The Poison in Your Blood

I stayed with him that night in his house and to tell you the truth the whole thing seems kind of hazy. I’m sure he didn’t drug me or anything, because he bought me food from Panda express for dinner and I drank coffee I made myself. I told him if I saw him again he should consider having some food and drink in the house and he promised to keep that in mind. I never really put any further thought into it. I’m not sure I’ll see him again, though when he dropped me off at my car the next morning I gave him my number. I hadn’t been afraid through the night. Each time I got anxious or worried about something he had a way of calming me. I can’t explain it, but I know I spent that night feeling like I’d been hypnotized.

I’m back to my routine now. I haven’t seen or heard from Austin in a week and I’m not sure I’m upset about it. It took me most of the week to feel like my body could function without pain again. The sex had been the best I’d ever experienced, and I’m not going to lie when I say I’ve had a lot of sex in my 28 years. I started having sex when I was 14, so that’s 14 years worth of sex. I spent the other part of my week craving that sex, and his smell and his skin against mine. It was like an addiction I couldn’t figure out. I have no feelings for the guy, honestly I find him kind of scary. But even now a week later I’m craving that feeling.

It’s my day off. When I got back to work the guys who own the studio asked me what was different about me and went on and on for days about how the glow of getting laid made me shine. Mostly their taunting made me bitter. I love my job. I hate the guys I work with. They think I love them, mostly because I bring them coffee every morning and I don’t tell them they are cock suckers. I desperately want to sometimes, but then I’d lose my job. Since I have an apartment to pay for that wouldn’t be good.

I’m lying in my apartment now with the heater on. I hate December because it’s fucking freezing. I love it because it’s Christmas and who doesn’t love Christmas. I lay here on the couch and flip channels for a while on my TV. Nothing really on, which sucks. I get up and make my way to my bedroom and see the shirt I “borrowed” from Austin lying on my vanity chair. He let me keep it when he brought me home since I had only had the half top and it was 45 degrees when he dropped me off. It smells like him still even a week later and I’m not going to lie, I like to put it on and let myself be intoxicated by that smell. I pick it up and put it on over my long sleep thermal t-shirt. I leave it open and wear it kind of like a jacket. It’s a flannel thing, nice and warm.

I turn on my laptop and decide on playing some internet games on Facebook. I told you before I’m hardly a fun person. If I’m not working I’m on Facebook or watching TV or something stupid. Sometimes I make it to the mall and spend money I haven’t got. I play Bejeweled Blitz for an hour and a half before an ad on the side of the screen catches my eye. It’s an ad for birth control, some kind that makes it so you only have a period four times a year. I about choke on my own tongue.

I haven’t been on birth control in over a year. I went through a pretty rough dry spell and found no real reason to be on the pill. I was consumed with work and I was taking a couple online classes and I spent all my free time holed up in my apartment. Sex wasn’t high on my list, though I guess it could have been had I wanted it bad enough. I ran out of pills and decided there was no point in having the prescription filled. If I should so happen to get laid I’d take some condoms. As I’m staring at the ad with my irregular heartbeat I flash back to the two nights and full day I spent with Austin in his house. We each only had our clothes on for about ten minutes the whole fucking time I was there, and I’m pretty sure he never put on a condom. My heart starts thumping against my chest and all I can do is wonder what kind of risk I’d put myself at. Not only could I be pregnant, but who knows what kind of STD he might have had. He’s a musician what’s saying he doesn’t fuck girls all the time? I don’t want a baby and I definitely don’t want an STD.

I jump out of my chair and to my cell phone on the coffee table. I open my contacts and I’m surprised to see his name in my phone. I can’t remember saving his number, he must have done it himself when I was asleep. I find this odd but I can’t spend too much time on it. I call my doctor and wait impatiently for them to answer.

“Hello, you’ve reached Dr. Warren’s office, how may I help you?” says the receptionist.

“I need an appointment right away,” I say. “I need a pregnancy test.” I’m having a heart attack. I almost tell her I need some heart monitors too but decide most likely she’ll tell me to call 911 and hang up on me. “Today if you’ve got a spot.”

“I can get you in at 3:30,” she says. I look at my clock. It’s 2:30 already.

“Perfect!” I nearly shout and then I feel a little embarrassed. I don’t want to sound like a freak or anything. I hang up the phone and run into my bedroom and change my sweat pants to a pair of jeans and run a brush through my black hair. I debate on a pony tail and finally decide its freezing and I’ll wear it down. I fluff it up a bit and grab my purse before leaving the apartment in a rush, not bothering to turn off anything I’ve left on all this time.

I have to remind myself not to speed. I kind of wish in a way he was here so he could calm me down like he did in his house all that time I spent there. I could use some calming down. My heart is still pounding in my chest and I can imagine that to the average person I probably look like a lunatic.

I get to my doctor’s office at 3:15 and walk in quickly. I check in and take a seat in one of the chairs in the waiting room. I bite at my nails, a horrible habit I know. A woman who is about 40 looks at me with scorn. I look over my body, wondering what he problem is, and realize I look about 16 in my flannel shirt over the thermal and jeans. I’m wearing a pair of black and white converse and no makeup.

“Can I help you?” I snap. I don’t make a lot of trips to my gynecologist, but this was an emergency.

“I didn’t realize Dr. Warren helped little girls,” she says in a snotty tone. I look at her with narrow eyes.

“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” I say, “Since I’m almost 30 years old.” Her eyes widen slightly then and she looks down at her magazine. I’ve always looked younger than I am my whole life. When I worry about my makeup I look like an adult, but nobody ever guesses I’m 28. When I don’t worry about my makeup I can look anywhere from 16 to 25 depending on what I’m wearing. It pisses me off though when people assume I’m a teenage punk just because I don’t always dress like a grown up. It’s my fucking day off for Christ’s sake.

“Lana,” the MA calls. I jump up and hurry behind the door with her, shooting the old hag a custom “Lana death glare”. She ignores me. The MA weighs me and checks my height. I’m not super tall. I’m only 5’6”. Then she leads me to an exam room and I sit there feeling horrible. Dr. Warren comes in a few minutes later. She’s about 65 I’d say, but she’s nice and she’s gentle and she never messes with me. I had a male gynecologist when I was really young and I found him overwhelmingly creepy. My mother sued him when I was 17 because he touched me with his bare hands in a non professional manner.

“Hello, Lana,” she says. I take a breath.

“Hello, Dr. Warren,” I say. She smiles and looks over my chart quickly.

“Been a little while since you’ve been in. I understand you are looking to get a pregnancy test.” I swallow hard and look down at the chipped black nail polish on my finger nails for a minute.

“I actually needed a couple tests,” I say and think for a minute. This feels awkward. “I went out last week, and I went home with this guy, and one thing led to another and I’m not sure we were…protected,” I explain, feeling my cheeks flame red. She writes some stuff down on the chart and then she looks at me with a weaker smile.

“Okay, Lana,” she says. “We’ll test you for the usual STD’s and pregnancy. You’ll have to return in 6 months for the HIV test.” I frown. She’s being so nice and sweet like it wasn’t totally stupid of me to go out and be trampy and have unprotected sex with a man I’d known for five seconds. She has a nurse come in and draw blood and blah blah blah and then leaves me sitting for a long time in the room.

After what seems like days she comes back and sits on a stool in front of me. She adjusts her glasses on her face and looks at the chart again. “I know I should have been smarter. Just give me all the bad news at once,” I blurt out. She looks up at me.

“No bad news yet,” she says. “Pregnancy came back negative. We won’t know about the STD’s for about a week. We will call you with the results. It is a little early after you’ve been active to check for pregnancy, so we recommend you test again if you miss your period.” I want to be relieved, but I’m not. I have to wait a week to know if I’m going to end up spending the rest of my life with herpes. Calm down, Lana. A week isn’t long, only seven days. I bite at my nails again. “No need to worry. If you have contracted anything, most STD’s are treatable.” She sets me up with an appointment for next week to have everything checked out again and sends me home. I drive home feeling defeated.

When I get back to the apartment I flop on my sofa and I pull out my phone. His name is the first on my list. I groan and then I hit dial without hesitation. I listen to it ring three times and I start to think I’ll just hang up and change my number so he can’t call back.

“Lana?” he asks then and my plan to hang up is shot. “Hello?” he asks after I don’t say anything for a long minute. Then I’m suddenly pissed off.

“You asshole!” I shout.

“What the fuck? What did I do to you?”

“What did you do to me!? You took me to your fucking house and fucked me for two days and never once did you bother to be sure I was protected! I swear to god if I’m sick…or…or…knocked up…I’ll fucking sue you!” I scream. There is a long pause.

“I’m safe,” he says after a minute. His voice is low. I hear some strange kind of gurgling noise in the background. “Hold on a minute.” I hear a series of weird noise and slamming and then the gurgling stops and he’s back on the line. “You caught me at a bad time.” His words sound off and I feel that weird creepy feeling I felt when he’d told me if he’d wanted to kill me he’d have done it by now. I suddenly don’t want to know what the gurgling was. “Anyways, I didn’t put on a condom because I’m safe.”

“You might not have a fucking disease, but I’m still a female! I still can get pregnant!” I scream. I must admit, I’m glad he didn’t tell me he has gonorrhea or something. He’s quiet for a minute. “Are you there?! Are you listening to me!?”

“You aren’t going to get pregnant,” he says. The tone of his voice practically has me quaking. It’s deep and frightening and laced with the kind of darkness you see in horror movies. I have to make an effort to open my mouth again.

“How the hell do you know that?” I ask. I sound surprisingly assertive.

“I just know it,” he snaps. “If you called me just to scream and me and bitch because you didn’t take your fucking pill you can save it. I don’t have any STD’s and you won’t get pregnant with my baby. Now if you’ll excuse me, I was just finishing lunch.” The line goes dead then and I stare at my phone in horror. What the fuck kind of lunch gurgles and makes loud fucking noises? I call my doctors office a little bit later and cancel my appointment for next week. I’m going to go ahead and trust him when he says I won’t get pregnant. His tone of voice didn’t imply that he was lying at all.

Maybe I should get another cat. Cats are good company. They lay around, they eat a little, they don’t talk in voices that make me scared, they don’t have creepy eyes that turn black for no reason, and they don’t eat lunches that gurgle. That’s it I’ll get a new cat. Maybe a boy cat. Then I can pretend like I have a man in my life. I’ll name him something like George or something, so I can tell people I have a man named George in my house.

But then if George dies I’ll be heartbroken. Maybe a new cat isn’t the answer. How about a time machine? I need one of those so I can go back and tell myself to put a jacket on and get the hell out of that bar.

I turn on the TV. The news is on and I slump back onto my couch and pout. Breaking news pops up on the screen. “A woman’s body was found behind a Starbucks in Los Angeles moments ago. The woman appears to have been assaulted before being decapitated and left near the dumpsters.” I gag and turn off the TV.

I cross my arms over my chest and I can smell his smell coming off the shirt. I close my eyes and breathe it in for a few minutes. I never notice myself falling asleep.

I’m suddenly standing in an alley way. It’s late and its dark and it’s raining. I’m freezing, each time I breathe a white puff blows into the air. I don’t know where the hell I am or why I’m here, but I can smell Austin despite the rain. That smell that drives me crazy. I turn around and he’s behind me, his eyes black as they’ve ever been. I look at him and back up, feeling uncomfortable with him there. He takes a step closer to me and he smiles widely.

“Hello, Lana,” he says. I back up until I back into the wall and he’s there, coming closer and closer. I want to scream, but his smell surrounds me and I can’t. I’m paralyzed by it. He runs his hand down my arm and all the hairs on my body stand on end. “Why are you out here in the rain, Lana?” I can’t open my mouth to say anything. I’m completely lost in the blackness of his eyes and the slow hypnotic tone of his voice. He laughs and in one of his impossibly quick movements he’s got me in his grip and I finally scream.

As I jolt forward I find myself back on my sofa, but my heart is racing so quickly I could easily go into cardiac arrest at any moment. Calm down, Lana, it was just a bad dream. Just a bad dream that stemmed from the stress of the day and that news story. Austin is just a guy. Sure, he’s a little strange, but he isn’t a murder. I repeat these things in my head over and over until I calm down. I notice that it’s dark in my apartment now and I frown. I turn the TV back on in hopes that I can take my mind off of the dream and the overall stressful events of the day. I take in a deep breath and blow it out through my mouth.

I end up on NBC and a rerun of Dracula, starring Jonathon Rhys Meyers comes on. I decide I might as well watch it. I knew him for a little while. I still have his number somewhere, but we don’t keep in contact often. It was a weird thing I did with him, and it was a few years back when he was doing the Showtime show. It was a stroke of luck too.

I’m not a star fucker. I’ve slept with a few musicians and I just somehow ended up having some kind of weird secret affair with Jonathon. He was kind of mysterious and didn’t share a lot with me, he just called me when he wanted some kind of company and I went and we did really dirty things and pretended like we had feelings for each other. But the whole affair was always kept under wraps and when we finally decided it wasn’t working out we said we’d keep in touch. We did for a long time, he’d call me late at night and he was usually pretty drunk. He’d go on about whatever was bothering him and how much he missed me, and I’d listen to him talk in his sexy accent and I’d miss him too.

Now once in a great while I get a phone call from him. I knew when he signed on for Dracula and I promised I’d watch the series. I watched every episode religiously and I loved the season. The last time I talked to him was last year when the first season ended. Something kind of sexy about a vampire being in love with somebody. I guess I probably had more feelings for him that I’d like to admit, but I knew when I had the extreme pleasure of knowing him he’d never have them for me. I was easy and I could pretend like it didn’t hurt that he didn’t really love me back.

To this day I don’t know much about him. He was another one I found kind of scary when I was around him. But his eyes never turned black and he didn’t dart around the room at lightning speed. He made a good TV vampire that much is certain, and the sex was pretty good there. But not like the sex I’ve had recently.

When the episode is over I feel like crap and I want to lie in bed for a month and cry and not wash my hair. The only man I guess I ever really loved didn’t love me back, and it was clear to me he never would. The new man I’ve been around is scary as hell and I don’t know if I even want to see him ever again, and yet I’m compelled to call him this very moment and spend another three days in his house having rough sex. I really need to get another cat.

The next day I go out. It’s pouring rain but I want a latte from Starbucks, although the idea of Starbucks makes me a little queasy since a lady was decapitated behind one yesterday. I need to get out of my house. I spent my whole night lying in my bed feeling sorry for myself. So I put on my big black suede coat that’s lined in sheep wool with a big fur collar. It was a gift…we don’t need to go into who from. I also wear black knee high boots over my jeans and I have on a cute little black top but it’s covered with my ridiculous jacket.

I strut out of my apartment and down to my car and take off out of the parking lot. I’m really thinking I’ll stop by the animal shelter and get a cat. When I had my cat I hardly worried about men at all. I wasn’t as complicated when I had my cat. I make it to Starbucks and waltz in, thinking I look pretty damn good in my big beautiful jacket and all. I wait in the line and finally when I get to the counter I tell the girl I’d like a large gingerbread latte and a slice of banana bread. She writes all the shit on the cup and as I’m digging through my purse an all too familiar voice rings behind me.

“I’ve got hers,” he says. I watch him set the money on the counter and I look over my shoulder and I feel myself shake slightly. When did he get here anyways? I was watching through the whole store like a paranoid weirdo.

“Please, I can pay…”

“I’ve got it, Lana. Since I apparently gave you quite a scare yesterday the least I can do is buy you a cup of coffee,” he says. The girl behind the counter snatches up his twenty dollar bill and gives him his change. I glare at him and stalk off to the counter to wait for my latte. He orders himself a coffee and joins me with my banana bread in a little bag he holds in his hand. “You forgot this.” I turn my nose up away from him. “Oh come on, Lana!”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” I say. “Not after you yelled at me on the phone.” I feel a little childish, but I’m honestly a little uncomfortable with him. He frowns.

“I’m sorry,” he says. I look at him and I’m glad to see his eyes are looking normal. That doesn’t seem to happen too much.

“How the hell did you find me here anyways?” I ask. My latte comes over the counter and I pick it up and take a drink, glad Starbucks coffee is never really hot. He frowns at me.

“I uh…just happened to bump into you,” he says in an unsteady voice.

“Are you stalking me!?” I snap, probably louder than I should. He looks around the little room and he takes hold of my arm.

“We need to talk out of here,” he says and pulls me out of the coffee shop. I’m instantly annoyed but it’s soon replaced with confusion as we are all of the sudden next to his car across the parking lot.

“How do you do…?”

“I told you once not to ask me any questions,” he says. I look up at him and his eyes are black, just as black as they were in my nightmare last night and I try to step back but he won’t let me. “I had to get out of that Starbucks. Too many people.” I’m so confused right now. What the hell is he talking about?

“It was only a little crowded.”

“I can’t be around that many people this early in the day,” he says. The rain has stopped but there isn’t any sunshine. “Don’t’ question it, Lana. Just believe me.” I look at him with wide eyes.

“You are scaring the hell out of me,” I say. He steps back and his eyes go back to normal. “Why do your eyes change colors like that? Its fucking scary as shit.”

“Lana! Please, I can’t tell you everything. I just wanted to apologize for what I said yesterday. I shouldn’t have been so mean about it. I understand you had legitimate concerns. Don’t worry though, you won’t be pregnant, I promise.” It irritates me to no end that he’s not answering my questions. “I’m not stalking you. I just…happened to be here and I could…see you,” he says. The pauses in his words raise a million red flags but I don’t think I want to identify any of them.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I say. He frowns and looks at me standing against his car. I’m personally surprised at how easily my words are coming out; since I’m pretty sure my heart stopped about ten minutes before.

“Lana,” he says and sighs. He’s quiet for a long minute. “Are you afraid?” Oh shit, how the fuck does he know that? “Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I-I’m not afraid,” I say. He can probably tell I’m lying pretty badly. I’m scared to death of him sometimes. He meets my eyes with his and the fear washes off me as I look into the green blue of his eyes.

“Come to my place? Come with me. I have food in the house now; you can make what you like.” I nod once and let him help me into his car. One of these days my car is going to get abandon in a parking lot and they are going to tow the damn thing. But his tone of voice and that smell I’ve been craving all week have me under a spell again and I’m his for the taking.