***
Standing outside of the church, I know that this will be hard. I also know that Lance would be upset with me. I am having trouble with the simple everyday details of my life. I am embarrassed to think of our earlier hunting outing. Not only did I lose my prey on the first try, but I caused half the forest to clear out. The positive side to being a vampire is the element of surprise. Our prey, most of the time do not see us coming. Let’s just say that my family and I needed to work a little harder to eat this morning. The good thing about being out in the open was that I was able to clear my mind. My mental mind block is working once again, which is nice to be able to keep all of my thoughts to myself again. I am also not hearing my family’s thoughts. I think it is helping me not to have to hear them worry about me. Staring at the outside of the church, I tell myself I can do this. I have to do this. It is time for me to say goodbye to Lance. It is time for me to finally make peace with the choices that were made all those years ago. Straightening my back and shoulders, I look towards my family to let them know I am ready. Isaac walks up to me and places his hand on my forearm and we make eye contact.
“We’re ready if you are.”
With that, he turns and heads toward the building. My legs start to move before my brain processes what I am doing, and before I know it, I am right on Isaac’s heels, Olivia and Christopher are right behind me.
Walking into the church, the scent of old musty wood accosts my nose. If I had to guess, the structure is probably over two hundred years old. A lot of other scents swirl in the building. There is a hint of orange, roses, lilac, cinnamon, freesia, honeysuckle, lavender, apple, and many other scents. However, the aroma of human blood is the most appealing. Each human brings his or her own flavor, which makes my mouth ache. I wonder if I will make it through this service without needing a breath of fresh air. My family members are holding their breath too.
The church is not shabby, it is a nice size and the color decor blends well together. The windows along the walls have red, yellow and blue stained glass. The huge stained glass behind the pulpit depicts two huge hands that are outstretched. On one side of the hands there are three crosses, and the other side a dove appears to be flying towards the heavens. The pews are a dark wood with deep red plush cushions, and the carpet matches the deep red seating. Following the middle aisle runner back towards the pulpit, my eyes fall on the center of attention. Lance. Well, not just Lance, but Lance in a white and silver trimmed casket. The casket is closed, covered with flowers.
Two hands on my shoulders nudge me forward. I did not realize that I stopped walking. As always, my family and I have caused a scene, just by entering the room. To deflect the stares, Isaac sits down in a pew a few rows from the back. Olivia sits next. As I enter the pew, Christopher puts his arm around me, and in sync we sit. This whole time, my eyes have not left the white casket resting front and center of the church. It is taking everything in me not to go up there and open the casket, to make sure this is not a joke. To make sure that Lance is really in there. My body starts to rock in the seat and Christopher's arms tighten around me as Olivia's hand moves quickly to my knee--if to hold me in place.
Isaac clearing his throat breaks my trance. If he had something to say, something that he did not mind others hearing, he would have said it out loud.
I lower my wall to hear what he is trying to say. “Amber, can you pay a little more attention please? I think Lance may have told his wife more about you then we figured.”
I am confused. My sight slides over to Isaac as I try to make sense of what he is saying. He slightly inclines his head while he tries to listen to everything going on in the room. I guess I am a little slow at reading him today. It has taken me longer than he would like for me to catch on. Understanding what he wants, I open my mind up to the others in the room.
My mental wall drops and there is a flood of voices swarming in my head. The service is about to start and there are a lot of background noises to pick through; however, I now see what Isaac is talking about.
“Amber! Um, Hello! Oh, I cannot believe I am doing this...”
Yes, Lance definitely told Madeline about my abilities.
“Amber, can you please tell her she is yelling? She is going to give me a headache.”
Looking over at my father, I can say I honestly have a real smile on my face. “Sure thing, dad.” This is going to be weird. I do not want to startle her. She is worried that the information about me may be false. It is not every day that you have a mental conversation with someone. I zero in on Madeline's mind and try to take this slow and easy.
“Madeline, can you hear me?” A slight gasp comes from the woman sitting in the front row. A lady with mid-length grayish black hair starts to look around. Shoot, that must be the widow. I do not want her to cause a scene. “Mrs. Grayson, please stay still. We don’t want to give people the wrong idea.”
“Oh, yes, well all right. Are you really there?”
“Yes, I’m here.” The widow begins to cry into her tissue and I stutter, “Please, don’t cry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I–I thought he was just...I guess I thought it was the medicine making him say all of those things.”
“I’m unsure of what things Lance told you, but I doubt any of it was false. We can talk later if you like. I don’t want to pull your attention away from what’s important right now.”
“Oh, well, of course. So you will talk to me later?”
“Yes, I will. And um, can you do me a favor? Can you tone down the mental yelling just a little? I’ll keep my mind open so you won’t need to yell to get my attention.” Before she can respond, I close our link. The last statement may have confused her a little.
Isaac leans over and gives me a quick pat on my hand. “Thanks,” he says.
With a happy father and a calmer widow, I bring my attention back to the center of the room and close my eyes. It seems like only yesterday when Lance and I were out on our umpteenth date, roller skating. Well, it was not our umpteenth date—actually, it was our one hundred and twenty-seventh date. When Lance picked me up that night, he was completely bursting at the seams to tell me where he planned to take me. Round Robin’s Roll-O-Rink had just opened in town, and Lance—who supposedly learned to skate while on summer vacation one year at his grandparents’ house—wanted to take me skating.
When I joined him in the car, Lance leaned over to kiss me before saying, “So, want to guess where we are heading tonight? And no reading my mind.”
Before answering his question I smiled, he knew I did not read his mind, well not on purpose at least. I then took a deep breath filling my lungs with the aromas in the car. I could tell that he just ate, and his blood-sugar was high which made my mouth ache. Taking my mind off of draining my boyfriend, I picked through the other scents in the car. There was a strong scent of metal and oil. Gazing at him with a puzzled stare, I shook my head.
“Ha! Do you give up? We’re going roller skating! Round Robin’s opened two weeks ago. Are you excited?”
I was thrilled. I was ecstatic to spend another evening with him. I could have cared less about what we were doing as long as I could be near him. “Yes, I’m excited. I haven’t skated before so this should be interesting.” That put a frown on Lance's face. Activities and the two of us did not always go so well. I either ended up winning at everything—once he realized I was throwing the games on purpose to make him feel good, he put an end to that—or I ended up blowing the surprise by having experienced the outing in a past life. Humans would doubt how many activities appear new to them are actually recreations of some form in centuries before. Most are not documented well.
Seldom did Lance find something for us to do that did not fall into one of those categories. Roller skating happened to be one of them. I do believe when roller skating first came about, Christopher asked to take me, but I never really desired to go. Knowing Lance wanted to take me skati
ng brought about a bit of excitement, but also sadness. I was eager to try skating with Lance, but saddened by the fact that I did not want to go when Christopher brought it up. Over the years that Lance and I dated, Christopher stood quietly to the side, never getting in the middle of our relationship. Dating Lance hurt him, but he never said a word. Most days he was pleasant to Lance, saying hi, but never really holding long conversations with him. On a few good days, he and Lance would talk about sports—I was never too far away. I could never truly be sure when Christopher's mood would change and Lance's life would be in even more danger than it was.
When we pulled into the skating rink parking lot, I saw a lot of cars there. I was not worried about embarrassing myself, I mean, it was a pair of shoes on wheels, how hard could it be? I was worried about outshining Lance once again. I knew I needed to clamp down on my excitement before we entered the building. Being the gentleman that Lance was, he got out of the car and walked around to let me out. In the beginning of our relationship, he scolded me often for moving too fast and not giving him a chance to be gallant. I always thought he moved slower than I wanted him too. Still, I learned to wait for him to get to my door. After helping me out of the car, he opened the back door and pulled out two sets of skates. I knew then that was what I smelled in the car earlier.
“I figured that it would be nice for us to own our own pairs. I wasn't sure how this would go over for you, since you tend to be a little rough. At least, we won’t have to explain why the wheels fell off by the end of the night.”
Looking at him in the dimly lit parking lot, I could see him smirking. He was joking about the wheels falling off, but I also understood what he was saying about me being a little rough with borrowed equipment.
I turned to face the building as I grabbed the smaller skates out of his left hand and said, “Come on, let’s see how good you really are.” He grasped my free hand and we strolled in the building. Once inside, I put a mental wall up to muffle some of the loud music being played for the skaters. Lance paid for our admission and we found a booth to sit in and put the skates on over our shoes. The rink was about six feet away from our booth. As I waited for Lance to finish putting his skates on, I could see how much fun all the skaters were having. I paid close attention to the humans as they skated by. By the time Lance was ready, I had the method of skating down. As we stood, I saw that Lance; however, did not. Before we took one step, he began falling backwards. My vampire reflexes kicked in, and I caught him before he went too far. Thankfully, I moved quickly enough where no one saw me—well besides Lance. Lance’s face immediately turned beet red. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, no one saw us. Here hold my hand, we can take it slow.” I promised Lance when we first started dating that I would not use my abilities on him. I have to say, it probably would have made the night go a lot easier, but since I was keeping to my word, we moved slowly. I was strong enough to keep him up while we glided across the floor. The only problem was Lance was a good deal bigger than me. We would have brought too much attention to ourselves once people noticed that I was the one holding Lance up, so I tried to make it look like I was the one who needed the help.
We inched towards the rink and eased onto the brown shiny floor. In the six or so feet that we moved, Lance came close to falling at least four times. The moment his right skate hit the shiny floor his weight shifted. The only way to stop him from falling would have drawn that attention to us that I was trying hard to avoid. So I went with it and he wiped us both out. I think Lance was more shocked at the fact that we were both sprawled out on the floor, than the fact that he lost his balance. The look on his face was priceless. The whole scene was quite comical to me. Watching it all happen in slow motion and adding the look on Lance's face as we lay there, left me laughing so hard I do not think I could have stood up if I wanted too. Once I regained my composure, I stood up and stepped away as Lance tried to get up with the help of the wall that divided the main floor from the rink. I was thankful that most of the humans out that night were good enough skaters that they had no problem going around us.
As the night went on Lance did cause a few pile ups. After his first fall on the rink, I decided it would be best if I did not hold his hand to help keep him up. He was doing a little better, but the few times he did slip, he was on his own. During one of his wipe outs, there was another couple learning to skate right behind us. There was no time for them to attempt to react. I doubt with how wobbly they were, their reaction time would not have made that big of a difference. I was not too far ahead of Lance when I heard him fall. As I turned to check on him, I saw the wobbly couple coming up behind him. The young lady gasped as she and her gentleman friend both toppled over Lance. They looked like a huge knot. There were arms tangled around legs, fingers under roller skates, heads hitting walls and floors and a bunch of moans and groans. And to top it all off, another person, someone I thought had a little more control in skating came hurling around the bend. He too saw the pile-up too late and went flying head first into the floor. Although he did not become as tangled in the human knot, he did managed to split his lip. The scent of blood hit me like a ton of bricks. Spending most nights patrolling Lance’s house trying to figure out who was vandalizing his car, I had not eaten in a few weeks. Lance saw the bloody lip a few seconds after I smelled it. Our eyes locked and he spoke in a voice only I could hear.
“Go on, I’ll catch up with you.”
I wanted to help him but I knew it would be bad if I moved to close to Mr. Bloody Lip Guy. I turned and skated toward the middle of the rink. I am assuming the name Round Robin came from the design of the rink. The center was shaped like a nest, with benches in the middle to sit on.
Once the floor was cleared of bloody lip guy, Lance gradually made his way to where I sat in the middle of the rink. I stood to meet him with my arms outstretched. Slowly, I pulled him close to me and we embraced. I loved any chance I got to look into those deep blue eyes of his. I could smell that he had bruises forming in a few spots on his body. I felt sorry that he had hurt himself, so I suggested we leave. “Maybe we should call it a night?” Smiling down at me, I could tell he did not want to call defeat for the night, but he knew it was best.
“Okay, that’s a good idea. Let’s go.”
On our way out, he fell a few more times and was able to knock out a lady who just happened to be skating by as he fell. While we drove back to my house, he told me it must have been a lot longer than he thought since the last time he skated, and he would need to practice more before we went out again.
“I’ll need to go a few times without you. So the next time we go, I’ll be able to fly around the rink with you.”
Once again I out did him. I was thankful that he did not take coming in second to me too badly.