I was a senior, a bunch of us filled our high school principal’s car with rubber duckies while he was in the market doing his grocery shopping. Senior prank. Any graduating class worth their salt tries to pull one off. It felt pretty good to have the laughter directed at someone else for once.” He shook his head. “Anyway, we all hid across the street behind the planters and bushes, waiting for him to come out. When he saw what we did, he just laughed. We came out of our hiding places and tailgated with his groceries. Had them for dinner, right here on Main Street. It kind of turned into an unplanned block party.”
He looked over at Mary to find her cheek leaned against the seat, a silver-blue radiance meandering slowly around her head in the darkness, a dreamlike expression on her face that set off a leapfrog contest in his chest. Lord, she was beautiful.
In another life, maybe he was bringing home Mary to meet his pops for the first time.
They’re coming home for Thanksgiving dinner. She’s nervous, he’s reassuring her. They’ll have to sleep in separate rooms, but they’ll sneak out in the middle of the night. Out to the porch, beyond to the fields surrounding the house where fireflies dance and crickets chirp. Hand in hand, their kisses teasing at first, but turning more and more desperate until he’d have no choice but to wrap her legs around his waist in the shadows and appease their hunger, using his kiss to keep her quiet. But it would all feel like a prelude to their future. Something they’d relive through memories for the rest of their lives. Relatives would stop by for dinner the next day and ask when he planned on marrying the girl and he’d be smug as a son-of-a-bitch, because the ring would be in his pocket.
“When you were human, did you want to have children?”
“Yeah.” His lips tipped up, the sound of laughing babies and barking dogs filling his head. “Hell yeah. A whole brood. I wanted the messy house and the long road trips where everyone complains. Little league games, trips to the emergency room, last-minute barbeques.”
Mary shifted in her seat. “Is it human to want the bad things?”
“I don’t know.” He flipped back through a file of memories and voices from the past. “No. I don’t think so. Everyone believes they’ll be better at life than their parents when they get older, but hard as they try, it’s a pattern and the pattern is going to get you. The bad things are just as unavoidable, no matter how much knowledge you consume. I loved that guaranteed repetition, though. I think I appreciated it even more later on because my father broke it. He deviated. And I wanted to keep going along the same normal route I’d been promised. I was going to reestablish the pattern.”
“When?”
“When?” He shrugged a shoulder and laughed. “When someone settled for my ass, I guess.”
Damn, did he really say that out loud?
Mary frowned. “What does that mean? Settled.”
Wishing he’d kept his mouth shut, Tucker put the Impala in drive and left Main Street in the rearview, turning them toward the outer edge of town. “Settled?” He said it casually, like it wasn’t something that had constantly occurred to him during his human and vampire lives. “It’s kind of like, when all the other options have run out, a last resort starts looking like a decent one. Like when the diner is out of pancakes, so you opt for an omelet, even though you know the diner makes them with rubbery brown edges.”
For a moment, her eyes locked right in with his, holding so long he started wondering if she could see him after all. “But you’re not talking about eggs, you’re talking about yourself.”
Anxiousness crawled up the back of his neck like a prickly beetle. He was trying not to overthink the fact that he’d be seeing his father soon or he would have changed the subject. Instead, the ugliest bullshit that had been plaguing him became the only form of distraction available. No way around. No way to laugh it off. “When you have your sight, Mary, the world will teach you to see the difference between what’s beautiful and what’s not. It’s unavoidable, even for someone as pure hearted as you.”
Her frown deepened. “It seems like this your way of telling me you’re not one of the beautiful things, Tucker. You’ve tried to tell me