FOUR
A flight of stairs and several hallways and doors later, I found Jessica in her room up to no good. Not “are you hiding up here because it’s your turn to change a poopy diaper?” no good but clandestine-research, followed by hurriedly-shoving-papers-under-the-bed-when-she-saw-me no good.
“Jesus!” She finished shoving papers and glared up at me from her spot on the floor beside her and DadDick’s bed. “Scared the hell out of me.”
“Uh-huh, and that’s not furtive at all. Jess, what’s going on?”
“What? I’m just sorting. And thinking. And then more sorting. Yes.” She got to her feet and began prowling around the room. She’d stuck a clipping in her back pocket, but I couldn’t think of a subtle way to grab it other than tripping her, sitting on her, and emptying her pockets. For which I would pay and pay and pay. I was stronger and faster; Jess was smarter. Just the thought of all the terrible things she could do to me was enough to make me feel guilty for even thinking of assault as a way to get to the bottom of this, however careful I would have been. And even though she’d made her view on being turned into a vampire mucho clear before I cured her cancer (long story), I could absolutely see her nagging a vamp into turning her just so she could keep punishing me through the centuries. Also, the tripping and sitting and pocket rifling wasn’t a nice thing to do to a best pal. It’s very wrong that I thought of that one last.
She looked startled, but that could have been the ’do—she kept her black hair pulled back so tightly her eyebrows were always arched. Her manicure (lime green, urrgghh) was chipping, something pre-twins/not-insane Jess would never have allowed, and her T-shirt had splotches on it that, luckily, were only spit-up formula. (I hadn’t given one thought to enhanced vampire senses + newborns = gross and really, I should have. Ohhhhh, I should have.) Her jeans were so faded they were nearly white, and she was annoyed that skinny jeans were out again. She was so painfully thin (when carrying Thing One and Thing Two, she’d looked like a tent pole someone had hung a bag of volleyballs on), any jeans she pulled on were skinny jeans, even just a few weeks after popping twins.
“Why are you in here?” she barked.
“Because I’m lonesome?”
Jess snorted but didn’t kick me out. “Mm-hm.”
I sidled closer to the bed but knew I was no match for Jessica’s chaotic pile-everything-into-a-box-beneath-the-bed filing system. For a modern businesswoman, she was a Luddite when it came to paperwork. A big fan of old-fashioned file cabinets and long plastic containers that she stuffed with newspaper and mag clippings, she still shopped at Hallmark, for God’s sake.
Unless I was willing to sneak in here when she and DadDick were out, or sleeping the sleep of the deeply sleep deprived, rummage endlessly through decades of clippings while trying to figure out which story had grabbed her interest (I wasn’t), or worse, which story was missing and now riding in her back pocket, I’d have to finesse it out of her. Subtlety, that was key.
“Tell me what’s wrong or I’ll sit on you!”
“What?”
Okay, I could see it now. My finesse sucked. Time for a new tactic. “So, how’s my mom?”
“Huh?” Jess had at least ten IQ points on me, which anyone overhearing this would assume was a testing error. “What?”
“My mom. Who you went to see.” Wait. Whom? Whom she went to see? Gah, Sinclair was rubbing off on me in all the wrong ways. And now I was thinking of Sinclair rubbing. Must not . . . be distracted . . . by thoughts of . . . hot husband . . . “With the babies you forgot.”
“Oh. I didn’t . . .” She waved vaguely at me. “You know.”
“I don’t know, Jess, you postnatal weirdo. What’s going on? You look like someone clipped you with a brick.”
“Don’t be a dope. Nobody’s been near me with a brick.”
Sighing at the effort this was taking (vampire queen/best friend’s work was never done), I plunked down on the queen-sized bed she’d had for a decade. Jess was indifferent to her riches (the wealth was impressive, but her shitpoke father had earned it all, making it much less awesome in her eyes) and formed deep emotional attachments to restaurants, pals (we’ve been friends since junior high), and beds. (Also, DadDick and the babies, I assumed. Before you accuse me of vanity, I listed myself second on that list.) So the bed didn’t so much sag as suck me in, like quicksand in a quilt. But I was used to its ways and kept both feet on the floor.
I really liked Jessica’s room. It was the most modern in terms of setup and decoration, the carpet a deep caramel, the walls tan, the furniture all light wood (blond wood?). The wallpaper was red and tan and there were red accents all over the place, including the quilt and several picture frames.
And gawd, when would she stop displaying the one of us on my twenty-first birthday? Drunk off my ass was not a good look for me. Jess looked cutely rumpled and was grinning into the camera while hoisting a daiquiri-filled plastic cup, her arm slung around my shoulders in what looked like camaraderie, but in fact she was keeping me from pitching face-first into the floor.
I was so much more than rumpled; I was sweaty, and my face was so flushed I looked like I’d sworn off sunscreen before napping in a tanning bed. My T-shirt was more stained than a new mom’s, making it difficult to make out the lettering (“Step Aside, Coffee, This Is a Job for Alcohol”), but worst of all was the expression on my face. One eye was half-closed, my mouth was hanging open like a dying trout’s, I was giving Jess the side-eye stink eye (she had just cut me off, which unfortunately did not prevent the vomiting doomed to start an hour later), and basically looked like a crazy cat lady in her youth, pre-cats.
And it had pride of place on the wall! I could only pray that once the twins were sleeping more, Jess would update their walls with baby pics, a new-parent phase I was actually looking forward to. I wanted to pull an Anne Geddes, draping the sleeping babies over all kinds of strange surfaces and then snapping away until I had enough for a calendar.
I wriggled on the bed, trying to get more comfortable without actually getting slurped in. Sinclair and I slept on a—wait for it—superking. Yeah. I know. But the thing was doomed; we went through a half dozen a year. Was there such a bed as a super-duper-king?
“Did somebody come up to you and say something? Are—nnf! Stop it, bed, I know all your tricks . . . are you getting audited? Were you meeting a new boyfriend?” The last was completely out of character, but Jess was a sleep-deprived mom now, and they were crazy.
“Yes. But it’ll be fine.”
“Wait—yes?” Oh God! In a moment of carelessness one of my feet had left the floor! I shifted my weight until I had them both planted again. Might be time to make a break for it. “Which yes?”
“I’ve got to go,” she replied, laying off the pacing in favor of darting to the door. Her fingers went to the clipping barely peeking out of her pocket, checking to see if it was still there. “I’ll take the babies to see your mom.”
I was so startled I shifted my weight and both feet left the floor. “Good God, woman, you are losing it! You’ve got to tell me what’s wrong. Okay? Jess?” Her hand was on the knob . . . her body was through the door. “You get back here, young lady!” Normally I could have crossed the room and blocked the door before she got anywhere near it, but normally I wasn’t being inexorably devoured by Bedzilla. I was reduced to wrenching myself upright with superhuman strength to escape, finally reaching the door only to almost knock the vampire king on his ass.
“Aw, fuck!”
Sinclair beamed. His vampire reflexes had saved him from my vampire klutziness. “Darling! You missed me.”