More throat-clearing before we meet the hot vampire you all came here for
Re-reading this draft, I forgot how ham-fisted and on-the-nose it all was. You're welcome!
The trio squeezed into the back of a cab, Norah and Erik pressed up uncomfortably against opposite windows, and spent the fifteen-minute ride to the bar in an awkward mix of silence and Shelby-chatter. Erik seemed content to let her talk, adding polite interjections here and there. Occasionally from the corner of her eye Norah’d catch him glancing over at her like he wanted to try to include her or ask her a question or something, but then stopped himself. She wasn’t sure if it was because he wasn’t sure what to do with the third wheel, or if it was because he wasn’t sure she was cool with making small talk with a vampire. She should have been asking Erik questions about his background and cracking the occasional joke to put him at ease, but she was coming up empty. Mostly, her feet hurt. Sometimes life is just not that deep.
The cab stopped outside the new bar on a busy street downtown. They paid the driver and walked inside. It was a pretty nice place, lots of dark wood, and booths around the outside with tall bar tables dotting the middle. It was a couple steps up from a sports bar, just fancy enough to make you feel like a jerk if you spilled anything, but not too fancy that you’d try that hard to stop a rogue beer mug from tumbling to the floor.
It was a Sunday night so it wasn’t too crowded. There were a handful of couples holed up in the booths and a few small groups of friends at the tables. Erik put his hand on the small of Shelby’s back and led her to the bar. Norah trailed behind like a weirdo, and they took seats toward the end of the bar and ordered a round.
Norah sipped on her Corona while Erik told Shelby all about these plays in the park that were so great. She wondered if he actually liked live outdoor theater or if he was just pretending to because Shelby was a girl he clearly wanted to hook up with and girls like that kind of thing. Because Norah knew Shelby hated plays. She was just playing along enthusiastically too because she clearly wanted to hook up with him. He had no idea. It was kind of cute, in a way, how little he knew about how to impress a girl after a thousand years to practice.
He clearly thought he was smooth, and he might have come off that way if you weren’t actually paying attention to the words. The tone of his voice would suggest he was successfully talking her into bed. But he just went on and on about the scenery and the magic of the crowd, thinking every word was a home run. It was getting hard to watch.
“So, Erik,” Norah began, cutting him off mid-sentence. “You work in finance? What’s that like?”
He chuckled. “Painfully dull.”
She chuckled good-naturedly. Like park theater. [editor’s note: I love park theater; Norah’s obviously an asshole.] “You didn’t grow up around here, right?”
“Me? Oh, no. I was born on the other side of the world, fairly far north. It’s been quite a long time. The country there now is Norway.”
Shelby and Norah both looked a little stunned. It was one thing to look at his name tag and see “age: one thousand.” But it was a whole other thing to hear him talk about growing up in Norway before it was Norway.
“How old were you…?” Shelby asked. “If you don’t mind me asking…”
“Of course not. That’s why you came tonight, isn’t it? To learn more?” he said, and Shelby nodded. “I had just turned 28. I was hunting.”
“What happened?” Norah asked. “We cover it sometimes at work when it’s particularly… brutal. But that’s kind of rare these days. I can’t imagine… a thousand years ago… who would have even done it?”
He shrugged. “Honestly, to this day, I’m not sure. I was hunting, as I said, and then… I saw her. A woman. Out in the middle of the open grass. I didn’t have time to think how strange that was before.. The next thing I know, I woke up under some brush, starving, and devoured some live game in a haze. A muskox I think? It’s precursor? It’s a little blurry looking back on it all these years later. The whole thing seemed strange enough to me that I had the good sense to abandon home before I accidentally hurt anyone.”
“That’s… insane!” Shelby said, mouth-hanging open. “Did you have any clue what happened to you?”
Erik shook his head. “No. This was the early days, the very early days. Soon there were rumblings of what was starting, but at that point, nothing. I traveled alone for a very long time before meeting anyone experiencing the same thing. I think eventually enough of us started finding each other that we started to piece it together, match up myths with reality.”
“Nobody really knows, right? How we all… came to be?” Shelby asked.
“Not that I know of. I’ve kept up on the latest reading over the years. People have theories. But if anyone’s doing the research and finding the answers, they aren’t sharing it with the rest of us.” He shrugged. “Erik’s not even my name, by the way. Not my original name anyway. I picked it out about four-hundred years ago.”
“Really? How many names have you had?” Shelby asked.
“A few.”
“You seem so calm about all of this,” Norah said.
Erik took a swig of his beer and smiled. “I’ve had some time to get used to it.”
“Hey, you talking about vampires?” Shelby, Erik and Norah turned to the right, looking at the man calling out to them from the other end of the bar, he and his friend clearly picking up on snippets of their conversation.
Norah nodded. “Yeah, just… wondering how they all got here, like originally, you know?”
The man who’d called over—an older, gruff looking sort—mmhmm’d in a very serious way, slowly nodding his head up and down while his friend sipped a Coors.
“I don’t know where they came from,” gruff man said, “but I sure as hell wish they’d leave.”
Norah traded nervous glances with Shelby. Thankfully the pair hadn’t seemed to over hear the part about two out of their three-person crew being vampires. Erik cleared his throat, and spoke up.
“Why do you say that?” he said, calm and nonchalant.
Gruff guy shook his head. “It’s just not right. The way they bite people. Walking around like they know more than we know. It’s not natural.”
He bald friend laughed. “Oh c’mon Frank. They aren’t that bad.”
Frank huffed like his friend was talking nonsense, but the friend pressed on. “Naw, I’ll tell you what the real problem is,” he said, turning to the three of them like he was lecturing teenage kids about the good ol’ days. “The problem is the government, and the damn media. You get all this conflicting shit in the news and nobody knows what to think!”
He pointed the neck of his beer toward the television behind the bar, fixed on one of the local news stations. “Turn that up, would ya?” Bald man directed the bartender. The flannel clad guy working the bar turned to grab the remote, which was sitting on his side of the bar, in front of Norah. Norah accidentally caught the bartender’s eye, and he gave her a smirk, then turned back with a disinterested poker face and turned up the volume.
“See!” Baldy slammed his drink down. “This is the shit I mean! These damn reporters don’t tell us anything! Is everything fine? Should we be worried? What the fuck do they know?”
Shelby glanced over at Norah, feeling her tense up like she always did when somebody around her started railing on the media, like they were one big glob of stupid out to make the world a dumber place.
“I’m gonna run to the bathroom real quick,” Norah mumbled to her as Erik started to engage the men in nice civil debate about the fate of the universe or whatever it was they were so worked up about.
She set down her beer and fumbled her phone out of her purse, checking her email. Her heels clicked on the slightly sticky bar floor as she made her way over to the little hallway with “restrooms” sign hanging overhead. She pulled open the door and slouched in front of the mirror, rolling her eyes as she fiddled with her bangs, trying to get them to set right for once, please and thank you. She didn’t actually need to come in here, she just didn’t feel like listening to the bald guy shit on how she paid her bills. It was an occupational hazard. This guy at least didn’t know what she did for a living. Usually it didn’t matter. Norah had been to many family gatherings where her relatives try to convince her to take up something better paying, like marrying a doctor. She sometimes would try to gently explain to them that when she’s on deadline with a story about a boring city council meeting, she didn’t really time to sit and plan for how to most effectively sneak her brain-washing bias into the story, but they had yet to relent.
She ran her fingers underneath the bottom of her hair to fluff it up a little. No such luck. Taking a step back from the mirror, she whipped her head over in front of her, shaking out her hair a couple times, and whipped it all back behind her. There. That… didn’t work. Whatever. Another battle for another day.
She pushed the door open, nearly colliding with the bartender, who was coming from the room at the end of the hall with a crate of empty bottles.
“Shit!” Norah stumbled back, trying to get out of his way. “I’m so sorry!”
He chuckled. “No problem.” She glanced up at the poor guy she’d nearly knocked over, and promptly felt herself blush a little. Tall, broad shoulders, clearly nice arms underneath the slightly hipster 90s reject plaid shirt. But his hair was dark, his eyes were dark and the scruff on his face was dark. He definitely had that whole hot bartender thing going on and she was too tired to do much of anything besides blush. Maybe he didn’t notice.
“You… okay?” he asked. He totally noticed.