The Elephant in the Room

[The Cedar Witch]

"You are so pushy.  If you want me to move out why don\'t you just tell me straight out."  She stuck out her tongue at him.  She hoped this wasn\'t his round-about way of saying it, but it didn\'t seem that way.

"We were just friends.  We spent a lot of time together, but we weren\'t quite as close as family.  It\'s not like we lived together or anything."  Rachel looked back to her book, still smiling.  Of course, she did want to be closer to Gabe at one point, but that was awhile ago.  He never seemed to take an interest in her - not that she outright asked him.  After dropping a few subtle, unanswered hints she gave up trying to trek down that road.  She wasn\'t going to try and waste her time making something work at the risk of damaging her friendship.  That would have been awkward.

"And I don\'t think it\'s depressing to hang out with you guys."  She looked up at him as she spoke, a playfully \'angry\' expression on her face.  "You\'re more interesting than most of the humans I\'ve hung out with."

[Saiketsu]

He rolled his eyes at her in disbelief. He had known her long enough to know that this was actually bothering her, this being away from everything she had known before. Damien didn\'t like to think about the things that had taken her away from her home, and he was positive that she didn\'t either, and there was an almost overwhelming urge to help her return back to normalcy. Maybe because he knew that she still had the choice to do so -- unlike he had -- that he was so persistant with this. He would have given anything just to see his sister again.

"That\'s simply because we\'re dead and tend to shrivel up in the sun," he said quite darkly, leaving a bad taste even in his own mouth. Quickly changing the subject for his own mental stability, he said, "I do have every intention of bringing you somewhere else for you to live when we can resolve this Laurent situation." If we resolve this Laurent situation, he almost added. "I just don\'t want anyone connected there to ever find you again. Though if you really think you could stand it, I suppose you could get old and wrinkly around us and we would continue to offer you support and aid. Just saying." And the vampire turned back to his newspaper with a small crooked grin on his face.

Through ther corner of his eyes he watched the human roll her eyes and turn her attention back to her book, the cat in her lap eyeing him with his usual ferocity as Rachel\'s hand stroked him lovingly. He waited a long moment, trying to determine the proper way to express the thoughts in his head. "What was he like? Gabriel? You alwasy speak of him but then you brush right over him whenever anyone asks more about him."

[The Cedar Witch]

"You are the only one who ever brings him up and I am not trying to brush over anything."  Was she?  The girl\'s cheeks colored slightly, but she laughed it off.  By now she was used to his seemingly-random sessions of questioning - even though sometimes they made her feel self-conscious.  He didn\'t know any better.

"What else is there to say?  He lived in the same building as I did, was a really nice guy and helped me out when I needed it, cheered me up when I was feeling shitty and he made really corny jokes like he wouldn\'t ever grow up."  Rachel smiled.  Of course she was leaving out the part about her having any sort of feelings for him because that was all over with.  No sense dwelling on the things that could have - but most likely would have never been.

"What else did you want to know?" she looked up at him and noticed that he was watching her. It was something she knew wasn\'t really odd for him to do, but the color flushed into her face again.  There really wasn\'t any reason for her to be getting flustered about it at all.  God.

"Its not like you ever ask me anything specific."

[Saiketsu]

"No, I know that I don\'t," he reflected easily, folding up his paper and putting it down on the coffee table in front of the couch. The vampire stood to fetch a pen and paper to jot down a short note or two with. He returned from the kitchen faster than any human could have hoped to do and sat down next to the girl on the couch, purposely leaving a good foot or so of space between them. Damien then bent over the table and scribbled down a few notes onto the pad of paper in front of him as he spoke. "It\'s just, I don\'t know, you act like you\'ve had feelings for him and I was wondering if that was the case, more or less."

He knew that she had been blushing before -- she was always blushing -- but he could smell the blood flush into her pale face, making him feel a bit bad. That was confirmation enough of her feelings. "Not that it matters," he began feeling rather horrible about her humiliation filling her cheeks one beat at a time. "I mean I just figured that it was part of the reason why you talk about him all the time. I mean I sort of figured that you did, seeing how you blush everytime anyone really mentions his name. I mean, nevermind." And Damien murmured something in another language that vaguely sounded like a complaint about himself as his head bent a little closer to the paper in front of him and the note he was writing.

[The Cedar Witch]

She couldn\'t really respond for a minute - she didn\'t know how to.  The air filled with the sound of her partially started sentences before falling to silence again.  She felt ridiculous.  Of course she knew by now that he could smell her blushing, not that she could have helped it anyway.  But she knew that it was useless to try to deny it.  It felt like the Pierre situation all over again.  Except this time, Damien wasn\'t getting all bothered about it.

She still didn\'t understand what the hell was up with that.  Whatever.

"Well, yeah I did.  But it doesn\'t matter."  It came out sounding more defensive than she intended it to be.  To cover it up, she continued talking.

"I mean, we were just friends.  It would have never been anything more than that."  She stared down into her book awkwardly again, trying to think of some way to talk herself out of this conversation because she must have sounded stupid.

"Its not like he had feelings for me.  Nothing ever happened.  We were just really good friends."  That was all.

[Saiketsu]

"Well, did you ever ask him? I mean maybe he did have feelings for you like you had for him." He felt that human awkwardness creeping up on his skin again, like he needed to move and be far away from her. "Maybe he felt that way when you left and he was wondering every day you were gone. I mean I know I would have been."

That uncomfortable human feeling crept into his skin and into his blood again and he fiddled with the pain, not daring to look up at her. Why did he feel so strange all of a sudden? It wasn\'t like he was telling her something he shouldn\'t have. They were just talking.

[The Cedar Witch]

What did he just say?  

"No, I never told him." she laughed, almost nervously.  Why should she have?  Its not like it would have ever gone anywhere anyway.  She had given up on that silly wish a long time ago.

"I seriously doubt that he had feeling for me.  I think I would have been able to tell anyway."  The color didn\'t leave her cheeks even though she was convinced that there was no reason for her to be feeling this uncomfortable with the conversation.  They were just talking.

"Besides," she continued suddenly, trying to cover up the awkwardness that had seeped into the air yet again.  "I wasn\'t his type."  The comment was dismissive and she went back to reading her book - or trying to anyway.  Not that she could have focused on the words in front of her if she had tried.

[Saiketsu]

His mouth moved against his will and he couldn\'t shake that aweful flushing feeling nor move his legs to work with his mind to get up and put distance between them. He suddenly began to regret sitting down next to her, but especially turning his head to talk to her. "What do you mean you\'re not his type? His type of girl? That sounds ridiculous. Why wouldn\'t you be?" His tongue felt thick in his mouth and there was a sudden and inconceivable thirst in his throat for blood -- as if it would make the human feelings go away.

Something in his chest was tight and tense and he had never really experienced anything like it before -- or at least in a very, very long time. His focus shifted to his hands, which had abandoned the pen and paper for wriggling around nearly uncontrolled. The feeling in his mouth was distracting enough to not make him realize that he was still staring at her dumbly and she was blushing brightly, her pale skin on fire so close to him.

"I mean it\'s not like you\'re some weird girl, Rachel," he said, his tongue stumbling a bit as he went on speaking his thoughts without edit. "I\'m sure that he could have had feelings for you. There\'d be no reason not to..." There was a very quick but lop-sided moment of tension sitting in the air before Damien spoke again attempting to balance it. "I mean, if you two were that close..."

[The Cedar Witch]

It was hard not to notice how strange he was seeming all of a sudden, but it was easy enough to attribute to him not being able to think of what he wanted to say in English.  And he was always weird and sucked at explaining his thoughts on most days.  Most of the time she was used to it, but now it just seemed unusually difficult for him to get out.  What the hell was he trying to get at anyway?  That she should want to go back and reconnect with Gabe and spill her guts and start a family?  Yeah right.

Besides, she just didn\'t feel that way for him anymore.  She stopped it as soon as it started.

"Well yeah, we were close."  He had absolutely no relationship sense.  "But that doesn\'t automatically mean anything."  She shifted awkwardly on the couch, making Lestat jump from her lap and trot into the kitchen to find food.

"I just wasn\'t the type of girl for him."  She sighed.  God, explaining this kind of thing to some nine-hundred-something-year-old guy was impossible.

"What I mean is, there weren\'t enough things about me that would have made him want to start a relationship with me."  Now that just made her sound like a whiny teenager.  Whatever.

[Saiketsu]

Somewhere along the lines of history, love had developed types. Women were no longer nice, or pretty, or good, or honest, or home-makers, or mothers, or ignorant. Now they were types. The change must have slipped right by him in his age, because even Pierre had taken part of the selection of women. He had never concerned himself with whether a woman was blonde or brunette, tall or short, fat or skinny or anything in between. He never particularly noticed how this or that any woman was and the notion that Rachel was not anyone\'s type was simply odd to him.

The thought of Rachel made that human sensation of the tightness in his chest and the odd desire to sweat linger. What was happening? He had never felt this way around anyone before, not even Lucretia.

He had always thought the Rachel was a beautiful young woman, sweet and innocent beyond anything he had ever known. She was fiery and defensive, much like his sister had been. He always secretly liked that about her, but he had never said anything towards it. Lately however, he had noticed how much he had enjoyed her company and the ability to communicate easily with her. It was something that he would have never expected to happen.

Now she sat beside him with a thick awkward tension pacing between them, partially because he thought she was completely wrong. "Yes, but I don\'t understand why you think anyone would think that," he said quietly, fighting through the feeling in his chest not to look away from her. "I mean you\'re attractive, nice, funny, and I don\'t see why anyone would have not thought so."

If he were human his skin would have turned nearly as bright as hers did at that exact moment. Instead he sat next to her with a very peculiar look on his pale face.

A thought flashed across his mind that made his eyes dart back down to his hands, the pen and paper on the table and the picture of Jake McCloud on the newspaper. A proposterous thought, one that he would never let happen, one that he couldn\'t understand where it could have possibly come from, a thought that made him hate himself and wonder at the same time.

[The Cedar Witch]

The girl laughed nervously, unbearably aware of the strange tension that had filled the space between them.  She too looked away from him, down into the words blurring on the pages in her lap.  What was she even reading anyway?  Rachel couldn\'t even remember the last three pages that she had flipped through, the sentences that her eyes passed over.  None of it registered, so she flipped the book closed and fiddled with it in her hands.

Why the fuck is he always so awkward?

Culture gap?

"Yeah, you would say that," she paused, biting the inside of her lip, "You have to deal with me on a daily basis."  She giggled, the tone strained but airy.  Somewhere she was hoping that the humor and sarcasm would relax the atmosphere.  It did not.  Right now, at this second, she hoped that Lestat would come back and provide some kind of hissing distraction, but for once he was in the other room, away from her.

Figures.

"Besides," she perked up suddenly and looked at Damien, hoping in vain that it would change the tone of the conversation.  "He couldn\'t have liked me.  The girls he was into...They were just..." She trailed off awkwardly, trying not to stare blatantly at the vampire but nothing seemed to work.

What the fuck...

He was going to change the subject soon, right?  Yeah, that\'s how things usually went.

[Saiketsu]

Damien opened his mouth as if to speak to her about something of great importance, as if he were going to catch his breath and speak again with a solidness that was unwavering. Yet once he looked back at the girl again, her eyes fixed on his and her face bright pink, his thoughts wandered back to the forbidden thought once more, his silvery eyes landing ever so briefly on her lips.

It had been more than two years since he had met the girl in that dark alleyway in the middle of some unknown city. More than two years since he couldn\'t stand the scent of her lingering in his car the night that he and his son had rescued her, since she had run away and ran straight into him. It had been more than four hundred years since Lucretia had died, more than four hundred years he had allowed himself to touch a female in any way more than cold friendship. But more importantly, it had been more than nine hundred years since the first time he had kissed a human, a warm cheek that could feel sickness, death, and the rays of the sun.

He moved faster than he could recognize that he was in motion. The tension in his chest seized him as he felt the girl\'s breath on his lips, a gentle, almost calming roll of hunger in the back of his throat reminding him of what he was and what he was doing. Her breath had caught in her throat when she finally realized he had moved. There he hesitated only a moment, too late to turn back now that he had moved. No thoughts of his sire pushed into his head as the vampire put his lips against the human\'s, his silver eyes closed as if it were the most natural thing in the world, even after four hundred years.

[The Cedar Witch]

Holy shit he moves fast; was the thought that came before any realization of what exactly he was doing, was planning on doing, or had done.  But in the instant that their mouths touched, the tension that had been harbored in the air moved into her chest all at once.  She couldn\'t breathe, and in that second she wasn\'t sure that she felt like trying.  The feeling of his unnaturally cool lips against hers - hot with embarrassed blood - absorbed all of her concentration.

Before anything had time to register in her mind, she moved her lips against his in the smallest of motions.  Only for a second, or what seemed like a second to her - something that must have been longer for him.  And to her further surprise and confusion, she was the first to pull away from him.  And then the thoughts came to her mind all at once, after it was over almost as quickly as it had happened.

What. The. Fuck?

She opened her mouth, gaping dumbly at him for what seemed like a painful eternity before looking firmly at the floor.  Rachel could feel the blood in her face and the sudden rush was making her lightheaded.  Eyes wide, she glanced quickly up at the vampire again before the feeling of self-consciousness overtook her ability to look at him in the face.  

It all made sense now.  But she wasn\'t in the right state of mind to piece together the puzzle that had become their interactions - past and present.  The desire to speak and fill the even more awkward silence overwhelmed her, but there was nothing that she could say when she couldn\'t even process what had just happened.


"I..."  It felt like all of the blood in her body was in her face.  God, she sounded so stupid.  Well, why the fuck would that matter right now?

What the fuck?

[Saiketsu]

He could remember that feeling, what this was supposed to feel like. Her lips were soft and warm, warmer than he thought humans could be. A tightness gathered in his chest and held onto his lungs and stomach as his lips enjoyed hers. A sense of panic set in and almost tore his lips away from hers until there was was a small human movement of her lips against his. She kissed him back, her lips moving nearly as much as his were, responding to him. That heaviness in his chest grew weightier and weightier until  at last she moved away from him, parting their lips. Damien looked at Rachel for a long moment before the realization of what he had just done set in.

Nearly as soon as her lips opened to mouth something incoherent, the heaviness finally dropped deep into his stomach, making him instantly nauseous. The vampire knew that he shouldn\'t have done that, not to her, not to any woman. He tried to offer her an apology, but his breath seemed caught in his stomach with the nauseous weight of what he had just done to her. Without managing to speak, Damien stood suddenly and left the room at a human pace and climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, unable to contend with himself and what he had just done, leaving Rachel with her thoughts below.

[The Cedar Witch]

She watched him leave, a sense of dread and guilt filling her.  But why?  It\'s not like she had done anything.  There was no reason for her to feel guilty.  It wasn\'t like she had done anything bad or said anything mean.  He was the one who kissed her.

He kissed her.

She watched the direction that he walked in for a long time before closing her eyes and leaning back into the couch.  Things made sense now.  Why he had reacted the way he did when he found out that she had a little crush on Pierre, it was because he was jealous.  All of the awkward moments that they had just had.  How long was he planning on kissing her?  What part of the conversation pushed him to do that?  Or was he thinking about this for a long time?  All that talk about how she should have told Gabriel how she felt about him...

No.  That didn\'t make sense.  He just couldn\'t have had any sort of...feelings or otherwise.  Not Damien.  It didn\'t add up.  He was way too wrapped up in his own existence, his own problems, his own past, to possibly leave room for anything else.  He hadn\'t even felt anything for anyone since everything happened way-back-when.  No, this had to be some kind of "see, you\'re attractive and you should have told Gabriel.  I\'m right, you\'re wrong" thing.  Had to be.  Of course.  He just didn\'t know how to express it the right way, or he forgot to say some kind of stupid sarcastic comment that would have changed the mood of everything that had just happened and now he feels stupid so he ran away?

No, that doesn\'t make any sense either.

The girl sighed out a heavy "what the fuck" that she knew that he could have heard from upstairs but wasn\'t too concerned about at the present moment.  \'What the fuck\' was exactly how she felt right now.  She didn\'t know what to think.  She wanted to crawl into her bed and not come out for a few weeks until this whole thing blew over and they could go back to being the way they always were.

Friends.

Would that even work?  Rachel didn\'t even know how she felt about anything anymore.  She had kissed him back, yes, but why?  Just because that was the thing to do?  Of course she found him attractive, and he was extremely caring and they had pleasant time together.  But she had never tried to entertain the idea of any sort of feelings blooming between the two of them.  Not with Damien.  Damien was still that unreachable, cold person deep down.  They both had their darkened pasts and they both knew that.  She wouldn\'t dare to even think that he could move on from that, much less for her.  

Now she was thinking too much.

The girl groaned aloud, moving into a laying-down position on the couch.  Lestat\'s mew drew her attention to the floor and she smiled at him.

"Where were you five minutes ago?" she laughed softly, forgetting that she could be easily heard.  "You could have protected me from this mess."  She picked the cat up and flipped over onto her back, allowing Lestat to settle contently on her stomach.

"Now what."  She sighed again.