Xavious must have sensed my pulling away emotionally. He pulled me physically closer and said, “Hey, you wanna get out of here?”

“I do.” I did want to leave. I wanted to keep drinking but not somewhere this public. I didn’t, however, want to sleep with Xavious. For all my flirting and my speculation, I just wasn’t into him as a person, never mind as that weird thing I hadn’t fucked yet.

“All right, let me get the tab.” He pulled away from me to signal to the bartender. I was relieved he wasn’t touching me anymore, and I could think again. I reached into my purse and started pulling out money. He reached over and pushed my hand back into my bag.

“No, no. Drinks are on me.” He patted my hand.

“I ordered a lot of shots. Like a lot, a lot. I don’t want you to have to pay for them all.” I smiled but in my mind, I started doing the math. I had ordered way more drinks than I could afford. Even if I gave him all the money in my purse, it would hardly make a dent. I tried to hand him my credit card.

“Don’t make this more complicated than it has to be. The bartender doesn’t want to split everything up and try to put half this shit on cards or whatever. Just let me pay,” Xavious said putting his hand back on my thigh. I didn’t want to force the issue.

He paid the tab. I found my coat. I was hoping maybe I could just meet back up with my friends downstairs, but no one replied to my text. When I finally got downstairs, they were gone. We walked out into the cold street. The night air had a tang of metal and garbage I had long ago started to associate with the city. The night was dark and probably clear, but the towering buildings and streetlights obscured the sky. The wind funneled down the street with nowhere to go. Sometimes I wondered where it started. How was the city not completely still surrounded as it was by walls of buildings?

I looked around for a cab. When one showed up a few moments later, I was trying to figure out how to get in it alone. My head was spinning, and I felt tired. Xavious opened the door and gave the driver his address.

“Maybe I should just go home.” I wasn’t pretending to be coy. I wanted to leave.

“Come on. The night is young,” Xavious said, and he smiled.

“No, really. I’ve had a lot to drink, and it’s late. I don’t want to go to another bar,” I told him and crossed my arms over my body against the wind.

“I’m not taking you to another bar. I’m taking you to my house. I have a full bar there,” he explained, and he put his hands on either side of my arms and rubbed.

It sounded like a terrible idea, but I couldn’t quite articulate why. “I’m not sure. I just want to go home.”

“Come on, it’ll be fun.”

“I don’t want to sleep with you,” I blurted out.

His hands dropped from my sides, and sounding outraged, he said, “I know what the reputation of my kind is, but you’ll be safe. I’m not a monster.”

“I don’t know,” I said again, but he was rushing me into the cab, and I didn’t want to go home. There was nothing and no one waiting for me at home. Better to keep drinking at his house than spend another night in my empty bed. For all my trepidation, I didn’t feel any less scared of going home to my empty bed than I felt about going home with him.

When we got into the cab, he sat next to me, and I sat next to the door. He put his arm around me. I watched the lights pass by the window of the cab. They smeared together into one glow when I didn’t focus until it seemed the whole world was filled with artificial light and darkness. The cab was too warm after the cold street, but I didn’t want to remove my coat. I tried to ignore Xavious’ arm. It didn’t totally work. I didn’t feel comfortable leaning against him. I wanted him to go away. Of course, he didn’t go away. He couldn’t, we were trapped in the back seat of the cab together.

Too soon we got to his apartment. He didn’t live far away from the bar where we had been drinking. The building he lived in was a giant skyscraper of glass and steel. The lobby was open and marble, and a uniformed doorman greeted him by name. The guard called the elevator, which seemed unusually large. There were no numbers. Xavious held his key fob to a panel, and the elevator whisked us to his floor. The hallway leading to his apartment was tastefully decorated in earthy green tones and softly lit with recessed lighting. The contrast between the warm hallway and the black and steel coldness of his apartment couldn’t have been starker.

The outside wall of his apartment was all glass, featuring an expansive view of the city. As we entered the apartment, a few ceiling lights came on automatically. The lights highlighted the huge black topped, dark wood bar dominating the center of the room. It almost looked like an altar. There was a massive thin TV hanging from one wall across from a black leather couch that was all hard angles and chrome. Beside the couch were two settees which looked substantially more comfortable than the couch. I walked over to the window and looked out over the lights of the city at night. It was a spectacular view.

I stood there for a while trying to pick out landmarks I recognized. Behind me, I could hear Xavious making drinks. He came over and handed me something in a martini glass, and I took a sip. It burned like fire despite the fact I had been drinking for hours. After swallowing the burning liquor, I looked over at him.

He had taken off his pants but left on his sports coat and his purple button up. He had somehow tucked the shirt so it didn’t hang below the jacket. His legs were now uncovered. I could see his brown, curly fur. His haunches were thick and muscular. His knee and ankle joint looked like that of deer, and he had split hooves. His penis was clearly visible, massive and hairy, dangling between his thighs. As soon as I looked at it, I felt awkward and returned to looking out the windows.

He asked with a touch of bitterness. “Am I too much adventure for you? Too much monster? Do you prefer your monsters to be like the pretty, safe looking vampires?”

I looked at him, and I was careful to only focus on his face so I could avoid looking at him below the waist. “Vampires are far from safe for humans. They hunt us.”

“Yes, they have to seem normal to do it. All the worst monsters do. How else could they get close to you? What can I do to you? I possess nothing more than a disfigured body and a hollow leg. Sure, I can drink you under the table, but I have to hide what I am to get close enough to you to do even that.” he said, and he was watching me back.

“You don’t have to hide. You’re not hiding. It was on your profile, and we met on Cinder. Very obviously, I was looking for a man like you. It was very clear to me what you were. This,” I waved at all of him below the belt with my drink, sloshing a little over the rim, “doesn’t come as a shock to me.”

“Can you look at it? Can you touch it? Can you imagine me inside you? Inside your pussy? Inside your mouth? I bet you’ve fucked the vampires you met and let them bite you, too, but you can’t look at me.” He walked away from the sofa and back to the bar. I stared at him as he walked. He had a small furry tail, a little stubby fluffy tail like a rabbit or a deer. He was standing by the bar, and he must have finished his drink because he put the glass into the small sink that was part of the lavish bar. He reached into the built-in wine cooler, selected a bottle and took the bottle and a corkscrew to the low coffee table in front of the settee. I watched as he sat and set the bottle on the table.

“Do you really have a hollow leg?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.

“It’s not actually hollow,” he explained in a tired, sounding voice like he was talking to a singularly stupid insect.

“No, I get that. I’m familiar with the expression, but you’ve been drinking all night. I’m pretty plastered. You’ve had more than me, but you keep drinking more. Are you drunk? Can you get drunk?”

I left my spot by the window, sat on the settee opposite him, and set my drink on the coffee table in front of me. I didn’t need to finish it. I hadn’t been exaggerating about how drunk I was. I wasn’t even sure I wasn’t blacking out and had the strange feeling of asking myself if I would remember any of this the next day.

For a moment his face looked vulnerable and somehow younger. “I’m not drunk, not really. I can get that way, but it takes a lot of human booze. Elf wine or ambrosia or any magical drink works better. I don’t get drunk like humans do. I get awesome. When I’m blind drunk, it’s when my limited magical powers are strongest. Just another joke from the universe on the satyr.”

He put down the corkscrew without opening the bottle. For the first time since he had come down the stairs to meet me, I felt connected to him. He looked alone and lost. It touched me, to see him so vulnerable. I got up from my settee and want over to sit next to him. I reached out a tentative hand and petted the hair on his leg. It was soft and wiry, like chest hair, only thicker. His penis was dangling between his legs in such a way that the hair obscured it, so I didn't have to look at it. He moved one hooved leg away from me.

“Don’t,” he said, and he sounded disgusted. I pulled my hand back. “I use to be a demi-god. I don’t want the pity of a modern child.”

The hardness was back, but I still felt sorry for him. Damaged men always got to me. Something about a broken man appealed to me, something I thought I could fix, something I wanted to make whole.

“Did you really used to be a god?”

I knew some of the creatures had been part of the ancient religions, and the magical beings had always existed alongside humans. They were the same creatures as they had always been, only they used to be worshiped for what they were. Of course, some are still worshiped. Jesus’s magical feats were legendary. Muhammad had arguably surpassed him, but he did come later and have the benefit of a better understanding of magic. In Europe, the revelation that magic was real had caused a greater shake up of religion than Darwin's On the Origins of the Species. Magic wasn't hidden everywhere in the world, and Buddha's power level couldn't be quantified because he walked away from magic and opted to live a normal life, urging his followers to do the same.

He replied, “Demi. Demi-god. It’s an important distinction. I wasn’t Bacchus. No one ever prayed to me, but I wasn’t human. There are times when that has been more pleasant than others.”

“Is this so bad a time to be more than human?” I asked him. The alcohol had numbed me, and I leaned away from him.

“It’s not the inquisition years or anything so dreadful. We may be more powerful than the strictly human. You do have us beat in numbers, but the magic has gone out of our magic. Your technology has almost reached a point that it may as well be magical. You can fly, talk face to face over long distances, make light whenever you want it, and heal the sick. What place does my sad drunken magic have in your world? I don’t even need to carry women off anymore. I can just use your magical cell phones and call one to come to me. What a strange world this is.”

He didn’t look at me as he spoke. He stared straight ahead as if he was looking back into some distant unfathomable past.

“I’m sorry.” I said, not really sure what else to say. I wasn't sure what I was apologizing for, science or humans, but the habit of reflexively apologizing was deeply ingrained.

“Are you? Are you sorry? Why should you be? It isn’t your fault. Not really. You’re part of the problem of course, but you didn’t mean to do it.”

He looked over and spoke in a detached voice, as if I was insignificant, which I suppose I was. I was just a puny human. I would be dead before he even noticed, but I was trying to be sympathetic and understanding to his plight. It had to suck to wander around, a fallen demigod with goat legs.

“I suppose I am sorry in a way. Not for anything I did, but rather that you have to live in a time that makes you unhappy. It sounds difficult.”

Xavious looked at me like he wasn’t sure what I would do next, and that freaked him out.

“I just don’t understand this time.” He sounded cold and detached. “Do you want to sleep with me or not?”