Молли Харпер: Nice Girls Dont' Live Forever

What’s next? Sweater vests?”

“So, what are you doing back?” she asked, squeezing me tight. “I told Zeb not to call you. The break-in wasn’t that bad.”

“Yes, I’m very glad to be back, and I missed you, too,” I responded in a flat voice, avoiding the question. “Keep this barrage of homecoming welcome going, and I won’t give you your presents.”

“Presents!” Andrea cried, clapping and hopping up and down.

“From the snottiest personalparfumeriein France.” I paused to hand her a little lavender gift bag.

“I have to tell you that the chemist was slightly unnerved that I was able to describe your natural scent in so much detail, but it was important to get the blend that would complement you.”

“I’ma little unnerved that you could describe my natural scent in such detail,” she admitted. “Did you get Dick what he asked for?”

“Yes, I got him shot glasses from every country we visited. And in every gift shop I entered, I was glared at and called a ‘horrible American,’” I said, rolling my eyes as I handed her the tinkling box of extremely embarrassing trinkets. “And I got him this!”

She squinted to read the wrinkled red T-shirt I was holding up. “It’s in Italian.”

“It says, ‘My friend went to Italy, and all I got was this stupid T-shirt,’” I said. “I thought I’d add some class to Dick’s T-shirt collection.”

“I just got rid of most of the tackier ones.” Andrea groaned.

“So … you framed my dog for T-shirt theft, huh?” I narrowed my eyes at her.

“If you were laundering a “Federal Bikini Inspector” T-shirt what would you do?”

“I would not use an innocent dog to mask my attempts at giving my boyfriend a makeover,” I told her.

“I’m not trying to change all of him,” she whispered, eyeing the back of the shop, where Dick was working. “Just the tackier T-shirts. And the ones with crusty armpits.”

Andrea eyed my hesitant gait as I rounded the counter. “Did you get a rash while you were traveling?”

“Mom, jeans, starch. I don’t want to talk about it.” I shuddered as I climbed onto one of the high, cushioned bar stools I’d ordered in a deep eggplant. “How do you guys do it? You make it look so easy. You’ve only been dating for a little while, and your personalities are so different.

Frankly, your googly-eyed happiness is starting to piss me off.”

“Well, to be honest, we had a little outside help,” she said, her tone a bit sheepish. She disappeared to the self-help section, then came back with a large pink book with pouty fangpuckered lips from the cover.

“Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less Destructive Relationships.” I read the title aloud. My eyes narrowed at her. “You read this crap?”

“We sell this crap, you hypocrite,” she said, her lips pinched into an expression that would have made Jenny proud. “Besides, there aren’t a lot of books out there for mortal women dating vampires. I think the psychiatric world at large believes that if you’re dating a vampire, you have other issues that need to be addressed before your relationship problems. But this was really helpful. It’s written for women who have recently been turned and are having a hard time adjusting to dating their undead peers. There’s lots of stuff about healthy expectations and boundaries and violent tendencies. So, do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

Andrea walked to the coffee bar. A few seconds later, the espresso machine roared to life.

“Right, because what would I know about being in a relationship with a much older vampire you may or may not be able to trust?”

“Dang you and your logic.” I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and took a deep, unnecessary breath. Andrea was the first human I’d ever fed from. It tends to bond gals for life.

Andrea helped me bridge the gap from semi-social-phobic closet vampire to respectable undead citizen. Thrilled finally to have someone to take classes with after years of an empty social calendar, she enrolled us in yoga classes, ceramics classes, jewelry-making classes, even cake decorating, which we agreed later was a mistake. She’d basically become the girlfriend I’d always tried to make Zeb into. If I couldn’t talk to her about this, whom could I talk to?

I sighed. “He’s probably cheating on me. And I think he might have broken up with me … but without saying the actual words.”

Andrea chewed her plump bottom lip. “Gabriel is a pretty direct person. I’m sure he would have—”

“He said, ‘If you have to go, you have to go.’ And then he said, ‘This is for the best. This trip didn’t exactly work out as we’d hoped. I’ll call you.’” I caught the flash of horror cross her features. “See? You flinched! I knew it!”

“Let’s go back to the beginning. Why did you think Gabriel might be cheating on you? Not impressions or feelings, actual facts.”

I ticked the offenses off with my fingers. “Weird phone calls that he refused to take around me, manic behavior, constant changes in our hotel plans, notes at our hotels that he wouldn’t let me read. And what I could read wasn’t good. Lots of present-tense words. But I’m just being paranoid, right? I mean, there’s probably a rational explanation for all this, right? Like he’s an undead secret agent? That’s plausible, right?”

Andrea winced as she poured me an espresso in a tiny white demitasse. “Well … probably not.

That’s all pretty suspicious stuff. When Mattias cheated on me, he had a lot of late ‘faculty meetings.’ He took calls from his ‘teaching assistant’ in another room.”

“Please stop using the quotation marks, I need this life lesson to be unvarnished and without ironic subtext.” Andrea pushed the fancy cup at me again. I considered claiming some sort of vampire aversion to the high-octane concoction, but Andrea was well aware that while we lack the digestive enzymes to digest solid food, we have no problems with most liquids. Sometimes it’s a pain that Andrea is so well informed.

I was not a big coffee drinker in life. Iced frappuccinos from Dairy Queen were about as adventurous as I got. But Andrea insisted that if I was going to sell coffee, I had to know what I was talking about. And now that the machinery was up and running, she was my self-appointed caffeine pusher.

“Do I have to?” Andrea shoved the cup at me with more force. I took a sip. “Gah! That’s awful!

My cousin Muriel isn’t that bitter, and she has two gay ex-husbands … who now live together. Is that how it’s supposed to taste?”

“Sadly, yes. It’s an acquired taste,” Andrea admitted as she sipped her own coffee without making Edward G. Robinson faces. “So, invisible quotation marks aside, when Mattias cheated on me, he stopped taking me to familiar restaurants, because he’d started taking her to our places.

It was new restaurants all the time. He was on edge. He accused me of being paranoid when I asked legitimate questions like ‘Why did you change your e-mail password?’ or ‘Where did you sleep yesterday?’” I groaned. “I’m going to be miserable and alone for the rest of my long, long life.”

She shrugged. “Oh, it’s not so bad. We still have yoga on Thursday nights.”

“Oh, yeah, that will make up for the loss of companionship and sexual gratification.”

Andrea grinned salaciously. “Well, you never know what you mightlearnin yoga.”

“Perv.” I chucked a coffee filter at her.

Andrea finally gave me the full report on the break-in. She’d arrived early a few evenings back, expecting a delivery of comfy chairs for the reading nook, and found the front window bashed in.

She called the cops, who were sadly familiar with the neighborhood, and they chalked it up to drug addicts, teenagers, or drug-addicted teenagers. Proving precisely why I hired her in the first place, Andrea had already filed the insurance paperwork, arranged for an antiques appraiser from Louisville to come by to estimate the damage to the books, and contacted a glass repairman to replace the front window the following afternoon.