14. Xander

Ibade goodbye to Luke at the front door, keeping myself protected behind the shadows while Luke stepped out into the bright afternoon sun.

“I’ll see you again soon?” he asked hopefully.

“Indeed,” I replied, hastening to close the door before the sunlight crept in. “I shall send you correspondence soon. Wait for another letter from me.”

Luke nodded eagerly. “I most certainly will. Bye, Xander. And thank you for the amazing time!”

I watched him leave through one of the less opaque curtains. I’d given him directions back to his home before he left, confident now that I could fully trust him knowing where I lived. He gave me no reason not to trust him, but I’d had unpleasant experiences with men before – disguised vampire hunters in the 1800s who attempted to stalk and kill me, men who wanted to show their friends the wild creature they’d had sex with, and men who took revenge on me after breaking up. Luke was not one of those men, I was happy to say. Luke was different from everyone else I’d ever met.

I stepped away from the dangers of the window once Luke turned the corner, safely outside of my estate. I had nothing but a large, empty mansion to go back to now that he was gone, but I had one task I needed to do before I began my daily session of wallowing in self-pity.

I made haste to my library, sitting down at my desk to pen another note to Luke. I had a better idea of what to say this time. The first time I wrote him, I’d never even met the poor man before. I had no idea what he looked like, what his interests were, or if the first date would work out.

Now, we’d been as intimate as possible for two creatures to be. I knew every inch of him. I knew what he looked like when he fell asleep next to me. I knew I could count on him wanting to see me again without being repulsed by my more vampiric qualities.

I finished writing my wordy note in record time, but I had to wait till dusk to take it out to the mailbox. I briefly considered risking sun exposure for a few minutes, but the pain that would put me in for the rest of the day was simply not worth it, and I thought better of my foolish idea. Lust was a powerful desire, but not powerful enough for me to put myself in severe danger. It was too late for the letter to be dispatched today anyway.

The moment the sun set enough for me to go outside, I ran the letter out to the mailbox. It would reach Luke in a few days, and until then, All I had to do was wait patiently and hope he was as excited as I was to continue this relationship.

Waiting proved to be harder than I thought. Many humans spoke to me about time seeming to move more quickly as the years wore on. I experienced that for a time as well, but after a century or so, time slowed down again.

As I became more aware of immortality’s grasp on my existence while my friends and non-vampire family died all around me, the days dragged on in endless agony. There was no end rapidly approaching me, unlike humans. I didn’t need to complete my life goals before I died. My only timeline was that of humanity’s progress, which had put a wrench in my plans before, but there was always a workaround.

With the snail’s pace of time in mind, I conceded to the idea of waiting for my reward and set to work cleaning up the mansion. The least I could do for Luke was make this place more livable. I refused to hire a housekeeper, lest they, like many others, become too repulsed with vampirism to continue working, so instead, I did the bulk of the work myself and left bins of years-old detritus by the roadside for the garbage collectors to dispose of permanently.

After a full night and day of work, I stood back to admire my results. The dining hall was no longer ornamented with stacks of old newspapers and mail, the entry floor lay polished and sparkling, the pictures lining the staircase walls were straightened and staring back as ominously as ever, and the thick layer of dust coating everything in the house was gone, leaving it vibrant and alive, in a sense – more alive than I would ever be.

“Yes,” I said to myself, “Luke will be pleased when he returns.”

And the best part about my cleaning spree was that I was an entire night and day closer to seeing him.