Teeth

R and R

It's difficult to relax surrounded by relative strangers, and more difficult when one of them has, however unintentionally, stirred the shadows of old monsters up to dance around in your head in an shadow play that whispers I love you and makes it sound like someone drawing a knife. If it weren't for my father, I wouldn't have had any idea at all that love is not something you use to hurt people with.

We don't air our dirty laundry to strangers She used to tell me, and that settles badly with the bagel and orange juice in my stomach, because Elsie says they met, and it's Elsie, this, tiny enthusiastic stranger giving me shelter, that I believe.

If we don't air our dirty laundry to strangers, and she didn't tell me about Elsie...

I'm not sure if I've fallen into old habits and put on a blank face, or if it's just Elsie being Elsie (Which based on the scattering i know of via the papers could be possible.)

Either way, she chatters like a pro, telling me far less about how she met Lily, or what their relationship was, other than the words 'deliciously scandalous', and far more about her Husband. She seems determined to explain that they were 'good for each other' even if it wasn't the most passionate affair, and I attempt to break through the haze of my own lack of focus with questions, afraid that if I don't, I'll be drawn back into old memories.

"So, Carolyn didn't seem to think my survival chances were that... great. Is that... normally a problem?"

Carolyn has already apparently bluffed to me once, and it’s hard to be sure if she was kidding, trying to save me from information overload or… I don’t know. In spite of her generally being curt and disproving of me in general, I kind of want to like her, in spite of that being deeply unreasonable. Elsie is easy to like, she’s colorful and fun and happy to share food with hungry people who are feeling just a touch out of control and a lot underfed.

She even goes so far as to nudge the Orange juice at me again quietly as she thinks about this, and I refill my glass feeling only a little guilty.

“That’s… rather the unglamorous part of things. She’s lost a few. Not all of them should have probably been brought that far in the first place, as I said, and that impacts things, but you seem like a smart young man. You don’t even have to stick with Lily, you could look for another vampire to partner to, though that might take time.  They’re not common, and they run as hot and cold as anyone else. Think of it like… sort of like shopping for a relationship. You want to find someone with whom you’re compatible. Going it alone is much harder unless you’re an actual vampire. Having the off switch on the abilities is risky when you’re treated like an infectious agent.  I don’t much like it.”

I’m not a master of history. Much of the time I need to include something in a book I have to research the fuck out of it, but the way she said things made it resonate with some of the darker things humans have done to each other, and made me suspect I understood Lily and maybe Ellie just a little better than I had before. And maybe my grasp on why Caroline is so dead hung up on my family tree. I feel sort of dim for not putting it together, but then, I’m only just now starting to get enough pieces that I can make out the first hints of what the end of the jigsaw might look like.