A Predatory Nature Who: John and Shelly What: A walk, a trip home When: Present, night Where: Vegas Ratings: Low
Las Vegas’ version of the Eiffel Tower fascinated Shelly. Why was it situated near an Italian-style hotel and casino? Why did people dressed as Marvel characters dance outside of it for tips? Shelly had never personally been to Paris, so she couldn’t vet the authenticity, but she had an inkling it wasn’t right. Regardless, she stood outside the structure, dressed in a black and white striped boat-neck top, black tapered pants, and ballet flats. She couldn’t commit fully to the look, she didn’t want to chop her hair off, but instead it was pulled back in a ponytail.
She was also holding a pretzel in a paper wrapper, large flakes of salt falling off. A bite mark could be seen on one curve of it. The blonde was watching Iron Man breakdance.
John spotted the blonde ponytail easily enough in the crowd. He strolled towards her, hands in the pockets of his gray colored trousers, his navy shirt buttoned but without a tie. He had to admit he liked the view from this side of her almost as much as the front. He leaned around her shoulder and took a bite of her pretzel, making a second imprint of teeth. “That’s good,” he told her around a mouthful. “Salty.” John used his finger to wipe a dot of salt off the corner of his mouth.
He took in her shirt and pants. Very Parisian. “Where’s your beret?”
She heard his voice and felt his presence before seeing him, turning around to look.“There’s no beret,” she told him, as if that were patently obvious. “That would ruin it.” Shelly looked up at him, smiling. “You’re almost right. You just need a…” The blonde reached up and ran her fingers through his hair, displacing some of the soft strands. “There,” she said softly. The scattered crowd began clapping, Iron Man must have been done with his dance.
Shelly waved the pretzel. “Do you want the rest of this? I just bought it for something to do while I waited. You always need a hand prop.”
“No,” he scoffed. “Bread’s not really my thing.” John took the pretzel out of Shelly’s hand and tossed it at the nearest trash can when there was a break between the people. The food made it into the receptacle, but her paper napkin flapped like wings and sailed across the plaza. It landed on the ground and stuck to someone’s shoe. “If you need a new hand prop, I make a decent one.” He took her hand and linked it around his elbow. John leaned closer to ask, “Which did you pick first, the location or the outfit?”
Shelly laughed, watching the napkin get stuck like toilet paper to a guy wearing loafers. “Mood, outfit, location. In that order,” she explained. “But I’m being myself tonight, I decided. Even if it might ruin the fantasy.”
She leaned against him, her fingers wrapping around his arm. “I didn’t plan anything beyond this. I kept thinking to myself, where do I want to go next with John? And I realized I’d probably be up for going anywhere.”
“Well that’s flattering,” he said, and he found that he quite liked the lean of her on his arm. It wasn’t often that he found himself in frequent company with a human he wasn’t seeking to add to the menu. Not that he’d surrendered the idea of biting her altogether— that picture of the blood dotting her leg had been merciless.
John took them on a walk in no particular direction, following wherever the crowd parted. “Too flattering. I nearly forgot to ask who I had drinks with the other night, if it wasn’t you. I’m not offended. I haven’t been my unadulterated self either.”
“That was...75 percent me,” she told him, smiling. His admission had her even more intrigued. Shelly turned her head to look at him, studying his profile carefully. “Don’t tell me you lied,” she said, faux-scandalized. “I don’t know if I could take it.”
“Oh, I don’t think I lied!” John was the picture of innocence. “I might have left out a few key details.” They bumped past a performer in a red cape. John’s hazel eyes were dancing, committing him to the narrative.. “Who could blame me? It’s never a good thing to say too much in the beginning. I need to tip the scales in my favor first… Make it harder for you to run screaming in the other direction.” His fingers imitated a woman scampering off. “Especially if I’m going to win you over without cheating.”
She listened to him, amused. “And how do you know you haven’t already won me over? I could be ridiculously easy to win over.” Shelly imagined the different possible scenarios in which she would run away screaming. The first thing she could think of was that he was married. The blonde hoped that wasn’t the case. They were good for a mark, but she didn’t want to actually like a married man. That would be too cliche for words.
“What if I asked you back to my apartment?” Shelly locked her gaze onto his. “Does that sound like I’m afraid?”
“No. It doesn’t.” John stared back, in some danger of steering them into a person or an object. With any luck, they were nowhere near a fountain. “It’d be a hell of an invitation, one neither of us would likely forget. If you asked,” he amended, tilting his head. “Semantics.”
They passed under a slew of neon and blinking lights, which painted their faces and the sidewalk around them in unusual tones. Nearby, Las Vegas Boulevard was packed with traffic. He could hear the car engines, the horns of enthusiastic tourists and paid drivers. Overhead, an elevator took groups of people to the top of the Eiffel tower to take poorly-lit photos of the strip.
“Now, that sounds a little ominous. I might be reconsidering. Quick, do something charming.” She tugged at his arm insistently, pulling him off to the side so they wouldn’t be bumped into.
John let himself be pulled out of the swarm of people and he examined Shelly from close range. He lifted a thumb to her lip and rested it there, close to her human teeth. His knuckles were soft on her chin. He had daydreamed about kissing her since he saw her — once or twice. It seemed as if he wanted to do it now. He looked like he was contemplating how much he wanted to crack open a bottle he’d been saving for a special occasion.
“Who can be charming on command? Call that man a liar.” He backed away, but he pulled her by the hand, arm bent to keep her close. “Yesterday a student brought a Keats poem to my class. I was sitting in the back of the room, trying to forgive him for being predictable. He might have been going through a break up. But the further he went, the more I thought he might be warning me about you. Do you know La Belle Dame sans Merci?”
Shelly let herself be tugged along, smiling to herself as the way he looked at her burned itself into her brain. “No, I don’t think so,” she answered honestly. “Tell me about it.” She wove her fingers into his, the gesture strangely intimate. Each touch they gave each other felt weighted with meaning, or perhaps she was imagining it.
John picked up her hand and kissed the back of it. “It’s the story of a woman with beautiful eyes who seduces a knight and leaves him to die. It’s about illusion and reality, love as a kind of enslavement. No one ever accused Keats of subtlety.” He smiled and looked at her fingers. “When the knight realizes what’s happening, it’s too late, and from the sounds of it, he wouldn’t have stopped it even if he had known.”
“Do you think I would do that to you?” she asked. “I’m not really that powerful, you know.” Shelly watched him carefully, then with her free hand she pulled out her phone. After a few moments, it chimed to let her know that a car was on its way.
“I don’t invite people back,” the blonde told John. “But I guess you were charming enough.”
John looked at her phone, then to Shelly. “I suspect it’s because I would have happily accepted less.”
The impending arrival of a car gave him somewhere to walk. They went from the base of the tower to where cars could idle while they let on passengers. “I think it’s best to take romantic poetry with a grain of salt,” John said. “It was written from his perspective. Is he a lover scorned or an obsessor? Maybe she was wise to leave him on that hillside.”
As they approached the curb, he asked, “Am I going to find out you leave laundry all over?”
She gave a noncommittal shrug. “Maybe. Or maybe I’m a hoarder. That’s all part of the element of surprise.” Her eyes lit up. “Ooh, no. I have 20 cats, and they all want to sit on your lap at once. Mean cats.” Shelly stifled a laugh, looking away.
The truth was, her apartment wasn’t the most glamorous, but it was hers and she liked it. The living room was her favorite, painted jade green and adorned with framed film posters. The blonde had scored an antique tufted brown leather sofa at a vintage store. It was a stately character.
A silver Hyundai joined the queue, the license plate matching her app. “That’s us,” she told him, leading him over.
He imagined himself sitting in an armchair under a lapful of cats, all vying for attention. “Going home with you is a sore temptation,” he said, opening the door, “but twenty cats might be a dealbreaker.” He waited until she’d gotten in the car to get in and close the door. “If you said ten, I could look the other way.”
“No cats,” she assured him, her hand reaching across the small middle seat to find his. “I have a giant, shaggy, drool-y Saint Bernard. Absolutely hates men.” She grinned, head leaning back against the seat, her ponytail trailing down her shoulder as she turned to look at him in the dim. Usually, Shelly liked to stare out car windows and sink into a pleasant sort of melancholy, but this was much better.
“What a sales pitch. Does he eat shoes, as well? If so, I can’t wait to meet him.” John watched the lights of the city coming through the windows to flash across her skin and hair.
The car wound its way through tourist traffic until the lights faded and the people began to thin out. She lived closer to downtown, in a modest apartment building off 14th St. and Stewart Avenue. The nearest attraction was a Roman Catholic church constructed in a Spanish Mission style. They pulled up in front of her building, a plain stucco two-flat. She lived on the top floor.
John looked outside at the neighborhood. It surprised him. The streets were wide, the buildings all done in a similar beige, with little vegetation to delineate the properties. In the distance, if it were daytime, they’d be able to see the foothills past the suburbs of Las Vegas. They hadn’t ventured far from downtown, but it seemed like another world. John hadn’t become accustomed to more expensive things until the last few decades, when he’d begun to publish as well as teach, but he wasn’t prone to extravagance. Most of the places he’d lived had been small, urban dwellings with little light and more books, pieces of artwork, and records than furniture.
He gave her hand a light squeeze. “Come on. Show me where the real Shelly lives.”
She dug out her keys from her small black purse as she led the way up the stairs to the second floor. “As opposed to the fake Shelly, who lives in a giant penthouse,” she joked, opening her door.
Once she had crossed the threshold, she gestured inside with her arm. “Welcome to my apartment. Come on in.” It led into a little hallway with coat hooks on the green wall, a small table that held a mix of open and unopened mail. There was no hint of either cat or dog. The living room was in plain view beyond.
John looked down at the threshold and stepped across. He closed the door behind him and took a few steps into the apartment. “I like the green,” he said, venturing into the living room. If he had guessed what color she would have painted the walls, this wouldn’t have been it, but he was hard-pressed to explain why. It was a color of the natural world. Life. He felt himself in strange juxtaposition to it. The walls of his condo were charcoal gray, the shelves wood, the decor, a collection of paintings and thick drapes. It was a home in a state of perpetual night, or rain. Hers was vivid. Not overdone but tasteful.
John browsed the framed posters, pointing to one. “You’re a cinephile?” That did not surprise him, given her retro-chic aesthetic. He reached a hand out to her, still looking at an image.
She took his hand readily, smiling as he looked at the posters like a visitor in an art gallery. “I guess you could say that.” And then, Shelly tossed it out like it was nothing, conversational. “It was something I always used to do with my dad.”
The blonde pointed to a poster of Grace Kelly and James Stewart from ’Rear Window’. “That was his. Did you want something to drink?” She looked toward the kitchen, the humming white fridge.
John caught the past tense on both sentences and gave her a curious look. Had her father passed away or was he no longer part of her life? Having watched the death of everyone he knew and loved in life, he couldn’t recommend the experience. Before he could take a conversational bite out of it, she brought up a drink. An offer, a quick retraction. He barely knew her, but he had an inkling that there was something peculiar about the way Shelly darted between topics. Then again, he might have been seeing a pattern where there wasn’t one and she was only being a polite hostess.
“I’m fine,” he waved it off. “Do you always follow consequential things with inconsequential ones?” Any notion that he was being critical of her was put off by a soft smile.
Shelly looked up at him, more than a little surprised. “I don’t really talk about consequential things with most people,” she admitted. “I don’t think they deserve it. They get surface level stuff.” It was strange speaking that out loud. It was an inner thought that usually remained dormant beneath a thin layer of subconscious.
“Hmph!” John shook his head, trying to imagine how her mind worked out who deserved which parts of her. “It must be lonely at the top.” He looked at the Hitchcock poster and then frowned, taking a mental pause and thinking, ‘Wait a minute,’ because he did know how that was, didn’t he? It was only that his criteria were markedly different.
“You know what?” John turned to her. “I can relate to you on this, but I’m in a position of not being able to tell you why without being vague.” He rubbed his thumb across her hand, as gently as he could.
“What if I told you that I was a predatory sort of person? Professionally,” he corrected, narrowing one eye, a clear indication that he might be being facetious. “And that, in any given situation, I had to decide whether to behave as that predator or not? And if so, how cut-throat would I be? And that, after all this time, I couldn’t tell you why I chose to go one way or another, who deserved decency or to have me looking down my nose as them, but there’s some sort of internal metric for it? A sense I have of things, rather than it stemming from any logic?”
“I would say that everyone is a little predatory, especially here.” Shelly looked down at his thumb, watching it sweep over her skin. “But it sounds like you’re talking about something different.” Even as this hypothetical — was it hypothetical? — was posed, she found herself drawn closer to him.
“And I would ask what I would get. Decency or…?” She raised a curious eyebrow.
John raised his back at her. “You would already know if it was the other.”
He picked her hand up and linked it around his neck. His other palm went to Shelly’s lower back. He didn’t know the nature of what was between them, but he liked being in her company and talking to her, trying to decipher the puzzle of her, and he liked to look at her.
He put his cheek alongside hers and breathed. When he was alone, especially in a bad mood, he could go the longest time without remembering to do that simplest of human things. As long as she kept him talking, moving, he’d do it often enough to seem like he was alive.
She closed her eyes, her fingers resting on the back of his neck, and pressed closer against him. Shelly could feel her pulse quicken a little at the touch and proximity. And then she turned, just a little, to plant a kiss on his cheek, smiling at the small gesture. The simplicity of it. Her touch was usually given to seduce, lure, manipulate. This was none of those.
“You fascinate me,” the blonde whispered, the words barely containing enough air to move past her lips. “I want you to stay.”
“Then I’ll stay.” Between the kiss and the whisper, it was a draw which was more appealing. The way she behaved with him reminded him of women from a different time, when everything was incremental and between the lines. She was more effective like this than she gave herself credit for.
John ran her ponytail in the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, fixating on the way it curled at the end. He imagined wrapping it around his fingers in a tight cinch. The more he thought of things like that, the more careful and slow he tried to be, which was not altogether altruistic. He could be a bit of a masochist and he liked to test himself. Struggling was a lot more entertaining than coasting by. “What would you like to do? I think you could propose just about anything and I’d agree to it.”
“I think first we need to do this, or it’s going to drive me crazy,” she said, eyes locked on his and smiling before she pressed her lips against his, like at Lucky Day but more insistent this time. Her fingers crept from the back of his neck up into his hair, the slight curls of it. Her lips parted and her other hand rested on his shoulder.
He was right. It was agreeable.
John let himself kiss her back this time. It was one of his favorite things to do because it required so much deliberation. Even if he kept his fangs from lowering, they were always in his mouth, a touch sharper than human teeth. Care had to be taken not to nick her: good for him, less pleasant for her. He opened his mouth and deepened it, going slow but not holding back. Shelly’s mouth felt as good as it looked.
He wondered what she thought of his, a couple of degrees cooler, like he’d drunk something cold. The longer it lasted, and the more friction created, the more heat would transfer from her to him. Over the years, he had figured out that the better he was at this, the less his partner stopped to think. He found himself breathing along with her. He could hear her heart, a muted thump-thump-thump coming at him from all directions. He tugged her closer by the waist to see if it would change for him.
Shelly wasn’t thinking about much except sinking deeper into that kiss. She welcomed the pause in her brain, which seemed to whip from thought to thought without her control sometimes. She let her hand fall from his shoulder, to his chest, then to the buttons on his shirt, toying with them without any real intent to undo them. Shelly wouldn’t mind if they did, though.
The blonde pulled back from the kiss, her cheeks slightly flushed and eyes bright as she stared at John. “I thought that would help, but I don’t think it did.” She laughed lightly, her arms lifting to wrap around his solid shoulders.
“That’s the sort of thing I tell myself when I need an excuse,” he admitted. He ran a thumb along his lip. “Am I wearing your lipstick?” He looked at his thumb. He could remember a time when going home with someone’s make-up or perfume on him was a badge of honor, one likely to get him boxed upside the head by his father. “Not that I mind.” John gave up looking and laid his forehead on hers, a perpetually black, unruly head of hair next to a sleek, blonde one.
Her eyes fluttered closed again, just breathing. “It might have been an excuse,” she admitted. “I can’t seem to stop touching you.” Even now, her hands roamed, finding different places to rest, palms flat to feel as much surface as possible.
“Are you a predator?” Shelly asked suddenly. “If you are, you should tell me now.” She was smiling, but inside her pulse was quickening again, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Because she couldn’t remember letting someone this close in a long time.
“Yes.” He saw no reason to lie. Sooner or later, the truth of things revealed itself, so a lie was no better than a stall tactic. “What if I agreed not to take it out on you? Would that be enough to keep you here a little longer?” John’s hands moved on her lower back. It was an unfair question. No matter what Shelly’s imagination brought to mind when he called himself that, he knew she wouldn't think to herself ‘vampire.’ Thief, habitually abusive, sexual predator, she might think of those things, and at least he didn’t fit those bills. “If you want to know, I’ll tell you. But you might wish you hadn’t asked.”
“Well, I live here,” she said, slightly breathlessly, her hands falling onto his arms. “So, it’d be keeping you here a little longer.” Shelly wanted to know, but didn’t. It was deciding which part would win out that was difficult. The one who needed to know everything, and the one who liked pretending.
So, she tried something new. “You decide,” she continued, tilting her chin up. “I’ll leave it up to you.”
She was antsy about it. He could tell by her respiration. John leaned back to look at her, weighing his options. This early in knowing her, the only thing he had to lose was potential. Well, that, and his good sense. So here's to hoping that if she ran off, his fickle brain didn’t turn it into a chase he couldn’t give up. God knew that had happened more times than he wanted to count, with people he liked far less. He gathered Shelly’s hands in his, turning them over, his thumbs making soothing circles on her skin.
“Shelly,” he said, “Look at me.” He bent his knees a bit, catching hold of her eyes. The length of time that passed between blinks was cat-like. “You are safe, no matter what I show you.” John’s thumbs kept up their calming rhythm, his pupils expanding while he looked at her. What he was doing was borderline, nudging up on the line of planting a suggestion without forcing it. If she was easily susceptible, it would be like sliding into a dark, warm cocoon. If she was the type to resist, it would just seem like persuasion.
He lifted one of her hands and kissed it. John opened his mouth and let his teeth rest on her skin. At first, those teeth might seem more abrasive than she was accustomed to, but then some of them began to lengthen, to grow sharp. He didn’t bite down or break the skin, but he let her feel it.
Her expression at first was dubious, but as she looked into his hazel eyes, a calm came over her. Her breath was at even keel as her gaze dropped to his mouth. Shelly wasn’t entirely sure what she was seeing, or feeling. The teeth brought to mind movie images, there was no frame of reference grounded in reality. The only thing she knew was that she wasn’t scared. She was, however, curious.
“Are you...you can’t be.” The blonde shook her head slowly. “What are you?”
John took his mouth away. “I’m a lot of things. I am a writer with… five pseudonyms and counting? I’m a professor who’s recredentialed himself at least that many times. I’m a British citizen, or I was, all my documents are fraudulent.” He laughed to himself. “I happen to be one-hundred and fifty-three years old.” He put her fingers on the side of his neck. “My heart beats a fraction as often as yours, more when I’m exerting myself. The teeth are for exactly what you think.”
“Are you going to use them on me?” The question was presented calmly. “Or would you already have by now?” Shelly didn’t try pulling her hand away; she found that she didn’t want to. It was too interesting, too out of the ordinary. And possibly dangerous, though she didn’t feel any fear.
The other facts he had stated bounced around in her head, trying to find purchase in the logical parts of her brain. He was old. Very old. John was a vampire. The word made an odd sort of sense. The hypothetical statements now suddenly made sense.
“Only if you asked me to, and not to hurt you or turn you,” he said. “But I’m not always this polite about it.”
John had killed people, of course, doing so on purpose when he was hungriest, or they screamed too loudly, or threatened to expose his secret, or when those dark impulses crawled up out of nowhere and made him want to. He had gone back to the same victim numerous times and only killed them when they suspected it least. And then there were the occasional, drunken ‘oopsie daisies’ when he buried his face in a throat and didn’t notice until the body slumped across his arm. But more often than not, he stopped short of doing permanent damage because survival and a trail of dead bodies didn’t go hand in hand, and because he genuinely liked people.
“That picture,” he said. “That was an example of what not to do, unless you like torturing me, and you might,” he added lightly. “But I’m not incapable of being around you. I won’t leap on you if you bite your tongue.”
Shelly swallowed. She had forgotten about that photo. “I don’t want to torture you. I don’t even want you to leave. I’m a little bit questioning my sanity, but…” There were two options. One, he was a complete fantasist and she had bad eyesight, and wasn’t she also a little guilty of the former? Two, he was telling the truth, and she was making a very poor decision.
The blonde looked down at the floor, then back up at him. “I don’t want you to leave,” she reiterated.
“So I’ll stay for a while.” John tucked a finger under her chin, wanting to ease her mind. “But I’ll wait to kiss you until you want me to. Mouths on vampires,” he said, lifting his shoulders in a mild shudder, “they’re a risky thing.” He could understand some hesitation on her part, now that he’d left the imprint of his fangs on the back of her hand. Shelly must have drawn some conclusions about the things his mouth had done over a century and a half.
“Okay,” she agreed, drawing her hand back but only to lead him over to the sofa. They could sit together for a while. It was still odd and unfamiliar to have someone in her space, a relative stranger, and that wasn’t even factoring in the vampire situation. Shelly needed a good sit.
“I need time to think this through,” she admitted to him. “For now, I just want to be next to you.”
“Easily done.” John sat next to her, stretching his legs ahead of himself on the floor and sinking back in the leather couch. His fingers found her ponytail again, twisting it into a knot and letting it spring free. “Whether you want to do that again or not, you really ought to consider knowing me. We could people-watch,” he told her with a smile, framing the scenario in front of them with his free hand. “Deliver scathing commentaries.”
Shelly laughed, leaning against him. “How did you manage to choose the thing that would appeal to me the most?” she asked, half-jokingly. And then, more seriously, “You want to know me?” She watched his fingers play through her hair.
“What possible other motive could I have for being here?” John used the tail end of her hair to swish her nose. It was probably too soon to make light of the situation but he couldn’t help himself. “Of course I want to know you.”
She laughed again, but there was a nervous note to it this time. “Well, when you come to regret that decision, I’ll make sure to remind you that you wanted to.” Shelly kicked off her flats and adjusted to tuck her legs underneath her, then rested her head against his shoulder.
It could have been worse, she supposed. He could have been married.