About a week later I found myself out at brunch with the girls. We drank champagne and ate eggs with under-seasoned hollandaise sauce. When everyone else went home to their boyfriends, husbands, and babies only Lauren and I were left. We didn’t have anyone waiting for us at home, not so much as a dog. We did the only obvious thing and went to another bar. This one didn’t even bother with the pretension of food, it just served beer or shots in a dark wood paneled room with a few discreet TVs showing hockey on mute.

In the daylight, it was not a happy bar. At night it was fine. A bar has to be pretty hard up to look bad in the dark, sometime the really rough places even end up being cool and dangerous after dark. By nine pm this place was just a normal run down bar. On Friday and Saturday nights the regulars filled the seats, and on the weeknights, they made enough of a showing it didn’t seem empty.

In the bright sunlight of a Sunday afternoon, the bar looked depressing. It was all dark browns and greens. The dirt on the pictures and the scruffs on the pool table where people had marred the felt were all illuminated in the bright light of the day. The posters that looked retro at night just looked old, faded, and curled at the edges. Even the windows the light shone in through were dirty. The bartender had once been handsome. His cheekbones were still strong. Now they were mired in a strange sort of swollen fat. I wondered if he was taking steroids, to treat an illness and not to build muscles.

He still acted like he was a handsome man, flirting shamelessly with us. It had a desperate edge to it, though, like he knew there wasn’t a chance. I could see he was hurting. There was some secret sadness, or perhaps his sorrow wasn't a secret. I just didn’t know about it, which wasn’t really the same thing at all. Either way he was so obviously broken, I found it appealing, and I was attracted to him on some level in spite of myself. I couldn’t stop myself from flirting with him even though I wasn’t into him.

When he finally left me alone, Lauren turned to me and said, “I heard you’re on Cinder.”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean I am, but how did you hear that?”

“Laila told me. She thinks we’ve lost it. I have an account so I tracked you down.” She sipped her beer. She was pretty, in a pale redheaded way. Her nose was marked with freckles that made her look younger than she was. Her figure was fuller. She dressed in a sort of funky over the top way that worked somehow. Right now she was wearing a very tailored turquoise dress, gray leggings, and matching turquoise heels. On me the dress would have looked like I was wearing something I had stolen from my mom's closet. On her it worked really well.

“You have an account?” I asked, trying to sound surprised although Laila had already told me Lauren did.

“Yeah.” She looked around to make sure the bartender was in the back and too far away to overhear, “I don’t know if you know this. Why would you? I never told you, I don’t think, but I was a virgin for forever.” She took a sip of her beer, and I waited. When I didn’t say anything she went on. “It was okay when I was eighteen. When I was twenty-one it was weird. By the time I was twenty-five, I just couldn’t seem to get rid of it. It totally freaked out the two guys I told. After they knew, they didn’t want anything to do with me. I finally went and had a one night stand. I didn’t even tell him. After that I had a lot—a lot—of one night stands. I started picking up men on the chubby chaser websites. That was pretty cool. It was nice to be with men who are really into the way I look, like they all thought I was hot. I never got used to it. Then Cinder came out. I don’t know. It was cool to be able to fuck all kinds of things. Like the one night stands were all either great or awful. The thing was they weren't special. You know? Maybe it was because I waited so long to have sex, but I kept expecting it to be magical, and it wasn't. So I started going on Cinder, and suddenly it was magical. Literally magical. Anyway, I didn’t mention to the girls but I wanted to tell you, I totally get why you’re on there.”

We kept drinking. The bartender didn’t come out front.

I said, “I don’t even know what I’m doing on it. At first it was just something random, just to try it, you know? But now, I don’t even know why I’m still doing it. I’ve had some epically bad dates. They’re just all so freaking damaged.” The bar smelled like mold and spilled beer. It was as broken as the bartender with nothing appealing about it.

“Men, or the men you meet on Cinder?”

“All men, all people, but somehow a tragic vampire is a lot hotter than a tragic day shift bartender.”

“That’s only because you haven’t seen the vamp in a dirty bar on a Sunday.”

I asked, “You think it’s the sense of mystique that makes them so sexy?”

She laughed. “That and the bite.”

“You’ve been bitten?” I asked.

“Of course. Haven’t you?”

“I have, but everyone is so against it. Even the vampire who bit me seemed reluctant.” I remembered the bite. The feeling of togetherness, of perfect union that had filled me as his teeth entered me.

“People are just anti-fun. Don’t let them get you down. A little sip here, a little bite there. It’s nothing. It’s not going to turn you into like a Renfield or anything. It’s just a good time, and it helps the vamp. Sure some of them have real deep feelings about it. That doesn’t mean they don’t need blood to live, because they sure as fuck do.” She turned to look at me over her beer.

“I thought if you let them bite you, you got addicted.”

“You know there are people who smoke meth and don’t get addicted, right? You’re drinking a beer right now, and you ain’t addicted to that, either. Addiction is never straightforward, you know? What’s maybe no big deal for you may be the end of the line for someone else.”

“How do you know? How do you know if you’ll become an addict?” I pressed. I wasn’t sure I wasn’t an alcoholic. I wasn’t vomiting in the gutter, but my relationship with alcohol was fast becoming as fucked as my relationships with men.

“You don’t. No one does. How do you know you won’t end up a homeless bag lady trying to trade blowies for forties after your next beer? You don’t. Not really.” She shrugged in an expansive gesture that somehow incorporated the risk inherent in all of life.

“How do you know if you’re slipping? Can you recover?” I asked. I had thought it was one and done when it came to vamp bites. The idea I could maybe experiment with it again was very appealing. Maybe I could just slide into vamp addiction the way I was sliding into alcoholism. After all, I could stop drinking anytime I wanted to. I just didn’t want to.

She shrugged again, but this time with only one shoulder. “Does anyone ever recover from any addiction? Sure, people survive, but do they ever get over it? Cheers to grim life choices,” she said and clinked her glass to mine.

“Do you think you’re addicted?” I asked, making my voice softer and leaning closer to her.

“I don’t know.” Lauren asked, shaking her glass at me as if she was challenging me. “Do you think you’re addicted to booze?”

“Maybe? I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure if you gave me an online addiction quiz, I would flunk it, but I would say no.” I shrugged only my shrug was stiff and defensive.

The bartender came out of the back room, putting his phone into his pocket “What else can I get you ladies this afternoon?” His smile stopped at his mouth, his flirt from earlier wilted in the sunlight.

“I think we’re okay,” I said.

Lauren cut me off. “Give us two shots of Jameson and another beer for both of us.”

He poured the shot, and I started doing head math. Could I afford this round? How far in the hole was I for this weekend? The brunch hadn’t been cheap, but I had budgeted for it. I hadn’t planned to go out drinking like this, and it was going to put me in the hole. I’d like to have enough left over when my bill came due to give the guy a decent tip. That’s what was running through my brain when I tapped the tiny cup against Lauren’s and drank the burning liquid. I managed not to cough. He refilled our beer glasses and settled down to wash dishes not far from where we sat, which pretty well put a damper on discussing anything more about vampire bites. I was disappointed. I was sure I had more to learn. I wasn’t sure what a Renfield was, but I vaguely remembered it from Bram Stoker’s famous memoir.

I managed to pay the bill, but only just. I’d have to make coffee at home until payday. I rode the train home alone. When I got to my apartment, it was empty. I lay down on the bed without changing my clothes or taking off my shoes.

My apartment was small, a studio really. The walls were inexplicably painted orange. I just went with it and decorated in an equally loud color scheme. My curtains were green with gold trim, and my bedspread was pink with tiny mirrors on it. When it was clean, it looked great. It hadn’t been actually clean in months. There were clean clothes in the laundry basket and dirty clothes on the floor.

There were cider bottles piled by the trash, empty take out boxes and garbage everywhere. My mother would have been horrified. Oh, fucking well, I thought, it wasn’t like I would ever invite her over. Alone in my room I listened to the noises of the city around me, even the faint sounds of my neighbors, but here, in this room, it was just me. I had no one to call, no one was looking for me. It was just me in this big city. I had friends, but it wasn’t the same as having someone who loved me and wanted to be with me, just me. I thought about going back out to the bar again, but I didn’t have the cash. Checking Cinder seemed like too much work. I fell asleep, passed out is more likely. When I woke up it was dark, and my mouth tasted like the trashcan behind a bar.

I didn’t want to get up or move, but my bra was too tight, my feet were cold and heavy, and I was hungry. I got up, took off my bra and shoes, and microwaved myself some dinner. I washed down a handful of ibuprofen with some beer and wondered if I should turn the heat up. Instead I crawled into bed and drank my beer while watching a movie on my laptop. The light of my laptop was the brightest thing in the apartment. The only other lights were the glowing lights of everything charging. It was far from dark, but it wasn’t light, either. Before the movie had even finished I found myself stalking my ex on the internet. Of his three updates that day, two were about how much he loved his soon to be “wifie”. I hated both of them. I spent some time looking her and her mother up, because I’m emotionally healthy like that. Ha!

It was sometime after midnight. When I'd seen enough photographs of my ex’s future mother-in-law’s cat to choke a mule, I decided to look up Mike. It took a while, but I found him by searching his name in combination with the place where he ordered pizza. There he was grinning in a photo with the man who had delivered the pizza and being crowned winner of their eating competition. Apparently Mike had taken down thirty-two slices of pizza to win a year's worth of free pizza. I suppose delivery must have been included in the deal. Once I had his last name from the article it wasn’t difficult to find an email. He ran some sort of transport business. The website was a little short on details, but it did include his name, photo, and email. It took another beer before I decided to email. I wrote to thank him for his kindness and to say I had meant my offer of a beer. I also added I hoped it wasn’t too weird that I had contacted him out of the blue like this.

I went to bed and woke up with a massive hangover the next day. Work didn’t start until around ten for me, but that was still too soon.