“How have you been?” he asked.

Really? We were starting off with awkward pleasantries? Because I was in an “apologize or be destroyed” sort of mood. Hmm. How have I been? Sharpening a lot of stakes. Watching Kill Bill over and over again …

Gabriel pressed the flowers into my hands as I asked, “What are you doing back?”

He shrugged and smiled. “It’s your big night. I wouldn’t miss it.”

“Well, you did miss it. You’ve missed a lot of nights recently. So many nights, in fact, that I started to think maybe you weren’t coming back. Thanks for putting me in that position.”

“Jane, that’s not fair,” he said quietly as Jettie and Mr. Wainwright disappeared. Dick and Andrea had a sudden and overwhelming desire to reshelve misplaced stock.

I sat down and laid the flowers aside. “Look, Gabriel, I’m tired, and I don’t have the patience for empty banter. I’ve had a very long night. A great night, in fact. And you weren’t here for it. I did all of this without you. The funny thing is, I didn’t need you. I didn’t need you to protect me or take care of me or shield my delicate self in your big strong manly arms. I’m getting to the point where I kind of like not needing you. In fact, I’ve decided to start a no-strings-attached, purely carnal relationship with Dick to meet some of my needs, so you don’t even have to show up for that.”

Dick’s smirking face rose over the diet and health-maintenance shelves. “Well, Stretch, if you’re offerin’—ow!” he cried as Andrea’s hand snaked up from behind and slapped the back of his head.

Gabriel pushed through an obvious distaste for the mental picture the words “purely carnal” invoked and said, “Jane, let me explain. I haven’t called because I’ve been stuck in meetings every night for the last few weeks. First, a manufacturing plant I’d hoped to purchase in Leeds had labor problems. And then a real-estate deal fell through in Italy. I had to soothe some very insulted Czech tempers when my interpreter called one of them a ‘horse’s ass’ when I was trying sell them a film-processing plant—”

“You’re lying to me.” At this point, I was thankful for the gut-burning anger that was preventing tears from welling up.

Gabriel started. “What?”

“You’re lying, right now. To my face.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are, because when you lie, you get this little wrinkly line between your eyebrows.” I tapped him on the forehead. “You don’t think I’ve noticed, but it happened every time you got one of those fancy linen envelopes and tried to explain it away as business correspondence. It’s like a little exclamation point in the middle of your forehead that screams, ‘I’m lying!’”

“I do not!” he cried.

“You’ve got one right now!” I yelled, pointing to his head, over which he slapped a protective hand.

“I’ve explained to you—”

“You’ve explained nothing to me. Nothing. And this is not an issue that will go away if we ignore it hard enough. Weirdly timed ‘business’ calls I’m not allowed to overhear. Secret notes at every hotel that you destroy immediately after reading. Notes that talk about what you and some other woman ‘are’ to each other. How I can’t satisfy you the way she ‘does’—”

“You read the notes?” he demanded, his voice reaching that “boyfriend in trouble” pitch that only dogs can hear.

“I didn’t want to, but damn it, Gabriel, what else what I supposed to do? Just keep pretending that nothing was going on? Pardon me if the only logical conclusion I can come up with is that you’re cheating on me. If there are other less crazy options, please tell me. I would love to hear them.”

“I can’t believe you would think, after all we’ve been through, that I would want to be with someone else!”

“Which is something that someone who is cheating would say.”

“Stop!” he yelled. “Just stop it, Jane. I’ve told you, there are things going on right now that I can’t tell you about. It’s for your own good. I asked you to trust me, and you can’t stand to be happy, can you? You’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when there are no problems, you invent them.”

“Well, that’s … painfully accurate. But let’s explore why I might look for problems, shall we? Since I’ve met you, I’ve died. An insane blond Realtor tried to frame me for murder so she could turn my family home into a tacky condo development. My sister is suing me because she’s decided that I don’t deserve any part of my family’s history. My grandmother has stopped speaking to me, a vampire, but she’s perfectly OK with being engaged-to-be-engaged to a ghoul. My tenth high school reunion is coming up, and I’m the only Undead American in my graduating class. Oh, and my suppliers believe I’m lonely enough to need porn.”

Gabriel’s eyebrows drew up at this, but I continued my tirade. “And despite all of that, the only thing that’s really knocked me on my ass is thinking that, yes, you’ve been with someone else. That you’ve touched someone else, told her you love her, despite all of your sire-childe, ‘I’m drawn to you because of your innocence and how good you smell, I’m going to love you forever’ bullshit. If there’s another explanation, I would love to hear it. Because what in the world could be worse that that? What could be so bad that you don’t think I could handle it?”

“Please, just trust me,” he said, clutching my face between his palms like a life preserver. “Trust that everything I do is to protect you. Trust that seeing you being threatened tears at me in a way that I can’t explain. Just trust me, Jane.”

“Threatened in what way? What the hell are you talking about?” I pried Gabriel’s hands away. “And why should I trust you? You’re jealous and secretive, and you have a tendency to kill people, somehow deluding yourself that it’s for my own good. I don’t want to trust you. I don’t care anymore, Gabriel. I just don’t care what you have to say. I wish you and her—at least, I hope it’s a her—my best.”

“Jane—”

“Shut up! I’ve given you a dozen chances to explain.” The more I spoke, the angrier I got, until I was shouting loudly enough to rattle the windows. “All you do is make excuses and tell me half of the truth. This is a textbook bad relationship. And you know what? I’m glad I am discovering this now, before I spent one hundred years of my life thinking that I was lucky to have you.”

“I hope all your books keep you warm at night!” he yelled, stomping toward the door.

“Hey, you’re room temperature at best, buddy. You never kept me that warm to begin with!” I shouted back, tossing a particularly weighty Tolkien volume at his retreating back.

Well, there went my “healthy, normal relationship” goal.

“Ow! What is wrong with you?” he roared, stalking back to me.

“You!” I yelled.

“So, hit me, but don’t bother with the books,” he demanded, grabbing my shoulders.

“You don’t get to touch me!” I slapped his hands away.

Dick emerged from the back room, his face thunderous as he told Gabriel, “Son, you’d better back off, now .”

Gabriel’s face softened, and his hands dropped to his sides. “Just let it out, so we can get through this.” He was almost begging now. He leaned his forehead against mine and pulled my hands gently into his. “This is what we do. So, let’s just fight and then fight some more until we get this out of our system and we can go back to normal again.”

“No,” I said, my own voice shaking as I backed away from him, toward my office. “I don’t want to feel like this anymore. And we are anything but normal. Just stay away from me, Gabriel.”

“But I love you.”

“I know you think so.” I nodded and stepped back behind the closed office door, waiting until I heard the front doorbell tell me that he’d walked out.

6

If a man is callous and fickle in life, being a vampire won’t suddenly make him sensitive to your needs.

— Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less

Destructive Relationships

There is nothing sadder than a vampire in her bathrobe, drinking Hershey’s Blood Additive Chocolate Syrup straight from the bottle and watching Fatal Attraction over and over again.

I hadn’t gotten so much as a call from Gabriel since the ugly scene at the shop. Even though I probably would have hung up on him if he had called, he could have at least made the gesture of letting me hang up on him. But it appeared that Gabriel had learned his lesson from the first time I stopped talking to him. Complete radio silence. Every once in a while, I thought I could sense his presence outside the house, but it seemed like wishful thinking on my part. I walked outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. But there was nothing, not even a trace of his scent on the breeze.

Gabriel, it seemed, had moved on. And if he hadn’t moved on, he was doing a damn fine impersonation of someone who had. So I decided to follow suit.

For the past four nights, I’d served coffee, helped customers select books, and kept our new mascot, Cindy, in comics and lattes. The crowd wasn’t quite as big as opening night, but it was certainly respectable. And we seemed to be developing regulars, human and vampire.

But when Sunday night, our closed night, came, I found myself in my bathrobe in the kitchen, staring down the Hershey’s bottle. The phone rang, and even though I really, really hoped it was Gabriel, I was still contrary enough not to answer just in case it was Gabriel.

Instead, Mama’s voice echoed from my answering machine through my impossibly empty kitchen. “Jane, honey, it’s Mama. Daddy told me all about what happened with Gabriel. I don’t know why you told Daddy about it instead of me … but anyway, I think you just need to stop being silly and call him. It’s not like there are a lot of available vampires out there. And you two are so good together. Whatever Gabriel did, I think you just need to—”

The machine cut her off. God bless technology.

Before Mama could call back, Andrea and Jolene came barreling into the house like the cavalry, armed with DVDs; dessert blood, obviously for me; ice cream, obviously not for me; and wine, obviously not for Jolene. There was also an alarming assortment of junk food, including ready-made cheesecake filling in a tub, which I didn’t even know existed. And now that I was aware of it, I was extremely disgruntled that I couldn’t eat any of it. At the sight of this cornucopia of girlie comfort, I promptly burst into tears.

“I love you guys.” I sniffled. “I’m fine. I’m not crying ’cause of Gabriel. I just really love you guys.”

Jolene wrapped her arms around me and made soft wuffling noises as I snotted up her T-shirt. I had really good friends, girlfriends, which was something I’d never had in life. Somehow they complemented each other to form some sort of perfectly balanced break-up safety net.

“Aw, honey, it’s all right,” Jolene soothed. “He’s a bastard. Zeb was too busy mumblin’ empty threats to make it clear what Gabriel did, but he’s a bastard.”

“Oh, have we already reached the ‘calling Gabriel names’ portion of the festivities?” Andrea asked, returning to the kitchen with my corkscrew. “I thought we’d at least get her drunk and watch a movie first.”

“I thought we were supposed to get her drunk and put her panties in the freezer,” Jolene said, her pretty face scrunched in confusion.

“I think you’re mixing up your female-bonding customs,” I told her. “That’s ‘thirteen-year-olds at a sleepover,’ not ‘vampire boyfriend may or may not have cheated on you, but either way, he’s an emotionally unavailable asshat.’”