Death Is a Handsome She

I had caught her eyes, and she stole my soul. 

Laurie’s blue pupils flashed before mine. Those eyes weren't as mysterious as indigo blue nor was it as vibrant as the sky on a windy day. Instead, it was the color of the ocean’s horizon during a light thunderstorm. 

Her eyes were blue with a hint of gray, and sometimes they sparkled with an innocent look that was so enchanting, it made me crave more of her company. 

It was the only reason I invited Laurie to stay with me for the past six months. She was not a mystery to be solved. Mysteries often resulted in an unexpected or well-anticipated outcome. However, behind her eyes only laid dangerous secrets that could possibly stop my heart if she told me the whole truth. 

I stopped asking questions about the blood stains on her blouse and her strange addiction to the odd smelling wines she bought from the liquor shop down the street. 

My lips were sealed as I sat at the edge of a bar counter listening to 1989 (Taylor’s version) on repeat.

I traced my fingers through Laurie’s dull hazelnut hair. Once in a while she would open her exhausted eyes, hinting me to keep stroking through her loosened curls, despite my fingers becoming numb from the repeated action. 

I kissed her forehead and breathed in her rose-scented conditioner. Even though Laurie washed her hair twice during her evening showers, the familiar salty smell of the sea lingered in her curls. 

Sometimes, I forget the danger within her, but every time the vibrant smell of the sea found its way into my nostrils, I remembered everything. 

***

I recall the way she kissed me on the shore with me laying in freezing sand at night. I was bleeding out with a kitchen knife buried in my lower stomach. It wasn’t the type of danger a twentieth century woman would’ve thought of encountering on the shores of Chicago Beach. 

The cloaked shadow who stabbed me was a young boy around sixteen of age. He wore a pair of black sweatpants and a loosened white cotton shirt. He had two distinguished features. One being his freckled nose and the other being the serpent tattoo that ran down his left arm with a pair of neon green eyes. 

Although the thief looked fierce on the outside, he still almost fainted at the sight of my blood pouring out from my lower stomach and flooding the sand around me. 

His hands were shaking as he touched my cold skin and removed my purse from my right shoulder. 

I couldn’t speak, and I could barely breathe. But my mind became a theatrical playground.

I thought about my first vacation to a winter resort in Quebec Canada when I was four and tried out ice skating for the first time. I thought of the last vacation I took in July with my college friends to The Bahamas and got food poisoning from eating too much shellfish. Perhaps if I knew I was going to die at the age of twenty-seven, I would’ve stayed much longer.

A tear streamed down my eyes as his hands continued to search inside of my black coat until he finally left me to die after a few more minutes. 

I heard the thief’s rapid footsteps starting to drift off into the distance. He had run off with my last possession, including my cell phone and my wallet. I began to hopelessly cry like an exiled wolf on the peak of a grand mountain. 

Death came for me in the darkness. I felt it tighten around me like a snake trying to seduce its prey as all of my muscles stiffened and my senses began to disappear. My mouth no longer felt dry, I no longer whispered for help, and my vision became more blurry.

Before I was about to be completely submerged into darkness, I heard a woman's voice. She sat down above me in the sand and placed my head in her lap. She brushed away the golden locks of my hair revealing my hollowed cheekbones. 

I felt a sharp pain as she sliced her nails into my cheeks. She wiped the blood off of my cheekbones with the tip of her index finger and tasted it. 

“That’s delicious,” she exclaimed. 

I searched the darkness and begged for my vision to return to me. This woman can save my life. She can call an ambulance if I just open my eyes. I thought. My sudden adrenaline forced my eyes to open. I teared up due to the coldness of the oxygen around me, but through my blurry vision, I caught a glance of her blue eyes. 

The woman smiled at me. She traced my lips with my own blood and with the same hand, she gripped the knife in my lower stomach and twisted the blade inside of me before pulling it out. 

I squeezed my eyes shut from the pain. I tried to scream as her lips met my own. She forcibly parted my lips even further as her tongue twisted itself around mine. And out of instinct, I bit down into the red flesh. 

Her blood became infused with mine through our kiss. I felt my body begin to change and hers as well. My wound began to itch as I felt it starting to heal. I realized the more blood I drank from her, the faster I could recover.

Her blood tasted like caramel, cinnamon and with a light metal aftertaste. As I craved her blood, she became hungry for mine. In a battle for both of our survival, our bodies became entangled with each other.  

After a few attempts to gain dominance, I managed to flip her over while continuing to kiss her like a starving wolf devouring its prey after days of food deprivation. 

“Who are you?” I asked as I took a break from our make-out session to catch my breath. 

“Laurie,” the woman replied. She rolled me over and pinned me into the sand with her legs squeezing into my torso. “This is going to hurt, but I haven't had dinner yet.” 

My eyes widened as I saw two sharpened fangs, and her blue eyes darkened as she sank her teeth into my neck. 

I felt no pain and no pleasure. My hand climbed up her back and pressed her body against mine. After a few moments more, Laurie’s teeth finally withdrew themselves from my skin, and I had never felt more alive.

***

“Do people ever tell you that your hair looks as if it is on fire under the light,” Laurie said, pointing to the dimmed ceiling lights. 

“No?” I frowned.

She yawned loudly and whispered,  “what time is it?” 

“It’s one in the morning.”

She shifted her weight and got up from the counter stool as I finally withdrew my freckled arm that became sore from it being used as Laurie’s personal hairbrush.

“Well, that’s the beauty of living for so long. Everything is boring to me, all I can get out of this world now is the euphoric feeling I get from going to clubs and chucking down alcohol.” She looked at me like my childhood golden retriever begging for food underneath our dining table. 

“Stop doing that! Your empathetic face will not convince me to have another drink.” I recalled how partying with Laurie for the past few months had turned my life into a complete mess while the alcohol tormented my sleep schedule and my stomach. 

  “Emma please,” Laurie begged as she slightly adjusted her moss green jacket and her white glittery top.

“I have work tomorrow,” I said annoyed, recalling my boring corporate job as an accountant at Microsoft. Laurie ignored me as usual and pulled me off the stool and onto the floor with Multi-Colored LED lights built beneath its surface. I almost tripped twice on the stairs that led to the dance floor due to the constant flashing lights that transformed the surface into an optical illusion. 

On the elevated platform I held onto Laurie tightly as the people around us danced like wild seagulls fighting each other for food on almost every beach in Chicago, causing a small earthquake as they danced to the song, How You Get The Girl (Taylor’s Version).

“We are on top of a sixty story building, there is no way that this is safe!” I yelled in the crowd of sweaty bodies, glittering dresses as I squeezed myself between a ridiculous amount of young couples whose love affairs had only blossomed in the past four hours and probably due to their high alcohol consumption. “Do you think they are real?” I asked, looking back at the men buying their girlfriends cocktails at the end of the bar. 

Laurie turned my head around and pulled me into her arms. Her red lips painted by a peculiar pigment brushed against the tip of my ears and said, “life is not a rom-com, more like a Shakespeare play. Except people don’t die in the end, they learn to settle for less.”

“Do you ever lower your standards?” I pulled back and looked directly into her eyes. The storm in them began to shift, and I knew a hurricane was approaching when they finally darkened fully into indigo blue. 

“No, because I only date the most intriguing people. And you, my darling, is a mystery. Why didn’t you try to fight the thief when you were still conscious, he didn’t stab you anywhere too lethal? I personally witnessed your strength when you were craving for my blood.”

“He was just a kid.”

“So you'd rather die than beat up a kid?” She questioned me with a frown and I laughed. 

“No, I just didn’t want to react. I just—” 

“Come with me,” Laurie insisted. She pulled me off of the dance floor and dragged me into a private room with white lace curtains and maroon wallpapers with a strange floral pattern that looked as if they were constructed of a million odd faces. 

There was a canvas placed in the right corner of the room. A studio light was shone directly above the stool in the center of the floorboards where I assumed the potential subject would sit. 

“Can you paint me?” she asked. 

“Me? I’m not a painter,” I said. 

“But you were once, and you painted things that others were too afraid to paint before you gave up your life for a corporate job three years ago.” She guided me to sit down in front of the blank canvas as she went and sat on the stool across from me and began posing. 

“How did you know I was a painter?” 

“The details don't matter, but I knew you were going to paint the palm trees in The Bahamas until you got food poisoning.”

I rolled my eyes. “Sit straight.” My fingers felt like cotton as I struggled to dip the paintbrush in the oil paint already squeezed perfectly onto the pallet according to the order of the rainbow. 

“Is this good?” she asked, and I nodded, approving her pose. 

Laurie looked beautiful under the glistening light. She had curls that surpassed her waist, pink cheeks, a pair sparkling eyes and slightly pale lips. Her features made her look frail and innocent as she sat gracefully across from me and I struggled to paint it. 

“Do you need some help?” she asked with a smirk. 

After two more tries of my attempting to find the right base color for her portrait, I nodded with defeat.

“Come in.” Laurie yelled at the door behind her that led to the emergency exit. 

The door opened and the young thief came in. 

“Hello again,” I said. 

The thief who tried to kill me stood in front of me. He studied me like I was a hellenistic statue. However, I was not frozen in pain like those marble sculptures, instead, I recovered without a scar. 

“You are okay.” He sighed with genuine relief.  

“Oh she’s fine,"  Laurie said in an almost seductive tone. She got up and with her lips tracing his neck, and whispered, "however, you on the other hand, is not in luck." The thief stared at me in horror as Laurie's teeth sunk into his flesh. He focused on me for long as he could possibly manage before his world drifted off into the darkness. 

Laurie gently let go of him as his lifeless body hit the ground with a loud bang. 

“What—”

“Are you ready to paint me now?” she asked again. 

I picked up my paint brush and started painting without another word. I made sure to capture the sparkle in her eyes, the smug smile hung upon her red lips and her light blush that was triggered by pure excitement after she had her long-awaited dinner. 

I stopped when I got to painting her dress. Laurie thought I was finished but I gestured for her to sit still. 

I changed the color of her white dress to the same color as the dried-up blood at the corner of her lips. I left her plain and innocent expression and didn’t include the thief's lifeless body nor the blood on the floor into the painting. 

“It’s perfect,” I whispered, and Laurie ran to my side to see her portrait for the first time. 

“What did you do to my dress?” 

“A good monster knows how to hide their crafts, so I chose to show your true nature in a symbolic way instead,” I slowly turned to her, my eyes focused on her lips, not daring to meet her eyes and too scared to find out what she thought of my work. 

“I’m beautiful,” she commented.

I squeezed my eyes shut as Laurie turned to me. I felt her warm breath on my cheeks as her lips met mine. I bit down on her lips in our warm embrace. I swallowed her blood that tasted like wild honey as I smelled her rose scented skin. 

She withdrew from our kiss and bit into my neck and drained every last drop of blood in my veins.

It felt like I was in a deep sleep for centuries before I awoke on the hardwood floor with fangs and a hunger for human blood.