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Ketchup Blood
by Kalima
*Usual disclaimers. I'm just playing with someone else's toys.
Afterwards, we went to Denny's. Partly because I really had to pee and
he didn't have a toilet. I mean, of course he didn't. He lived in a crypt.
At the mention of my need, he'd thoughtfully dumped the butts from an urn
he was using as an ashtray and handed it to me, you know, like I was just
supposed to pee in an urn and who knew whose ashes were mixed up with the
cigarette butts. I could have popped outside, but it still seemed kind of
disrespectful to pee on the dead. I said, "I'm really hungry, let's go to
Denny's." And we got dressed and went to Denny's.
I was really hungry. Ravenous, in an eat-a-horse kind of way. I wanted
loads of carbs and fat and protein. Like after slaying. After laying. Same
difference apparently. So I made a limping run for the restroom (you try
riding on the back of motorcycle when your bladder's full) and when I came
out I found him in a back booth, his legs all sprawled out taking up the
whole bench - you know, in that way men do - I mean, even though he's a
vampire he's got that whole man thing going on. His arm was stretched along
the backrest, long fingers dangling with the so-out-of-fashion black nails.
He didn't slide over. I figured it was my cue to sit across from him. I
ordered pancakes, eggs and a chicken fried steak with gravy. Then, just
because, I added an extra side of hashbrowns to the order and the biggest
orange juice they offered.
Spike had coffee, which he kept saying tasted like shit, but kept drinking
it, kept letting the waitress refill it. I wondered idly if he'd ever tasted
shit. I wouldn't have been surprised. I didn't ask. We weren't doing much
talking because we didn't want to talk about IT and what IT meant especially
after we weren't going to do IT ever again or anyway, I wasn't, but then I
came back, kept coming back, and it was starting to piss him off but not
enough to stop.
Four hours of incredible IT and now we just looked out the windows, watched
as the cars pulled into the lot, watched as the people started drifting in.
It was after two in the morning. The bars were closed. This was where
people came, all loopy from alcohol. Loud, obnoxious college kids. The
hip and the cool, straight from the clubs. Musicians with all their equipment
in the trunks of old Plymouths or Chevy vans. Middle-aged guys from convention
hotels, their arms around women their wives would never know about. And us.
Watching. Not talking. Looking at each other then looking away. Every so
often the muscles in my thighs would spasm and he'd glance at me like he'd
felt it too. Then a swallow of coffee.
My orange juice arrived. I gulped it down and asked for another. It was a
burn in my empty stomach, and the sugar was a jolt. Finally, my breakfast.
The waitress grinned and asked, "Sure you can handle all this, honey? Looks
like your friend here could use a bite." She winked at him. He gave her one
of his slow, predatory smiles and she froze for a second, just blinking her
eyes. Maybe she'd noticed the stillness, the pallor of his flesh. Lack of
reflection in the window, always a big clue. But if she did, she handled it
the way most people handled it. She decided to ignore it. She refilled his
cup, hands shaking a little. Then she moved onto the next table. I put the
paper napkin on my lap, buttered the pancakes and poured syrup all over them,
smushed the eggs and hashbrowns into a gloopy mess. Salt. Pepper. I reached
for the ketchup, and started to pour. I caught him watching it dribble out
over the mess on my plate.
"What?"
"Looks disgusting."
"This from the guy who pours blood over Cheerios." I scooped up a forkful of
deliciousness and slowly put it into my mouth savouring the flavours and textures
as they mingled there. Food always tastes so good after sex. I don't know why.
"The cereal is just to make me feel full," he muttered. Then louder, "I'm never full."
One knee started to bounce. "Fuck. I hate this. It's discrimination is what it is!"
"What?" I said looking around for whoever was being discriminated against. I could
right that wrong easily enough. Unless he was implying that vampires were somehow
being discriminated against and that might be a problem. Demon-rights?
Affirmative action for the un-souled?
"Not even a little section cordoned off from the rest where we can smoke and drink
our coffee in peace," he continued. "No. We have to stand outside, all huddled
and shameful - - Oh, cigarettes. "What's the world coming to when a fellow can't even
smoke his fag in a public restaurant?"
A group of homosexuals looked over and then started laughing. He sneered back,
gave them the English version of rude finger salute. I'd only recently learned
it was rude.
He was probably as famished as me.
"Want some ketchup?" I asked helpfully.
"No." He crossed his arms over his chest, slouching and sprawling even more. He
looked more like a grumpy little kid than what he was. It was cute and sort of
irritating at the same time. I decided to distract him.
"When I was about nine," I began, talking with my mouth full and not even caring,
"I had a friend, Justin. Not a boyfriend, just a boy who was a friend, right? We
used to play together."
"I'll bet he loved dressing Barbie's hair, too. Later you were stunned to discover
he turned out to be gay." The gay guys shot us a glance again. Said something
about rough boys and leather. I wanted to tell them how rough he was and how they
couldn't handle it. Wanted to tell them how he got all clingy afterwards -
"Wrong," I said. "This game involved sword fighting. Plastic swords. I wasn't,
you know, the Chosen One back then. My name was Princess Ariel but I disguised
myself as a boy - "
"Ariel? Tempest? Or the Little Mermaid?"
I gave him my best - duh, what do you think - look.
"What? Sword-fighting mermaid? With the tail and all?"
"Well, no, I had legs of course. See, Ariel used to be a mermaid, but then became
a real girl, but because I was a girl they wouldn't let me fight in the Crusades-"
He looked both bored and annoyed, which was how I knew he was confused. "Okay,
never mind, we'll skip the complicated Let's Pretend backstory - it has nothing to
do with what I'm telling you. This is a story about ketchup blood.'
"You have my interest."
"Thought I might. Anyway, we decided to make our sword fights more realistic. We
needed the gore."
"Ketchup blood."
"Uh huh," I said, taking up a forkful of egg, potatoes and ketchup. "But we didn't
want to get in trouble because, as my mother had pointed out, ketchup stains are
stubborn stains, almost as bad as mustard. So we took the bottle of ketchup out to
the tool shed where no one could see us. I lifted up my shirt and he squirted a
line of ketchup across my belly, the plan being that he would then quickly pretend
to slash me with the sword and I would groan and clutch my gut and die dramatically.
It was my turn to die, see."
"Nice of you to take turns like that."
"It was a more civilized time. Anyway, the ketchup started dripping down my stomach
to my pants. I panicked. The pants were new. I was trying to hold back the torrents
of ketchup but there was too much, it was all over my fingers. We were laughing,
you know, because it was so funny how it wasn't working the way we thought it would.
I started licking my fingers and then, for some reason I suggested he should lick it
off my stomach."
I glanced up. He'd leaned forward. Hands wrapped around his cup. I had his full
attention. "Naughty little Slayer," he said. "And did he?" His voice was low and husky.
"Yup. We ended up nearly naked, squirting ketchup on each other and licking it off."
I cut into the chicken fried steak and shovelled it in. I waited for the laugh. I
mean I expected him to laugh and make a suggestion about ketchup. Honestly. A wicked
grin at least. I didn't get it.
"Is this your attempt at allegory?" he asked.
"Huh?" I said, my mind scrambling around for the definition of 'allegory.'
"Surely there's some moral lesson you wish to impart here."
It always makes me uncomfortable when Spike stops being crude and goes intellectual on
me. "Nooo, not really."
He cocked his head, clearly not believing me. "Did you and Justin get caught?"
"Nope."
"Did you do it again?"
Oh.
"I thought not," he said quietly. "I'll hazard a guess at what happened next. You
started avoiding each other. Stopped playing games together. Maybe one of you made
some cruel remark about the other while in front of all your chums - oh nothing about
your little secret. Something hurtful though. And then no more swordfights. No more
fun. And all because you indulged in little ketchup licking."
The next bite of steak didn't go down quite so easily. "That's not why - this has
nothing to do with you and me! I thought you'd think it was funny."
"It's adorable. Precious, really." Precious is never a good word when he says it.
He leaned across the table suddenly and I drew back. "You think they're never going
to find out?" he whispered. "You think when you get home smelling of cigarettes and
booze, none of your pals is ever going to figure it out? I can tell you right now
that every demon in my neighborhood knows what we've been up to. We reek of it. In
either camp, we-" he pointed his finger at my chest, then his, "are an abomination."
I tensed at that. At the thought that he was sneaking around and trying to hide it
just as much as I was when he supposedly loved me so it shouldn't matter, or at least
if he was hiding it, he should be doing it for my sake, not his own reputation. Then
I thought, god, I am a bitch.
"All we're doing is playing with ketchup," he said. And he sounded so tired.
"That's all we're doing?"
"That's all you're doing. I can give you the real thing. I can give you blood and
passion and everything in me a thousand times over, but you don't want it."
"So what you really want is to turn me, is that it? Make me like you?" It was stupid
and crap and really obnoxious of me because of course I knew that's not what he meant.
He knew I knew it. The muscle along his jaw started jumping like when he's about to
go into game face and he got out of the booth real fast, hitting the table with his
knees, pounding the top with his fist as he stood up. Then he threw some money in
front of me, bills crumpled, coins scattered.
"My turn to buy, right? I'll be out having a smoke."
If I were Spike, I probably would have left me there to find my own way home. But he didn't.
He never does.
-fin-
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