Sucks to Suck – Chapter 7

Marion's fingers flicked through the pages of the book, finding the combination of its weight, size, and hardcover made it somewhat hard to handle but realising that quite a number of the volumes in Logan’s extensive collection were of similar make and dimensions. She wondered if there was a reason that she wasn’t privy to that could explain why the tomes were made that way, but it was an idle musing that she didn’t bother expressing out loud as her eyes skimmed through the text.

“Fun read, huh?” Logan asked, leaning forward on her seat, with eyes bright and wide, peering toward Marion.

“It’s… Interesting.”

She wasn’t sure why she was so intrigued by fantasies about her own condition, or something similar enough to it to be an analogue, written by humans. But she could not deny that it held some appeal that spoke to her, especially regarding the unorthodox format in which it was written. She had tried vampire novels before, and while she didn’t hate all of them, none had drawn her in like that. Marion was laying back on the couch of Logan’s apartment – well, their apartment now, she reckoned, even though she was just renting a room – with her legs over the armrest and her back supported by pillows. The poster of a movie with a Dracula wearing red and black armour stared down at her, side by side with a poster of a woman holding two guns and looking menacingly, which, judging by the pale treatment given to the actress, was supposed to be a vampire as well. Marion knew to some level that humans were intrigued by her kind, and she was not unaware of the media around it, but seeing it all concentrated in just that small division of Logan’s living room really made her appreciate just how much mortals seemed to be drawn to what was essentially their predators. But then again, they had multiple movies about all sorts of man-eating creatures, besides vampires. So, it could just be that humans tended to be fascinated by that which could devour them. She was sure there ought to be some fascinating psychological explanation for that predator attraction, but it lay far beyond what she could understand with her limited grasp on how people’s minds worked. She could barely understand her own, to whatever extent she still counted as ‘people’.

“Are you sure you don’t want to play with us?”

“Oh, gracious, no… I couldn’t. I really have no actual experience with this sort of thing… I would just be a drag on your enjoyment.”

“Hey, nobody has experience with these games until they do. And teaching someone to play can be fun too. Again, no pressure but, given how interested you are in the books, you might get a kick out of, you know, actually playing?”

Marion made a soft grunting sound as she ran her tongue through the inside of her mouth in quiet contemplation of the words. Sometimes she needed to find things to do to fill her nights, when she wasn’t out there, failing miserably to hunt, work or buy blood illegally. Back when she was living with Claire, she would often fill those additional hours with reading; something she could do by herself that was fairly low maintenance. She couldn’t afford to have a library, so she would buy used books and then resell them at a loss or simply donate them when she was done. For those that lived as long as she did, it was best not to get too attached to material possessions, as, over time, they tended to accumulate into unwieldy hoards that were just too hard to move around when the time came to leave whatever place she had been inhabiting. These games were not, judging from what the books told her, a solitary hobby, but they did intrigue her. Perhaps she could take some entertainment from it without participating directly? After all, there was a little less appeal in the idea of pretending to be a different vampire than there was in the notion of watching a group of humans pretending to be immortal blood-drinkers themselves.

“I don’t know… I’ll admit I’m curious but… I’m not sure if it’s me.”

“Well, if I was judging by looks alone, I would totally guess it’s you,” Logan said and then snorted, shaking her head. “But, hey, you don’t need to decide on anything. If you’re around for our game this Thursday, you can just sit in and watch. I’m sure the others won’t mind.”

Marion’s eyes were studying a picture of a girl sinking her fangs into the neck of another young woman in what seemed to be the bathroom of a seedy bar. They both seemed ecstatic about the feeding, and she couldn’t deny the surge of a strange feeling inside her as she looked at it. It was just ink on paper, of course, just an illustration of fiction, but if she closed her eyes, she could picture herself in the bathroom of a louder bar, smelling the sweet scent of flesh mixing over in the air with other less pleasant odours, feeling the loud music outside vibrating the walls and the heat of a living body against her. And then she pictured the sensation of rending flesh with fangs and feeling her throat warm up with the flow of blood, that heat radiating across her whole body. The feeling of her heart starting to beat again as vitality returned to her.

“Sorry, I didn’t want to be pushy, just got a bit excited."

And then Marion opened her eyes to turn and find Logan with an expression of slight embarrassment on her face. She realised that her own cheeks were growing red and warm, though not as much as they would’ve been two nights before when she had just fed. But she wasn’t reacting out of embarrassment but out of arousal brought forth by her night-dreaming fantasy about trading places with that character of ink. With her tattoos and punkish hair, and her leather bracelets, she looked so confident and powerful. Not exactly how Marion saw herself. But realising that Logan had been watching her so closely while she fantasized soon made her blush for a different set of reasons. If she was freshly fed, she would be red as a cherry, but luckily that wasn’t the case, and she could disguise at least some of her shame knowing her face was pale pink at worst.

“No, no, you’re not being pushy I’m just… Distracted… But sitting down and watching sounds like fun… If you are sure that’s okay?” Marion asked, gladly wanting to keep the conversation moving as she closed the book to hide the stimulating picture from herself.

“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Logan reassured with some excitement, getting up from the armchair she had been sitting in and grabbing her phone on the side table near it. “My friends are super chill, and Sam kinda wants to meet you, so perfect excuse.”

“Wants to meet me? Why?”

“Oh… Sam’s been my best friend for years now. Of course she will want to meet my new roommate,” Logan explained, lifting her face from her phone's screen as she paced around, stopping then to look at Marion. “But I mean, like, in a chill way. You don’t have to feel put on the spot.”

“Oh.”

Marion shook her head as she decided that she did not feel put on the spot by that, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she decided not to make a fuss about it even if she did. In the end, she would need to meet Logan’s friends, just as she had done with Claire’s. With any luck, much like it had been with her previous roommate, they would see each other on very rare occasions and mostly not cross paths until it was time for Marion to start her next cycle, whenever that happened, but almost certainly within the next decade. And then Logan's attention returned to her phone for a moment longer as the dark-haired roommate shifted from laying on her back to sitting properly on the couch. The book was still held in her hands, and she realised that despite having closed it, she had left her finger inside it marking the page where she had seen the art that had sparked those ravenous thoughts.

“Great. I’ve just talked to the group. They are all fine with you sitting with us, and excited to meet you.”

That put a little more pressure on Marion than she would’ve liked, and she shifted uncomfortably on the couch before getting up. Why were people excited to meet her?

“Yeah, that sounds great,” she lied, “let’s just see if I won’t have to work that night.”

“Oh, yeah, work comes first for sure.” Logan offered a reassuring smile before adding, “but I really hope you make it.”

Marion squinted and lifted a single brow as she looked at Logan and watched her lightly freckled face grow just a shade more flushed than usual, as she licked the interior of her mouth. It was starting to feel dry, which often happened two days after she fed fully, and was the earliest sign of the decay of her apparent vitality. She could get away with being cold and pale when she was around self-absorbed Claire, but as she watched Logan and noticed the girl was still looking at her, she knew that she would need to do better not to arise any suspicion with her. And that, Marion knew, would be a tall order. She didn’t starve herself because she wanted to, in the end, and she wasn’t sure she had what it took to step it up while she was living under the pink-haired girl’s roof. She would need to try her best though, and maybe avoid being too close to her, or talking to her for too long under bright lights whenever possible.

“We will see,” Marion said, walking towards the bookshelf where she had taken the game manual to place it among the others.

At that moment, Logan checked her phone again and muttered something about her food being almost there before she went towards the intercom near the door to wait and buzz the courier in. She had offered for Marion to partake in her food, but Marion told her she wasn’t hungry. If only she could order her own type of sustenance to be brought to her door like that. She chuckled to herself, standing by the bookshelf holding the book in her hands and picturing Dave in a delivery uniform not unlike a pizza boy, bringing her a warm bag of blood inside a paper bag. She then wondered if there were even enough people like her around that that could be a viable business and, in a moment of realisation, concluded that it was unlikely, but not impossible, that something like that already existed and she was so divorced from the rest of her kin that she simply didn’t know about it.

Logan exchanged a few words with the delivery man, who wished her a good night in an accent Marion could not place, and then closed the door to place the brown paper bag over the kitchen counter and begin to unwrap her order. The scent of her dinner, fast food Tex-Mex, filled the room in an almost aggressive way, at least to Marion’s sensitive sense of smell, giving the vampire pause in the process of putting the book back on the shelf. Once again, her eyes went for her fingers marking that page, and she wasn’t exactly sure why she had kept it there. Was it the hunger brought forth by the depicted scene? She had eaten a lot but a couple of nights before, she ought not to be this desperate for a meal, she reasoned with herself.

“Oh, yes, spicy burrito… You sure you don’t want anything, Marion? I probably can’t eat all of this by myself… At least eat a couple of the hot wings?”

Marion was sure she didn’t want hot wings, but she briefly allowed her mind to wander if Logan ate a lot of spicy food, what would that do to the taste of her blood? And then she revisited the memory of the sensation of fangs tearing flesh. Usually, that was tied to abstract memories and faceless people. But she realised that within her mind, the skin her teeth were rending had the same sweet smell as Logan’s skin.

“I am sure, t-thank you,” she said, shaking her head to dismiss those very dangerous thoughts; it was a bad idea to feed on someone you lived with.

“Suit yourself. Imma dig in.”

Marion opened the book to take a final look at the image before putting it back. She remembered her fiasco at the Donjon, just the most recent of something that had become a sad routine in her attempts to seize prey. She wished she knew others like her so that she could ask if they struggled as much as she did to feed themselves, and if not, inquire about their secrets. She surely was doing something wrong. Her eyes scanned the punk mortal girl in the picture, the one being fed on by the tattooed and edgy vampire. Maybe whatever she was doing wrong had less to do with her condition and more to do with her general lack of social aptitude. Perhaps whatever she was doing wrong did not need the help of another of her kin to be fixed. Just the help of someone who knew how to deal with people.

“Uh… Logan?”

Marion immediately regretted calling her friend's name because what she briefly considered proposing was a bad idea. Just a terrible idea. She had the vain hope, for the briefest moment, that her roommate had not heard her over the crinkling sound of the paper and foil being removed from her burrito. But as Logan sunk her teeth into the soft wrap and spicy red sauce ran down her chin, she turned to Marion, mouth still full:

“Yeth?”

Marion eyed the picture a final time, closing the book and putting it in place. It was a bad idea, and she should just say ‘nothing’ and be done with it. Or just accept one of the hot wings. Anything she could say, really, would be better than going through with it. She slotted the book back between two other tomes and turned around slowly to watch Logan wipe the sauce off her chin with a napkin while still looking expectational towards her. ‘Say something else. Say nothing at all.’

“Would you like to go out… Like, dancing or something?”

Logan's eyes went wide in surprise at the invitation, and if the reason behind her shock was because she didn’t really think that Marion was the type to want to go dancing, she was completely right. She would usually not go to loud and dark clubs for fun, but they were rich hunting grounds and Logan seemed like the type of girl who could navigate those environments with ease. Maybe she could learn something going there with her. Taking a few seconds to beat her chest with a fist as if to help herself swallow, Logan finally responded:

“Fuck yeah, let’s,” the girl sounded positively enthusiastic. “Do you have a place in mind? Because, actually, tomorrow…”

As Logan talked, Marion smiled, feeling a jolt of joy that lasted a glorious three seconds before panic settled in. She should’ve just asked for a hot wing or made another excuse. But now she had gone past the point of no return, she reckoned. She proposed it so she could not back out of it. There was only one way out, and it was through.