You Suck: A Love Story

Jody said. “Hardly anything broken.”
    “You think that monkeys really do it that way?” Tommy replied.
    “I always thought you were just using that as an expression.” She’d thought she could remain detached enough about their lovemaking to stay in control-to enjoy it, but to use it, as it were-but since Tommy had changed, it wasn’t like that anymore. She lost herself in it, she didn’t just make love with him, she fucked him like a crazed monkey girl. It was good, but disconcerting. She had liked being in control.
    “You look amazing from this angle,” Tommy said.
    “You look like a man-shaped fluorescent lightbulb,” Jody said, grinning at him, then noticing a change.
    “Do not get wood, Thomas Flood. You will not get wood, do you hear me?”
    “You sound like my mom,” Tommy said.
    “Ewwwww,” Jody said, shuddering and covering her eyes.
    “Ewwwww,” Tommy said, realizing what he had just said and about what and whom.
    He dropped to the bed and bounced. “Sorry. Quick, put the self-tanning lotion on me, we only have a few minutes before sunup.”
    “Okay, but just the lotion.”
    “Right, go.”
    Jody took the lotion and squirted some on her hands. “Turn around, I’ll get your back.”
    “But-”
    “Just point that thing the other way, writer boy, you have had all the monkey love you’re going to get to night.” She said it, but she didn’t mean it-she’d go another round if he wanted, if they had time before sunrise. Then she remembered.
    “Did you say you found us a minion?”
    “Yeah, I did. She’s going to start tomorrow-er, today. I gave her money to get us an apartment. Told her what we needed.”
    “Her?”
    “Yeah, you remember that girl we saw in the drugstore?”
    Jody stopped rubbing, grabbed his shoulders, and spun him around. “You gave our deposit money to a nine-year-old?”
    “She’s not nine. She’s sixteen.”
    “Still, Tommy. You trusted our secret to a sixteen-year-old girl?”
    “She already knew.”
    “Yes, because you let your fangs show like some doofus of the night. You could have explained that somehow, or better yet, never seen her again.”
    “Look, she’s smart, and she’ll be loyal. I promise.”
    “You could have just gotten us killed.”
    “What would you have done? Huh? You have to trust someone.”
    “But a sixteen-year-old kid?”
    “I’m only nineteen, and I was a great minion. Besides, she thinks I’m her dark lord.”
    “Did you even tell her about me?”
    “Of course, she knows all about you. Knows that you’re my sire-that’s what they call the vampire who made you. I even told her that you were older, that you had vast experience.”
    “Vast? Vast experience sounds like I’m a slutty old divorcee. How old does she think I am?”
    “Five hundred.”
    “What?”
    “But you look great for five hundred. I mean, look, you got my attention. Do my front.”
    “Do your own front.” She threw the lotion bottle at him and he snatched it out of the air.
    “Love you,” Tommy said, slathering self-tanning goo all over his face and chest.
    “I’m going to lock the bedroom door,” Jody said as the alarm on their watches started beeping, signaling ten minutes before sunrise. She’d gotten the alarm watches for both of them, just in case. “You didn’t give her keys, did you?”
    “Not to the bedroom.”
    “Great. What if she finds William in the stairwell and stakes him out? You could have given our key to a Buffy wannabe-”
    “This stuff is supposed to take like eight hours to work, so by sundown I’ll be sexy bronze.”
    “There’s a bronze vampire in the living room. Why don’t you go ask him how that’s working out for him?”
    “He’s impersonal bronze, not sexy bronze like I’ll be.”
    “Come to bed. And put on a T-shirt. I don’t want a sexy bronze stain on the sheets, even if they are torn up.”
    Tommy sniff-tested a half-dozen shirts, finally decided on one, climbed into bed, and was kissing Jody good morning when the sunrise put them out.

11 – Then, When They Woke Up
    Oh my God, that stuff turned me completely orange.”
    “Not completely.”
    “I look like the Great Pumpkin.”
    “Good grief, Tommy, you do not.”
    12 – Blood, Coffee, Sex,
    Magic-Not Necessarily in That Order
    Just after sundown.
    They watched the coffee dripping out of the filter like they were distilling nitroglycerine and the slightest
    bit of inattention might cause an explosion. “It smells really