This Must be Fiction

I pulled away from him.

"What are you talking about?"

"You really think that your little body would have cause that huge dent in the car? Molly, that was me." He ran his fingers through my hair and tried to wipe away my tears. I know I promised myself that I wouldn't cry in front of him, but I was too emotional at the moment.

"I don't understand." I shook my head.

"I saw the car coming at you... I ran in front of you... pinned you to the ground before you could get hit, and it hit me. Are you hurt at all? I was kind of in a hurry I couldn't check on you before I ran."

I looked at him and lifted up his shirt, inspecting his midsection. There wasn't a scratch on him. His tattoos were still in the right places, muscles still gleaming.

"How did you... what?" My confusion wasn't going away. How could he be hit by the car? He would have had to have move so quickly and get out of there so fast... and how did his body withstand that amount of force? How was there not a scratch on him? My mind was at a complete blank.

"How..." I desperately tried to make sense of this. "You weren't hit... I was."

"Why is this so hard for you to believe?" Ville asked, now seemingly disappointed.

"In order for you to be hit so hard and not even get hurt... you ran so quickly.. no one even knew you were there to begin with. Ville... what's going on?"

His hands cupped my face and the beads of sweat instantly diminished. Those beautiful emerald eyes came down to my level and stared at me with such pleading intensity that it made me want to be lost in them forever.

"Molly, think about it. I can't say it, but you already know. Think about that book." His eyes flashed over to the leather-bound book sitting on the coffee table that he had clearly been reading.

"You can't honestly be telling me..." I looked at him, asking for answers. He was cold, hard as a rock, he didn't eat, barely slept, strong enough to damage a car, startlingly beautiful, but there was one thing missing.

"Ville..." I started, his hands traveled from my face down to my hips. "...what do you eat?" the wispy words barely made it from my lips.

"The very thing that runs through your veins." He whispered back. I took a few steps away from him and felt the need to run. Either he was crazy, I was crazy, or the entire situation was crazy.

"No... that's not even real!" I yelled. He looked at me, still pleading with his eyes.

"You know it is. Very few humans in the world know, Molly. Please, you've got to understand how important this is."

"You're honestly telling me that you're... a vampire?"

He nodded. I started sweating all over again. "No... this is a joke. You can't really be serious." my feet shuffled backwards until I reached the door.

"Molly... please calm down. I'm begging you to sit here and listen to me." He was more calm than I expected. Was he joking? He didn't seem like it. Ville wasn't one for this kind of joke. I knew he was being serious. This was real. He really was... a vampire.

"I'll stay but I'm not sitting." I said, shaking my head. "I don't know if I can handle this." My forehead was in my hands in an attempt to keep my brain from exploding. This kind of stress was not what I needed when I had a concussion.

"You've got to tell me that you believe me before I can say anything else." He stepped closer to me.

"I believe you." I mumbled. I believed him, for whatever reason, although I didn't want to. His hands covered mine completely and the coolness from them calmed me.

"I wanted to tell you, but there's rules that come with being... what I am. You have to promise me you won't say anything to anyone. It could mean both of our lives." He said. I looked at him with a tear-streaked face and intense fear in my eyes.

"You know I won't." I said. My hands rushed to my forehead again.

"I know." He paused. "Are you sure you don't want to sit down?" He asked. I rolled my eyes.

"Can we stop worrying about my comfort level right now Ville? I'm waiting for some sort of explanation."

"Alright, but what kind of explanation are you expecting? You know what I am... You know who I am... what is left to say?" His hands were flailing in the air as only Ville did when he was flustered.

"Well just what the fuck does being a.. a vampire entitle? What do you do? What happens?" I walked into the kitchen area and opened a bottle of beer. Drinking was going to make this easier. He walked to the other side of the counter and sat down on a stool.

"I... drink blood." He stopped and looked at the beer bottle. His arm reached across gracefully and he took a long swig from my beer. "Sorry, I've never had to explain this to a human before." His long fingers wiped his forehead as if he was sweating too, but I could clearly see he was not. I was trying not to concentrate so much on the fact that he was an entirely new person to me, but more on what he was trying to explain. Whatever it was that he was trying to explain.

"Now please understand that I haven't killed anyone in a really long time, I've evolved since I was first changed."

I immediately grabbed the beer and finished it, retrieving another one from the refrigerator. He hasn't killed anyone in a long time, but he has killed someone. Ville's killed a person. To drink their blood. He had literally ended a life in order to drink blood. I wanted to faint.
The second beer was gone in seconds.

"But you've killed people before." I said.

"When I was young. I never meant to, it was always accidental. There's a way of drinking blood without killing a person, and I've mastered that by now. But years ago when I was new to the vampire life... I had to kill people to live. I didn't want to. I never wanted to."

I wasn't sure there was enough beer in the fridge to make everything he was saying ok.

"I'm sorry, I'm freaking you out. Maybe we should talk about this tomorrow, you've had a long day." He put his hand on top of mine, to which I immediately retracted. Ville looked hurt.

"No, no. Keep going. Tell me about yourself, I guess. Just dance around the gruesome parts." I shrugged. I had to remind myself that this was Ville, we were close friends, he wouldn't hurt me. No matter what he really was, it was Ville, not a monster. I breathed heavily, remembering that.

"Ok well... I was changed in the late eighteen hundreds. My family and I were working as farmers in Finland. I'll save the story of my transformation until some time later, when this all sinks in to you, but I was only twenty two when I was changed. So, I guess you can figure out that vampires age, just very very slowly. Although not all of them age, only a few. I'll eventually stop aging at a certain point, but it's impossible to know when. What else is there to say..." Ville trailed off for a moment. "...I've been constantly moving around in Europe and America since I was changed. I've learned how to hide myself from humans, although it was more difficult with you because we've spent so much time close together." He stopped talking and looked me in the eyes. I wasn't sure how to feel anymore. It sunk in that this was still just Ville I was looking at, just a new side of him. I guess I had already known what he was, but I would never have admitted it if he hadn't come out and said it.

"I don't really know what else to say. Maybe you should talk now. You've been quiet."

"I don't know what to say, Ville. This is really some fucking news. Were you planning on keeping this from me forever?" I asked.

"Well, as long as I could have. I just felt that the timing was right. You were reading that stupid book, which is actually almost accurate, and I couldn't let you think that you actually got hit by a car. I knew you'd put the pieces together eventually anyway."

"So should I keep reading the book?" I asked. He looked at me from behind the beer he was chugging.

"No, any questions you have you can just ask. I'd sell it if I were you, it's pretty dated. The views on vampires are greatly biased in that book."

I nodded. The beer bottles were beginning to create a mess on the small counter space.

"How can you drink alcohol?" I asked. "Or coffee?"

"Well, liquids don't really have the same effect on me as food does. Although it takes an enormous amount of alcohol to actually get me drunk, it works. No one really knows why. Coffee doesn't really have any effect on me, but I've grown used to it."

"So you can't eat any food at all?"

"Yes and no. I can eat food, although it all tastes terrible, but generally it reacts badly in my stomach and will just come back up. That's not always the case though, some foods will just rest in my stomach taking up space."

"Oh... Is Kat..." I motioned with my hands for him to fill in the blanks. Ville nodded. "I knew it! I knew there was something about the both of you that was so strange!" I laughed lightly. He half-smiled at me.

"But once again, she can't even know that you know. Well, Kat's smart so she probably will figure it out, but don't say anything nonetheless."

We were quiet for a little bit as I finished my next beer. I laughed internally at the fact that I was chugging beer, because of the terrible hangover I had in the morning, and that I had mild concussion, but alcohol was a necessity.

"You really shouldn't be drinking." Ville said, as if reading my mind.

"Ok well, finding out my best friend is a vampire is something that requires alcohol." I said into the next opened bottle before taking a sip.

"Best friend?" He asked, smirking.

"Well.. yeah.. you know what I mean. Don't change the subject! We were talking about you here!"

"Ah yes but what else is there to say?" I got up and walked over to the couch.

"I don't know... I don't know.. Ville, I was fucking hit by a car today. Okay well maybe I wasn't really, but I'm really stressed out." I was just talking for the sake of speaking.

"I know. I'm so sorry for this, I hadn't meant to make you stressed or in any more pain than you already are." He walked back over to me and stood with his arms open. I inched my way into them until I was wrapped securely in his arms. My breathing became more steady until I felt entirely comfortable in his arms. I inhaled his smell deeply and shivered.

"Ville... you wouldn't ever.. umm.. you know... from me?" I asked into his chest as we were embraced.

"Oh god no!" He said as he put one hand on my head. We pulled apart. "I could never drink from you. That would be crossing a line with me."

"Have you ever thought about it?" I asked, not sure if I really wanted to know the answer.

"Do you want the truth?"

"Yes." No.

"I think about it all the time. It's difficult to explain the kind of smell you have to me. It's like... imagine walking into a bakery knowing you can't eat anything in there, but smelling everything all the same. You'd want it desperately, you can see and and smell it and practically taste it, but you won't eat it. It takes will power, my dear."

I stepped away from him.

"That scares me, Ville."

"I know it does. I'm sorry. I was being honest."

His face was clearly one of sorrow and pain, he had made a mistake in telling me what he was, and he never wanted me to be this scared of him. I closed my eyes for a second and heard the sound of our breathing in sync.

"You breathe. Do you need to?"

"Not really. Only once every couple hours would I need to take a breath. But, it's a habit. You wouldn't just stop breathing because you didn't need to, it's too mechanical." I was speaking with his hands.

We stayed quiet for a little bit until I walked slowly over to the bed. He joined me and sat on the opposite side.

"I'm so sorry about all of this." He apologized again, desperately trying to get me to look at him. I couldn't, not at that second.

"I'm glad you told me. I think that maybe after I sleep I'll feel better about this." I stopped and forced myself to look at him. My emotions kept climbing from terrified to interested to thinking about the love I had for him.

"Do you sleep?" I asked after thinking about going to bed.

"Not nearly as much as you. I only need a few minutes to an hour... I could go without sleep for weeks if I needed to."

"Alright. I'm done with questions for now." I said, crawling into the covers and pulling them up to my chin.

"Do you want me to lay with you?" He asked. I thought about it for a minute. It was Ville, the same Ville I had practically begged to sleep with me the other night. I couldn't start thinking of him differently now.

He folded the covers over on one side and actually got under them for once. I had never seen him under a blanket. Ville scooted in close to me before I had the chance to answer his question.

He layed on his back and opened an arm up for me to crawl in to. Carefully, I rested my head on the perfect nook between his shoulder and neck. His arm wrapped tightly around my shoulders, and I ignored his frigidness. I couldn't imagine a moment better than this. The only noise between us was my shallow breathing. I placed my hand gently on his chest in order to feel a pulse. There wasn't one. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the feeling I was getting from being this close to Ville.

"This is nice." I said, forgetting everything we had just discussed. He tilted his head slightly to look at me and kissed my forehead.

"Yes, it is."