He had the classic look: smooth, clear skin that seemed to glow; a soft, smiling mouth and brilliantly-colored irises, hair styled as if he had just rolled out of bed, except every strand fell in perfect artistic symmetry with the planes of his face, etc, etc. And he was a vampire, did I mention that? The Twilight kind. Say what you will about them not being as great as your classic, fanged night-dwellers, but they're impressive to meet face-to-face.
This is what I’ve got in front of me: sparkling, bloodless conglomerate of everything we girls think we want in a guy. Take “vampire” out of the description and replace it with sensitive/rugged/brooding/charismatic/successful, or whatever we always want to find in a mate, and you see these guys everywhere – in fiction, anyway.
So I come up to this guy. Let’s say his name’s Edwin. And he’s flashing his pearly teeth at me, saying all these things about how he’s so entranced by and devoted to me but it’s too dangerous but he wants to know everything about me because even the middle name of my great-great grandmother is so fascinating to him and what’s my favorite color? Is it still my favorite color now? What will my favorite color be tomorrow? And oh my gosh, will he ever stop talking? He’s got all this hot’n’ready intensity over nothing. Like it’s been waiting to shoot out at whoever he decided was different enough from bland but more normal than spectacular and I just happened to be the person that fit the profile.
Whoops. I’ve been tuning out for like five minutes and he’s giving me puppy dog eyes, entreating me for an answer to whatever perfectly flirtatious-but-gentlemanly request he just made. I blink.
“Um, what?”
“Oh, you silly goose.” Edwin chuckles under his breath and shakes his head fondly. “That’s so like you – lost in all the beautiful thoughts floating around in that head of yours.”
He reaches his hand to brush my cheek – softly, I’m sure, because it’s always softly or tenderly or lovingly, one of those -ly words – but I grab his wrist and bat it away, impatient with pretty much everything about him. If I hadn’t been presented with so many versions of this kinda guy in entertainment lately, I probably wouldn’t be so annoyed with it now, I’m sure. Or at least I wouldn’t understand why he chafes at my last nerve.
“Just tell me,” Edwin finally says, leaning toward me. “Tell me something I can do to make you happy.” At first I want to sigh, but then an idea strikes me.
“Like what?” I ask, wondering how far he’s willing to go.
“Anything.”
I perk up.
“You really mean that?”
His face lights up with all the glory of the morning sun. Or evening sun. Whichever’s more glorious, I guess. “I do.”
Yuss.
I pump my arm in a cha-ching! gesture and pull out a huge, honkin’ horse syringe filled with human blood. “See you on the other side!” A grin splits my face and I plunge the needle toward his chest.
“What the – wait!” Horror-stricken, Edwin knocks my hand out of the way. “What are you doing?”
I lower the syringe and look straight at him, completely serious. “I’m making you real.”
“But – “ His mouth works for a moment. “But I am real.”
“No, you’re fiction. You’re the kind of fiction that young girls and desperate housewives dream about but no one really wants to live with. But this,” I say, gesturing with my syringe, “is full of blood – human blood! With all of its degenerative imperfections. That’s what I want from you.”
“But honey,” he says, and the simpering way he says it makes me shiver and twitch away. Which doesn’t stop him from taking my hand and holding it to his chest. “This is who I am. I want to be with you. Isn’t that enough?” Again, his pinkish lips toy with me in a soft smile. But no, that wasn’t enough.
“Look at me,” I say, “and look at you. Do you see a difference? Besides – “ I cut him off preemptively, seeing where he’ll go with that – “besides that whole I’m a normal human girl, you’re a monster inside deal. Look at me. I’m a person, not some kind of deity. You keep saying that’s part of what you love about me. I believe it. And underneath this sparkling layer of – of fakeness,” I say, waving my hand at his general appearance, “I think the real you might be someone I’d like to see. Is that so crazy?”
“But – ”
“I can’t promise I’ll love you as you’d become. But I do know…the version of you I see now? I can never really love. Not the kind of love I want.”
Edwin holds his breath, obviously struggling. I see panic in his eyes. I can understand that. After all, who doesn’t hide behind a mask of pretended perfection? The version of themselves they think everyone else wants to see? Who wouldn’t feel frightened at the prospect of losing that?
For the first time, I feel a real spark of empathy for him – maybe even a connection.
I wait.
“All right,” he says finally, blowing out all his breath. “I’ll do it.”
I lean forward and really look at him, though he attempts to avoid eye contact. “Thank you,” I say, and he glances up briefly. “It means more to me than I can say.”
Edwin’s mouth flickers into one last – admittedly dazzling – half-grin. “Just…try to remember me this way,” he says, as a last resort. I just smile myself, half-shaking my head, committing to nothing.
I blow out my breath. “Here goes nothing.” I give him a brief, tight hug. “For real, this time...see you on the other side.”
And so, I delicately insert the larger-than-life needle past his shirt, through his skin, between his ribs, and into his anxiously beating heart. I take a breath, then slowly, but firmly, push the plunger through the tube, expelling red, wet, very human blood into his system.
Edwin gasps – except it’s more than a gasp, it’s like a death rattle. But opposite. Because he’s finally coming to life. It’s his first breath of life in hundreds of years. I know I should keep my eye on blood level in the syringe, but I can’t help watching as he changes.
Most notably, first, his frame changes. There’s somewhat of a crunching noise as his spine shrinks and he falls several inches shorter, much closer to my height. At the same time, his shoulders curl into a natural hunch, probably formed from years of bad posture before vampirism automatically corrected it. His neck curls back, sort of the way a turtle’s might, so he can keep his head up even with his shoulders down.
I am not proud to say that, when a little bit of a gut rolls over his belt line, I want to flinch. But I know how carefully he’s watching me, now that I’m seeing what he really looks like – what he was willing to turn back to, for me. And I asked for imperfections, didn’t I?
I look at his hands. They somehow lose both their strength and their delicacy. Now they’re just…hands. With a little bit of man-hair creeping up onto the backs of them.
His clothing doesn’t drape so becomingly, either. The rumples aren’t artistic, but untidy. His shoulders aren’t so wide now, so the seams fall too far down his arms.
I’m noticing the weirdest little things just on those arms – a couple odd, dark hairs sticking out amongst the fair ones, uneven skin tone, ashy elbows, patches of rough bumps and a spattering of over-sized freckles – things that are normal in real life, but no one ever cares to mention in stories. Unless it’s on an unsavory character. Or an amusing one. Someone we are meant to dislike, laugh at, or look down on. What are we saying about ourselves?
And then I look up at his face. Now it’s my turn to gasp. Neither in pleasure nor displeasure, but sheer surprise is all. He’s still Edwin, but not the Edwin I’ve known. His jaw and bone structure has rearranged, a little less symmetrical. He’s smiling, insecurely, so I can see that he still has nice teeth, if a little crooked, but the chin beneath it is a bit weak. And his nose features a pretty large, protruding bump in the bridge. The skin in his T-zone has enlarged pores, and the rest of his face holds scattered pockmarks and acne. His mouth is thinner. One hair in his left eyebrow has grown out way too long. His hair, sans gel and magical vampire auto-arrangement, is just flat now. Still a bit mussy and curled, but the color is duller.
And his eyes – finally I meet his eyes.
They don’t dazzle. They’re not a clear blue, or green, or gray, or hazel, but a mix. Like the way a muddy lake might look if it were a cloudy day.
But for all that the color is clouded, I can finally, really see him.
You’d think, with all those imperfections I just described, that he looks like an ogre. Or at least one of those awkward, creeper Nice Guys ™ you try never to end up alone with at social functions. But he doesn’t. He’s not. He’s just…a guy.
I guess he can’t bear the silence any longer, cause he spreads out his arms and says, “So…what do you think?”
I withdraw my syringe and drop it, crossing my arms and tapping my chin. A chin which, by the way, aches from those obnoxious, deep, cyst-like pimples that don’t go away for weeks.
“I don’t know yet,” I say finally. “Talk to me.”
A bit taken aback, Edwin just shrugs. “What about?”
“I don’t know, what kind of stuff do you like to talk about?”
He makes an incredulous expression. “Don’t you know? I only spent an hour talking about architecture yesterday.” He laughs.
“Well yeah, but you made it all so obnoxiously poetic that it felt more like a show than a conversation, so I tuned you out!” I smile in return, satisfied. Cause I recognized in his laugh, at the corner of his mouth and the way it twitched his cheek a certain way, the part of him I’d liked to begin with. The display was smoother before, perhaps, but stifling the true art of it, like cheap plaster and paint put over a stone-cut wall.
It wasn’t how good the smile looked that mattered. It was the fact that the way his mouth moved reminded me of something I loved about him.
Here I’d thought I was coming along to teach Edwin this great big lesson about letting down his guard, and not being vain, and how if he did those two things he’d stop sounding like such a royal stickup. And now I’ve started putting together what might be a big part of the puzzle of my own love story. I mean, being attracted to each other is important…but that one part of that one way he just smiled is so much more compelling to me than his entire same person being physically perfect had been. Why is that?
"So..."
Whoops. Zoning out again.
“Sorry, what did you say?” I ask, bringing myself back to the real world.
Edwin scuffs his shoe against the ground. He mumbles something.
“What was that?”
He glances up, then looks back at his toes and mumbles it just a bit louder, but still too indistinct to make out. I feel bad that I have to ask again. “Sorry…still didn’t catch that.”
His head is still tilted down, and his hands are thrust in his pockets, but this time he keeps his eyes directed at me. “Do you think you can love me now?”
I feel even worse than when I hadn’t heard him. It was such a plaintive, simple question, so much simpler than my emotions ever are. The honest answer is, I don’t know. Can I? Sure, he seemed a bit humbler now, but how long would that last? Would he still treat me like some kind of doll? And I can’t just tell him I don’t know.
Can I?
“I don’t know,” I confess. Predictably, he looks crestfallen. Like the weight of the world just fell on his shoulders, and all of this was for nothing. It sears my insides just to see, and I feel like an awful person.
“Kay,” he says, and starts to turn away. If I hadn't seen something in his smile before - something that clued me in to the fact that hey, maybe there was something inside I actually might enjoy about him - I probably would let him keep going.
“Hey, Edwin?”
“Yeah?” He turns back hopeful.
“I still don’t know,” I warn him, before he gets too excited. “But I do know that I want to figure it out. Wanna go on a date with me?” I hold out my arm, to his surprise.
“Right now?” he asks, awkwardly threading his arm through mine, unsure the angle his arm is supposed to go when being escort-ee instead of escort.
“Why not?”
“Where?”
I shrug. “Wendy’s?”
So we went. And a week or so later, we went on another date. And another. And now we're going out, and see each other pretty much all the time.
Is it going to work out? Honestly, I don’t know. But if it ends, even if we need to not hang out around each other for a while, I hope we end up friends after it all. Cause now that there’s not a cardboard cutout in the way, I’ve finally realized – I really, really like Edwin.
