Oops. Sometimes, despite my best efforts, my thoughts leaked out, especially when I was bonding with someone.
Oh, bloody hell, I thought. Please don’t tell me I’m bonding with her.
“I’m not that bad,” said Nancy, inhaling and looking around. “And who are you talking to?”
“Sorry,” I said, inhaling deeply on my own cig. “I do that sometimes.”
“Do what?”
“Think out loud.”
She giggled. “So do I!”
Great.
I sighed and looked at her and exhaled a plume of smoke in her direction. I had been tempted to do so in her face, but realized the longer I was with her, the more my hate for her was quickly ebbing. Above, a seagull squawked. I was fifteen miles from the sea. This time, I kept my thoughts purposely open.
“Maybe it’s lost,” said Nancy. “Wait a second...your lips didn’t move.”
“No.”
“But I heard you...”
“Oh?”
She thought about that. “Actually, I heard you directly in my head. Just inside my ear.”
“How cool is that?”
“I...I’m not sure it’s cool. How come you aren’t blinking?”
“I don’t need to blink,” I said.
“Oh, Jesus.”
“He might have blinked,” I said. “But then again, I’m not an historian.”
“Then it’s true,” said Nancy.
“That I’m not an expert on Jesus.”
She slapped my arm, a gesture that surprised both of us. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“You really are a vampire.”
“I’m something that has vampiric traits,” I said. The suggestion always rankled me, although, to be honest, few people suggested it. “What, exactly, I am is open to interpretation.”
“You’re not going to, like, kill me, are you?”
“Only if you sleep with my next husband.”
“I’m really sorry about that.”
I nodded toward my house. “You didn’t sound sorry earlier.”
“I guess I was feeling a bit defensive...and didn’t think about your feelings.” She made a small face at the word feelings. Speaking of feelings, I had a strong feeling that Nancy didn’t much like talking about her own.
“And how do you think I feel?” I asked.
She scrunched up her face at the question, as if she’d bitten into a sour grape. “Well, it’s like...I can feel how you felt. It’s weird.”
“Go on.”
“You felt abandoned. Alone. Jealous. Scared. Heartbroken. And I...”
“And you what?”
“And I contributed to a lot of that.”
We were silent some more, each sucking and puffing and sitting closer than I ever thought I would sit next to my ex-husband’s mistress.
After a moment, she said, “It’s no secret that I was a stripper. And when Danny showed an interest in me...I mean, he was a lawyer, for Christ’s sake.”
“You couldn’t help yourself,” I said.
She shrugged and I sensed her getting defensive, so I mentally pushed her to continue. If anything, hearing her side helped me to heal a little. Helped me understand a little more, too. Danny was a shit, but I had been in love with him and his actions back then had been a dagger to the heart. Mercifully, not a silver dagger.
“I had a rough life,” she went on. “I’d been turning tricks since I was fifteen, after I left home.”
Despite my best efforts to shield myself from her own memories, I saw them now, flashing through her mind, each more disturbing the next. She had been abused by her parents and grandparents. Her memories made me want to never let my kids leave the house again.
“How did a hooker...” My voice trailed off.
“Go on, you can say it.”
“Fine. How did a former hooker end up as Danny’s legal secretary?”
“I have a funny how-we-met story.” She paused. “I had a car wreck when I was hit by a drunk driver on the way home from the strip club. I had to be cut out of my car with the Jaws of Life and Danny was there when they took me to the hospital.”
“Let me guess. He wanted to take your case on contingency.”
“Yeah, how did you know?”
“Lucky guess. Did someone rich hit your car?”
She nodded. “I was hit by a local politician who desperately wanted to settle out of court. Danny told me that during the case, I couldn’t work as a dancer, since we were claiming disability, so he gave me a little job as his legal secretary at one-tenth of what I made before, you know, to show that I had lost earning power.” She paused. “Danny got me a nice out-of-court settlement and he used his part of the proceeds to buy out the strip club where I worked because I told him it was a gold mine. I used my part of the settlement to get a little condo in Beverly Hills. I went back to dancing at the club he now owned and the rest is history.”
Now the pieces were coming together about why Danny had left lawyering to own a strip club. I tried not to let my eyebrows go up. “And you and Danny got pretty close, I guess,” I said, not bothering to hide my irritation.
She shrugged. “Danny seemed like he liked me. And he told me he was getting a divorce from you, and that you were this horrible person. He made me not like you in return. And then...”
“And then he told you about me being a vampire.”
“Yeah.”
“What did you think about that?”
She looked at me long and steady before she replied, “Let’s just say that I wasn’t as weirded out by it as you might think.”
What I saw next in her mind made me gasp. I snapped my head around and stared at her. “Your ex-boyfriend...”
“Is not so different from you, Sam...”
Chapter Five
Allison and I were at a place called Alicia’s in Brea.
Besides being a typical sit-down café, Alicia’s specialized in, of all adorable things, making to-go picnic lunches, complete with wicker baskets, silverware and checkered tablecloths. A picnic with Kingsley sounded like fun, now that I no longer shrank away from the light of day like a monster in a 1930s’ horror movie. Maybe we could go to Tri-City Lake. Spread out a blanket in the shade. Lots of wine. And lots of canoodling—
“Canoodling?” said Allison. “Are you sure you aren’t, say, a hundred and five?”