When Louise finally came home at three o'clock in the morning, she found me and Jaime sprawled out on her couch, completely passed out and leaning on each other.  She took a picture of us then, Jaime leaning contentedly on my shoulder looking very much like one of those impossible scenes from those romantic comedies.  You know the movies I'm talking about: the ones where nobody seems to have sex naked and the girl is always wearing a bra in bed or in some cases a bra and a t-shirt.  Jaime wasn't wearing a bra, but the white t-shirt, black girl-boxers (brand new) and white socks put her directly in Rom-Com territory.  I had managed to change at some point, after all it had been a long and interesting day, so I was in a t-shirt and boxer-briefs.  To all intents and purposes, anyone looking at us (or the picture of us on Facebook) would have been right to assume that we'd been having sex at some point.  We just looked so comfortable together that it was quite possibly the only thing we could have gotten up to.

Here's the thing: if your friends aren't entwined in each others arms and completely naked, or at least naked from the waist down, and there isn't the funky smell of sex hanging about the room, then in all likelihood, no sex has actually been had.

This was the case with me and Jaime.  We got very comfortable with each other very quickly.  It was almost like we'd known each other our whole lives and we fit together so well, especially once we got past our mutual embarrassment.

So when Louise started to yell at us, it was a bit of a shock.

"YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE SEX ON MY GODDAMN COUCH!"

Imagine waking up to that being yelled in your ear.

Louise got right into my ear and just let me have it.

I was on my feet in seconds,  dancing away from the source of my pain, still asleep and for some reason full of guilt that I had no idea where it was coming from.

"I didn't pee on your bed!" I managed to stammer out and then stopped myself.  "Wait, what?"

Louise could only howl with laughter as I stood there in the middle of the room, a befuddled Jaime blinking from the couch at me and Louise.  She stretched languidly then, giving me a full idea of exactly what languid actually meant, and why someone had come up with that word in the first place.  There was a slight twitching in my pants at the sight of her and I suddenly found myself having to concentrate very, very carefully and not look at Jaime at all.

"Oh hi Louise," Jaime said as she stifled a yawn. "What time is it?"

Louise just shook her head.  "I can't believe you two.  Did you even go to work? Jaime?"

"They'd already called in Calvin to cover my shift, so there was no point."

My brain was still waking up but I was putting two and three together and the math was all fucked.

"We didn't have sex," I protested and Louise snorted in disbelief.  Jaime just slid down onto the couch and stretched out some more, still being as languid and alluring as possible.  I was having difficulty concentrating and goddamn it, why was my heart beating so quickly.

"Tell her Jaime!"

"Tell her what?"

"That we didn't have sex!"

Jaime raised her head from sleep and peered at Louise.  "Nope. No sex. No sex was had.  If there was any sex going on then nobody told me about it and he's about to be in so much trouble."

Louise looked from me to Jaime and back again.

"I really can't believe you two.  What the hell have you been up to all day?"

Okay, so let's back it up a bit.

After we'd both gotten cleaned up and changed, there was that moment of awkwardness where we avoided even looking at each other.  I'd emerged from the bathroom and Jaime was on her smartphone, just glaring at the screen.  She'd borrowed a pair of Louise's jeans and they fit her remarkably well even though they were at least two sizes too big, and the fact that she was going Commando until she could grab a new pair from the closest store (yes we went underwear shopping and it was awesome).  Louise was taller and a little wider in the hips so there was no way her jeans were ever going to be a perfect fit for Jaime.

"Everything okay?" I asked, mainly just to say anything about anything not related to periods, blood or masturbation.

She glanced up at me and tapped her screen.

"Yeah it's all good.  Just stupid Ebay.  Five minutes to go on this item I'm bidding for."

Bleep! Notification on my phone. I checked and it was from my own Ebay app.  Someone had just outbid me.

"Oh I hate that time.  Some moron always comes along in the last five minutes and pushes the price up way beyond what you wanted to spend."  I tapped in a new bid and hit send.

Jaime pointed to the kitchen. "You want some coffee? I put some on and figured you might want as well..." Her phone bleeped as a notification came in. "Oh fuck a duck! Seriously?"

"Another bid?" I definitely wanted coffee.  More coffee sounded pretty damn good right about then, especially if I didn't have to leave the house to get coffee.  Louise had this French Press that she swore by and that I just swore at, since I always screwed it up.  Jaime apparently didn't have any problems with it: coffee was ready to be poured.

"I'm just going to wait until the last minute and put my bid in. Screw this guy."

"Good tactic.  I do that all of the time especially when they just seem to be doing it to deliberately mess with you." I poured my coffee and watched Jaime as she walked back and forth, watching her phone like a pissed off hawk.  "How much time left on your auction?"

"Two minutes to go."

"Wow, same here.  It's almost go-time."

"My heart is pounding in my chest right now. It's always such an adrenaline rush, especially when you win."

"Even when you lose it's still a rush. Did you know people can actually get addicted to auctions just like they do gambling? For them it's not about the outcome, but more about the actual process, the countdown, the thrill of being involved."

Jaime was looking at me like I had grown two heads.

"Surprisingly deep there Bob," she said and then reached out her hand. "I'm Jaime by the way.  We never got introduced."

I shook her hand and it was a nice feeling, and she had such nice hands—

Bleep!

Jaime snatched her hand away and grabbed her phone.  I whipped my phone out from my pocket.

"One minute!" She said and I almost laughed. She was fierce when she was high on adrenaline.

"Fuck!" Someone had just placed a bid, bumping my price up above the $100 I was prepared to pay. 

"Take that!" Jaime snarled and I just had to turn away from her at that point.  As attractive as she was and no matter how nice her eyes were and how nice it was to touch her hand, she could wait for a minute.  Ebay waited for no man!  I tapped in a new bid, adrenaline daring me to be brave, to risk it all now.

"All or nothing, you sonofabitch!" I whispered, trying to keep my composure.  My heart was pounding through my chest and my hands were shaking from the adrenaline.  I could feel the fever heat of anger burning off of my top lip, forcing me to inhale and really feel the heat. Twenty seconds were left on the clock.

"YOU MOTHER FUCKER!" Jaime yelled from the next room and I laughed triumphantly as my bid was confirmed as the new high bid.

"Ten seconds to go!"

"FUCK YOU!" Jaime yelled, then—

Bleep!  I was outbid again.

"FUCK!" I yelled, and tapped in a new bid even though I knew I shouldn't but goddammit, I wasn't about to lose like this. I glanced up as Jaime entered the room, and she had this curious look on her face, but I could't look then, no, Ebay was calling and I had enough time to make the last bid—

"Bob," Jaime said and just her saying my name like that was enough to make me pause and look at her, look deep into her calm green eyes, eyes I would willingly get lost in.  "I think we're bidding against each other."

Five seconds to go.

I looked from the phone to her, my finger hovering above the bid button, the button that would officially put me $100 over my balance and struggling to either find a new freelance job really fast or end up calling Claude for a help-me-out-buddy type to loan. I had a choice in that small window of time to look like the hero and let Jaime win or be the asshole and push that button and win at any cost.  I'll tell you right now that I chose, actively chose to not overdraw myself, which coincidently also would make me look good, but here's the problem with addicts like myself: we're not always in control of ourselves and certain parts of the body, like traitorous thumbs which are amped up on adrenaline, they don't get the message so easily, or sometimes they just straight up ignore the commands from central.

So yeah: dumbass me hit the confirm button.

"Shit."

I looked from the phone to Jaime and then back again, my traitorous thumb still pushing on the screen and it was already too late.  My adrenaline rush at winning was being soured and was ebbing away through my whole body by the sheer virtue of me being a complete dumbs and now this girl who made me my heart ache just from looking at her and being so close to her was going to hate me and I would never get close to her—

"Hey, it's okay.  I couldn't afford to bid that much anyway."

Say what now?

Jaime smiled at me and I would have done anything for her in that moment.

"I kinda got caught up in the moment there.  I have a feeling you were too."

"I would have let you have it, but my thumb—"

"It's one hundred percent cool.  Seriously."

"Okay..."

We stood there just looking at each other for a long moment?  She smiled and I knew I was smitten.

"Let me buy you lunch?"

"Deal."

We spent the rest of the day together and a lot of it was just talking.  There are conversations you have where you're constantly looking for things to say or desperately trying to make the other person laugh or to even like you, just so there were no silences, no moments to wonder if you're having a good time.  This wasn't one of those conversations.  We'd already been through the awkward embarrassments, and we both knew that the other cursed like a pirate, so there was no pretending to be better than we actually were.  At that point there was nothing I could do to embarrass myself any further and she still wanted to be around me, so I didn't even try to impress her.

By the time we left Louise's apartment, we were already friends and I wasn't being shy about my interest in her.  There was no point in hiding it and trying to be shy.

"So how do I get you to go on a date with me?"

"You could just try asking dumb ass."

"Oh, well in that case, you wanna go on a date with me?"

"Too late! I already asked you out."

"Oh. Right."

We ate at some hole-in-the-wall Caribbean Food place that served the most excellent roti I've ever had and then we ended up at a thrift shop looking at the discards of other people's lives.  That's what Jaime called it and it was suitable.

"You can learn a lot about a neighbourhood by the quality of discards you find in the thrift store.  There's a store up on College that a lot of high-end stuff gets dumped into, and it's always things that you would never think to find in an actual thrift store."

"Rich people don't think like real people do.  I sometimes think they're some kind of aliens who don't really understand how people behave. Like they haven't met any of us."

"For all we know, they could be vampires," Jaime said and I just nodded.  Neither of us knew how true that would turn out to be.

We spent the rest of the day drinking at a bar and just talking and enjoying each other's company.  There wasn't any of the fluff you imagine like going to a spontaneous fair that just happened to be in town at that very moment, or me buying her flowers in an act of spontaneous romance.  It was just the two of us getting to know each other and really being into each other and to tell you the truth, that was all we needed.  I didn't want to stop talking to her, didn't want her to go away, and she felt the same way.  So we ended up back at Louise's place, beer in hand, pizza already ordered and showing up before we got back to the apartment so I ended up having to race the dude back to his car.  Then it was playing Mario Bros on Louise's Wii for a couple of hours before we watched a movie on Netflix and ended up passing out.

"I don't believe you." This was Louise and she was just shaking her head.

Jaime rolled her eyes and sat up and shot me a wicked grin. 

"Fine then, we fucked all afternoon, took a shower together, ordered some pizza, fucked some more and passed out from exhaustion on the couch."

Louise turned on me, clearly not getting the truth from Jaime.

"You! Tell me the truth? Did you fuck my friend?"

"Nope. Not me, not today and definitely not on that couch?"

"Well why not? You two are perfect for each other. Have you heard the mouth on this girl?"

And with that, Louise flounced into the kitchen leaving me alone with Jaime and my rapidly beating heart.

 ***

Jaime was officially making my head hurt.

"Stop being such a brat and make up your mind what you want Jaime!"

She wheeled on me, her agitation peaking again through her raging emotions and for a second I wondered if I should duck from whatever she was about to throw at me, or just give up and leave and let her sort it out in her head.

"You can't just spring this kind of shit on a person! It's a lot to process!"

I buried my head in my hands and just closed my eyes.

We' spent the past hour in the room with Jaime going through all of the stages of grief or whatever you want to call it.  Just when I thought she'd had a lock on the whole vampire thing, she had swung wildly back to denial with a side order of anger but that was just her natural state with me at that moment.  I wondered how long long she was going to be able to sustain that anger, after all, being that angry at a person as she seemed to be with me wasn't healthy.

STAGE 1: DENIAL

Denial looked something like this:

"There is no such thing as vampires. They don't exist except in stories, so this, us, you, me, we can't be happening. What's really going on is that you've drugged me or something and I'm tripping the fuck out.  None is this is actually happening.  Your eyes aren't blue and neither are mine!  What's happening is that this drug you've given me, makes me extremely open to suggestion! A-ha! That's it right there!"

"Why would I drug you and then tell you that you're a vampire? If I were me, I'd use that kind of drug to make you not hate me so much."

"Fuck!"

"Did  you always used to swear so much?"

"It's one of the reasons you like me so much, did you forget already?"

"Oh yeah.

"Prove it."

"What? That I forgot about you swearing?"

"No. The vampire thing. If I'm not on some fucked up drugs you gave me then you've got to prove to me that vampires are real.  For all I know you were just involved in some kind of experimental surgery or something where you had your eyeballs replaced."

"Seriously?"

"I'm grasping at fucking straws here Bob! The alternative is losing my fucking mind! Now prove to me that you're a vampire."

"How am I supposed to do that?

"Well you're the vampire aren't you? You're supposed to be the expert."

"You're a vampire too."

"Not until you prove it. Right now as far am I'm concerned I'm tripping some serious balls and it isn't nearly as fun as I've heard."

Spend a year building a pedestal under someone and idolizing them and the reality comes as a bit of a shock.  I'd forgotten about how arguing with Jaime was such a futile proposition, how she always somehow managed to make me feel like such a dumb-ass, especially when I was just being a dumb-ass.  She never let me win when I didn't deserve to.

I could hear someone coming down the hallway and it occurred to me that another reason for Jaime's freakout about the whole drug thing is that her senses were being bombarded by all of the noise and smells and had no idea what to do with it all.  I'd managed to tune it out naturally, it just became part of the experience and I'd learned to focus, but in the first few hours I'd just about lost my damn mind.  And she was right: it felt exactly like being extremely high.

Jaime turned to look at the sound of the approaching man and then looked at me, terrified.

"You hear it too," she whispered.

"Smell his cologne?" I asked, and I knew she could.  "He hasn't showered in at least two days and smells like sex."

"How are you doing that? This is my trip."

He was three steps from the door now.  I grinned and pulled the door open, half-scaring the man in the corridor.  He was tall and greasy looking, the kind of guy your eyes would slide right off of in your average dive bar.  He was the kind that would fight dirty just to prove to anyone watching not to fuck with him because under all of that posturing he was scared that someone meaner than himself was going to come along and kick his ass.

"Hi!" I said, my standard go to line when I was looking for trouble.

"The fuck do you want?"

"I need to borrow your knife."  Guys like this always had a knife on them.

"Fuck you man. I don't carry a knife."

"You are a horrible convenient plot device."

"Who the fuck are you?"

I was showing off at this point.  I rolled my eyes at Jaime, and then being overly cocky, turned back to the dude and saying a little prayer to whatever small god might be listening, I glammered the dude.

Holy shitballs! It worked!  It actually worked!

"What the fuck are you doing to him?" Jaime asked as she came to my side.  Dude had just gone slack and wide-eyed, staring into my eyes, completely under my control.

"It's called glammering," I said to her.  "Give me your knife," I said to the man and he shook his head.

"Knives are for pussies," he said, and reached into his waistband, only to pull out a matte black dangerous looking handgun. "But you can have my Glock."

"Uh, no thanks, but if you happen to come across a knife—"

"I know where I can get one, no problem."

Dude walked away abruptly, leaving me and Jaime stunned and clueless.  I was fighting a serious case of what-the-fuck-itis and was still trying to figure out if I had opened Pandora's box a crack or just completely fucked up the lock.  I really, really needed to talk to someone besides Louise's basic instruction about what glammering was before I fucked it up further.  If anything, the whole situation with Clarissa should have taught me slow the fuck down.

Jaime turned to me and there was a look in her eye I hadn't seen before.  She was officially back to believing in vampires.

"What else can you do?"

##################################

AUTHOR'S NOTE:  Please vote, and leave a comment.  I'd love to hear what you guys thought of this latest chapter.  Lots more to go as this epic adventure heats up!

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