I went to see Jaime.

Or at least I intended to, but I wussed out at the last minute. There is something magical to a restraining order that inspires that kind of wussing out. So I didn't walk into her store and tell her the news that our mutual friend Louise, the one who had brought us together, was dead

Instead, I stood in the alley across from her store and tried to cry for Louise and all that we had lost. As easy as the tears had come earlier, they were decidedly less forthcoming at that moment, so I stood there, stalking my ex-girlfriend and was completely unable to cry for my friend. The alley had the perfect combination of shadows and the occasional homeless person that allowed me to stand there long enough to catch a glimpse of her through the window without ever being seen.

After a while, feeling like a complete fraud because I couldn't cry for my friend, I stumbled off to work.

***

I was still in a state of depression, especially after I realized that I didn't have any pictures of me and Louise. Sure she had a bunch of her pictures up on her social media accounts, so I had those to remember her by, but I didn't have any of the two of us together. In fact, I couldn't remember taking any pictures of the two of us. I was always the one behind the camera, and now nothing was all I had to show for it.

By the time, Sammy showed up I had gotten to thinking about how I was going to tell my friends that Louise was dead, in fact, what I was going to tell them about her death. This had quickly led to the fact that I couldn't actually tell anyone that Louise was, in fact, dead, without telling them how I knew for sure, oh and by the way, she was a vampire and now I am one too. That would go down very well.

Maybe they would figure it out after a while when she failed to update her Facebook page. The last time had been the night she had met me in the bar and then nothing after that. Just the picture of her and her eternally sunny smile on her timeline banner. The picture had been taken at night in a bar somewhere.

In fact, all of her pictures had been taken at night.

There are some points when you ask yourself exactly how well you know your friends. How much do you really, really know about them, and how much of it is truth? How much do they actually want you to know, and how much can you know before you begin to judge someone? In all of my memories of Louise, I now realized that I had never once met her during the day. All of our encounters had been after dark, but that was just the nature of the friendship, and I hadn't thought twice about it. She was just one of those friends that always seemed to show up in dark places. Even when I had crashed on her couch for a couple of weeks when I was trying to find a new place, we had never gone outside during the day and the curtains had always kept the place dark, which was fine by me.

Now I wondered exactly how long she had been a vampire.

So that was what was on my mind when Sammy showed up, steam practically coming off of her.

"I hate men!"

"I'm a man."

"Well, I hate you too, but that's different. That's a personal hatred. This is more general and a lot more vindictive."

"Lucky me."

"What the fuck is wrong with you? Somebody died or something?"

"Actually yes."

"So remind me to care in about twenty minutes."

Anger. Genuine anger and hurt. How well do you know your friends, and if you knew them well enough, would you actually care?

"You're a fucking asshole Sammy. I want you to know that."

"I think you meant to say bitch," she snapped back at me.

"No," I replied. "You're definitely a fucking asshole."

I didn't speak to her for the rest of the night. She eventually tried to apologize, a real heartfelt apology, but I wasn't listening at the time. I just wanted to get away from her and be depressed and think deep and depressing philosophical thoughts.

Most of all I just wanted to mourn for my friend in peace.

***

When I got out of work, someone had stolen my car.

I stood there looking at the space in which I knew I had parked my Honda eight hours before, and I felt so lost, so alone. I didn't even think to look anywhere else since this was the spot that I had parked it in. This was my spot, the only place I ever parked. It even had a minor oil stain about the size of Texas from the everlasting leak in the bottom of it, so there was nowhere else to look at all.

I should have laughed and been cheered up. After all, someone was obviously broker and more fucked up than I was. So fucked up that they had to take my car...

When I turned around, I spotted my car parked in front of the store, lights on, engine running. I knew it was my car. I had been driving it for years now, and it was one of twenty in the entire city and besides, my POS had a particular lean to it, just like the one in front of the store.

I got pissed then. I mean it's one thing to steal my car, but it's another thing entirely to steal it and then flaunt it in front of me. I had enough of my own problems right now, with my best friend abandoning me to my own devices when I needed him the most, me being an extremely broke vampire and my other friend dead because of me, and I couldn't even mourn her in peace. So yeah I got pissed, and before I knew it, I was walking towards my car, fists clenched, ready to fight tooth and nail over what was mine.

I was ready, adrenaline pumping something fierce and about halfway there I started to run. I had a passing thought about if vampires had any additional strength like in the movies, since something like that would come in useful right about now.

My bubble got busted when the car door opened, and Claude stepped out into the light and waved at me.

Have you ever had one of those moments where your emotions are suddenly switched, and you're left holding the bag and you're caught up in the momentum of whatever it was you were doing? That was me all around. I couldn't stop running, I tried to, but I literally couldn't stop myself, and I couldn't stop running either. Claude had this moment where he was smiling and then saw me still coming at him, and the look on his face went into "oh shit" mode. And then he took off, running from me, not knowing what the hell was going on. I ended up chasing him around the car, but by that time I was laughing more out of relief than anything else.

"Dude stop chasing me!" he managed to yell, and that broke the spell. We both stopped then, looking over the car at each other, me completely out of breath. Claude grinned. "Good to see you too man."

"You stopped texting me, dude! I thought you got arrested or something!"

"Never! Getting arrested is for amateurs," he grinned. "How's the vampiring going? Bitten anybody yet?"

That was the funny thing. I hadn't even had the urge to bite anyone and had just been eating regular food, if you can count expired cereal and egg sandwiches as regular food.

"Actually no. I haven't. I've been wondering about that, and I really gotta talk to someone about it."

"Yeah, I thought it was one of the basic tenets of vampirism. Goes with the teeth, the sleeping during the day, the coffins, the lusty young maidens..."

"Well, I still don't have a coffin and last time I checked, still no lusty young maidens."

"Any word on Louise?"

I nodded, not able to say the words, suddenly unable to breathe, and finally there with my best friend in the world I was finally able to cry for my dead friend Louise.

I don't know how long I cried for and it didn't matter. Claude let me cry and didn't say a word. It didn't even feel like I was crying for her but for all of the things I never got to say to her, all of the time I had wasted doing other shit than appreciating her while she was still there. She had been my other best friend, and now she was gone and it wasn't fair, none of it. I should have been the one who was dead and I knew it. I'm kind of embarrassed to say that I was also crying for myself, the thought of everything I had gone through, all of the hard times and all of the things I had lost. I cried and was horrified for even being so selfish that even then I couldn't make it all about Louise, but I guess that's what human is being about.

And I wasn't that anymore and I knew it.

So I cried and fuck you if you think any less of me for it. You would have cried too.

Claude handed me his phone while we sat on the curb drinking beer from the trunk of his car. I looked from the phone to Claude and thought I was going to cry some more. Finally, I just took the phone and flipped through the photos I had been looking for.

Pictures of me and Louise.

They were exactly what I needed to be able to say goodbye.

******** AUTHOR'S NOTE **********

The book is now AVAILABLE in Hardcover, Paperback and Ebooks. It's going to live here free on Wattpad, but if you love the story and want to support your awesome author (me), grab a copy from one of the lovely retailers below. Who knows: maybe it can become a bestseller with the help of you lovely WattPadders

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