The Top of the Mark is the restaurant bar across the street from me at the Continental hotel. We went there once for my father’s birthday brunch and it was all sorts of swanky. I figured it would be a good place to go. Not only is it close by but I feel safer in an expensive place. I’m aware that people—vampires—like Solon would hang out at these establishments with ease, probably more so than a dingy dive bar, but it’s also for myself.
See, I don’t know how I’ll act around Elle. Will I want to bite her? Will she pick up on what I am, be afraid of me? I feel like if I’m in a fancy establishment full of white linen, champagne bubbles and crisp words, I’ll be able to control myself.
Time passes slowly. Maybe it always will now, when it feels like you have an eternity at your fingertips. As I often have been lately, I wonder about my own mortality, what it means, and if I’ll ever truly know if I can live forever. Do vampires die of natural causes at some point in time? Do they ever age? Because I’m only half, what does that mean for me? Will I age slowly or stay forever twenty-one?
Then I catch myself thinking of the clothing store. Damn. Hope it’s not run by vampires.
Eventually I take a shower and get ready, then I’m heading across the street, taking in the fresh air. It’s sunny, the sky that impossible blue that SF gets sometimes, and I slip on my oversized sunglasses, wincing at the light. After being indoors for most of the last two weeks, including when I was studying, it feels like a knife in my brain and I’m kicking myself for not suggesting a dark bar somewhere.
I take my sunglasses off in the elevator, then step out of the doors and into the restaurant.
Elle already has a seat by the window, sun streaming in.
Great.
“Hey!” She waves at me and gets to her feet, running across the restaurant to me. A few heads turn and follow the girl with the piercings and the tattoos, but they’re just snooty diners having a late lunch and there’s not many people in this place.
Elle pulls me into a hug and I immediately stiffen, trying to hold my breath so I don’t do something weird like smell her or something. Elle is into some weird shit but that would really be pushing it.
“You look amazing,” she coos at me, holding me by the shoulders and looking me up and down. I thought ahead and wore a long-sleeved tunic and leggings that hide my lack of tattoos. But still, she frowns. “Did you get taller?”
Shit. I had a feeling I did. All my pants are feeling shorter on the inseam, maybe by two inches.
I muster a laugh. “No. Maybe you got shorter.”
She ponders that for a moment. “Huh.”
It’s then that I realize I’m breathing, and smelling her. Not in a purposeful way but I note the baby powder smell of her deodorant, her Sol de Janeiro shampoo, her natural scent which is something like lilac and musk, and the traces of champagne on her breath. She’s started drinking without me.
But luckily, all those smells aren’t making me want to bite her neck and drain her of blood, so there’s that.
“You okay?” Elle asks. “You seem so…”
“I need a drink,” I say abruptly, slipping on my sunglasses.
“Well, I already started without you,” she says, walking back to the table. She gives me a funny look over her shoulder. “You’re wearing sunglasses inside?”
“It’s bright out,” I tell her, sitting by the window, thankful that she’s the one sitting in sunlight.
“Are you hungover?”
I nod. “Yeah. Totally.”
“Your birthday was like two days ago,” she says.
“It was a big birthday.” I’m glad she can’t see my eyes under these sunglasses, because I have a feeling she’d see all through my lies.
“So, then tell me about it,” she says, pouring me a glass of champagne and handing it to me. “Wait, no first, we toast to you turning twenty-one, baby. Welcome to the club.”
I raise my glass and clink it against hers, keeping my movements gentle. I nearly broke my toothbrush in half this morning, so I need to be aware that I have more strength than I used to.
“Thank you,” I tell her, and my nose starts to sting from the feeling of tears building up at the back of my throat, emotions suddenly running through me. All those nights in the house and I thought I would never be in this situation again, thought I’d never see my only friend, be free in this world, pretending to be normal.
But I know I’m not really free.
That this is a pause in my life, just like the pause between the lust and the bloodlust. Soon I’ll have to make decisions about how much of my old life I can have back without endangering myself and my parents.