Sunshine

I was frying eggs when he came out, looking very exotic in the kimono. I stood there holding a skillet with three beautifully fried eggs in it and said miserably, “I can’t even feed you.” How I’d organized my entire life: feeding other people. I heard what I was saying—or what I was saying it to—a moment after the words came out, but his gaze did not waver.

“I do not eat often. I do not need food.”

I shook my head. I’d narrowly avoided mental breakdown as a result of facing ancient all-consuming evil, and now I was about to lose it over giving a vampire breakfast. I felt tears pricking at my eyes. This was ridiculous. “I can’t eat in front of you. It’s so…I feed people for a living. If I don’t do it I’m a failure. I identify as a feeder of…”

“People,” said Con. “I am not a person.”

I’d just been having this conversation with myself in the bathroom. “Yes you are,” I said. “You’re just not, you know, human.”

“Your food grows cold,” said Con. “It is better hot, yes?”

I shook my head mutinously. He was right, though, it was a pity to ruin such ravishing eggs.

“I will drink with you,” said Con.

“Orange juice?” I said hopefully. It had to have calories in it. Water didn’t count.

“Very well. Orange juice.”

I moved three white roses out of one of my nice glasses, gave it a quick wash, and poured orange juice in it. It was one of the tall ones with gold flecks. Silly thing to drink juice out of. I didn’t see him drink—it occurred to me I hadn’t seen him drink his tea in the goddess’ office either—but nearly half a gallon of orange juice disappeared while I ate my eggs and two toasted muffins and a scone. (What a good thing that it hadn’t occurred to me to empty my refrigerator before I died.) Did that mean he liked it, or was this his demanding standard of courtesy again?

“What does it taste like?” I asked.

“It tastes like orange juice,” he said, at his most enigmatic.

How was I planning on putting us-on-the-right-side, anyway? Con had been on the right side as compared to Bo. Con was still a vampire. He still…

I did the dishes in silence while Con sat in his chair. The kimono made him look very zen, sitting still doing nothing. I’d seen it first at the lake, that capacity for sitting still doing nothing with perfect grace: although that wasn’t how I’d thought of it when we were chained to the wall together. And it was interesting that he retained it when he wasn’t under the prospect of immediate elimination with no way out, which might be expected to focus the mind. If it didn’t blow it to smithereens.

I did the dishes slowly. We’d done washing and eating. There wasn’t anything to come except to figure out sleeping arrangements. Con had acknowledged that vampires did something like sleep during the day. And my body had to have sleep soon or I was going to fall down where I stood. But my mind couldn’t deal with it. I’d tried to convince myself to haul some laundry downstairs but I couldn’t face the effort: stairs: the assault on Everest, and where were my Sherpas? I rescued Con’s trousers from where he had rinsed and wrung them out and draped them over the towel rack (you don’t think of vampires in domestic-chore terms, but I suppose even vampires have to come to some arrangement about getting their clothes washed), and hung them on the balcony for the sun and wind to dry them; at least they were still trousers, if a trifle ravaged by events, which was more than could be said for the remains of his shirt. I scuffled around in my closet again—at some peril to life and limb, since my com gear tended increasingly to get left in there—and pulled the spare shirt out, and left it on the closet doorknob.

Every utensil was scoured within an inch of its life and dried and put away too soon.

Sleep. No way.

At least, being this tired, and still half-watching my hands for renegade moves, I wasn’t interested in—or maybe I should say I wasn’t capable of brooding about—what else might happen in a bed-type situation. Or could happen. Or wasn’t going to happen.

I was capable of brooding about being afraid to be alone. Afraid to sleep.

“You’ll have to have the bed,” I said. “There are no curtains for the balcony, and the sun gets pretty much all round the living room over the course of the day. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

He was silent for a moment, and I thought he might argue. I’m not sure I wasn’t waiting hopefully for an argument. But all he said finally was, “Very well.”

Of course I couldn’t sleep. I would have liked to pretend—even to try to pretend—that it was because I wasn’t used to sleeping during the day, but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago “something or other or die” had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other.