Only At Night Chapter 5

Before I could think about it too much, the light in Carina’s cubicle blinked off. I heard the muted tap of pumps on carpet, and saw Carina’s outline as she came out to the elevator bank, emerging from the shadows one long stride at a time. It was almost as much to take in as that talk with Abigail had been.

She was wearing a Thierry Mugler dress, black leather, short-sleeved, cut-out on one side of the waist and with an asymmetrical hem to show off a flash of thigh inside the knee-length skirt. It was nearly skintight, and while I knew that Carina took care of herself, I’d had no idea just how much there was to take care of. Her breasts were pert and perfectly formed, filling the chest of her dress almost to excess, while her hips, her belly, her legs, all were svelte and lithe and nearly sculpted, the body of a Greek goddess made human by the self-aware look on her button-cute face… knowing how good she looked and being amused by it as much as she enjoyed it.

“Wow,” I said cleverly.

Her grin only widened at my response; what it lacked in wit, it made up for in sincerity. “What can I say? Taco Tuesday is getting to be a big deal around here.”

“I see that,” I said, still not up to banter while Carina looked like she should be getting escorted by a bouncer to the bottle service crowd of some hot nightclub, not being walked to her car by a mug like me. 

She broke the tension by holding out her tiny little clutch. “Would you take my bags, good sir?”

“Certainly.” I took it and tucked it under my arm. “Let’s go.”

As I walked her through the empty streets, she filled me in on what I’d missed. It’s been a slow day for office gossip, and a slower day for computer glitches. She tried to break it to me gently that I hadn’t been missed that much. But I didn’t mind. Not being missed meant that I was doing my job right. Or something like that.

To keep the conversation going, I ended up holding forth on politics. Dangerous, I know, with all the different subspecies of liberal seeming to be in a rush to see who could eat who first, but Carina seemed like the last person to hold someone’s politics against them.

“Now I don’t like Trump,” I said as we came down the sidewalk. Being winter, it had rained, and now the water in the streets provided a phantasmagorical reflection of the city lights above. Pretty, in a way. “I think he’s a bad president, bad human being. But the gay jokes about him and Putin have to stop.”

“Oh, trust the guy named Ivan not to like people joking about Putin,” Carina teased. 

I glanced at her again. She still looked like a million dollars. I was never going to get used to that. Not that I’d ever thought she looked bad, but—you just don’t think about people looking a certain kind of good.

“Putin is a fucking James Bond villain,” I said quickly, trying to cover how I’d almost lost myself in staring at her. Maybe this was how Abigail had felt looking at me. “But what’s the joke with these jokes? They’re supposed to be taunting them over being homophobic, but it’s never that, the joke is always that they’re two men supposedly having sex, which is unmanly, which is bad. Colbert and all the others are pretty much just calling Trump a fag; they should have the guts to come out and say it.”

“You hear Colbert doubled down on that recently?” Carina asked.

“I thought he apologized.”

“No, there was apparently a taping and when they were off the air, someone asked him something, and he said the cockholster thing again.”

“Well, I’m glad we’re being so precise in this.”

Carina smirked. “So hey, why’d you really miss work?”

“I had a sick day. I was sick.”

“C’mon. You? You don’t get sick. You’re a workhorse. When you die, they’re going to make you into glue.”

“I always did kinda like letting some dry on my hand and then peeling it off.”

“Ick,” Carina said, quirking her face. She looked so adorable that it was tempting to gross her out some more. I felt like I was in the third grade, at recess with a girl I didn’t know how to talk to. “Come on. Spill. Were you taking some me time? Having a little siesta? Maybe you met someone--?”

As she asked oh-so-leadingly, she reached over and hit me in the ribs. It was barely a lovetap, but it hit right on the wound one of the vampires had left. My vision went black with pain, I stumbled on wonky gravity—somehow managed to hook a streetlamp with my arm and hold on while the world rattled. I could taste bile at the back of my throat, but refused to let my stomach take its rebellion that far. That would be just perfect: Carina dressed up nice and I vomited in front of her.

“Ivan! Ivan, what’s wrong? Jesus, I didn’t mean to—I wasn’t—I’m not—“ Whatever Carina was muttering, I heard it like I was underwater. Then she was there next to me, gingerly rubbing my back with one hand. “Are you okay? Ivan? C’mon, man, speak to me—“

“I’m fine…”

Carina let out a shocked guffaw. “Yeah fucking right. Let me see…”

She pried at my shirt and jacket; I was hardly in any condition to stop her. She saw the scabs, the blackened varicose veins where the infection was working its way out of my system.

“It’s not that bad,” I said. “It was worse the day before—it’s getting better.”

“Yeah, now…” She faced me. “You could’ve died…”

“I got rolled. It happens.”

As I looked away, her eyes seemed to flash dangerously. I was reminded of looking up at the moon and seeing it was yellow. “It shouldn’t—come on, we’re almost there.”

And we were; I’d nearly blown chunks on the curb of the parking garage. With her keeping an arm wrapped around my waist—although I don’t know what that was supposed to do if I did a pratfall—we walked to her parking space.

Carina drove the kind of van that had to be old enough to buy liquor. On the side was an airbrushed mural of a white-haired wolfman playing glam rock with an electric guitar that could’ve beheaded someone. I still had no idea where she had gotten it. Inherited from an old brother? A first car bought from an uncle who never drove it anymore? Hell if I knew; it didn’t seem Carina’s style at all. But then, neither did leather dresses and stiletto heels.

She opened up the sidedoor and popped me in. As set as I was on the role of big strong man with high pain threshold, it was a gasping relief to land in the backseat and feel the weight slide right off my feet. Carina hit the interior light and looked me over, pulling at my clothes to find more of the wounds I had hidden.

“Jesus, Ivan… four? You got jumped by four vampires and you didn’t go to the hospital?”

“Maybe I ran into one vampire,” I suggested, “and then I fell on a rake a bunch of times.”

She grinned reproachfully—one of those oxymorons that women do as easy as breathing. “This isn’t funny.”

“I’m fine,” I insisted. “I just needed to catch my breath. You hit hard.”

“Told you I could take care of myself.” Apparently satisfied that I was healing up, she sagged into the backseat next to me. Not that she’d ever admit I wasn’t on the verge of an embolism, not in the state she was in. 

I’ve never been accused of being a genius; I just realized it had been twenty-four hours since the last time I used my powers. I called them up now, checking my own status. I could see plenty of debuffs—blood loss, infection, fever. None of them were too bad; they all rang up fifty points. I spent each one, leaving only the ten-point scars. That felt much better. I was down two hundred points, but I’d spent zip at work, so it evened out. 

“You know, the best way to get back at the vampires isn’t just not letting them get away with stuff like this,” Carina was saying as I did all this. “It’s also taking care of yourself. They’d probably love it if everyone rolled over—“

“I’m not rolling over.” My pride was healing up as fast as the rest of me.

“Then what are you planning on doing about this?”

“What is there to do?” I rubbed at my tired eyes. “Fuck it. I can take it. Better me than someone else, someone like—“

“Me?” Carina asked. 

Suddenly she reached over and turned off the light. We sat in the backseat of an empty van, in a deserted parking garage, in the darkness just before dawn.

“You know,” she said, her voice far quieter. “I used to have these dreams that… daydreams… where you’d be walking me to this stupid van and some thugs would come out and you’d… defend my honor…”

“How’d I do?”

“Well, I’d end up patching up your wounds…”

“Thanks a lot.”

“And I’d say thank you. For protecting me. Just for thinking about me, really. The way you see the world… you think everyone is sweet, kind, that they would be good to someone like me, the way you are. They aren’t. You are.”

I looked straight ahead. Out the windshield, a street sweeper was moving down the road. “Lots of people have fantasies. It’s probably nothing. You don’t have to be embarrassed or any--”

“Oh, shut up,” she said firmly, and kissed me like an animal in heat.