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“I could have sworn it was Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick.” Trixy looked perplexed.
There were two more hours till midnight and we had been playing games for four hours, nibbling on chips all the while, although Adam politely refrained. He had done the same at my parents’. He could eat something if he really had to, but his body didn’t utilize normal food in the same way as humans did. A steak for him was like a bucket of Styrofoam for me – it tasted bland, lay heavy in the stomach and it’d come out again one way or another in the end.
He fared better with drinks. After all, there was water in blood. Tea or coke were also no problem. Adam simply said he was allergic to many things: lactose, gluten, nuts... the list was endless. Actually it wasn’t even a lie, because he really couldn’t digest those things well.
That was another reason I was in no rush to be turned – I loved good food. And I wasn’t keen on the idea of dying first either.
“It’s okay, love,” Lennox comforted her. “We’ll win next time.”
The fact that he was now calling her love made her beam, and she nodded in determination. He reached for her hand and brushed a kiss onto it. Now Adam had seen the two of them together, he no longer suspected Lennox had a crush on me.
“Twister!” shouted Trixy and slapped a hand to her forehead. “We should play Twister. That’s how you guys met after all.” She looked over at me and Adam.
I smiled, because I could hardly tell her Adam and I had already met much earlier than that. Our lives had joined when I was still only little. Meanwhile, I really enjoyed getting out on the ice again. Falling through it back then was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
I wasn’t planning on doing it again of course, but my fear of the lake had vanished. My fall had been fate. It had cast me into Adam’s arms time and again – on the lake, when I stumbled in my high heels, playing Twister, buying gloves and ice skating. I had always been thrown off balance by his presence. It had taken a while for me to understand that. Since we were together, the stumbling had stopped. That could be a coincidence, but I hadn’t believed in those for a long time now.
“I like playing Twister,” said Adam.
“I won’t fall over anymore you know,” I teased.
“I bet you will.” He waggled his eyebrows.
We set up the game. There was plenty of space for it, because I had already packed some of my things into moving boxes. This was my last New Year’s in the apartment. I was really moving in with Adam in the new year.
Since there were only four of us, we were missing a referee, but we decided we could manage without one and just took turns spinning the spinner.
This time Twister went amazingly well for me. Of course, today I wasn’t wearing a skirt and the pumps were already safely stowed away in one of my boxes.
Lennox was the first to drop out, and he took on the role of ref from then on. The rounds went by and I held steady. Then Adam even dropped out of the game before me. From there it should have been down to me and Trixy, but Adam grabbed me unceremoniously and pulled me with him from the mat. He buried me beneath him on the carpet and kissed me.
“Hey!” I protested, because he had done that on purpose.
Trixy didn’t care. “I won!” she yelled. “Woo hoo, I’ve never won anything.”
She jumped around joyfully.
Lennox was about as helpful as Adam, pulling her to him for a kiss. “You won me over,” I heard him whisper.
Trixy giggled in her own sweet way. “You must be confused, Lennox. You’re the one that chased me.”
“You were really hard to catch,” he agreed.
Trixy whispered a few lines from an Annie Lennox song about the fall of night and the end of a journey. I didn’t usually remember all the lyrics to a song by heart, but this one had stuck in my mind because it had played during the closing credits of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - ‘Into the West.’ He really had come home to Trixy. It had been a very long journey, when you think of how long she had liked him.
“Look at that,” whispered Lennox. “You’re using my Annie as your ally.”
“There’s just something to her lyrics.”
“True,” he murmured, and kept kissing his Trixy as if he had found in her his own new goddess.
I grinned into Adam’s lips. “They’re so good together, right?”
“Yeah.” He sounded distracted. “Why aren’t you wearing a skirt?”
I poked him in his strong chest. “You couldn’t have your way with me anyway, we’ve got visitors.”
“But it’s still your apartment,” he teased. “They’ll run away as soon as I get started, don’t worry.”
Thousands of nerve endings tingled in my heart when I just thought of how he touched me.
I nipped his lower lip gently with my teeth. “I’m not worried. You’ll behave yourself.”
Adam groaned. “You can’t bite me. Now I’ve got a hard-on, I can’t get up anymore. I’ll have to keep laying here on you.”
I didn’t have to check to see if he was telling the truth, I felt it already.
Trixy picked that moment to ask, “So, shall we play something else?”
Giggling I pushed Adam off me. “You’ll just have to sit in the corner until it goes away.”
“Till what goes away?” Trixy asked.
Adam rolled his eyes with a pained expression.
Lennox, who guessed what was up, grinned mischievously. “If you guys want to celebrate the New Year in bed, I only live down the hall. Trixy and I could get out of your hair.”
“Really?” asked Adam hopefully.
I crossed my arms over my chest. Trixy and I both shook our heads. “No way.”
Thankfully Adam’s little burst of horniness subsided quickly and we spent the rest of our time reading out each other’s horoscopes which we had printed off from the internet. With so many cryptic prophecies I had to think of Bailey and Hope. Would they find their dream men too?
I wasn’t nearly as worried about Pia. She was only looking for a perfectly normal man, and for that the selection was much larger. She’d been dating a musician for a few days now. Apparently he played every instrument in existence and had begun to write pieces for her. Their first song together had sounded wonderful. If music was an expression of love, then they had really been giving off sparks. Unlike Ethan, he had fallen in love with Pia’s voice, just like I had. Meanwhile I knew how good he was for her. I wanted only the best for my friend, and I really liked the musician for Pia. If I was even half as right as she had been about Adam, then everything was perfect.
“Thanks to your conservative lifestyle, you will remain down-to-earth in the coming year,” read Trixy. The curious horoscope came from a website you couldn’t really take too seriously. “But don’t buy any growth-promoting fertilizer for your thinning hair. It won’t work.”
“Conservative lifestyle,” echoed Adam, who didn’t exactly find us artists conservative.
Trixy made an indignant face and pushed her horoscope away from her. “Who cares about that part? But going bald?” She clutched at her silky hair as if it might suddenly fall out.
Lennox comforted her. “You can’t trust these horoscopes. Mine says: Congratulations, the New Year holds joy and love for you. But don’t leave the house under any circumstances.”
“Does it also say why not?” asked Trixy.
Lennox shook his head.
“Maybe if he’s caught in sunlight he’ll turn to dust,” joked Adam and I looked at him in disbelief.
Surely my vampire wasn’t cracking vampire jokes with normal mortals?
I grinned and leaned in close to his ear to whisper: “Are you speaking from experience, darling?”
He turned to me and returned the smile, with his back to Lennox and Trixy so they couldn’t see him. Then he flashed his fangs at me and I shivered all over, because I had found my vampire. I was so incredibly lucky. My letters to Santa hadn’t been in vain.
“What’s in your horoscope?” Lennox asked me.
“Don’t give up baking, you’re much more talented at it than your friend Lennox,” I joked.
“Ha ha,” was all he replied.
That reminded me I’d baked a cake, so I offered each of my guests a piece. In the meanwhile I had learnt to get all the ingredients ready beforehand, and when I bit into it I tasted the most delicious cake I had ever baked.
Even Adam tried a little piece and nodded grinning. It probably had a similar flavor to chipboard for him. “Scrumptious,” he said.
I began to laugh, and I couldn’t for the life of me stop.
Trixy and Lennox stared at me in astonishment.
“I’ll be alright in a minute,” I chuckled, but actually it took a while. Then my stomach hurt, but this time in a good way. Not all pain was created equal, and not everything in life was what it appeared to be, not by a long shot.
“My horoscope says, I’ve found the love of a lifetime,” murmured Adam in a deep voice.
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Lennox teased him.
I knew that wasn’t what was written. Probably his horoscope advised him not to step on any daisies or toadstools, or it promised he would get rich if he started recycling.
But unlike what was really written, I knew what he said was true. We would spend eternity together.
When the ball dropped at midnight, we put on brightly colored hats we had made together earlier. Lennox’s hat was flamboyant just like he himself was. Trixy’s hat was as perfectly done as her paintings. I had glued a straw angel on my little hat. And Adam’s hat... well, it looked like he had made it himself, and he was the only one in the room who didn’t study art. I thought it was charming.
We threw confetti over one another cheerfully.
Trixy hugged me.
Lennox pressed a kiss onto my cheek.
But Adam kissed me until I grew faint, and when I looked into his eyes, a silver spark twinkled in them like the evening star in the sky. I knew I would spend many more star-filled nights with him.
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