Midnight Cocktail

Midnight Cocktail - Chapter 3

The name stuck, gaining a large slab of irony within a very short time of her joining team V.

But it wasn't all fucking and partying. Not for the first few weeks.

For starters, she almost died.

I don't do requests, won't turn anyone who asks me to do it. Plenty of very good reasons; mostly I don't want a queue of social misfits, gloomy goths, and dreary billionaires looking for the fountain of eternal youth on my drive every evening.

Cherry was different. A one-off. And a mistake, if I'm honest.

You see, I fell in love with her.

After that first night at my club we were inseparable, and I know how lame that sounds. She was cute, funny, sexy despite the whole virginal innocence thing she had going on, and she made me wonder if I'd ever really been in love before. And I had, many times.

A couple of weeks later, when we were in the mansion together for the first time, when I had found out enough about her to know that I wanted her to see where I lived, the true intensity of my feelings for Cherry really hit me.

We were lying on my huge double bed together, giggling at something one of us had said, both naked, and I caught myself looking at her half-open mouth, listening to the sound of her musical, honest laughter and I realised that I didn't want to lose her.

If I hadn't done anything, if we had carried on the way we were, then nothing was surer than that inevitable loss. I've been with humans a few times and it doesn't last. Nothing ever lasts for them. That's just the way it is.

So I asked her.

I touched my finger to her lips, looked into her eyes and asked her.

"Would you like this to last forever?"

"Yes," she said, before she had really taken in the words or had time to think about what they meant.

"It's a big decision. And there's no going back."

She smiled at me, absently stroking my hair.

"I want to be with you," she said. "Forever."

"It's not just about that. It's not like changing your shoes or having a tattoo. You can never lie on the beach, getting a tan, never walk in the sunshine."

"I never did like the sun much anyway."

I sat behind her, held her in my arms with my wrists crossed beneath her breasts. I nuzzled her hair at the nape of her neck and listened to her breathing for a while.

"Think about it for a week," I said. "Walk in the sun, look up at the summer sky. Think about everything that you will be giving up. Then decide."

She twisted around in my arms so that she was facing me, her beautiful blue eyes more serious than I had ever seen them before.

"I don't want to walk around in the sun for a week. You won't be with me."

I closed my eyes.

Kissed her forehead.

If she had said anything else, I never would have turned her.

"After I bite you, you'll feel unwell at first," I said. "And you will be asleep for a while."

It wasn't exactly a lie, just a few thousand miles short of the full truth. If I had told her there was a chance she would go into a coma and possibly die, I think she may have had second thoughts.

I had no intention of letting her die.

"I'll look after you," I said. "I'll be right beside you the whole time, and I'll be the first thing you see when you wake up."