LoveBites || #NONC2022

3.1 Stupid Questions

What am I? What a stupid question.

My tongue was too dry to say so. I swallowed. Had my mouth always tasted like sand?

"I'm Kate," I said weakly. Nothing was making sense. Maybe I was losing it. Maybe Dane and I had entered some shared psychosis. Or he was playing some elaborate prank at my expense.

The breath of his dark laughter had no humor. In the muted streetlight that filtered through the windows, his canines seemed particularly sharp. Fang-like. I shook my head. This was impossible.

"I think we've established that," he whispered. There was no room for a joke, for a prank, for anything other than complete and deadly conviction in his voice. I could see my reflection—the confusion, the fear—in his dilated pupils. The black almost erasing the ring of blue. "But what are you, Kate? Hunter? Wicca? Half-breed?"

I coughed. "Doctor?"

The answer gave him pause.

Dane sat back in his seat. Black returned to blue.

"Doctor?" he asked, incredulous. His brow furrowed. The dangerous promise in his voice battled against processing the absolute stupidity of my answer.

"Yeah," I said. In the tautness between us, I couldn't stop talking. "I'm a resident. Or at least I was one. I'm not working right now. I'm on a sort of vacation."

The silence was almost laughably uncomfortable. Truth settled like a stone.

This wasn't a prank. And I wasn't crazy. Somehow, Dane—the catfished man bun who worked in finance—was something that shouldn't exist. Somehow, this was real.

And somehow, strangely, that made it easier to process.

It didn't matter that my memories were splintered or my sympathetic nervous system was constantly short-circuiting, I could deal with a monster sitting across from me. I could deal with something tangible.

"So you're a vampire." The word sounded asinine as it fell out of my mouth, but my voice didn't waver. "What's that like?"

Dane sat back in his seat, shoulders robbed of that coiled tension. The hard angles in his face smoothed in the heavy surprise. I guessed that my questions, as ridiculous as they were, made it difficult to maintain that predatory guardedness.

His voice was soft, disbelieving. "You're human?"

"Pretty sure," I said with a shrug. I couldn't speak for my dad—he hadn't stuck around—but my maternal relatives had never shown any hint of being anything other than normal, functioning humans. A ghost of sage tickled my mind. Maybe not normal in the nuclear-American-family sense, but they were certainly human by all biologic definitions. "My mom is at least."

Dane scoffed in amazed laughter. He covered his mouth with his hand and paused to stare at me. Then laughed again. Shaking his head, he pulled the tie holding his bun in place. His hair fell in golden, shoulder-length waves. I might have expected the look to soften his features, but it sharpened him into something that was both brutal and disturbingly attractive. A spark of wild energy shot through me. Said malfunctioning nervous system liked the way he looked.

"You're taking all of this remarkably well," he said, running a hand through his freed hair. For a moment, too focused on watching his fingers, I forgot how my mouth worked. "For a human."

After processing the comment, I feigned nonchalance. "Working a couple night shifts gives you a different threshold for dealing with things that are batshit crazy."

It wasn't untrue. I'd seen patients with acute psychosis try to escape the hospital through the ceiling and people who swore that they definitely fell onto phallic shaped objects... and patients with unbeating hearts speak and think during active chest compressions, patients walk away from accidents that should have destroyed them, people survive unsurvivable odds... we called them outliers and miracles and lucky. Maybe I was desensitized to things I couldn't always understand, or maybe my brain was just broken.