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“So you’ve got the hero, and you’ve got the quirky sidekick,” says your assistant, drawing a sharp fingernail down your spine. “You know what’s missing, don’t you?” You nod, and she nods with you. “The girl.”
“Don’t worry,” you say. “I have the perfect person picked out.”
Gripping your head, you collapse backward onto the couch. “Ouch,” you say. “That was a bad one.”
Your hero brings you a glass of water and some dubious looking pills. You raise your eyebrow at him and he shrugs. “Didn’t have any aspirin,” he says. “But these’ll do the job.”
“Hmm,” you say. A hero who doubles as a pusher isn’t quite what you had in mind, but there’s still plenty of time. Molding time. You take the pills, and kick them back with a sip from the grimy glass.
“So what’d you see?” your hero asks, practically bouncing now, itching for a fight. You gesture for the pad and pen kept for just this purpose, and he hands them to you. You scrawl an address and pass it back. He reads it, once, twice, and then a third time.
Your hero says, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Your hero walks, hands in his pockets and head bent, past the statue of a sabertooth tiger. You follow, a discreet distance behind. This isn’t the best spot to observe unnoticed, but when the idea came to you, you just couldn’t resist. When your hero pauses to light a cigarette on the bridge overlooking the statue of a wooly mammoth and taking in his surroundings mutters, “Bloody hell,” you know you’ve made the right decision.
You become even more convinced once the fighting starts. The vampires you’ve hired arrive right on schedule, dragging the girl with them. She’s resisting, and resisting well; as her captors near the bridge, she even gets a good blow in, jerking one elbow back and into an unlucky vampire’s eye. The vamp lets go and clutches at the bruised and bleeding socket, but there are still five of them holding her, and she’d have a hard time of it, all on her own.
But she’s not alone. You’ve seen to that.
“Well, well,” says your hero, entering stage right. “What have we here?” His voice hitches as he discovers the answer to that question all on his own; there’s a moment’s pause as captive and rescuer recognize each other, and recognize each other recognizing each other. A smile spreads across your lips when you see the twin expressions of wonder and fear on their faces harden over as façades are drawn back up, and then it’s back to business as usual. Your hero grins, razor-sharp. “I believe the museum’s closed, boys.”
“Fuck you, traitor,” says one of the vamps.
Your hero looks at the girl when he says, “While it is a romantic spot for it, I’ll have to pass,” and then the fighting begins in earnest.
It’s not much of a contest, really—what with being a rigged one, and all—but your hero does indeed have impressive might, and the girl herself is far from ordinary. The injured vamp is quickly staked out of its misery, as are two others. Another pair meet the business end of your hero’s favorite axe, and then there is one. Your hero and the girl back this last vamp—the one with the dirty mouth, tsk tsk—up against the rail of the bridge. He’s grinning fangily at them up until the moment they pitch him over the side. After that, he doesn’t even have time to scream before he plunges face-first into the La Brea Tar Pits.
Your hero and the girl watch as the unlucky vamp is slowly pulled down into the sticky depths, making lots of interesting squelching sounds as he goes. Then the girl turns and, for the first time that evening, looks your hero in the eye.
“Cool,” she says.
You trail behind them as they walk up the block to Johnie’s Coffee Shop. You watch them go inside and settle into a red plastic booth at the back of the restaurant. You wait five minutes, then follow them in. Time to really test this thing.
“Oi!” says your hero when he sees you. He gestures for you to join them. “How’d you find me?”
“Vision guy,” you say simply. You look the girl straight in the eye as you ask, “You including dinner with your services now?”
The girl’s eyes had gone wide from the moment she saw you, her lips parting as if desperate to spit out the information her brain is now fishing to find. But it’s no use. Anger gives way to befuddlement, and then her features relax completely. She smiles at you, a hint of seduction in her dark eyes.
“She’s an old friend,” your hero is saying. “Faith, this is Doyle.”
“A pleasure,” you say.
The girl scoots over, making room for you. “All mine,” she replies.
Your hero, always a gentleman, invites the girl to abandon the crappy motel that is currently her place of residence and come stay with him. Graciously, she accepts, and after stopping off to collect the girl’s meager belongings, you and your two companions return to the apartment you procured for your hero. It’s a one bedroom affair, but the girl says she’ll happily take the couch.
Somehow, you doubt this arrangement will last.
And yet, it does. Nights turn into weeks, and weeks into months, and still your hero and the girl have completely failed to succumb to the sexual tension that clearly exists between them, or, barring that, the pure animal instincts of two extremely attractive people with healthier-than-average sex drives who have been forced into close confines over an extended period of time. At first, you think you must be missing something, but that’s impossible: even when you’re not physically with them, you’re always watching. Always. On off nights, your assistant, who is quite thorough in the execution of her duties, likes to go down on you, and while she’s sucking you off, you close your eyes and watch your hero and the girl sit on the couch and play video games. Your assistant’s mouth humming around your cock, you watch your hero and the girl attempt to cook fajitas and end up throwing soggy slices of bell pepper at each other as they race, laughing, around the tiny kitchen. They work together, and they live together, and not once have they touched each other outside of friendship.
(Except perhaps that one time, right before a big battle, one that for once you had not arranged and had found yourself, quite accidentally, caught up in; then, right before they had plunged into the fray, your hero had taken the girl’s hand, and she had turned to him and said, “I’m glad to be with you, Spike, here at the end off all things”; and afterwards they had joked, and your hero had cautioned the girl against too much instant messaging with someone called Andrew, and things had gone back to normal. But you cannot forget the way they had looked at each other in that moment; the look they had had only for each other, and not for you.)
“Are you paying attention to me at all?” asks your assistant, and you don’t know whether it’s funny or sad, the look that would cross her face if she knew that’s how you thought of her.
“Sorry, babe,” you say. “You blew my mind.”
She arches an eyebrow at you, and you realize that, despite her best efforts, the mind towards which she now inclines her head has still not blown.
“Roll over,” you say, trying to pass it off as restraint, “I wanna come inside you.”
So your assistant lies on her back, and though it gives you no pleasure, you thrust deep inside her and begin to move. And you see—
—your hero and the girl sitting at the small Formica table in the kitchen, a Marie Callender’s take-out bag between them. Your hero is smoking, the girl eating a slice of chocolate cake à la mode—
—“You’re better than chocolate cake, baby,” you mumble, “better than ice cream—”
—and they’re not talking, not doing anything in particular, just enjoying the silence and each other’s company. Your hero’s face is relaxed and calm, the worry lines that had in the past months taken up residence on his forehead having smoothed over, eternal beauty reclaimed. The girl, too, looks younger than she did: like a girl in her twenties instead of an agèd warrior. After a moment, their eyes meet, and in one swift motion, they swap: the cigarette that was in your hero’s hand is in the girl’s, and he’s already forking a mouthful of cake, grinning at her over the raised utensil. And they go on as before.
You wish they’d say something, anything—anything to drown out the noise in your head, the voices screaming there and the woman below you, moaning her completion into your chest. She shudders around you, and when she stills, you quickly pull out. Without a word, you tuck your still unsated member back into your jeans, and walk to the bathroom. You lock the door, then stand with your hands on either side of the sink. The markings on your chest, which once seemed magnificent to you, emblems of your triumph, are now empty symbols, vacant and meaningless. Nothing but a shell.
In that other apartment, the one you picked out and decorated and presented to him, your hero, your creation: in that far away, warmer place, the girl is leaning back in her chair, stretching out her leather-clad legs until they rest on your hero’s lap. You watch him grimace. “Bloody hell, did you walk barefoot through a swamp?”
“Just your bathroom,” she says sweetly.
“If you don’t like it, you can clean it,” he says, and then more softly, “They sore?”
The girl nods.
“Then stop wearing those ridiculous shoes,” he says, but begins to circle his thumbs around her toes, massaging the aching muscles. The girl arches her back, and looking up at the ceiling, mutters, “You’re far too good to me.”
In the tense silence that follows, you hear your hero say, “We’re good for each other.” And it’s then that you know that he isn’t your hero any longer.