Kiss Kiss Fang Fang: A Sucky Vampire Romantic Comedy Read online

  Kiss Kiss Fang Fang

  A Sucky Romantic Comedy

  Penelope Bloom

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  Contents

  1. Cara

  2. Cara

  3. Cara

  4. Cara

  5. Cara

  6. Cara

  7. Cara

  8. Cara

  9. Lucian

  10. Cara

  11. Lucian

  12. Cara

  13. Lucian

  14. Cara

  15. Cara

  16. Lucian

  17. Cara

  18. Cara

  19. Cara

  20. Lucian

  21. Lucian

  22. Cara

  23. Cara

  24. Lucian

  25. Cara

  26. Lucian

  27. Lucian

  28. Lucian

  29. Cara

  30. Lucian

  31. Cara

  32. Lucian

  33. Cara

  34. Lucian

  35. Cara

  36. Lucian

  37. Cara

  38. Lucian

  39. Cara

  40. Lucian

  41. Cara

  42. Cara

  43. Lucian

  44. Cara

  45. Lucian

  46. Cara

  47. Lucian

  48. Epilogue - Cara

  49. Epilogue - Lucian

  1

  Cara

  In the movie version of my life, the director would probably start with a brief tease. It’d be one dramatic snapshot to show you just how abnormal my mostly normal existence was about to get.

  They’d probably open with a black screen that slowly brightened until a fuzzy image became clear.

  There I’d be, looking like I just got thrown from an exploding building to land on the wet pavement. Face up, of course—for cinematic reasons.

  The camera would rotate and rise upwards so you had plenty of time to study my face and the “what the hell am I doing here” look written all over it.

  The average viewer might not notice the smoking gun in the scene right away. But that was okay. It would add to the drama.

  If they were a person of taste, they might go straight to the awesome Chuck Taylor’s I snagged on clearance.

  If they were a nitpicker, they might get stuck on my black-haired pixie cut that was in desperate need of a trim.

  And if they were an asshole, they’d probably laugh to see a gym membership card on my keychain—the same keychain that was dramatically strewn a few feet from my outstretched hand.

  And yes, I’d been on a little fitness hiatus since New Year’s. Okay? And no, I wasn’t talking about this past New Year’s or even the one before it.

  But even the assholes in the audience would feel bad when they noticed the most important detail in the scene.

  Cue the slowly growing pool of blood spreading from behind me.

  A good director would change the camera angle at this point. Maybe something low that gave a shot of my impressive A-cup cleavage and let you see him.

  There he’d be, approaching me from the shadows with concern all over his offensively hot face.

  Somewhere between admiring his impeccable jawline and to-die-for eyebrows they’d see the teeth. That is when the real question would start to form.

  They’d ask themselves, “Are his canines extra-long, or is it just my imagination?”

  If I wasn’t passed out, I would’ve happily cracked my eyes open to say that, “Nope. You’ve pretty much got it on the nose. Good job, detective.”

  As with any proper tease, the scene would cut away abruptly and bring you straight to the soul-crushingly ordinary existence of my Monday morning.

  Temporarily ordinary, at least.

  I looked for something to spread on my bagel before I rushed out the door. Birds were chirping outside, the air was pleasantly cool, and some asshole had left the cream cheese out on the counter until it fossilized. I gave the tub a dejected jab with a fork, then stuffed the bagel between my teeth and shouldered my bag.

  I had class to get to, then my internship, then my late-night gig. Just another day of chasing the dream.

  “Hey.” Zack appeared in the cramped, deteriorating kitchen. He played on the basketball team for our college, along with all the other guys I lived with. And no, there was absolutely no shenanigans going on, if you were wondering. The situation was a combination of coincidence, guys who weren’t pervs, and me not having enough disposable income to be picky.

  Besides, I was thirty years old, and if dating was a menu at a fancy restaurant, college guys were the section in another language. It probably would’ve been more accurate to say the entire menu on dating had gone up in flames when I decided to sacrifice my personal life to keep up with my academic goals.

  Zack was wearing a tank-top and his wild, curly brown hair was even messier than usual. “Have you seen the cream cheese?”

  I had a bagel in my mouth, arms full of books, and a bag on my shoulder that weighed as much as a tank. All I could manage for him was to make an indistinct noise and point my eyes toward the cream cheese container I’d knocked into the sink.

  “Ah, right on.” Zack pulled out a piece of bread from a bag that I had reason to believe was doubling as a mold and fungus culture. He ran tap water into the hardened cream cheese, then jammed a knife around in the container a few times until it softened and started spreading it on his bread.

  I knew I’d been living with a pack of mannerless, barbaric college guys too long when I didn’t even vomit all over myself at the sight of his antics.

  I was using my butt cheek and a tip-toe technique to push the door handle down when Zack lifted his knife and pointed it toward me. “Hey, wait a sec.”

  I bulged my eyes. This was worse than the hygienist trying to ask me about my day while she had four power tools jammed down to my tonsils.

  “You going to be coming home super late again?”

  I nodded my head.

  Zack made a face to show his disapproval. “You coming from that place you do the tours? Just text one of us. We’ll come walk you back.”

  I spit out my bagel and tried to call on some of my experience as a high school soccer player to knee it up and into my half-open bag. All I managed to do was knock it away, where it landed on edge and rolled under the couch. “I don’t need a personal escort,” I said. “But thanks.”

  “No,” Niles said. He was coming down the stairs as he spoke. Niles was the kind of tall that meant he had to duck his head to get through doorways. He was also so rail-thin that he could’ve probably walked through a fence by turning sideways, too. He had big, expressive eyes and a shaved head. “You shouldn’t be walking home that late by yourself. You at least need something. Do you still have that pepper spray Mooney gave you?”

  I felt like my shoulder and arms were going to disintegrate if I had to stand there holding my stuff any longer than necessary. “I know you guys mean well, but seriously. I don’t need a squad of over-protective, freakishly tall little brothers. I’ll be fine. I promise.”

  Zack and Niles shared a disapproving look on my behalf.

  I let myself out before they had time to argue more. As much as I appreciated their concern, it all only felt like a reminder of where I was. Thirty, still living in college-style housing, still trying to make a name for myself in my field, and still a student.

  There was also the ever-present, ever-depressing thought that I was spe
nding the twilight of my most datable years with my eyes glued to microscopes and my nose buried in books. I worried I’d wind up achieving all my goals only to find there was nobody who was still waiting around to share my life with.

  But I did what I always did and shoved those concerns down to my core where they could fester away in the background.

  I sat through my advanced hematology lecture while furiously scribbling notes. I crammed for a biomedical theory test in the brief break between classes, inhaled my lunch while watching an online class lecture on my phone, and finished the day off by falling down a small flight of stairs in front of an army of sorority sisters practicing some kind of cultish chant.

  I rode the bus to what I liked to think of as an internship, but my graduate professors not-so-kindly called a “borderline illegal enterprise where I was more likely to catch a deadly pathogen than contribute to my thesis.” If my translation was correct, they didn’t approve. But most of them saw my particular field of interest with blood as an insult to the field. I wasn’t supposed to want to modify blood. It didn’t matter if it could help people, what mattered is that it simply wasn’t done.

  At least some people didn’t share their belief, even if it did mean I had to resort to unpaid work with a woman nobody took seriously.

  I let myself in the rickety fence in front of Anya Yuvinko’s house. It was nestled in a residential section of downtown on a pretty street. The black paint, crumbling stucco, and long-dead plants made it function more like a wart on an attractive girl’s nose.

  I found Anya in her basement, like usual. She had several centrifuges spinning down vials of blood and she was hunched over a microscope.

  Anya used to be a leading researcher relating to all things blood and hematology in Russia. Some sort of falling out had occurred, and she’d more or less fled to the states. Now her sole focus in life was finding out how to splice human blood with cat blood. She… really wanted cat ears. I wished that was a joke. Regardless of whether Anya had lost her mind, she had all the equipment I needed and none of the pretentiousness to stop me from doing my own work.

  She was in her late forties with short blonde hair she cut choppily herself. She usually worked in bath robes, moo-moo’s, or whatever else she could find.

  I set down a few cans of ravioli and instant noodles on the desk by the stairs when I came down. She never acknowledged the food I brought, but I also never got the impression she really left her house. Sometimes I wondered if she’d just starve to death if I didn’t bring her something to eat.

  “You will extract plasma now,” Anya said in perfectly annunciated English. She had no hint of an accent, but she frequently struggled with grammar in ways that made her either difficult to understand or accidentally hilarious.

  I got some of the menial tasks she needed help with while my mind picked over my own plans for the day.

  If I had to describe my academic interests in layman's terms, I’d say I was basically obsessed with blood. Not in a creepy, I take baths in the stuff kind of way, either. My interest was because I felt like the healing potential of blood still hadn’t been unlocked. My dream was to find a way to make a sort of synthetic super-blood we could inject into ourselves to fight off infections and disease before they started. Anya was just one unconventional step I’d had to take in my pursuit of that goal. The other was the fact that I hadn’t so much as been on a date in at least five years.

  But there’d be time for men later. Maybe when I was in my forties. I heard great things about the dating prospects for sexually inexperienced women in their forties, after all.

  2

  Cara

  I stifled a yawn as the last of my tour group headed back home. I’d changed clothes after my internship into something that was more me. I liked wearing outfits that were a little out-there. Sneakers were usually a must. I might wear an old torn t-shirt from a show I’d been to years ago with a black plaid skirt one night and heels with a flirty dress the next. The point was having fun with it. My outfit was basically my version of those mood boards my elementary school teachers used to put up.

  Tonight, I’d opted for black Converse, an “I came for the turkey” t-shirt with suggestive drops of white splattered around the letters. I was also wearing a neon blue and black plaid mini-skirt. The intended message? It has been a long ass day and I have no interest in making small talk, thanks but no thanks.

  But I also tended to dress a little drearier for my late-night gig giving haunted tours of downtown Savannah, Georgia. I typically ended the tour at the old Mercer-Williams house.

  I was just walking around making sure all the doors were locked when I decided I couldn’t wait until I got home to pee. I wasn’t supposed to use the bathrooms in the tour locations, but I’d been holding my pee so long I was either going to squat in an alley somewhere or desecrate the haunted mansion.

  I stealthily pushed open the creaky front door and tripped on the loose floorboard. I wound up crashing face-first into an antique table, which knocked several picture frames over.

  Whoops.

  Thankfully, I was alone, unless the ghosts I told my tours about were real, at least.

  I tried the bathroom on the first floor even though I knew the water hadn’t been turned on for decades. Sure enough, it hadn’t magically been activated so I could relieve myself.

  I knew I usually heard pipes rattling from the basement, so I headed through the darkened manor down the stairs.

  Distantly, I thought how most sane people would probably be scared out of their minds right about now. I’d just spent the last two hours explaining to wide-eyed tourists how dastardly and haunted this house was. In truth, the place did creep me out. I always had the sense that I wasn’t alone here, but I hadn’t had any of the ghostly encounters other tour guides claimed to experience.

  There were stories of former tour guides killing themselves here. People getting pushed down stairs. Phantom hands grabbing ankles and leaving marks.

  But my personal stance on the paranormal was “maybe, but probably not.” I thought it was fun to talk about. Unless a ghost decided to formally introduce itself, I was going to remain a skeptic. So the only fear I really had going into the darkened basement was of giant rats.

  I had to cross the large basement area to a door I’d never bothered to open. I was crossing my fingers there was a toilet behind it. I tried the handle and found it locked.

  “Shit!” I hissed. That was it. If I didn’t find a way to a toilet in the next five minutes, I was going to pee myself. It was that simple.

  I went to a precarious, tall standing shelf lined with endless buckets of paint and heavy tools, hoping to find some kind of key. I stood on my tiptoes and saw something metallic hanging just over the edge of one of the top shelves.

  “Don’t do it, Cara. You’re not coordinated. You will die.”

  I ignored my own advice and planted one foot on the first shelf and tried to reach for the key. It wasn’t enough, so my full bladder compelled me to climb up one more shelf like it was a giant ladder.

  I barely got the key between my fingertips by stretching as far as my short frame would allow. I was on one tip-toe with my fingers fully extended like Harry Potter about to grab the snitch.

  That was the moment I felt the shelf lurch.

  I was falling forward toward a brick wall.

  Oh hell no.

  I closed my eyes and held on for dear life.

  There was a huge collision and clatter of thousands of things falling from the shelf—thankfully not including the stupid thirty-year-old thing clinging to it. My forehead banged against a paint bucket and something bounced up then pounded painfully against my back.

  “Ugh,” I murmured. I slid my hand between my legs to make sure I hadn’t peed myself. “Hah,” I said, finding I was dry. “I still got it.”

  With some premature old woman grunts, I pulled myself out of the spilled carnage of tools, cans, and now-broken shelves. When I got a few steps back, I
saw the shelf and its contents had broken a door-sized hole in the brick wall.

  Shit. I was going to get fired.

  I wasn’t sure what I expected on the other side, but I did not expect to see a perfectly preserved room.

  I stood there staring at the opening as dust filtered down from the disturbed rafters overhead.

  Why was there a room in the haunted mansion behind a bricked-up wall?

  I took a half-step backwards, then looked at my hand. I was holding the key.

  Some things in life were more important than the loss of your job, damaging historic locations, or potentially disturbed ghosts. One of those things was a full bladder, so I quickly rushed to what I prayed was a bathroom.

  Sure enough, it wasn’t.

  I closed the door anyway and found a bucket I could use. If I had to choose between discreetly finding a way to dispose of a bucket of my own urine and peeing my pants, I’d take the bucket.

  I was in the middle of hiking up my skirt when I heard footsteps. Multiple pairs of footsteps.

  3

  Cara

  I clapped a hand over my mouth and tried not to make a sound.

  I wasn’t imagining it. Footsteps. Shifting rocks. Voices.