Joe Vampire - By Steven Luna Page 0,61

The whistling lips, though? Those were right on the money. But that was a very good thing. “Joe?” My mouth went all dry as I stood and shook her hand. “I could tell by the Ray Bans. I’m Megan.” She sort of looked me up and down, and the smell of her skin made me too fuzzy-headed to be self-conscious. “I almost didn’t spot you from your description… there’s really nothing average about you.” She smiled when she said it, which I took to mean she scaled me on the above average side rather than the below.

That brought the rest of the self-consciousness through all at once.

I wanted to answer with some flattery of my own, but my language skills had switched off altogether. I sort of squeaked from the back of my throat, something like, “Me, too.” It made no sense, which was fine, I think, since it also came out sounding more like I had choked on my gum.

“Are you okay? You seem sort of… uncomfortable.”

My reply was so very unrelated to her question. “Weird about the polar bears losing their home to global warming, huh?” Shit! I had skipped over all the other topics and started at the bottom. That totally crapped up my word cloud. There was no way to go back and start over.

“So tragic, I don’t know how we’ve let this happen to our planet, but I’m sure it won’t end well if we don’t do something about it soon.”

Whoa. Good save.

It looked like someone had been working on a word cloud of her own.

POST 29

Getting (Un)Lucky

Megan and I had more in common that just music:

• She likes reading; I’ve heard of books.

• She’s studying fashion design; I wear clothes.

• She volunteers at an animal shelter; I eat animals.

The similarities were uncanny.

Actually, what we had instead of overlapping interests was a similar sense of humor, and a willingness to treat our blind date as a fun experiment rather than a stab at finding love. Not that the outing was lacking in romance. But it was only a first try, for both of us. She had put aside actual living in favor of grad school when an internship for a design house in New York came along and changed her plans completely. She’d tried balancing both for a while, which meant she was either at work or holed up in her apartment. It had been months since she’d had any fun, and she was just now figuring out how to balance her two worlds. She was ready to add some life back into her life.

See? We had so much in common it was frightening.

What we didn’t share was a taste for Cabernet Sauvignon; that was hers alone. I can barely pronounce it, let alone bring myself to consider it a beverage. When the waiter brought a bottle and two glasses, I turned mine upside-down. “Not a wine drinker, huh?” Megan asked me.

I couldn’t help remembering the sake effect. “Wine and I have a bit of a history together – a tainted history.”

Wrong words. She probably thought I was an alcoholic.

“Maybe you just didn’t try the right stuff. You could give it another shot now.” Megan’s smile was hypnotic, and paired with her sea foam eyes I sort of melted into agreement. Wasn’t that what this whole night was about, anyway – giving things another shot? So I went with it. She reached across the table and I sipped from her glass. The other diners probably puked up their crab legs at how cute we were, her feeding me wine while I clinked my nubby fangs on the rim, trying not to grimace when the dirty tang hit my tongue. “Maybe I should finish this with a straw.” I righted my glass and we split the rest of the bottle. Once or twice we interlocked our arms in that non-realistic way that people in movies do sometimes.

So sweet, this Megan.

And there was no life-altering sake aftereffect, thank Dionysus… or whoever it is that governs drunk folk these days.

When we were both nicely wined-up and mellowed out, right before her lobster Thermidor and my Filet in the Raw arrived, the conversation veered toward the more personal. “Does it make you uncomfortable that I know about your… situation?”

The ice having been well-broken by then, I wanted to answer honestly. “It does, a little. The fact that you didn’t shout it through the restaurant just now tells me you get how it is, though. Thanks for that.”

She tilted her