Having sex in a public bathroom is a highly risky and possibly dangerous act and requires nerves of steel and an unprecedented acrobatic ability.  If you've ever had sex in the front seat of a car then you've had a more comfortable version of sex in a bathroom stall.  There is just about the same amount of space and that hot sweaty desperation that got you and the girl there in the first place, is contagious and constantly passing back and forth, culminating in hot sweaty sex that bore no relation to making love in any shape or fashion.  Sex in a bathroom stall, much like sex in cars, is very much just plain fucking.  There is nothing romantic about it, just heat and bodies pressed against each other, almost trying to combine with each other.  There is the utter carnality of it all, the tongues and teeth and the grunts and moans building and building as you fuck the shit out each other, knowing that in just a few minutes it would all be over, but in that moment, that one moment, it lasted forever and forever was long enough.

Should it ever come to pass that you would have the chance to ever have sex in a bathroom, the kind without stalls is the better kind to choose; you know the kind, where it's a single use bathroom with just the toilet and the sink and some paper towels on the wall.  The sinks in those are usually pretty sturdy and you know what? Bending a girl over one of those sinks, hands pressed gripping the sink while you two fuck the life out of each other is a lot better than sitting on the toilet bowl in some questionable stall, all the while hoping desperately not to break anything, because even then you'll be wondering in the back of your head when was the last time someone peed on the seat and did they clean it up properly?  Those are the last thoughts you need when having wild ball-busting sex in a public bathroom.

The bathroom in the diner had stalls, only three of them since it wasn't a huge diner by any means, but it gave me hope that someone had cleaned up recently since there weren't as many stalls to clean.  Beatrice popped her head out from the last stall, the wheelchair accessible one, and grinned toothily.  It was strange to see her so giddy and full of mischief, so much so that she could have been a normal girl, and damn if there wasn't something sexy about that.  It wasn't a side she showed often, if ever, and she was more than happy to share it with me.  Well, it was either that or murder on a grand scale in the diner.

She stuck her tongue out at me and threw her panties through the air at me.

"Good catch. Now get in here and fuck me already," she said as I pocketed the panties and moved towards her, my erection straining against my pants for release and then some action.

"You've been planning this haven't you?"

"I've been thinking about it. A lot.  You fucking me while she waits outside for you? That just turns me on."  Beatrice grabbed me and dragged me into the stall, the door slamming shut behind us.  She kissed me then, long and hard, her tongue surprising me at first with its ferocity, but then again what did I expect with Beatrice, anyway? I kissed her back, giving myself into it, going with it and before I could think, her hands were in my pants, pulling them down and she was straddling me, pulling me into her and she was so warm and inviting and so fucking perfect.  It had been at least two weeks since I had last had sex and this was a relief, a welcome "oh yeah, this is what sex feels like, I remember this."

We fucked the hell out of each other in that bathroom stall.

And all I could think about was Jaime waiting outside for me.

 ***

Beatrice smirked as she watched me wash up, a pack of cigarettes in her hands.  She had pulled down her skirt and had pulled back on her overly tight blouse, her nipples poking through the fabric, daring me to tweak them or do something useful.

"I'll give you twenty-four hours to get this sorted out, but after that, you're mine.  If I have to come for you, people are going to die."

"You really know how to show your love don't you?"

"At least you know how I feel Bob. I usually have to cut your feelings out of you."

***

Look your ex-girlfriend in the eye, five minutes after you were fucking your other ex-girlfriend in the bathroom, and just try to pretend that everything is normal.  You do that and you've got to be the most dangerous and devious bastard walking the earth.

Either that or you're me.

"What took you so long?"

I made a point of looking Jaime in the eye as I slid into the the booth, my heart pounding a hole in my chest and I could feel the rapid bloodflow making me jittery, making me edgy.  Deep breaths, I told myself. Smile, but not too much and most of all focus.

"I think somebody was having sex in the women's bathroom.  They were very loud.  Very distracting."

Was that too much information? Was I smiling too much? I should stop smiling this much, I look like a bloody idiot and dammit she was going to find out.  I was actually surprised she hadn't heard us.

We had been very loud.  At some point it had turned into a cross between make-up sex and "I hate you sex" and it had gotten intense.  Like really intense.  The teeth had come out at that point and thank god the cuts stop bleeding quickly.

Jaime glanced over at the bathroom and smiled ruefully, probably trying to imagine the logistics of having sex in a bathroom stall and then wondering about the why of it all.  That kind of raw raunchy sex was something that would never have happened with Jaime.

"I heard the waitresses whispering something like that," Jaime nodded and shook her head. "Wow.  Did you see who it was?"

"Nope. But I could hear everything. I was just glad it when it was over."

How the hell did I manage to even look her in the face? Oh well, that part was easy: I had become an expert on lying to Jaime in the last six months of our relationship as I had sunken deeper and deeper into my drug use and then things had just gotten fucked up.  So yeah, I have a history of lying straight to her face and Jaime either allowed me to or really had no clue I was lying to her.  I hoped to god she really didn't have a clue because at that point, me fucking Beatrice felt worse than any of the betrayals I had made over the course of our relationship, and I had made quite a few.

I have no idea how that could be, after all, I had done some seriously fucked up things to earn her hatred of me for a long, long time, but that feeling in my chest beside my rapidly thumping heart, that hollowed out emptiness that made me want to simultaneously scream and vomit, that told me the exact truth: if Jaime knew, there would be no talking, no nothing, no chance to ever make it up to her.

"Did you order yet?" I asked then and looked desperately around for a waitress, unable to look at Jaime anymore.  I wondered briefly if she could smell the soap on me from when I had washed up after finishing with Beatrice.  The smell of sex had been overwhelmingly strong and I had felt like it had rubbed its way into my skin, inundating my nostrils with our combined scents that just screamed out to the world that "yes, sex has been had and damn it was good!"

Jaime gestured to the table where two cups of coffee sat alone with six mugs of steaming hot water.

"I was going to drink some coffee, but I decided to wait for you.  It smells really fucking strong and all kinds of alarms are going off in my head right now, but you know what? I've never realized just how good waffles could smell until now!"

"Have you just been sitting here smelling everything?"

"It's blowing my fucking mind.  I just want to taste everything right now.  It's like I never actually smelled anything before, you know?  Is this what the world smells like all the time?"

"You get used to it fast.  The brain adapts, but you've got to be really careful now.  No Indian restaurants for you anymore.  Or Thai." I was definitely smiling too much.  Something occurred to me. "I don't even think you can walk by an Indian restaurant anymore. I mean you can try..."

"Seriously? No more Chicken Masala?"

"Instant aneurysm.  The flavour and spices overwhelm the senses and boom, zing, bang your neurons are freaking out and you're having a seizure on the floor.  Not pretty."

From the look on her face you would think I had just presented her with a new kitten and then shot and boiled the kitten in front of her.  Maybe I could have been a little less glib about the whole damn thing but I was high as a kite from the small amount of Beatrice's blood I had drunk, and was struggling to maintain as much as possible, which in this instance, wasn't very well.

Oh wait, I didn't mention that, did I?

Vampire blood gets you very, very high, like really fucking fast.  It's like a shot of dopamine and adrenaline in a supercharged caffeine bomb and it mellows you right the fuck out. Of course vampires tend to fight to keep it inside them a hell of a lot better than humans do, but that was one of the benefits and seductions of sex with Beatrice: we got high off of each other.

One of the other side effects? Increased healing time. While the vampire blood is running through your system, your immune system responds with a boost of something really scientific that I'm not even going to pretend to understand, but as a result you heal faster.  I healed faster, I should say.  I think it may be the side effect of this healing that triggered the dopamine release that got you so damn high, so damn fast.

Jaime had been staring at the table for a few seconds and I had been desperately trying to say something, anything that wouldn't make me sound nearly as high as I felt in that moment.

"Coffee! I should tell you about the coffee—"

"Your hand is completely healed now," she said and I glanced down, suddenly guilty, and yep, she was right.  There was only an angry red line where the cut had been and it didn't even hurt anymore.  I flexed it, glad I hadn't cut deeper into any tendons so that I could actually use the bloody thing.

"Well will you look at that," I said as I flexed my hand.  "One of the benefits."

"Do the benefits outweigh the negatives, you know, like the whole food thing?  I don't think I can live like that, not being able to have my favourite foods anymore.  Might as well shoot me in the head, you know?  What's the point of having senses like this where you are so much more aware of everything around you, especially smell and taste, if you can't even use it?"

"You can still have it, don't get me wrong, but you have to change how you eat it so it's not the full flavour."  I poured 1/4 of the coffee into the empty cup and then filled it the rest of the way with hot water.  Jaime watched me like I was a fucking idiot and for a second, that's how I felt with this stupid pantomime of drinking weak coffee and eating bland food.  Was this really what I had become? This shadow of a person, clinging so strongly to the things I used to do, to the foods I used to eat?

I put down the cup, suddenly agitated.

"Don't look at me like that Jaime. I'm trying to teach you here and you're giving me that look—"

The waitress showed up and interrupted me.

"You guys ready to order?"  She was chirpy and a little peppy, probably due to the meth I could smell on her which she'd probably taken just a few minutes ago. Just a little hit to get through the shift for "Megan" as her name tag read.

Jaime just glared at me, obviously pissed that I was being so irritable.

"I don't know," she glanced at Megan's name tag to be sure, "Megan. Bob here was just filling me in on what I can and cannot eat."

"Okay..." Megan gave me a look that said she wasn't judging me if that was what we were into, but I could tell she was seriously judging me.

I glared right back at Jaime, the crack cocaine that was Beatrice's blood emboldening me.  Damn I was high and I just didn't give a fuck anymore.  I didn't look away from Jaime's new intense blue eyes which still looked so fucking alien in that so familiar face, but right now it was a face that was pissing me off and I was going to be damed if I was the one who backed down.  

"Four sides of bacon. She'll have waffles and I'll have the blueberry pancakes, extra syrup, two eggs on the side, scrambled.  Thank you Megan."

An extremely sketched out Megan looked like she was about to say something, then thought better of it, turned on her heel and escaped.

"That was easy. Easier than you made it sound."

"Really Jaime, you're going to throw a fit about the food.  It's breakfast food and breakfast food as we all know, just happens to be the finest and most perfect of foods." I thought about it for a second and reconsidered. "Unless you're eating sushi of course—"

"I'd better still be able to eat sushi—"

"You can!"

"I'm just saying that I have my limits is all.  This whole vampire thing is seriously fucked up, but you know what? I can deal. I can adapt.  But right now you're messing with my food and I— just slow the fuck down for a second, okay?"

"Would you prefer to drink blood or eat breakfast food?"

There was that look again.

"I thought you said I didn't have to drink blood?"

"You don't.  You know why? Because it's not food. This bad coffee, those delicious pancakes that they're cooking in there, that bacon, all of the stuff that you're used to eating, all of that is food.  Your body still needs that to survive, but it's really sensitive with flavour and if you overload it, you won't like the results. I've already made a lot of stupid mistakes because I had nobody around to guide me and a lot of those mistakes hurt.  Like a lot.  And sometimes over and over again because I tend to be a slow learner... but you don't have to go through all of that the same way I did.  I want to help you, but you don't trust me and I get it.  Really I do.  We have a lot of history of me fucking you over and fucking up constantly, so you have no reason to trust me—"

"You're not doing so well at the convincing me here Bob."

"Yeah I know. I maybe shouldn't have reminded you about the whole fucking you over thing, cuz right now from my perspective I'm not convincing me either." I thought deeply about it for a second. "Holy shit, you're right.  Wait, I mean, I'm right.  I'm the last person on this planet that you should trust, and I've proven that over and over again."

"And to think I didn't even have to do that much talking or yelling at you. You finally get it, just like that."

Drugs offer an amazing clarity sometimes.  Mostly they just fuck you up and offer a little bit of oblivion for a while, but sometimes the mind altering was a good thing.

"I still have holes in my memory Bob.  I don't even know what day it is or even what day it's supposed to be and it's freaking me the fuck out more than anything else that has happened.  Yes, weird I know, but it's my coping mechanism—"

"One major thing at a time, right?" I said softly, still way too deep in my own thoughts.  I looked at her and she smiled nervously.

"That's right.  I'm too scared to be properly mad at you right now, so let's just skip that whole food thing so we an get to the important stuff. I need to know something and I need you to be straight with me, okay?"

"The food is kinda really important--"

"Bob--"

"Okay, fine."

"Did I die Bob? Did you bring me back from the dead?"

Whoa.  I hadn't expected that.  It had been hard enough keeping up with Jaime's rapidly changing moods over the last few minutes and as much slack as I was willing to cut her, it was beginning to exhaust me.  It was definitely a massive harsh to my major buzz.  Man.

Look, in my defence, when I'm as high as I was on that night, the best thing for me is to go and veg out on a couch somewhere and just play Call of Duty or for a major trip an old favourite like Starcraft. Give me a way to occupy my mind for a few hours, someplace I can be a total idiot in peace for a while and everything is just awesome.  I admit it: I'm an idiot when I get stoned, but then again, who isn't right?  Pretending to be sober is really fucking hard and at some point, you just say fuck it all and stop pretending, stop trying to maintain.

"Well you weren't dead, not dead-dead, just very close to it.  And I had to do something.  I couldn't just sit there and watch you die.  After all of the shit I had put you through, you didn't deserve that."

"So you turned me into a vampire."

"Look, I've been a fuck-up for a long time.  I'm practically a professional fuck-up at this point, but nobody pays for that particular specialty, so whatever.  Everything I've touched recently or even in the past couple of years just turns to shit. It's a rut that I'm in and that I can't seem to get out of, and me even just running into you that night, completely fucked you over like never before.  You got caught up into my world of suck and I feel kind of like it was my fault that you got shot, and you never deserved that. You didn't deserve to die because of my fuck-up, not when I could do something about it. So yes I turned you into a vampire. Yes I made some shady deals and may have sold my soul to the devil herself. And no, I couldn't let you die."

Megan chose that exact moment to come back with the food, leaving Jaime to look awkwardly around the room, to look at anything that wasn't me.  She was obviously holding words back, all of that emotion being held in check by Megan's presence, and every clattering plate of food that thumped to the table just made her even more pissed off.

The thing is, the more pissed off she got, then the more pissed off I got.  Fuck her for being so high and mighty and pissy at me.  Fuck her for not appreciating that I'd literally stuck my neck out for her, and that I had been literally the only person who could have saved her. I wasn't looking for thanks or praise or even for forgiveness (a little acknowledgement might have been nice though) and her attitude sucked.  She just couldn't deal with the fact that it was me who had saved her life.

Megan was very aware of the tension between the two of us and moved faster than she had before, the plates rattling down before she fled with a tight smile on her face.  I was going to have to tip her well when we left.

I started to eat, a little more aggressively than I had intended.

"What are we doing here Bob?"

"Well I don't know about you, but I'm doing two things: eating breakfast for dinner and trying my damnedest to keep you alive. You,  I assume, are going to be yelling at me while I eat."

"I'm not going to yell at you."

That almost made me stop eating, but nope: I wasn't falling for that one.  Not today while I had a chance to finish my bacon and delicious pancakes.  Hell no.

"I want to say thank you."

What? That one made me drop my fork and I looked up at Jaime, waiting for the trap, wondering if I could finish the rest of the bacon before the trap sprung shut.

"I get it," she said.  "I really do." She thought long and hard and I could see her literally rejecting all of the things she was going to say, wanted to say so badly.  It was like a mental checklist for her, but right now her mind had been made up and she was literally trying to keep her cool.  Something finally clicked in and she forced a smile.

"Take it back Bob. Whatever it is you've done to me, thank you but no thanks.  Undo it."

"You said that before--"

"And I mean it now.  I've had a hell of a lot more time to think about it and my first instinct is usually my best one."

"Really? Even me?"

"Even you Bob.  I never regretted our relationship, not once.  I loved what we had.  My instinct was spot on there and we were good together.  I just hated how you changed on me and I never saw that coming."

"Fair enough."

"So I'm going to ask you again Bob. Can you fix this?  I don't want to be a vampire."

"You don't even know what it's like Jaime."

"I don't want to.  I've seen enough and it scares the shit out of me. Now can you fix me or not?"

"You'd prefer that I'd never saved you? Is that it?"

"That's not what I said.  Thank you for saving my life, really.  But I just don't want to be a vampire. Now can you turn me back or not?"

Seriously, what the fuck? Nobody gets turned into a vampire and then wants to go back human.  The thought hadn't even occurred to me to go back being human when I had been turned.  My job at the time had been coming to terms with it and adapting to the new life.  Was that just me and how I reacted to things, or was Jaime an anomaly here?

"Eat your waffle," I said instead of what I really wanted to say which happened to be a whole long string of fuck yous. "I'm going to need to make a couple of phone-calls."

I scarfed down the bacon as I got to my feet and Jaime grabbed my hand, completely out of the blue.  She looked completely scared and vulnerable behind those predator eyes of hers.

"Turn me back and I'll forgive you Bob."

I nodded, seeing right then that she meant it, how much the whole thing was scaring her, tearing down her worldview and leaving her completely helpless in a new universe where the only guide was me, and I was all kinds of fucked up.

"I'll see what I can do."

***************************
AUTHOR'S NOTE

So thats 3951 words for this chapter and adds up nicely to my Nanowrimo count.  More to come.  Don't forget to vote and comment and let me know what you thought of the chapter.