Bloodsucking fiends: a love story

mind? I've got my kids here."
    "Sorry," Tommy said, wiping vampire spit on his shirt. "We were just experimenting."
    "Yeah, well, this isn't the place for it, okay?"
    "Right," Tommy said.
    "See?" Jody whispered. "I told you."
    "Let's go home," Tommy said. "I've got a blister on my big toe."
    "No fucking way, writer-boy."
    "It's low in calories," Tommy coaxed, prodding her foot with his sneaker. "Good, and good for you."
    "Not a chance."
    Tommy sighed in defeat. "Well, I guess we've got more to worry about than my toe or your weight problem."
    "Like what?"
    "Like the fact that last night I saw a guy in the store parking lot that I think was the other vampire."

Chapter 16 – Heartwarming and
    UL-Approved
    There was a bum sleeping on the sidewalk across the street from the loft when they returned. Tommy, full of fast food and the elation of being twice laid, wanted to give the guy a dollar. Jody stopped him and pushed him up the steps. "Go on up," she said. "I'll be there in a minute."
    She stood in the doorway watching the bum for movement. There was no heat signature around him and she assumed the worst. She waited for him to roll over and start laughing at her again. She was feeling strong and a little cocky from the infusion of Tommy's blood, so she had to fight the urge to confront the vampire, to get dead in his face and scream. Instead she just whispered, "Asshole," and closed the door. If his hearing was as acute as her own, and she was sure it was, he had heard her.
    She found Tommy in bed, fast asleep.
    Poor guy, she thought, running all over town doing my business. He probably hasn't slept more than a couple of hours since we met.
    She pulled the covers over him, kissed him on the forehead, and went to the window in the front room to watch the bum across the street.
    Tommy was dreaming of bebop-driven sentences read by a naked redhead when he woke to find her sleeping next to him. He threw his arm over her and pulled her close, but there was no response, no pleasant groan or reciprocal snuggle. She was out.
    He pushed the light button on his watch and checked the time. It was almost noon. The room was so dark that the watch dial floated in his vision for a few seconds after he released the button. He went to the bathroom and fumbled around until he found the light switch. A single fluorescent tube clicked and sputtered and finally ignited, spilling a fuzzy green glow through the door into the bedroom.
    She looks dead, he thought. Peaceful, but dead. Then he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. I look dead too.
    It took him a minute to realize that it was the fluorescent lighting that had sucked the life out of his face, not his vampire girlfriend. He affected a serious glare and thought about how they would describe him in a hundred years, when he was really famous and really dead.
    Like so many great writers before him, Flood was known for his troubled countenance and sickly pallor, especially under fluorescent lighting. Those who knew him said that even in those early years they could sense that this thin, serious young man would make his presence known as a great man of letters as well as a sexual dynamo. His legacy to the world was a trail of great books and broken hearts, and although it is well known that his love life was his downfall, he felt no regret, as illustrated in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "I have followed my penis into hell and returned with the story ."
    Tommy bowed deeply before the mirror, careful to keep the Nobel Prize medal from banging the sink, then began to interview himself, speaking clearly and slowly into his toothbrush.
    "I think it was shortly after my first successful bus transfer that I realized the City was mine. Here I would produce some of my greatest work, and here I would meet my first wife, the lovely but deeply disturbed Jody…"
    Tommy waved the microphone/toothbrush away as if the memories were too painful to recall, but actually he was trying to remember Jody's last name. I should know her maiden name, he thought, if just for historical purposes.
    He glanced into the bedroom where the lovely but deeply disturbed Jody was lying naked and half-covered on the bed. He thought, She won't mind if I wake her up. She doesn't have to be at work or anything.
    He approached the bed and touched her cheek. "Jody," he whispered. She didn't stir.
    He shook her a bit. "Jody, honey."
    Nothing.
    "Hey," he said, taking her shoulders. "Hey, wake up." She didn't