But I still liked her. Petulantly, I muttered, “So?”
“This can only end badly.”
“What? She’s just… she’s nice. It’s not like we’re soulmates or anything.“ Some people thought that vampires didn’t have souls.
Jack came in then, looking pensive, and Aaron rounded on him. “Did you know Sam’s been talking to this girl?”
Jack stared. “What, the reporter?”
“No, a girl!”
“Ginny?”
Aaron said, “How come everyone knows about Ginny but me?”
“You should come out with us so you can meet girls too,” Jack said with a grin.
“Jack, you can tell him it’ll never work out, right?”
“Of course it’ll never work out. Don’t worry, he’s just killing time.”
“Exactly,” Aaron said decisively before stalking back to his room.
It would never work. Right. Because she was alive, and I was dead.
One nice thing about being a vampire—no insomnia. Ever. Eventually, the sun came up, and I slept. I still dreamed, though. That was weird. I was supposed to be dead—undead. Brought back to life. Something. No one had done any research about the whole dead-or-not thing. Like done an fMRI on a sleeping vampire to see what really went on in their brains. All I knew was that I still dreamed. Usually about sunlight. About being outside. And being lost in a strange city or in a forest or in a cornfield, and the sun got brighter and brighter until I had to shut my eyes against it. But I had to keep moving, and there I was, stumbling around in the dark, wondering where I’d gone wrong.
If I were capable of insomnia, I might have lain awake thinking about Ginny. If I weren’t a vampire, I could handle this. I’d ask her to dinner, maybe a movie. I’d let things progress. Then maybe I’d ask her to come home with me, or let her ask me to go home with her. I was a grown man, this shouldn’t be hard.
But I got stuck at the “ask her to dinner,” part. Because my mouth started watering and I pictured that bright vein at her neck. “Ask her to dinner” didn’t mean the same thing that it used to. So why bother? Because we had a lot of fun tag-teaming on Left 4 Dead?
Relationships had been built on lesser things.
I didn’t even know why I was thinking about it. Things would never work out. I was a vampire. I didn’t want to hurt her.
The next night, I was back on the sofa. Ginny wasn’t able to log on tonight, so no tag teaming. I’d spend the night playtesting a bunch of pre-release games I’d been sent. Actual work. Vampires shouldn’t have to work.
The cardboard boxes around the place were arranged in a different pattern again, in their endless migration around the apartment. Boxes of toys, Lego playsets from the early nineties, Cabbage Patch knock-off dolls—super creepy. I hoped they didn’t stick around for long.
Jack came out of his room. “Guess who called?” he said, holding up his phone.
“Clarissa Carter,” I said, because he wouldn’t have announced it if it had been anyone else.
“Yeah. She asked more questions. And she wants another meeting. She asked if I could maybe get her a meeting with Rick.”
I hit pause on the game—it was boring anyway—and looked at him. “She just came out and asked for a meeting with him?”
“She wanted to know if I could set it up.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said maybe. I asked why.”
“And?”
“She just said she wants as much information as she can get.”
Well, how could you argue with that?