"Let me get that." He lifted his jacket from the picnic bench before I could. While I was checking my purse for signs of rifling, he pulled a small black object from his jacket side pocket. "Portable alarm. If anyone had moved my jacket it would have gone off. You haven't been robbed."
"Oh. What a relief! I'm new in town and all my ID, my credit card info, Social Security number-"
"it's okay." He rested a calming hand on my wrist, but I jerked away as if burned.
"Sorry," I said. "I'm getting a terrible headache. I guess I panicked."
"May I have your phone number, Miss -?" The sunset-gilded pen he produced like a magic wand shone, liquid lava in his dark hand, against his luminous white shirt cuff.
I seemed to be seeing everything in intensified colors, the sunset bathing us in an amber-orange glow, the grass darkening to emerald.
"Miss-?" he repeated.
Dummy. Speak!
"Street." I decided to skip the Delilah part. He looked like the kind of Latin lover who'd call you "Miss" while he was unzipping your skirt. A gigolo maybe. Was I thinking this because he was so attractive? "I never remember my own number," I said, stuttering a little. "Let me look at my phone…"
Girlfriend, get a hold of yourself, urged Irma. He's probably straight both ways, gender and species, and you two have obviously got some heavy-metal chemistry going.
I found the cell, punched "My phone #," and read it off, watching Ric Montoya, consultant (on what?), punch it into his own phone. Twilight had edged into dark by the time he escorted me to the curb and opened the door of my queen-size black Caddy with the red leather interior and white convertible top.
"A lot of car," he noted, surprised and intrigued by Dolly. What guy wouldn’t be? "Should I follow you home?"
"No, I'm fine. It's just this sudden headache."
All I could see of him now was luminous splashes of white: that supernaturally white shirtfront, his flashing teeth and eyes. The lights inside my head were lurid red and green and blue.
"I'll call," were his last words.
Yeah. The elusive single male's familiar dating and mating call, cited in many animal behavior books.
And I'll see.
He will, girlfriend. I feel it in my bones.
Irma was playing Marie LaVeau now, the infamous New Orleans Voodoo priestess. That was the nice thing about having an inner girlfriend since before puberty; she could be multicultural.
I drove away with a pounding head, not even noticing where Ric Montoya had gone. But I had his number. Literally. Hooking up with a "just normal" guy would be great for a change.
Between the pulsing of every blood vessel in my head and trying to remember my way back to the Araby Motel in the dark, I didn't notice anything different about me until I felt a telltale warm trickle between my legs.
Shit! I was either having my period off-schedule, which would be weird because I'd been on the Pill forever to control killer cramps, or I was really, really into Ric Montoya. Or vice versa.
Or maybe both, if they didn't cancel each other out.
Oh, joy.
Chapter Ten
I woke up the next day and checked the Araby Motel's scratchy sheets first thing.
My panties had passed the period test last night. No blood. My dreams had been vaguely gory, sometimes a prelude to my periods, but the sheets passed too.
No "virginal" spot of blood, m’Lord. She is fit to marry a King. Of course she could just be pregnant…
I sighed, trying to come to grips with my sudden new Sunset Park side: sexy chick.
I'd always tried to act like a hip modern girl, especially once I'd got out into the working world, but sometimes I thought I was an oddball escapee from some forgotten fairy tale. I didn't remember a lot about my "wonder" years when things like hormones and periods and what guys might want appeared on the horizon.
Any shrink could tell you that never being adopted might lead to self-esteem issues. On top of that, my vamp-attracting coloring meant I'd had to stand up solo and secretly to the older bad boys who kept recycling back to the orphanage from foster home after foster home. All of them had long tails of initials in their case files, and half of them were OOW (out-of-wedlock) unwanted half-vampire spawn.
Every jaunt in and out of the institution just made them nastier.
Our Lady of the Lake convent school was a relief in getting away from the bad boys, being a girls' school, but the other students all had homes and families and their own venom-tongued ways of tormenting someone different.
By the time I hit college, working like a stevedore to earn living expenses, a social life was an afterthought. Somewhere, sometime after my institutional stays, I had the impression that I was no longer a virgin, in terms of not bleeding if you pricked me. Imagine how the fairy tale would have gone if Sleeping Beauty couldn't bleed? But I didn't remember when or how or who. Or what.
I also didn't remember a couple of heavy drinking college parties very well either. Maybe then. Whatever had happened, if it had, I came out of it with memory loss, nightmares, and such an aversion to vampire lunges and to lying on my back that the dentist had to work on me sitting up.
During my last year at the group home, my dreams of a humiliating and terrifying "alien abduction" pelvic exam began, mixed up with vamp boy attacks. That drove me in high school to the underground drug sellers for the "others." A lot of teen female werewolves had period difficulties during their "change," and I could get the Pill without a prescription or a pelvic, since many doctors still wouldn’t treat supernaturals. No one ever questioned my supernatural credentials. They were selling meds like street drugs. Besides, who would want to masquerade as an outcast? All this shady rigmarole to get the Pill made me feel neurotic and squeamish and childish. From what I'd heard, women my age had abortions with less angst than I produced for a P.E.
So it wasn't that I didn't want male company or affection or that I didn't dream that someday my prince would come. It's that the dreams I remembered were always of a huge pale stingray hanging over me. I couldn't breathe…was I underwater? Being held underwater? Being held down? A lot of working women had that dream. The stingray's flaccid white wings were arched and veined like a bat's, and became a black shadow above me, diving down, smothering me.
So I had some sexual hang-ups. My mind veered away whenever my thoughts wandered too close to the mystery. But it wasn’t rape. I'd never thought that was my problem. That nail file had done the job.
It was even harder to veer away from my old edgy emotions and fears now, after feeling that bolt of earthy energy from the ground under my feet, from the man behind me, whose hands in front of mine had tapped into all that subterranean sexuality.
Maybe my prince had come.
Literally.
So the good news at this point was that my sudden sogginess wasn’t my usually predictable period after all. The bad news was that I'd never had much luck playing well with men and I might be heading for another major disappointment. At least my über-headache was gone and I didn't remember dreams of any kind from last night whatsoever. Round one to Ric Montoya. Too bad I didn't have time to moon over him a little.
I had a lot of other things to do, Hector Nightwine still looming number one on my A-list. I'd come back from the breakfast buffet at the Lotsa-Slotsa-Fun on this gentrification-doomed low-end part of the Strip when my phone rang at 11:00 am on the dot.
My first phone call in Vegas! I let it ring two more times for sheer pleasure before I panicked and flipped it open. In the meantime I fantasized that Hector Nightwine's secretary…a male secretary named Niven…was on the line begging me to see his boss. Hmmm, my fantasies were definitely perking up.