You Suck: A Love Story

me.”
    There’s only one exit, so, you know, blackened Abby coming up.
    But the smoke formed into a pillar, and then it started growing arms and legs. When I saw it had eyes I ran into the bedroom and shut the door. I wasn’t trippin’ or anything, just totally calm. But it wasn’t like when your friends hold your hair while you puke and tell you it’s just the drugs and you’ll be okay-so I went for the safe thing of locking the door so I could assess the situation. Then the door just ’splodes into splinters and there’s the Countess, totally naked, standing in the doorway with the knob in her hand. And she was totally hot, except that her legs were all fucked up, like they were burned or rotted or something.
    So I’m all, “You totally wrecked your deposit.”
    And the Countess like grabs my hair and pulls me to her and bites my neck, just like that. It didn’t really hurt-it was more surprising-like you woke up from getting a root canal to find your dentist going down on you. Well, not exactly like that-more mystical. But still, surprising. (Okay, it hurt, but not as much as the time Lily tried to pierce our nipples with a compass from geometry class and an ice cube. Youch!) She smelled like burning meat, and I tried to push her away, but it was like my limbs were paralyzed or there was a fat guy sitting on me-like I was buried alive or something, just watching it happen. And then I started to get light-headed and I thought I was going to pass out. That’s when the ho dropped me.
    She goes, “Go downstairs and get my clothes off the sidewalk. And make coffee.”
    And I’m like, Wait a minute, I just lost my mortality virginity, shouldn’t I get a cigarette and a fucking towel or something? But I just said, “Okay,” because where the Countess was all burned was healing while I watched, and it was kind of freaking me out to be looking at her naked, burned-up thighs and her totally red pubes anyway. So I went downstairs and just outside the door there was a homeless guy digging through a pile of clothes. Well, really, he was sniffing her pan ties. And because I don’t feel we always do enough to help the homeless, I was like, “Take them, and tell no one what you witnessed here to night.” (I was already feeling the superiority of my Nosferatitude, so it only seemed appropriate that I go all noblesse oblige on his ass.) So off he went to sniff the lacy crotch of the undead while I went back upstairs to find coffee filters.
    So when I get up there the Countess is dressed and hair brushed and she’s all, “Where is Tommy? Have you seen Tommy? Did you talk to those cops? And where’s Tommy?”
    And I was all, “Countess, begging your pardon and shit, but you need to chill. The vampyre Flood was gone when I got here this morning, and so was that bronze statue from the other side. I thought you guys went off to sleep in the damp womb of your native soil or something.”
    “Yuck!” goes the Countess. Then she tightens down all of sudden. “Make me a cup of coffee, two sugars, and squeeze one of those vials of blood into it-and call us a cab.”
    And I was like, “Hey, step off, Countess. I’m one of you and you are not the boss of me and-”
    And she said, “I said for us, didn’t I?”
    So I did her bidding-well, our bidding, really-and we took a cab over to the Marina Safeway, but why we didn’t transform into bats and fly is beyond me. Anyway, we were there in ten minutes. But as we start to pull in, the Countess tells the driver to keep going.
    She was all, “It’s Rivera and Cavuto. This is not good.”
    The POS brown cop car was parked in front of the store. I was all, “Cops? Their shit is weak.”
    She seemed surprised that I knew the cops, but I told her how I had owned them like the little wussy-boys that they are and I could tell that the Countess was feeling pretty good about bringing me into the dark fold of the coven.
    Then she was all, “Fucking Clint-he’s telling them about Tommy.”
    But I couldn’t even see what she was looking at beyond the big glass front of the Safeway. I guess my powers will develop as time goes on. Five hundred years is a long time to get your vampyre kung fu down.
    The Countess had the driver drop us atFortMason, so we could still see the front of the Safeway, and we stood in the fog like the creatures of the night that we were while we waited for the cops to leave.
    Then the Countess put her arm around my shoulders and she was all, “Abby,