You Suck: A Love Story

embarrassing. People are like looking, and I’ve moved a couple of seats over so they won’t think I’m giving him a hand job or something.) I am totally overcome with dread and foreboding, and the time passes like a seeping infection on a bad eyebrow piercing. So we wait. I wish we had some pot. More later.
    Oh yeah, and Mom got me a green Care Bear for Christmas! I totally love it.
    Y ou’re sure this is where you left it?” Jody was looking up and down the Embarcadero. There were no people out on the street-the performers and hustlers were long gone. She could hear the Bay Bridge humming in the distance, a foghorn started to low over in Alameda. A BART train burped out of a tunnel onto the street a block away, headed toward the ballpark, empty. A police cruiser turning out of Market Street strafed them with its headlights before heading past the Ferry Building toward Fisherman’s Wharf.
    Tommy waved to the cops.
    “Yeah. I was right here and my watch went off. He weighed a ton. It would have taken a bunch of guys to move him.”
    Jody saw something shining on the bricks near her feet and crouched down to touch the source. Metal filings of some sort. She licked her finger and came up with a coating of yellowish metallic particles on her fingertip. “Unless someone cut it up.”
    “Who would do that? Who would cut a statue up and steal the pieces?”
    “Doesn’t matter. Maybe thieves, maybe city workers. If someone cut that bronze shell, one of two things happened. If it was daytime, Elijah fried out here in the sun. If it was dark, he’s free.”
    “It wasn’t light, was it?”
    Jody shook her head. “I’m guessing no.” She saw a light pattern among the bricks a few steps away and crouched down again. There was a fine, grayish powder between the bricks. She pinched some between her fingers and shook her head. “For sure no.”
    “What? What is that?”
    She brushed her finger off on her jeans and dug into her jacket pocket. “Tommy, remember I told you that you didn’t drink the whore dry because she wouldn’t have been there if you had?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, that’s because when a vampire drains someone-when we drain someone, they turn to a fine gray powder. I can’t explain why, but it looks like that. Feels like that.” She pointed to the mortar lines between the bricks.
    Tommy knelt down and touched the powder, looked up. “How do you know that?”
    “You know how I know that?”
    “You’ve killed people.”
    She shrugged. “Just a couple. And they were sick. Terminal. They were asking for it, sort of.”
    “So that’s why you weren’t upset about the hooker?”
    She pulled her cell phone out of her jacket pocket, then held it behind her back and twisted back and forth looking at her feet, like a little girl being interrogated about how Mommy’s lamp got broken. “Are
    you mad?”
    “I’m a little disappointed.”
    “Really? I’m really sorry. You would have done the same thing if you’d been there.”
    “I’m just disappointed that you didn’t feel that you could trust me.”
    “You were having a hard time with your change. I didn’t want to bother you.”
    “But it wasn’t sexual or anything, right?”
    “Absolutely not. Purely nutritional.” She didn’t think it necessary to tell him about kissing the old man. It would just confuse things.
    “Well, I guess it’s okay, then. I guess if you had to.”
    He stood and she ran to him and kissed him. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to have that off my chest.”
    “Yeah, well…”
    “Hang on.” She held up a finger and hit the power button on her phone.
    “Calling your mom to tell her she was right about your being a tramp?”
    “I’m calling the kid.”
    “Abby?”
    “Yeah. I need to tell her to stay away from our place. Elijah is going to start messing with us like before.”
    Jody watched as the little icons on her phone showed that it was searching for a signal. “But she said she wasn’t coming by to night. It’s Christmas.”
    “I know she said that, but I think she may come by anyway.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, she has a thing for me, I think. I bit her last night.”
    “You bit Abby?”
    “Yeah. I told you, I was hurt. I needed-”
    “God, you’re such a blood slut.”
    “I knew you’d be mad.”
    “Well, it’s Abby, for fuck’s sake. I’m her dark lord.”
    “Look, a voice mail.”
    E lijah Ben Sapir cast the twitching, pee-spraying alcoholic across the street, where he