Only At Night Chapter 4

The building where I work is short and squat, six stories tall and more square than rectangle. The corporation might be a multinational business empire, but you’d never be able to tell it from how they do themselves up. For upper management, architecture stopped dead in the fifties.

I went into the lobby, with its drab carpeting, bare plaster walls, and wood paneling to add the touch of attempted art that no institution would be complete without. The desk guard got up, wanded me, and took my picture for facial recognition. Between the vampires and the anti-vampires, you can’t be too safe these days. 

It was as pro forma as possible. He recognized me and waved me through before the system had finished matching me up with my employee identification. Didn’t even ask what I was doing in the building when I was off.

On the premises, I saw Thana waiting at the elevator bank. She had a blood bag in her hand, an IV tube running to her mouth. She sucked on it as casually as a soccer kid would drink a Capri Sun. I gave a half-thought to making myself scarce, but her nostrils flared and she turned her head to me like some possessed doll in a horror movie.

At least I’d been right about the slacks. They showed off about the best ass I’d ever seen on a white woman. Big, but not fat—smoothly tapering down into long, lean legs perfectly encased inside one of those tailored fabric straight guys never know the name of. It all led down into high heels that seemed far too sexy for the office; she’d probably become a vampire just to keep her balance. And she was wearing stockings despite the trousers. It was a little like wearing a T-shirt that said I have lingerie on under this, although more femininely subtle.

“Ivan,” she greeted me, rolling the IV tube around under her tongue like a cigarette. “I thought you were sick. Did someone kiss it and make it better?”

“No, just getting over it.” I shifted my shoulders, trying to hide the telltale scabs under my collar. “I’ll be in tomorrow night, same as always.”

“That’s good.” She smiled. Her teeth were red with blood, at least until her tongue traveled over them. “It’s not the same without you. So much less fun doing it on my own.”

“Yeah,” I said, the all-purpose American injective, eying the floor indicator on the elevator. You’d think the fact that I wasn’t running late would make it have mercy on me, but no, it stranded me here. 

“So why are you here?” Thana pressed, stirring the IV tube inside the blood bag like a straw. “Problem with the server room only our walking wounded can fix?”

“No, it’s just Carina.” 

Thana cocked her head, eyes blank as a doll while she scanned her memories for the name. It always creeped me out how she had to make an active effort to perform the microexpressions that kept living people from looking like the cast of The Polar Express. But I supposed it was nice of her to try. “Ah yes. Ms. Lilly. Did her car break down?”

“No, but we usually get off at the same time, so I walk her to her car. Can’t be too careful, right?”

I heard the plastic crinkle as Thana rubbed the blood bag between her fingers. “I get off when you do, Ivan. You could walk me to my car.”

“I think you can take care of yourself.”

She threw her head back and let out a sparkling laugh. Despite the gentility of it, I was reminded of a wolf howling at the moon. “And Ms. Lilly can’t?”

“Well… no. Or at least, I mean—she’d feel unsafe, if it weren’t for me, but she could probably—handle herself.”

“But it’s preferable for you to handle her.” Despite her lips not seeming to move, her fangs were suddenly showing. “Do you prefer powerless women to powerful ones?”

I wasn’t so much at a loss for words as dealing with a word black hole. “I don’t… like women… I mean, I do like women, but I don’t have preferences—I have preferences, but not about how powerful they are—about how nice they are, polite they are—“

She took a step toward me. Even though she was a head shorter than me, it didn’t matter much when I couldn’t look away from her eyes. “I can be nice,” she said, her voice suddenly almost cloyingly sweet. “Or do you think vampires can only appreciate things that are… hard and rough and fast?”

I paused. “I hadn’t really thought about it.” Vampires can hypnotize people by making eye contact, so most people use holy water as eye drops. It keeps your mind in your own skull. Now, though, I was left wondering if Thana was trying to bespell me or just looking me in the eye.

“You should,” she told me, with such command in her soft voice that she might as well have me hypnotized. “After all, once you know what you like, then you can get what you want.”

The elevator dinged, doors parting, and there was Abigail.

“Abby, there you are!” Thana said, shifting seamlessly to the same gushing affection that a sorority girl would use. “I’ve been looking for you—Ivan, go on up. I’ll get the next one.”

I stepped on the elevator and Abigail stepped off, eying the both of us with keen interest in her flinty eyes. I had a feeling I knew what the office gossip would be about the next few days.

I went up to the sixth floor. The elevator bank there opened into a corridor that led right in the cubicle farm where all the office drones made honey, or whatever it is they do when I have the systems running. I could see Carina’s cubicle from outside the rat maze. I sat down on a bench by a frond—the elevator bank was like some oasis in a desert of beige and neutral pastels—and got out my phone, sending her a text message. I like what you’ve done with your hair today.

I heard her phone go off, telling her she’d gotten a text. One-Mississippi for her to get her phone out, two-Mississippi for her to unlock it, three-Mississippi and she’d read the message—she rolled her office chair to the door of her cubicle and poked her head out to look around, seeing me immediately. She gave me a smile and rolled herself back inside. One-Mississippi later, my phone rang.

Carina is so girlish that it’s wholesome, with a puckish oval face and a button nose that make her almost too cute, like some frou-frou Pomeranian. Luckily for everyone, she’d cut a scar through her left eyebrow in some childhood accident, which gave her a punkish edge that was more indicative of who she was. Girl could tell some of the dirtiest jokes I’d ever heard. But she was still as adorable as one of those cheerleaders from back when they wore sweaters, an attractiveness that almost transcended sexual urge. She was only a few years younger than me, but she brought out a big brother instinct in me just like she did everyone else. She could’ve passed for a college freshman, easy.

“Ivan,” she said when I answered. “Don’t tell me you came all the way here just to walk me to my car.”

“Me, no. I just heard there were some leftover tacos. It is Tuesday, right? But, as long as I’m here—”

She was looking over the tip-top of her cubicle at me, her eyes warm with amusement. “You picked a bad day for a chivalrous gesture. I need to get these accounts done. It’s going to be a late night.”

“You mean an early morning,” I replied. “Okay. Get your accounting on.”

Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “And where will you be?”

“I’ll just hang out here for a while.”

“Ivan, no, you’re sick. You need your rest. I can take care of myself.”

“I’ll be fine. Look, I’m sitting down. I’ve got a book. It’s all very therapeutic.”

I could feel her smile over the phone, right through that gray scratching post shit they make cubicles out of. “Okay. Sit there if you want. But as soon as I finish this work, I’m going to get you back to bed if I have to drag you all the way to my car.”

“I double-dog-dare you to.”

She growled into the phone before hanging up. I took out my book and read. It was one of those old paperbacks with a Jeffrey Jones cover and not much else to recommend it; the nerd version of a coffee table book. It couldn’t hold my interest. With my butt parked on the bench, my tiredness caught up with me. Soon, the book was spread-eagled on my lap as I laid my head back and let my eyes close…

I slept like other people fell. Dreams whipping by me, faint impressions of memories, worries, fantasies. I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t touch, but I had the feeling I was going deeper and deeper, that there was more sky above me than there was space to plummet, even as the ground never seemed to arrive.

Another dream. This time, as I walked Carina to her car again, she had no flesh whatsoever. Just bones. Maybe a paleontologist could tell her sex from the width of her pelvis; I could only tell by the way she walked, bouncing and primping in a way that was one hundred percent girl.

I’d have never thought I could find a skeleton cute before.

This time I was talking, my consciousness butting into the memory of the conversation like I was a radio that had suddenly come within range of an AM station. “So I was going to the gym this morning, right?”

“You’re going to the gym?” Carina asked. “Good for you.”

“Only on weekends,” I admitted. 

“Still, it’s a good way to meet people who don’t eat things,” Carina smirked.

“For your information, gym people can’t stop talking about all the stuff they eat,” I informed her. “Anyway, I go to the weight room, swear to God, there’s this woman filming some sort of porn thing. She’s got a camera set up, she’s got a dildo…”

“Anyone you know?” Carina teased.

“No, I don’t have a public gym fetish, like some people.”

“Exhibitionism. I’ve heard about it. It sounds a bit redundant when you’re posting yourself getting finger-blasted onto the internet.”

“Fucked up thing is I think the camera got a look at me before I left. I might be in a porno.”

Carina shrugged. “Big deal. I was in a porno once.”

I stopped walking. “You.”

“I was an extra. I thought it was for a legit movie at first, but then I saw the acting, and trust me, it was a porno.”

I started walking again. “Your brush with greatness.”

“One of the producers actually tried to recruit me to do a scene. Total skeeve. They really do tell you that you only have to do lesbian scenes.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“Do you want the real version or the clever thing I thought of two hours later that I wish I really had said?”

“Bullshit me.”

“I told him that if I wanted a bunch of guys to watch me kiss a girl—“

I suddenly woke up to the feeling of being watched, a prey animal anxiety attack in my bowels layered with the odd intimacy of post-coital afterglow with a stranger. Or maybe it was just the vampire attack doing a number on my dreams. I looked around, trying to see what had thrown me for such a loop, and saw Abigail Sweat sitting next to me, her owlish eyes centered on me through her thick black glasses.

She didn’t feel the need to say anything, just examined me like someone might watch a deer in their backyard, entranced by the intrusion of something alien yet utterly unthreatening.

“Were you watching me sleep?” I asked.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Abigail spoke in her usual droll tone. “I got a good look early on. After that it was pretty monotonous…”

I looked over at the cubicle farm. The lights were out. I must’ve slept only a couple hours, long enough for the place to be left to the cleaning staff before the morning shift came in. Some Silicon Valley efficiency set-up. I don’t pretend to understand it. 

The glow of a computer monitor spilled out of Carina’s cubicle and I could faintly hear the clatter of typing. It would be light before too long. Maybe I should’ve left Carina alone. At this rate, all she’d have to worry about would be early morning joggers.

Abigail was still staring at me, or at least, had started staring at me when I woke up. I faced her. “Can I help you with something?”

“Degradation,” she said, not even flickering an eyebrow.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s what Thana’s into. Degradation, humiliation, masochism, that sort of thing. I have to buy her porn, so I’d know. And she’s a switch, not that it really matters. Who’s going to dom a vampire?”

“Is this a… topic of conversation?”

“I think it’s why she’s so into you. She could have any man she wants. You keep shooting her down. It embarrasses her, so she gets turned on…” Abigail’s eyes widened slightly, an unaccountably witchy expression. “I should know, right? She takes it out on me.”

“Takes it out…?” This must have been what being lost at sea was like—if you suddenly looked down and saw that the sea had been replaced with mustard or something.

Abigail’s lips curled in a profoundly understated acknowledgment of my… whatever she was getting out of this. “Oh, yeah, I’m pretty much her sex slave? The office runs itself, really, so she masturbates a lot. Then she realized she could get someone to service her, and boom, here I am. It’s a good gig, especially in this economy.” Her tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek contemplatively. “The only thing is that eating pussy is super-boring. I can see why you guys aren’t into it.”

If I ever understood women, I would never understand Abigail. “Is this millennial humor?”

Abigail’s voice was as dry as a good martini. “I’m being flirty and subtle and hinting that you should join in. Thana isn’t a bad lay. And I’m a woman. The less sex I have to have, the better.” Her sarcasm was as dry as a bone. If it was sarcasm.

“I’ll consider it,” I said, trying to be equally deadpan, probably failing.

“Goodie. I think she’s real into spanking—at least she does it to me a lot. But I might just have one of those asses.” She stood up. It didn’t look half-bad. Especially when she ran her hands down her hips to smooth out her skirt. “Also, Thana’s the one who asked Carina to stay late. Hell hath no fury like a something or other. Laters.”

And she took off. I guess she’d hit quitting time. Or she’d been off the clock for a while now… watching me sleep…