rest of my life pretending I don’t want to fuck you. Or that I won’t be staring at your arse while you climb, today. Because I will be.”
Several emotions flicker across Abe’s face, but the one that wins out, Steve thinks, is relief. “Now I—now I know why you don’t mind belaying.” He shakes his head: he can’t blush, but he chews on his bottom lip when anxious or embarrassed. “Steve!”
“You’re supposed to be—well, depending on the angle of the cliff face, actually, but don’t worry about that today—watching the climber on belay.” Steve pauses, just for effect. “Unless you want me standing there texting Johanna while you climb?”
Abe draws himself up and looks at Steve. “In the interests of, uh, climbing safety, I suppose I have to give you permission to look at my arse while I climb. As long as, well … that permission is returned.”
“I grant you unlimited and free arse-staring access, oh boyfriend of mine. Hang climbing safety.” Steve honks on the horn as he spots Aggie Skipton’s 1979 Range Rover heading into town; she waves, her horn being one of the many things in her car that doesn’t work, and waves harder when she spots Steve and Abe in the Toyota. “And between Jack, next-door-Greg and Aggie, the whole damn town is now going to know we’ve changed our relationship status on Facebook. Or the local equivalent. So. Dancing at Feeders?”
“Dancing.” Abe smiles, shakes his head and abruptly changes the topic as if the whole thing is too much for him to deal with—but that’s okay. He can sit and think about it if he likes, but it’s not going to change the evident truth. “I read Jorge Louis Borges’s Labyrinths last night. Strange take on realist fiction. But at least the South American realists don’t pretend the so-called supernatural doesn’t exist—not like the Western surrealist tradition. Or the vile classical realist propaganda that is Le Fanu, Stoker and Shelley.”
It occurs to Steve that Abe now knows him well enough to realise a comment like that is a red flag to a bull, certainly flag enough to avoid any further relationship-type discussion, but that’s not enough to stop him from answering—or revelling in the joy that he now knows somebody who can say ‘Le Fanu’ and ‘classical realist propaganda’ in the same sentence. “Better than the post-postmodern realists like Rice and Meyer with their weird half-worship-half-violence thing going on. And it’s not like zombies get a look in, ever—well, except for fucking Brooks. It’s why I only read surrealist fiction, when I do read fiction. Even if books like The Secret History or whatever feel like a bunch of fucking breathers trying to pretend the real world doesn’t exist, but sometimes—”
“It’s better to be ignored than it is to be included and vilified, trashed or inaccurately depicted?” Abe nods. “I hear you. Horrible kind of ‘better’, though. Brooks? Wasn’t that a film? I haven’t, uh, been to the pictures in a while.”
Nobody to go with, Steve guesses, and Abe doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d just go alone and not care.
“Mate, don’t get me started. I mean, my god, there weren’t enough fucking anti-zombie propaganda films already, so they take what’s essentially a book-long massacre guide that never bothers to distinguish between feral and sapient zombies and film it? Because it’s not dangerous enough for sapient zombies, being attacked by ferals and breathers alike? I wrote an email to the Classification Board, because if there’s any movie that should be banned it’s World War Z—come on, even the name promotes a fucking zombie apocalypse—but no dice. Zombies don’t count as human and we should gun them all down. Arseholes. It’s enough to make me want to come back as a feral and feast on breather brains, and I don’t give a fuck if that’s hypocrisy.”
“They let all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer air,” Abe says with a heat that makes Steve grin. “Before watershed, too. Fuck Stoker. At least True Blood or Being Human—aside from the lifeist name—have an appropriate rating. So I’m really not surprised anymore. Apparently the inclusion of two hot good-coded vampires makes it not an anti-vampire propaganda fest—oh, it depicts pre-modern mythological vampirism! They’re not slaughtering real vampires! The vampires are a metaphor! What, do they think queer breather characters make up for that? And a tiny bit of squint-and-you-miss-it queer subtext with Angel and Spike? Hardly. We have souls. And non-bumpy faces.”
“I just watched the bits with David Boreanaz in them,” Steve says. “He gets his shirt off a lot. Although it’d have been even better if Sarah Michelle Gellar got hers off, too.”
Abe angles his head and just looks at Steve. “You’re the worst straight man I’ve ever met.”
Steve grins. “Which is why Chichi and I were the only ones who didn’t know I’m not straight. Hey, next time there’s a vampire film out, do you want to go, throw popcorn at the screen, talk all the way through about how it’s terrible and give the breather audience a crash-course in lifeism?”
“I … um. Wouldn’t they throw us out?”
The aghast expression on Abe’s face makes Steve think that Abe is the worst vampire he’s ever met, but that’s okay.
Steve’s outgoing enough for the both of them.
Prequel: Scheme
They sit on the breakwater while Jack and Phil fish, Izzy sews and Greg throws chips at the seagulls, resulting in a terrific chaos of squawking white birds zooming onto the stretch of basalt rocks running out into the bay. It’s a pleasant enough day, with a low wind, waves gentle enough to avoid the usual spray crashing into the rocks, light cloud cover and a minimum of tourists to gawk at Izzy—most locals hang out on the breakwater simply because if tourists follow they have to get past Benjamina Bakersfield, the loud and verbose severed zombie head fastened to the bollard at the carpark. She’s got a thesis to be writing, though, so Johanna rolls her eyes for half an hour while the blokes prattle about irrelevant things before losing her cool: “Aren’t we fucking here to talk about Steve’s birthday?”
“Birthday? Does Steve even have a birthday?” Jack grins and throws her a punch. He’s still wearing his fish-reeking clothes from the morning’s work on his old man’s boat, although Johanna and Greg seem to be the only ones to notice. “Chill, girl. So. As we all know, Steve’s birthday is next month, and we need to come up with a dare that knocks his socks right off his feet.” He leans back and reaches for a handful of chips. “Say, we all know that Steve is fucking bi, right?”
Johanna has known Jack, Phil and Steve for seven years, and, in all that time, she’s never once heard Jack make an idle comment. She blinks, though, because of course everyone on the breakwater turns to look at her: as the group lesbian, she supposes, she must therefore be able to recognise a lack of heterosexuality in anyone else. Izzy is as queer as she is, but being born in the 1820s and spending most of her undeath hiding from ferals and humans alike hasn’t exactly given her the ability to grasp twenty-first-century sexuality: the things Johanna takes for granted are often all but mystifying to her.
She’s not stupid, though. Not even close. Izzy just knows that she’s got nothing worth the saying about Steve Nakamura—already confounding with his blazers, hair gel, firearms and lack of boundaries, given the amount of discussions they’ve had on twenty-first century fashion and culture—on the matter of modern sexuality. She pushes back a curling lock of dark hair with one hand and shoots Johanna a wink while she works on embroidering the edges of the bodice lying across her knees, one of many mid-1800s-style gowns she wears while guiding tourists around Port Carmila.
It occurs to Johanna that she might have spent too much time complaining to Izzy about being the token zombie-hunting lesbian if Izzy’s giving her pointed winks.
“I think it’s homophobic to hope the dyke’s going to answer,” she says.
Jack just snorts. “And?”
Well, it’d be the worst kind of stereotyping to look at Steve’s metrosexual ways and assume that a man who was devoted to good grooming before he ever left for Sydney isn’t straight. She thinks, though, about all the posters of bare-chested men engaged in extreme sports on his wardrobe d
oor; she thinks about the way Steve flirts with anyone if they stand still long enough; she thinks about how many offhand comments he’s made about hot actors and football players of any gender—before Adam Swanston got on his case, that is. Steve never relinquished the hair gel or his blazers, but he did make sure he only spoke about hot women—or the odd drag queen—from then on.
She’s fairly sure he started riding at her parents’ property just to crush on her brother.
“He’s totally bi,” she says. “Or pan. One of them. He does like the girls he chases, though.” How many times has she sat around with the guys while they drooled over actresses and hot merwomen? Jack and Phil are as straight as they come, but Johanna never had the sense Steve was making up an attraction to the ladies to fit in as much as he just left half of it out of the discussion.
“Oh, he was kissing girls in primary school. We know that.” Phil grins. “And that one vampire boy in Grade Two. Do you remember Mr van Dreven? He came around the corner and went off about blood diseases.”
“Is there a point to this besides memory lane?” Greg pulls his paper-wrapped chips away from Jack’s reach. “Don’t even think about touching the flake.”
“I was just thinking,” Jack says