietly and he sighs.
“He looks so fragile, so delicate. Life really is precarious, isn’t it? I’m glad I’m not delicate like that anymore. What would happen if I dislocated a bone?”
“You pull it back in place or slam it on a wall to put it back and move on. Such things are meaningless to you now.”
“He is beautiful, isn’t he?”
I nod. “He is.” Too bad, that’s what started all this. My cell rings. I step out in the hall after warning Justin to leave him alone. Pam is not feeling charitable as she says, “Listen, you asshole, your party needs to end. I want my car back and I need a break from this fucking club.”
I sigh and do not reprimand her. I need her on my side and it won’t be easy. “We’ll be back very soon. Tomorrow night, maybe.”
“By ‘we’ you mean you and the ad man? What about the little shit who borrowed my car?”
“Don’t speak of your brother that way.”
“Brother? Is that supposed to be funny? Because I am so not in the mood, Eric.”
“No,” I prepare myself for the onslaught. “It’s not a joke. Justin, the blond kid, is now your brother. It’s a complicated story, but there you are.”
She is stone quiet. Not good. She hangs up. I try to call her back. She doesn’t answer. There’s too much distance between us for me to give her a “maker” command. “Fuck,” I say aloud and decide maybe it's for the best for her to have a cooling off period.
“Are you the angel of death?” A frail old woman shuffling along in a robe and pulling a mobile intravenous contraption approaches me. She speaks in a thick accent of Eastern European origin.
“Sometimes,” I say with a smile and she puts a bony hand on my wrist.
“I’m ready to go. Take me.”
I stare at her parchment skin and can smell the death in her veins. The thought of draining that ravaged body makes me want to puke. I could snap her neck. But no, not here, not now. “I don’t take requests,” I tell her and escape back into Brian’s room. That was unsettling. I know vampires who haunt hospitals and drain dying patients, but I am not one of them. They fill me with disgust.
Justin is leaning over Brian, staring at him, fangs out because he is too inexperienced to keep his fangs in check when his mind wanders to blood lust. I grab his collar and yank him back. I shake my head and he shrugs. “I wasn’t going to do it.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“Maybe a taste. I wasn’t going to hurt him.”
“First of all, you don’t know how to stop a taste from turning into a kill. Second of all, his blood is full of narcotics and I don’t want to drag you around because you’re drunk from it.”
Just then Brian stirs, winces, and opens his eyes.
BRIAN’S POV:
I feel wonderful. Morphine is a beautiful drug. Nothing really matters on morphine, not even the fact a vampire is standing by my bed. Wait, even better, two vampires are standing by my bed and one was just a regular seventeen-year old kid a day ago. Now he looks pale but even more beautiful than he was before. God, I manage a smile. My stalker is a vampire. Deb is going to kill me over this. She’ll blame me and rightfully so.
“Are you here to finish me off?” I ask Eric, the Beautiful. No witnesses. Makes sense.
“Don’t be a drama queen.” He sits on the edge of the bed. “They’re letting you out in the morning. For obvious reasons, I can’t be here to pick you up. But you have my car, right?”
“Somewhere,” I agree. I left it in the Emergency Room parking. I guess it’s still there.
“Check into the Chartres House Hotel on Chartres Street. It’s a lovely old place, very exclusive, and the owner is v-friendly. When it gets dark, I’ll come by with this one. We need to talk when your head is clear. Can you remember that?”
“I hit my shoulder, not my head.”
“Until then, take it easy.”
“Don’t let him kill anyone.”
Eric laughs. “No, not at this stage. He would totally fuck it up.”
Justin hisses at him and that is one sound I never expected to come out of him. “His parents, he needs to come up with a cover.”
“I’ll have to think about that.”
“I can handle them,” Justin says with a smile and I shake my head.
“No, actually you can’t.”
Eric leans over me and flicks his tongue across my lips. “You rest, and I’ll handle this very familiar complication.”
“Yeah,” I say as I give my pain pump another push. “You’ve done so well so far.” The flow of morphine pushes me off that cliff again and when my eyes flutter open for a second, I am alone.
CHAPTER 18
JUSTIN’S POV:
I wake up from a weird dream. I am in total darkness. I can’t breathe. I feel quilted satin beneath me and beside me and it covers thick wood on the sides and even above me. Oh my god, I’m in a fucking coffin! Panicked, I begin to kick at it and claw at it and suddenly the top is flung open and the most beautiful blond man I have ever seen is towering over me, still wet from a shower, a towel wrapped around his waist. He is all hard muscle and perfect skin. My vision is so acute I can see the veins beneath his pale skin and I sit up, feeling a little dizzy.
“I was just coming to see if you were ever waking up,” he grumbles at me. “Look what you did to my box.” He fingers a flap of torn satin. “Don’t mess up my stuff.”
I climb out of the box and look around. It’s dark in the room outside this stairwell hideaway, but I can see perfectly well. I can see a spider web high up in a corner of the ceiling, and I can even hear it spinning an expansion to its housing.
Suddenly I double over as a cramp hits my gut like a sledgehammer. He looks at me and points towards a nearby bathroom. “Go on. Get it out, the last of your rotting food. This is not the fun part. But at least you’ll never go through such indignities again.”
I run to the bathroom and slam the door with such strength that it rattles and shimmies. The floodgates open and it is the longest and worst case of rampant diarrhea I’ve ever experienced. The cramps are hard and my bowels feel like they are tied in knots. It goes on until I feel I am crapping out my vital organs, and then, as quickly as it came upon me, it stops. There’s nothing left in me. And I experience a hunger like nothing before.
I find him upstairs, dressing, and I love him. Whoever he is, I adore him. I want him. I want to be him. I want to be with him. I want…I want… he gives me a glare.
“It’s just a stupor created by the making. It will pass.”
I walk up beside him, looking at our joint reflections in the oval mirror. I hardly recognize myself. The features are the same, the shock of yellow hair, but my skin is so translucently white and my eyes are a vivid shade of blue. When I smile, I see them, and that’s when I know. I have fangs. I have become a vampire. He is Eric. He made me what I am today and I love him for it.
ERIC’S POV:
Not only is he a newly minted vampire with severe maker adoration, but he’s a teenager with no life experiences to mellow him. This one truly is my child. It’s Brian’s fault. My infatuation with him allowed me to be vulnerable and to listen to his pleas. I feel the kid watching me as I dress.
“I’m so hungry,” he says. I nod towards the bottle of Tru Blood sitting on the bedside table.
“Drink.” He opens it, sniffs it, winces.
“It’s gross.”
“It’s food. Drink it.”
He gags on the first taste, but then drains the bottle in a couple gulps. “I’m still hungry.”
“There's more downstairs in the kitchen. Bring a few up here.”
He comes back with a six-pack. He drinks one, then another. “Enough for now,” I take the rest from him. “You don’t want to bloat up like a tic.”
“What exactly happened to me? It’s not clear in my mind.”
“I bit you, was feeding, and your friend, Brian, convinced me to turn you since it was very likely you were dying.”
“I don’t remember all that. Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. He took a fall and hurt his arm. Hospital, maybe.”
“I should check on him, but I feel so strange. Like I want to see the world through new eyes. Everything is so different! I feel strong and powerful.”
“Let me break it to you this way, kid. You are strong and powerful. But you go out in the sunlight, you die. Really die. Silver burns into your skin and silver chains restrain you. You are not immortal, you are just harder to kill now. That’s the preface to Vampires for Dummies.”
He laughs. “You’re wonderful.”
“Yeah, I’m all that and a side of fries. I think we should try to find Brian.”
I can tell by his face he wants to have those old familiar feelings for Brian come back, so he can feel normal again. It won’t happen. He may well recover some emotions for Brian, but he will never again feel normal. This is the new normal for him. Right now he is flooded with so many new sensations, he can hardly think of anything else. That and his inevitable maker/progeny crush on me. Tedious but inevitable.
“He can’t make me go home. I’m staying right here with you.”
Ya, definitely still a child. “That’s a discussion for later, let’s go.” I pause. “Wait, you have blood all over that shirt. Did you bring clothes?”
“Yeah. I left the suitcase in the car.”
“Go get it, change. No sense in drawing attention to ourselves.”
He changes and we take Pam’s SUV to the closest hospital. Brian has my car, at least I hope that’s where it is. When we get there, Justin is fascinated by everything as his heightened senses take it all in. A fluorescent light has new wonder for him. People’s voices seem uncomfortably loud. The hospital smells can be overpowering. He has not yet learned how to filter things in order to make it possible to endure. When they roll a bleeding accident victim past us he perks up like a hound after a rabbit. I shake my head and he sighs, disappointed. The woman at the desk is having trouble finding records related to Brian Kinney.
“Try it K-I instead of K-E,” Justin suggests. She finds him and we are directed to the fifth floor. Most people hate hospitals and hospital smells. Vampires love hospitals. The smell of blood and dying prey is like lilacs at dawn to us. Blood stored in plastic packages and kept in refrigerated cabinets is like a display of Godiva chocolates. I have to keep urging him past these diversions and finally we reach Brian’s room. A man in doctor’s scrubs is just leaving. “How is he?” I ask.
“Are you family?” He gives me a suspicious look. Our kind does look rather unearthly under harsh fluorescents.
“Friends.”
“I’m releasing him in the morning.”
“Why did he stay this long?”
“I can’t discuss his case with you, but feel free to ask him. He’s awake, off and on, but perhaps a little confused by the pain medication.”
I put a hand on his shoulder and glamour him. “You can tell me.”
“He suffered an anterior dislocation of the left humerus bone caused by a fall. We reduced the dislocation without surgery, but he was in a lot of pain, not making much sense and his blood pressure was high. I decided to introduce intravenous pain medication and keep him for twenty-four hours for observation. His blood pressure has returned to normal. By tomorrow morning, if there is no change, he can be released. His arm will be immobilized in a sling for a period of time, and I’ll prescribe a single run of hydrocodone to get him through the first few days. After that, Ibuprofen will be enough.”
I release him from my hold and go into the room, trailed by my new baby. Brian looks very pale in his little polka dot hospital gown. His left arm is in a sling and he sleeps. I don’t wake him. Instead, I sit in a chair by the window and motion Justin over to me. “Let him rest,” I say quietly and he sighs.
“He looks so fragile, so delicate. Life really is precarious, isn’t it? I’m glad I’m not delicate like that anymore. What would happen if I dislocated a bone?”
“You pull it back in place or slam it on a wall to put it back and move on. Such things are meaningless to you now.”
“He is beautiful, isn’t he?”
I nod. “He is.” Too bad, that’s what started all this. My cell rings. I step out in the hall after warning Justin to leave him alone. Pam is not feeling charitable as she says, “Listen, you asshole, your party needs to end. I want my car back and I need a break from this fucking club.”
I sigh and do not reprimand her. I need her on my side and it won’t be easy. “We’ll be back very soon. Tomorrow night, maybe.”
“By ‘we’ you mean you and the ad man? What about the little shit who borrowed my car?”
“Don’t speak of your brother that way.”
“Brother? Is that supposed to be funny? Because I am so not in the mood, Eric.”
“No,” I prepare myself for the onslaught. “It’s not a joke. Justin, the blond kid, is now your brother. It’s a complicated story, but there you are.”
She is stone quiet. Not good. She hangs up. I try to call her back. She doesn’t answer. There’s too much distance between us for me to give her a “maker” command. “Fuck,” I say aloud and decide maybe it's for the best for her to have a cooling off period.
“Are you the angel of death?” A frail old woman shuffling along in a robe and pulling a mobile intravenous contraption approaches me. She speaks in a thick accent of Eastern European origin.
“Sometimes,” I say with a smile and she puts a bony hand on my wrist.
“I’m ready to go. Take me.”
I stare at her parchment skin and can smell the death in her veins. The thought of draining that ravaged body makes me want to puke. I could snap her neck. But no, not here, not now. “I don’t take requests,” I tell her and escape back into Brian’s room. That was unsettling. I know vampires who haunt hospitals and drain dying patients, but I am not one of them. They fill me with disgust.
Justin is leaning over Brian, staring at him, fangs out because he is too inexperienced to keep his fangs in check when his mind wanders to blood lust. I grab his collar and yank him back. I shake my head and he shrugs. “I wasn’t going to do it.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“Maybe a taste. I wasn’t going to hurt him.”
“First of all, you don’t know how to stop a taste from turning into a kill. Second of all, his blood is full of narcotics and I don’t want to drag you around because you’re drunk from it.”
Just then Brian stirs, winces, and opens his eyes.
BRIAN’S POV:
I feel wonderful. Morphine is a beautiful drug. Nothing really matters on morphine, not even the fact a vampire is standing by my bed. Wait, even better, two vampires are standing by my bed and one was just a regular seventeen-year old kid a day ago. Now he looks pale but even more beautiful than he was before. God, I manage a smile. My stalker is a vampire. Deb is going to kill me over this. She’ll blame me and rightfully so.
“Are you here to finish me off?” I ask Eric, the Beautiful. No witnesses. Makes sense.
“Don’t be a drama queen.” He sits on the edge of the bed. “They’re letting you out in the morning. For obvious reasons, I can’t be here to pick you up. But you have my car, right?”
“Somewhere,” I agree. I left it in the Emergency Room parking. I guess it’s still there.
“Check into the Chartres House Hotel on Chartres Street. It’s a lovely old place, very exclusive, and the owner is v-friendly. When it gets dark, I’ll come by with this one. We need to talk when your head is clear. Can you remember that?”
“I hit my shoulder, not my head.”
“Until then, take it easy.”
“Don’t let him kill anyone.”
Eric laughs. “No, not at this stage. He would totally fuck it up.”
Justin hisses at him and that is one sound I never expected to come out of him. “His parents, he needs to come up with a cover.”
“I’ll have to think about that.”
“I can handle them,” Justin says with a smile and I shake my head.
“No, actually you can’t.”
Eric leans over me and flicks his tongue across my lips. “You rest, and I’ll handle this very familiar complication.”
“Yeah,” I say as I give my pain pump another push. “You’ve done so well so far.” The flow of morphine pushes me off that cliff again and when my eyes flutter open for a second, I am alone.