Dating : Stars and Lit Houses

My name is Oaken. I was the only son of Gregory and Elise Tinnick. My mother died when I was young so from then on, I lived with just my father. I had an ordinary childhood though my home wasn’t necessarily what I would call loving. My father was distant, spending more time at his job than with me. I had some friends but then fewer and fewer as I got older. When I was younger, I put more effort into having relationships since that’s what people do, I thought, but it always felt unnatural and forced to me so over time, I tried less and less to be like other people. Overall, it was a quiet and unremarkable life. I wasn’t tremendously unhappy but I certainly wasn’t happy. I felt like I was waiting for something.

At night, in the soothing darkness, I used to take walks through my neighborhood. Even as a human, I felt more at peace with the night. I would walk along the sidewalks, feeling the air on my face and listening to the rhythmic scraping of my shoes on the ground. Sometimes I would sit on the bench in front of the lake and stare out at the still water. Always, I would look at the night sky. Stars fascinated me. I would gaze up at their distant and admirable beauty. Then my eyes would lower to the lit windows of the houses that lined the streets. They existed just as far from me as the stars and I marveled at their easy perfection as well.

One night, as I walked, lost in my nighttime ponderings, a hand grabbed my arm, yanking me out of my thoughts and into a small cluster of trees. I didn’t even get to utter a single sound. I felt the unknown assailant’s chest against my back as they easily held me against themselves with one arm around my body and one hand over my mouth. Then I felt the fangs, two spears that dove into my neck and instantly paralyzed me into limp lifelessness. Soon, they were finished with me and let me fall to the ground before they were gone without a sound or footstep. I still couldn’t move. I could feel blood trickling out of my neck onto the ground around me until I was lying there in my own little stream of red. On that night, my human life ended and my forever began. I was eighteen years old.

After I went missing from my human life, the humans found my red stream and thus concluded that I was dead. I quickly moved on from my hometown. I felt no attachment to it. I began my life of even greater solitude. I explored the changes in myself. Increased strength, speed, and healing ability. Heightened senses. Hunger. I managed the hunger with animal blood. I thought my new form was more fitting of my nature but, once the novelty wore off, a certain thought plagued me. Nothing was better or even that different, not really. In the end, human or vampire, it didn’t matter. There was still the same sense of waiting, only now, without a final death on my horizon, it would last forever. And so after only a few years, I made my decision.

I didn’t know the legitimacy of all the vampire myths but I knew the reality of one. Sunlight. Sunlight will kill a vampire. And so, I sat on a creaky old wooden chair in the forgotten little shack I had been staying in. I sat there, staring out the open door to the outside, possessed by my plan and waiting for sunrise. When the day’s first rays of light appeared, I jumped up from my seat and ran outside like someone deranged. White hot light surrounded me, choking the existence from me. I felt myself burning. I smelled myself burning. After only a couple of seconds of the dawn’s torture, all higher thoughts had left me and I ran back into my shack, slamming the door shut and dropping to the floor. I crawled into the hole I had made through the floor and into the ground as my own little sanctuary from the sun. I stayed in there for many nights as my body repaired the damage my thoughts had led to. Curled up in my cave, my mind was frenzied and disoriented. Feeling truly insane, at times, I didn’t know where I was, when I was, who I was. However, I survived my dance with daylight, albeit not unscathed. To this day, my skin still bears the marks of my mind’s madness and the once white parts of my eyes now have a pinkish hue.

Since my survival instinct forced me to live, I had no choice but to oblige. I took up residence in an old abandoned crypt, a stereotypical dwelling but it suited me well. About half an hour’s walk from the crypt, there was a town, which had a bar that I started frequenting to break up life’s monotony and to watch the humans and other vampires that would gather there. Watching them and listening to their pointless conversations always reaffirmed to me that others had nothing to offer me. Sometimes one or two of them, occasionally humans but usually vampires, would come over to my table and ask to join me. I would always decline, usually getting up and leaving the bar in response to their propositions. Still, despite my unwavering indifference to all, I went there often, searching the crowd for what I had taught myself to not find. Then one night, he found me.

He sat down across from me at my small dingy table before saying a word, before I knew that he had taken an interest in me or that he was even there in the bar at all. I looked at him critically. He was a vampire of an unknowable age but looked as though his human life had ended when he was in his thirties. He had wavy brown hair, blue eyes, and was wearing a light green sweater over a collared shirt. He looked like a teacher or some other scholarly type whereas I was as feral as one could get, spending my nights in the bar and my days in the crypt. Having quickly completed my visual analysis, I stood from my seat to leave the bar. Then he spoke.

“You come here all the time but you never talk to anyone,” he said. “I finally had to ask, what are you looking for here?”

The dull question didn’t interest me but it did intrigue me that I had never noticed him before even though he had clearly been watching me for some time. Hell, he could have been watching me for years. I liked to think of myself as observant but he had escaped my detection. I sat back down.

“I don’t talk to anyone because I’ve never found anyone worth talking to,” I said. He laughed and took a sip of the drink he had brought with him to my table.

“Well, I’ll do my best to be worth talking to,” he said. “But you know, it’s not like people are always good to talk to. But if you do talk to them, you find some good moments now and then.”

I watched this unusual vampire as he told me his name, Baron, and made small talk about the bar and about the town. While he spoke, his gaze never left my face and his sensitive eyes seemed more pained by my scars and pink-tinted eyes than I had ever been. I felt myself melting under the scrutiny of his sentimental stare. For some reason, I felt the need to grant him some kind of relief from my pain so I interrupted his chatter.

“Just so you know, I’m fine now,” I said. “It doesn’t even hurt anymore.” He looked at me quietly for a few moments and then managed a small, unconvincing smile. I quickly averted my gaze from his and looked out at the nameless people in the bar that I felt more at ease with in that moment. Made uncomfortable by my own words, I soon told him I had to leave but that I would be back the next night. As I walked back to my crypt, my mind kept asking me why I had spoken to him as I did.

Despite my sometimes lack of enthusiasm, Baron sat with me in the bar every night. He told me about himself and about his life. He lived very much like a human, in a small house in town. He even told me about his past and about the vampire that changed him. He said he met him once, years after he was changed, and that the vampire said he had just changed him on a whim with no greater purpose or reasoning. Baron said he hated him for that and always would. Baron’s openness about himself was contagious and so I, in turn, told him about myself as well. I told him of how I was changed that night but that it didn’t matter to me if I ever met the faceless figure or not. Whoever they were was inconsequential to me.

Then one night, after many nights of chats that had started to repeat themselves, I realized that Baron had been silent for a while, which was unlike him. I shifted my gaze from the crowd in the bar to him. He was staring at me with a look of thoughtful concern mixed with perhaps a bit of impatience.

“We’re stuck, aren’t we?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” I asked in response as I took a sip of my drink. He sighed and tapped his finger against his glass.

Then, seemingly unrelated to the current conversation, he asked, “Have you ever gone back to where you grew up?”

“What? No. Why would I?” I said with a furrowed brow. He smiled and leaned towards me.

“Sometimes we have to go back to go forward.”

Baron had made up his mind that he would take me back to visit my hometown even though l didn’t see the point or purpose. Years had passed. My father wouldn’t be there anymore nor would anyone I had known, not that I had ever known anyone very well anyway. I couldn’t imagine what Baron hoped to accomplish but he was insistent so I gave him the address. He handled the arrangements and brought me, begrudgingly, back.

Once the sun had set, we walked down the familiar streets of my youth, past the cluster of trees where that youth had ended, and up to my old house. We stood there on the road in front of it. I felt I hadn’t the right to get any closer but still, I took in the nostalgic sight. The average, unassuming house looked strikingly similar to how it had before though the yard was different. There were more flowers now, adorning the landscape with blue and pink. For some reason, the flowers made me smile. I looked up to the window on the upper right side of the house. It was my old bedroom. My mind couldn’t help but reminisce. The days and nights I spent there, at the time, felt so long and so grand. Now they seemed so brief, so small.

Just then, a car pulled into the driveway across the street.

“Come on,” said Baron as he began to walk towards the car. I followed, unsure of what he was doing. “Hello there,” called Baron as a man got out of the car.

“What can I do for you?” asked the man. “You lost?”

“Not at all. You see, our father used to live near here,” Baron lied. “And he knew Mr. Tinnick.” Baron pointed to my childhood home. “He lived in that house. I think the current residents must be out. The lights aren’t on. By any chance, do you know whatever became of Mr. Tinnick?”

As we stood at the end of his driveway, the man introduced himself as Ben and went on to say that his father had told him the story of the Tinnicks.

“The son was killed,” said Ben. “But of course, old Tinnick didn’t believe that.” This caught my attention and I stepped closer.

“What do you mean, he didn’t believe that?” I asked intensely.

“Well,” replied Ben. “The boy’s body was never found so old Tinnick just wouldn’t accept it. He thought the boy was alive and spent all his time and money trying to find him. Eventually, he just became a recluse until one day, he died in there. That’s what my father told me. It’s a sad story, I guess.”

I was stunned by these simple words, stated to me so plainly. I stared at Ben for a moment and then looked back to my old house, my mind seeking answers to questions asked too late and feeling emotions neglected for too long. Seeing my state, Ben seemed sympathetic yet also confused by my reaction.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know the Tinnicks still had any friends out there or that anyone besides me even still knew about them at all.” Baron stepped towards me and put his hand on my back.

“Thank you very much,” he said to Ben as he began to lead me away. “We won’t take up any more of your time.”

Baron and I walked down the street to the neighborhood lake that was there just as it had always been and we sat down on the now rusted old bench in front of it. We stared out at the lake and sat in silence for a while though my mind was not silent at all.

“He cared,” I finally said out loud. “He cared and I missed it.” Baron sighed as he gathered his thoughts.

“Some things are missed,” he said to me. “But not all things have to be.” He turned his head to look at me. “You don’t have to miss anything or anyone in your present or in your future.” I turned my face to him with tears in my eyes. “Oaken,” he said. “I’m right here, right now. We both are.” He held out his hand. To my eyes, it looked like an oar, offered to me for my sail-less boat that had been stuck adrift for so many years. I took his hand and he held onto mine tightly.

As we sat there, looking out onto the lake, I couldn’t help but laugh to myself. I was a vampire before I began to understand people.

After that night at the lake, Baron and I started living together in his little house in town. We lived as companions, gradually growing closer. I felt my happiness budding and I wanted to see it bloom. One night, we were sitting beside each other on the couch in our living room. We each had a book we were reading. I had noticed that he had sat down closer to me than usual. I continued to read the words on the page in front of me even though they were disjointed and meaningless to my distracted mind. I tried to discreetly look over at Baron. He was looking down at the open page of his book but his eyes weren’t moving at all. Then I saw him smile. He turned and looked at me kindly.

“I’m trying to figure out what’s patient and what’s too patient,” he said softly. I looked back at him quietly. He slowly leaned towards me and I felt tears forming in my eyes though I didn’t know why. I wasn’t sad. Not at all. I stayed completely still as he continued to bring his face closer to mine. I closed my eyes as our noses touched. Then he tenderly kissed my lips. Once our lips parted and he started to lean back from me, I dropped my book and pushed myself forward, wrapping my arms around his neck and holding onto him tightly. He let go of his book as well and wrapped his arms around me as I felt him inhale deeply. My love, my happiness, my life, had bloomed.

The happiness I felt with Baron was overwhelming. Our love flowed through me, warming every shivering shadow within me and repairing every shattered shard. I was finally living my life instead of just waiting. Both of us were happy together. But, I could tell that Baron still had something he was holding back from me. Somber stares and subtle sighs spoke of his secret even when he did not. I gave him time, thinking he would tell me at some point until eventually, I grew impatient. So, one night, as I sat on the couch and he, on the large chair, I echoed back to him the words he had once said to me.

“We’re stuck, aren’t we?” Baron looked over at me in surprise. Then he stared down at the floor for a few moments before getting up and coming to sit beside me on the couch. I watched him as he looked down at his legs and seemed to argue with his mind for a couple of minutes. “Just tell me already,” I said.

He replied, “Oaken, I honestly don’t know what will happen when I tell you this.” He turned to face me and I stared at his sad eyes. “It was me,” Baron nearly whispered. “That night.” He continued even though I already knew what he meant. “I changed you into a vampire. But I had a reason.” I leaned back against the couch cushions and looked into the space in front of us. “Do you hate me?” he asked as his eyes searched my face.

“I don’t hate you,” I replied and then I shifted my gaze back to his. “You were lonely. You wanted to be happy.”

“That’s not why I did it,” said Baron. “I did it because I wanted you to live.” His eyes stared into mine, desperate for me to feel his sincerity. I smiled at him and reached out and touched his face.

“And I will,” I said.

It took me a long, long time but I finally understand what I felt when I stood alone beneath the stars and between the lit windows. I finally understand what I felt when I scanned the sea of those unknown to me. And now, I can finally say, no longer am I alone in the night. I live with Baron in a lit house of our own.

Copyright 2020 by Kristin Young