Vampire Coffee

“So how’s the vampire?”

           25-year-old Mona scoffed. “Don’t call him that!”

           “But you knew exactly who I was talking about, didn’t you?” came her slightly older sister, Beth’s, smug reply.

           They stood in the kitchen of Mona’s apartment. Mona was making dinner; Beth stood beside her and sipped from a huge glass of rosé.

           “He might be sensitive about it,” said Mona.

           “He might be sensitive about a lot of things,” said Beth, airily.

           “And that’s a bad thing?” Mona didn’t wait for a reply. “You know, it’s cool for guys to be in touch with their feelings nowadays. There’s this whole movement about it and everything, Beth.” Her voice punched the name ‘Beth’ as if this one woman were the origin of every grown man’s emotional repression. “Let men feel things!”

           “I’ll take my men reticent and grumpy, in a cowboy hat and big ol’ belt buckle.”

           Mona cut the stem from a green bell pepper. “The bigger the belt buckle, the more suppressed the trauma.”

           Beth giggled at that, then said, “You’re always so touchy about him. Any comment I make, you’re like –” She clawed her fingers and hissed.

           Mona glared. “He’s my friend; of course I’m gonna stand-up for him.”

           “It’s not rude to call someone a vampire,” said Beth, exasperated. “Vampires are cool! They sparkle in the sunlight and play baseball when it rains.”

           Mona’s stern expression crumbled into laughter. Beth laughed, too; it took a handful of seconds before they sobered.

           “It’s not what you said,” Mona insisted, chopping into the bell pepper. “It’s how you said it. What does it matter what time someone gets up or goes to bed? Mind ya own business.”

           “It’s just a bit concerning,” Beth said – and proceeded to sip from a wineglass almost as big as her head. “I worry about his future. If the early bird gets the worm, and the other birds get the other worms, then by the time the night-bird comes out, there’s gonna be no worms left, Mo. He’s gonna be wormless!”

           Mona squinted at her. Hard. “What does that even mean?”

           “It means – ” Beth huffed. She didn’t finish her sentence. Just huffed a few more times and shook her head.

           “Exactly,” said Mona, pointing at her. “A bitch don’t know.”

           “Heeeyy,” the word stretched out, taffy-thick, over a luxuriant yawn.

           “Speak of the vamp,” Beth leaned in and whispered in Mona’s ear.

           While turning around, Mona jabbed her elbow against Beth’s upper arm, just once, like prodding a naughty dog on the nose. Down, girl.

           “That is a comically large glass of rosé,” ‘the vamp’ was saying. “You might as well call it a bowl with a stem, at that point.”

           Mona’s roommate – and dear friend, after a year of living together – stood before them. Sameer: he had one of those rugged but sweet faces that could sometimes look ten years older, and sometimes, ten years younger. Today, he just looked his actual age, which was 28.

           His voice was always deep, and the leftover gravity of sleep had pulled it down an extra octave. A dark-blue, velvet rumble. Warm. (Impossibly warm. Mona felt an exact imprint of it, right inside her, blooming behind her belly button.)

           “Oh, would you like some?” Beth asked, swirling the glass’s pink liquid. “A fine, fancy beverage to wind down the evening?”

           Sameer rubbed his eyes. “I’ll stick to coffee, thanks.”

           “I’ll get the pot brewing,” Mona said quickly. (Like, quickly-quickly. The words rocketed out of her, as if on tiny turbo roller-skates. That’s always how she felt in Sameer’s presence – zippy, zooming, light.)

           “You’re the best,” Sameer said, striding to the fridge. He wore a Pantera T-Shirt and a pair of sweatpants. The top of the shirt and the bottom of the pants were separated by a good two inches. (That two-inch strip of stomach beyond the navel? Mona had to use invisible pliers to yank her eyes away.)

           Beth set her glass down on the countertop. “I need to whizz,” she said, and flounced out of the kitchen.

           “Ever the poet,” said Mona, scooping ground coffee into the pot.

           Sameer chuckled. The sound was a hot knife and Mona was butter; his laugh cut through her edges, melted her clean in half.

           The coffee machine roared to life, hissing and spitting like a feral cat. The heady, heavenly smell filled the room. Mona abandoned her bell-pepper-chopping to sit down across from Sameer at the kitchen table.

           “Hi,” she said, with a happy little smile. “Good morning.”

           Sameer had grabbed an apple from the fridge. Sleepy-eyed, he crunched out a bite, his mouth squished tight as his cheeks bulged out, and through it all, he offered her back the sweetest, close-lipped smile. His black hair stood up at odd angles. Scruff exploded along his jaw, across his upper lip. He was so cute, she couldn’t stand it; beneath the table, her toes squeezed together to try and ride out the cute-aggression.

           Sameer put down his apple. He stood, and passed by Mona, pressing his fingertips over the top of her hair in a silent hello. He walked over to the kitchen sink, where the window stretched out above it. Yanking aside the red plaid curtain revealed the navy hues of dusk beyond the glass. A herald of nighttime, pressing in too close, like a half-closed eyelid.

           Mona watched Sameer, bathed in light the blue texture of dreaming. The mundane beauty of it welled in Mona’s throat. Outside the window, day and night touched, coloring the kitchen in a fusion of cosmic fingertips, reaching from one end of the horizon to the other.

           Sameer grabbed two mugs, filled them with coffee, prepared one with just cream and one with cream and sugar. He went back to the table, handed Mona the coffee with just cream.

           They did this together, every evening. Drank coffee. Took turns with who prepared it.

           Sometimes, at her receptionist job during the day, Mona would be talking on the phone to a customer, but behind her eyes, this would be the scene playing, the image worn-in and loved, like a book page creased from fingers returning many times over:

           Sameer, his thick hair messy from the rough hands of a pillow; a red mug, with curlicues of steam weaving up in an effervescent ballet of gray; and the broad stretch of the wooden tabletop between them.

           The wooden tabletop, where they could each lay their elbows from the opposite ends, and lay flat their forearms, and just the tips of their fingers would touch (she knew this, because they’d tried it once. The way their fingertips had flexed together felt like a promise: for more touch, for more skin, for more to come, for just…more).

           “Did you have a good day at work?” Sameer asked. He always asked questions like he really cared about the answers.

           Mona was tempted to tell him she’d spent a good part of it daydreaming about him. Instead, she said, “It was pretty good; I had fun organizing the new schedules.”

           “The fact that I know you mean that – like, to your bones – makes me ever more endeared to you,” said Sameer.

           Mona grinned. “Nothing makes me happier than the highlighter function on Microsoft Excel.”

           “I don’t know how to tailor your next birthday present to that,” said Sameer. “Buuuut! I will try my best.” He lifted his hand to his forehead and saluted her.

           “The sun won’t burn you, you know,” Beth said, dropping herself into the chair on the outer edge of the table.

           Sameer’s neck whipped through a double-take. “There is an entire industry of lotions built on the very backbone of how wrong that statement is.”

           “I mean, like, you won’t burst into flames or anything,” said Beth, waving her hand around.

           Sameer nodded, slowly, and squinted his eyes, pretending like he was taking that into consideration. “Noted.”

           “I find that Beth is best understood when you don’t care to try,” said Mona.

           Sameer hid a snicker against his fist and looked away.

           Vampire, Beth took the opportunity to mouth, jerking her chin toward Sameer.

           Mona rolled her eyes. She started to lift her mug of coffee, but Sameer’s gaze returned to hers, just as she was looking at him. They both smiled, at the same time, in the same way, like their lip-neurons were built way back in utero with the sole mission of finding and mirroring the other’s in this moment.

           “Sunlight is good for you,” Beth was saying. “It gives you vitamin-D, it can give you a nice tan, it can improve your mood….”

           As Beth babbled, Mona and Sameer finished passing the smile between them, before breaking their eyes away, their mouths still curled just-so, bent from the exquisitely soft shape of all the simmering words between their hearts left unsaid.

&&&

Eleven hours later, Sameer sat at his bedroom desk. He’d been working for hours, finishing some commissions. He was a freelance artist, specializing in both hyper-realistic portraits and illustrated cartoons of people. He had a popular enough Instagram following that he made good money from it.

           He was shading in his latest illustration. A passion project. Its color scheme: black, white, gray, bruise blue, and midnight purple. The widow’s peak on the character’s head needed just a biiit more shading…. There! All done. With an amused little smile and a burst of pride, he pushed the illustration aside.

           It was almost 6:30 in the morning. His desk was pushed against the wall, with the window to his left. A desk lamp poured a honey-pool of light down onto the immediate area of his drawing. Beyond the window beside him, the world outside began to lighten. Dawn was breaking.

           Sameer looked over, to the window: the horizon was a bleeding mess of teal, orange, red, and navy. Parts of the teal stripes in the sky veered out of being more blue-based and poured instead into an almost supernatural hue of green.

           His first thought when witnessing such a spectacle – the kind that made your utterly fragile humanness pull tight within your throat, so that you had to swallow hard around the solid fact of it, like a precious knot – was always this: he wanted to share it with Mona.

           Lucky for him, she should be waking up soon.

           He yawned and rubbed at his eyes. She’d be waking up, while he was about an hour-and-a-half away from climbing into bed.

           A few minutes later, he heard it, the sound that swelled up in his chest like it had originated there in the first place: her footsteps, padding down the hall.

           Sameer crossed his bedroom in two quick strides and pulled his door open. “Mo,” he said, and Mona blinked up at him like her eyes were newly installed and she was still figuring out how the eyelids worked.

           Mona wore a bathrobe that swallowed her like a pink fluffy marshmallow. Her dark hair was cut to her chin in a way that pointed forward like wings, and she had these blunt bangs that kept her forehead in Witness Protection Program. She usually wore glasses, but not in the morning, and the absence of them gave her face a starkly naked quality. Her hair looked limp, and her eyes were puffy, and that bathrobe was frankly ridiculous – and it all remained one of Sameer’s favorite sights.

           “Hey,” Mona said. She always spoke in this quiet, thin voice until half an hour of being awake, when her tone would finally spring forward, robust, recharged, alive. For now, it was weak as a sand-dollar. If it were tangible, Sameer would have to hold that voice very carefully in the palm of his hand or it would shatter.

           “Come,” Sameer said, circling his hand around her wrist. “Come, come, come…” He dragged her after him, into his room, parked her in front of the window. He stood behind her and planted his hands on her shoulders. The dove-soft material of the robe puffed within his fingers. “Look at that!”

           “Whoa,” Mona murmured. The sunrise had sharpened its colors at least 30% in the past few minutes, turned the dial up on its vibrancy. “It’s like a painting.”

           Sameer felt hyper, being around her, holding onto her shoulders, inhaling the sweet, sleep-warm scent of the crown of her head. “I always want to run forward and jump into sunrises,” he said. “I want their colors to paint over my entire body. To dig around between the hues and taste it, not on my tongue, not even opening my mouth, but taste it way-down-deep in my chest, you know?”

           Mona hummed, then said, “I bet it tastes like lavender. And peppermint. And chocolate. And the way freshly printed paper smells.” She leaned her back into his front.

           “Tangerines,” said Sameer. “Limes. Salty ocean spray, and the way wind feels when it whips back at you from the top of a cliff.” His chin found the top of her head, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “I bet it smells like adventure.” 

           “Sam,” a wistful sigh, “I wish we could taste colors together.”

           For several long, luxurious minutes, they stared at the sunrise, watching it shift in saturation, golden light filtering through ever more steadily. Mona and Sameer leaned against one another and watched the world awaken.

&&&

Mona went to the kitchen, leaving Sameer to soak up the sunrise a bit longer. As the coffee brewed, she fluffed her fingers through her hair. Tried to give it some life.

           “I wanna show you something,” said Sameer.

           Mona turned; Sameer strode toward her. He handed her an 11-inch-by-17-inch cardstock, the front of it covered in his most recent drawing.

           A smile – surprised, amused, delighted – lit up Mona’s face. She made a little sound, like if “Oh!” were birthed within a laugh.

           The drawing was obviously of Sameer: there was enough realism in his features to be immediately identifiable, even as a cartoon.

           And cartoon-Sameer was styled as a vampire. Dramatic widow’s peak. Long fangs. A black coat with the collar turned up high. Vampire-Sameer held a mug of dark-blue liquid with gray steam coming out of it. Written on the mug in small, blocky penmanship: ‘VAMPIRE COFFEE.’

           “Vampire coffee?” Mona laughed. “Wouldn’t that be blood?”

           “He’s a vegetarian,” Sameer said. “–And if his diet is a necessity of me being out of red pen, then who’s to say, Mona, who’s to say?” Mona laughed harder.

           “Wait – ” Her eyes widened. “Does this mean…?”

           Sameer smirked. “That I’ve heard Beth call me a vampire? Yes. Many times.”

           Mona swung her chin toward her shoulder. “She really needs to learn how to whisper...”

           “It’s fine,” Sameer pulled a face, waved his hand to the side. “It’s funny.”

           “Why do you keep such…odd sleeping hours?” Mona winced. “Sorry! Not odd, just–”

           Sameer’s smirk was back. “Abnormal?”

           “No! Well – yeah. Different.”

           “It’s okay. I’m not touchy about it,” Sameer said. “Basically, you know I grew up in a biiig household. Mom, Dad, three brothers, three sisters. Well, nighttime was the only time I could be alone. Everyone else would be in bed by midnight, but I’d stay up in the living room and just feel my own company. I’ve always loved nighttime anyway – all that darkness outside, the quiet, just you and the night. It feels like you’re tucked within a secret.

           “So, when I started freelancing full-time and was able to pick my own hours, I realized: I’m an adult and can go to bed whenever I damn want. And when I damn want, just happens to be after the sun has risen.”

           Mona considered all this. “That makes sense,” she said, nodding. “Do you think you’ll ever switch back to being awake during the day and sleeping at night?”

           Sameer shrugged. Mona hadn’t known the act of shrugging could be attractive until she saw the motion unfurl across Sameer’s shoulders.

           “I’m sure I will one day. It’s not sustainable forever. Mainly because it gets in the way of some things I want to do.”

           “Like what?”

           “Liiike…there are a lot of things only open during the day.” Sameer leveled his gaze at Mona in a way that made shimmers run right through her. “Things like brunch. And office-supply stores. And office-supply stores that serve brunch.”

           Mona laughed, the sound lighter than air. “What?”

           “Those don’t exist?” Sameer asked innocently.

           “Nope,” Mona smirked. “Dare to dream.”

           Sameer grinned; he lived to make her laugh. “I imagine that you have the time of your life shopping for gel pens and folders.”

           Mona squinted at him in amusement.  

           “You love organizing,” he said, with such affection that she found her own lips pressing together in a sacred little smile. “If I cut you open, I’d probably find you alphabetized your organs.”

           “I think the body system is already organized perfectly as is."

           “I’m just saying," Sameer said. “I’ve seen your room. And how you light up talking about your job. If not a Home Depot, what is your ideal place to hang out in the day?”

           “Museums,” Mona tucked her chin-length bob behind her ears, (Sameer’s eyes zeroed in on it. It really was such a ridiculous haircut; Edna Mode, in the flesh. – Damn it, he’d never adored anything more.), “I love museums.”      

           “Next Saturday,” Sameer promised, “I’ll creep back into the dawn of the living, and I’ll take you to a museum.”

           A blush bloomed upon Mona’s face, the heat put there by the fire in Sameer’s eyes. “Okay…” she said, and her lips curled upward. “That’d be amazing.”

           “Then it’s a date?” Sameer asked, tone dropping to a softer shade of blue.

           Mona held his gaze: equally vulnerable, equally electric with potential. “Yes,” she said. “It’s a date.”

           Sameer’s smile grew wiiiide. “Perfect!” he said. “Now – let’s get you your coffee.”