Modern fantasy short. A vampire comes into the GUM clinic with symptoms of syphilis.
Rated M, 5.5k. Aoife Harkin meets a vampire at the Caer Afon GUM clinic who’s certain he can’t contract STIs. Also featuring Ephraim Margolis. Lots of descriptions of genitalia, including a lesion on the penis, and some ED.
“AS A VAMPIRE, OF COURSE, I AM IMMUNE TO VENEREAL DISEASES,” boomed Mr DeLuca. “BUT NONETHELESS, IL MIO CAZZO — ”
Upon Aoife’s request when giving his initial details, he had lowered his voice, but occasionally the windows of the examination room are still rattling on his more intense plosives, and even after putting a slight dampening charm over her ears to prevent them from ringing at the extreme volume, she knew that she would need to go and have a lie-down in the aftermath to prevent a headache.
Mr DeLuca was a very well-dressed man, of average height and somewhat portly — he wore a waistcoat with golden threads that barely managed to remain closed over his wide, barrel chest, and he had been so confident about dropping his trousers when Aoife had said it was time for an exam that his penis had felt close to slapping her as it bounced free.
It was quite a large penis, even on such a strongly-proportioned man, looking very thick and heavy even whilst flaccid, and she was unable not to think about the loud slap it would probably have made if it had made contact with her.
“That’s not strictly true,” Aoife said as she pulled on fresh gloves, and she rolled closer on the wheely chair, examining Mr DeLuca’s penis carefully, her lips pressed together and her brow furrowed. Strictly, he did not have to have his penis out for this conversation, but it didn’t bother, and unlike some men, he wasn’t being threatening or odd with it. It was just that he was odd. “Are you experiencing anything other than erectile dysfunction, sir?”
“DYSFUNCTION!?” repeated Mr DeLuca, his eyes widening. “IT IS NOT — ”
“Mr DeLuca,” Aoife interrupted him, holding up one hand in a sign for him to stop, “I am not criticising your penis. You said you had had difficulty getting it hard?”
“Ah,” Mr DeLuca said, almost at normal volume, and then returned to his usual boom to declare, “YES, I AM FUCKING, WHAT, ONLY THREE TIMES A DAY? WHAT, AM I A CORPSE?”
“I see,” Aoife said. “Previously, you had a much shorter refractory period than you do now?” When DeLuca peered down at her, Aoife said, “Um, refractory, do you need me to look up a translation to…?”
“NO, NO, REFRACTORY, IS REFRATTORIO, I UNDERSTAND. MANY MEN, THEIR COCKS, THEY REST A WHILE AFTER THEY ARE SPENT, HM? BUT NOT MINE! MINE, HE IS ALWAYS READY AND WILLING, HE SPENDS, HE GOES, HE SPENDS, HE GOES, BUT NOW, AH! HE SPENDS, HE SLEEPS — FOR HOURS!”
“Right, I understand,” said Aoife. “I’m going to touch your penis, Mr DeLuca, to look under your foreskin and then to take a swab of your urethra, around the hole of your penis. The swab might be a little uncomfortable, but it shouldn’t be very painful.”
She had had multiple conversations in the past few weeks about what a silence might mean with a patient, that a lot of patients went quiet when they didn’t know how to answer a question, when they didn’t know the answer or when the answer was embarrassing — or sometimes, when they knew what they wanted to answer to a question, but didn’t know how to do so without being rude or hurtful. That boundaries were difficult for people.
Most people hadn’t had the sort of direct tutelage in that area that Aoife had received over the years. Most people weren’t taught it, like she was — especially given that a lot of the teaching she’d had had been about tempering her expression of her needs, not so she wouldn’t have them filled, but because people perceived her as sarcastic or demanding even if she didn’t mean to be, and she didn’t care about being perceived as being that way, like other people.
She wondered if Mr DeLuca worried about that, about being perceived as demanding.
Mr DeLuca looked uncertainly down at her, and after a long few seconds of silence, Aoife said, “If you would prefer I didn’t touch your penis myself, Mr Deluca, I can give you the swab to — ”
“YOU ARE SUCH A LITTLE GIRL,” DeLuca shouted, and Aoife blinked, feeling a distant, mild indignation. “SUCH LITTLE HANDS. ARE THEY VERY COLD?”
“Oh,” said Aoife, seeing what his problem was, and feeling her sense of offence lessen somewhat. “I don’t think so. Here, can I show you?”
She put a finger on his thigh, which was a golden brown and thickly thatched with brown hair, and DeLuca looked down at it, then relaxed. For a vampire, he was surprisingly warm to the touch, but evidently she wasn’t too cold — some vampires ended up with a chalkiness to their skin from how much their blood vessels contracted upon getting the vampiric disease, how thick their skin was, but it seemed DeLuca was a rare individual whose veins didn’t respond that way.
“YES, IS FINE,” he said, and she gently took his penis in hand, rolling back his foreskin to get a better look at its head.
There was a little inflammation around his urethra, redder than she thought it perhaps should be, and when she lifted up his penis to look at the underside, she frowned. Buried in the fold back of his foreskin, there was a small, yellow mark, and she touched it very gently with her thumb, glancing up at DeLuca’s face — he grimaced, but didn’t seem to be in a lot of pain.
“There’s a lesion here, Mr DeLuca, do you recall when you got it?”
“IS A LITTLE SORE, IS ALL,” Mr DeLuca said. “SOME WOMEN, YOU KNOW, THEY HAVE A VERY TIGHT GRIP.” He seemed to worry she did not understand this, and went on to add, “AH, NOT WITH THEIR HANDS, SIGNORINA, THEIR — ”
“With their vaginas, yes, Mr DeLuca, I understand,” Aoife said, feeling her lip twitch, and reached for the swab.
“OR THEIR ASSHOLES, OF COURSE.”
“Of course.”
She had been working in Caer Afon’s GUM clinic now for a few months, and she already felt a lot more confident in the job than she had before. When she’d started out, she’d regularly gotten frustrated with people’s indirect communication in the clinic, regularly even worse than people’s embarrassment in A&E, but it wasn’t all bad — some communicators, like Mr DeLuca, were a lot more direct and explicit, and that was a relief.
She continued with the rest of the exam, taking a swab from the sore as well as Mr DeLuca’s urethra, and after checking his testicles and prostate, she set aside the various swabs from his penis, anus, and the inside of his mouth.
“You’re not experiencing any other symptoms but what you’ve mentioned, Mr DeLuca?” Aoife asked. “Any difficulties or pain with urination or your digestion, any changes in your appetite, your breathing, your heart…?”
“NO DIFFICULTIES PISSING, NO, NO CHANGE IN MY EATING. MY LUNGS, THEY BREATHE.”
Aoife looked up at Mr DeLuca’s face and pressed again, “Your heart?”
“MY CHEST, A LITTLE PAIN, SOMETIMES,” he said, and she nodded.
“Okay, let’s check your heart before I take your bloods then. Uh, Mr DeLuca?”
“HM?”
“You can put your trousers back on. I expect you’re feeling the chill.”
“OH… YES.”
* * *
“I’ve met Mr DeLuca,” said Ephraim over lunch, and Aoife nodded as she kept on eating. “He’s a very loud man.”
“I had to ask him to lower his voice and doused my hearing,” Aoife said. “Even with that, it was a lot.”
“He sings opera,” Ephraim said mildly. “And when he started out, there was no such thing as a microphone, hm? But you look well, I think. You don’t seem shaken or anxious — that didn’t trigger you, the volume?”
Aoife considered the question, and then slowly shook her head. “No, actually,” she said. “He wasn’t angry at me, he wasn’t being aggressive.”
“No,” said Ephraim, and smiled at her very gently, warmly, his eyes shining with pleasure. “But when you started here, I don’t know that it would have been so easy for you to know that. In your bones,” he said when Aoife opened her mouth, “not your mind.”
“My bones don’t know anything,” Aoife said with mild impatience, and Ephraim chuckled quietly.
“Your spine might know a few things,” Ephraim said. “And perhaps your gut.”
“The spine I will concede to,” Aoife said. “If we accept that thoughts are neural impulses, then they exist in the broader nervous system, radiate out from the spine. The gut is stupid.”
“The gut is stupid,” Ephraim repeated pleasantly.
“Saying the gut has thoughts is stupid.”
“Mm,” Ephraim hummed mildly.
“Bacteria in my gut don’t decide who I am or how I feel,” muttered Aoife. “Or they’d say it about everyone, not just people like me.”
“People like you?” Ephraim repeated, and Aoife chewed on a piece of radish.
“This isn’t a therapy session,” she said. “Let’s talk about you.”
Ephraim smiled at her, barely even responding to her tone, which she knew was flat, compared to someone else’s — or that all her tones were too aggressive, instead of being flat enough at all.
“Let’s talk about me, Aoifele,” said Ephraim, sitting back in his seat and folding his hands over his belly.
“How’s your day?”
“It’s good,” Ephraim said, exhaling softly. “My brother, Jean-Pierre, he called me on the telephone last night. He has a new boyfriend, which is nice, I think, he hasn’t dated in a long while.”
“How long?” Aoife asked.
“Oh, many years. His last boyfriend, I only met him once, he was a nice boy, very sweet, very gentle. Farhad, his name was, he died of complications from AIDs in the eighties.”
Aoife nodded her head, pressing her lips together. “That’s a long time ago.”
“Yes,” Ephraim agreed. “He has had time enough to grieve, though — more than enough. It is hard for him, to lose a lover, hard for any immortal, but he has a heart that loves, and it craves to love. So, the new one.”
“Jean-Pierre is the surgeon, right?” Aoife asked. “He’s blond, pretty? You have pictures of him on your wall.”
“Yes,” Ephraim said, nodding. “He was a surgeon, but he is back at medical school now — he goes back every few decades, retrains.”
“Why don’t you do that?”
Ephraim chuckled, and then shrugged his big shoulders. “Jean-Pierre likes to start fresh — he goes into trauma, hard cases, rough stuff, for years, and then needs the step back that education gives him. He likes the speed and rush and urgency, but in between, he needs rest, I think. Needs to start anew to keep his perspective. Me, I am not so much a sprinter.”
“You run marathons?”
“I do not run,” said Ephraim firmly, and it was Aoife’s turn to laugh, picking up her water and taking a swig of it. “I move steadily, slowly, and I take rests in between. So I read journals and I keep updated, keep learning, but I don’t feel the need to start from scratch as he does.”
Aoife thought for a while, settling into the silence. When Nurse Winston and Doctor Plummer had talked to him about awkward silences, they’d said at first that silence in conversation was a sign of discomfort, and she’d said, “Sometimes it’s just normal. It’s companionable.”
“Yes,” Doctor Plummer had said, “but not generally in an exam room.”
“What are you thinking about?” Ephraim asked. He wasn’t asking because he felt the silence was awkward. He was asking, Aoife was pretty sure, because he was curious about what Aoife was thinking. It wasn’t just to be polite: it was genuine, real, honest and direct.
“I think it sounds brave,” she said. “And, um, vulnerable. To be a surgeon, a doctor, and to go back to the beginning, in education, and be treated as a beginner again. It sounds strangely humble for a surgeon.”
Ephraim’s expression softened in a way that Aoife didn’t expect, his eyebrows raising and his lips parting. Aoife studied that expression, uncertain as to whether she’d said something wrong, something somehow offensive or upsetting, or merely so bizarre as to take him off guard, that he should seem so disarmed.
After a moment’s silence, the old angel’s expression softened further, warming, and then he said quietly, “Yes, actually. He is… He is more humble than people expect, viewing him from the outside. He has a personality disorder, my brother — he appears to people, often, to be narcissistic, arrogant, and yes, he can be, but what that means in fact is that it is harder for him to take and receive criticism on his actions, his person. It can wound him in a way it cannot others — most of all because people desire to take him down a peg because they find aspects of his person off-putting or find him unlikable. But still, he craves it, this criticism, education, adjustment on his medical techniques. He is a very caring doctor — care of his patients is ultimate in his considerations, not his ego.”
Aoife took this in as she chewed the last piece of her salad and then set her fork and knife down on her plate, arranging them in parallel to one another, then turning the plate forty degrees to the right, so that they were at a proper angle to the table.
“Am I being arrogant,” she asked slowly, “assuming that you’re talking to me about your brother so that I’ll apply some lesson about your affection for him to my own life?”
“That’s not the only reason,” said Ephraim, and Aoife frowned at him.
“We’re meant to be talking about you.”
“We are,” said Ephraim, and when Aoife looked at him sternly, Ephraim chuckled and sipped at his drink. “Okay, you have me: back to me. I love him very much, my brother — he is all wounds, at times. It soothes me, warms me from within, that he has found another who loves him, cares for him, as I do and as others have. I feel many fears about him — that he will hurt himself, hurt others, that he will feel alone, and that he will not have people to reach for. That I cannot always be the person he reaches for — nor should I be, for all things.
“It is nice to help people, to support people, most of all, the ones we love — there is a glory and a holiness in doing so. And what feels holier, to me, than seeing another conduct themselves with that love and grace that I try to see in others, foster in others? What is better than to see a person I love loved by another, supported by another? Rendered better able to extend their love and support to others themselves?”
Aoife smiled slightly, absently stirring her nearly-empty mug with her teaspoon.
“That’s nice,” Aoife said.
“Yes,” said Ephraim.
“Are you going to meet him? The boyfriend?”
“I hope so,” Ephraim said. “I hope it’s soon — they’re busy for now, but when things are settled there.”
“You’ve never been married, right?”
“No,” said Ephraim, slowly shaking his head.
Aoife wasn’t sure precisely what to make of his tone as she nodded her head, and the two of them got up from their seats to set their plates onto the trays to be bussed and washed.
“Would you like to be?” Aoife said. “You’re, what, eight hundred years old? Is it that you don’t want it, or haven’t met the right person?”
“I do not know, Aoifele, I’ve thought about it, here and there,” said Ephraim. “I’ve met women and liked them very well, and they have liked me — but I don’t know. I have the air of a widower, people tell me at times. I feel like I came to this world a widower.”
Aoife hesitated a few seconds, and then said in a quiet voice, her hand hesitating before she touched his arm (this sort of physical contact, comforting, was not her forte), and said, “Did it feel like, um… Do you think that’s from like, Falling? Or that you Fell to so much grief?”
“That’s a very insightful question,” Ephraim murmured, leaning into her touch and then gently pinching her cheek. “I do not know the answer.”
“I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate for me to say,” Aoife whispered.
“You can say things to me, Aoifele. You can care for me. I will not be offended because you have not survived what I have — I have not survived what you have. Hm?”
“Hm,” Aoife echoed. “Who looks after you, when you don’t have a wife?”
“You’re looking after me, aren’t you? You look after me — Colleen, she looks after me, Colleen Pike; my brothers, my sisters. Community.”
“Community,” Aoife repeated, nodding her head. “Yes.”
“You want to eat dinner with Colleen and I tonight, Aoifele, hm?”
“Do you call her Collenele?”
“No, Colleen is very short, especially compared to me — I can’t call her something to make her smaller, hm?”
Aoife laughed, and nodded, and went back to work.
* * *
“Mr DeLuca, I’m afraid that you’ve tested positive for syphilis,” said Aoife, and Mr DeLuca peered down at her.
“SYPHILIS?” he repeated, uncomprehending. “THE POX? BUT I AM A VAMPIRE!”
“Yes, Mr DeLuca, so — ”
“I CANNOT HAVE BAD BLOOD — I AM A VAMPIRE!”
“Yes, Mr DeLuca, can I explain? So, vampirism is actually an infection — it’s a disease that was cultivated a long time ago. The disease centres itself in your heart and your most protected internal organs — most people’s skin thickens and their veins constrict, their flesh becoming more dense, and their temperature dropping. This is because the disease generally prefers a slightly cooler temperature than most. The reason vampires normally don’t contract other diseases is because your immune system is dominated by the vampiric virus, and it basically beats them all into submission, but some strains, especially ones that are passed between vampires can become resistant to the vampiric immune response.
“I’m waiting for the doctor to come and give a consult and to examine you properly — my worry is that the chest pains that you’ve been having are as a result of the infection, so I know that you came in for your difficulties with arousal, but we probably want to make your heart our priority. Is that okay?”
Mr DeLuca was silent, his lips pressed very tightly together, his powerful brows knitted so tightly together they formed almost one line, with the wrinkle at the top of his nose in the middle, cutting it in half.
“MIA MADRA, MY MAMMA, SHE DIED, SHE DIED OF THE POX. AM I GOING TO DIE, SIGNORINA? CAN IT KILL ME?”
“I’m not absolutely certain, Mr DeLuca, there’s no definites,” Aoife said, “but even resistant strains of syphilis can’t normally completely overwhelm the vampiric violence, not enough to kill you. What it can probably do is make you really ill though, and we don’t want that. Normally, syphilis can be treated with antibiotics, but because of this strain, the options aren’t as wide as usual.”
Mr DeLuca reached out and grabbed her hand, and she flinched at the sudden touch, but the big man looked really very frightened, his eyes wide, and she slowly put her other hand on top of his, the ones holding hers.
“It’s really good that you came here, Mr DeLuca,” Aoife told him. “We’re going to take care of you here.”
There was a knock on the door, and Aoife tried to tug her hands away but Mr DeLuca’s grip was too strong. She could still turn her head, though, and turned her body slightly on the office chair as Doctor Plummer came in.
“This is Doctor Plummer, Mr DeLuca, and she’s also a vamp — ”
“IRENA!” Mr DeLuca boomed sobbingly, releasing Aoife’s hands and throwing out his arms. What tumbled immediately out of his mouth in the aftermath was a tirade of tearful, thundering Italian, and Aoife looked to Doctor Plummer as she moved forward, her expression compassionate.
Her hand, she was very grateful for, did not touch Aoife’s body or land on her shoulder, but instead gripped the back of her chair as she came to stand just behind her, and did not grip the top of the seat, which was too close to Aoife’s head and to her shoulder, but the spine of the chair, so she couldn’t touch Aoife by accident.
She was quite good at stuff like that.
“Carmelo, calmati, it’s okay,” she said, and Aoife stood up from the chair so that Doctor Plummer could take her place and keep talking to Mr DeLuca in rapid Italian. He was tearful, wet streaks on his big cheeks, his brown eyes wet with it.
Doctor Plummer examined him whilst still speaking with him, chatting to one another the whole time, checked his heart and his pulse, examined his eyes and ears and nose and throat.
Her Italian was very good — Doctor Plummer was originally French, Aoife thought, but had been in the UK for a long time, and her accent was very mild. It sounded more significant speaking Italian, maybe because the languages were a little bit more similar, Aoife didn’t know.
All she had was Irish and English and a bit more Latin than most, and she’d never considered herself as having much of an ear for languages, much of a good understanding of them.
It wasn’t a huge surprise, she didn’t suppose, that Mr DeLuca should know Doctor Plummer — a lot of vampires knew one another, and Ephraim said regularly that the older you were, the smaller the world became, the more interconnected.
“Aoife,” she said, and Aoife looked at Doctor Plummer. “I’m going to admit Mr DeLuca and we’re going to take him upstairs, these antibiotics will need to be administered under observation, and we want to have a better look at his heart. Are you alright to return to the rest of the clinic for now, and come up in a few hours to speak with him and start making a list of his recent sexual partners?”
“Yes, Doctor Plummer, of course,” said Aoife. It was funny, the way she asked it. Are you alright?, as if it would be such an inconvenience, or so unheard of, that she should do this sitting upstairs on one of the wards with Mr DeLuca, rather than over the phone or by email, or here in the GUM Clinic.
“SUCH A HELPFUL GIRL, SIGNORINA,” boomed Mr DeLuca through tears. “YOU ARE SO KIND. YOU LOOK JUST LIKE A LITTLE TOPOLINA — A LITTLE MOUSE.”
“Thank you, Mr DeLuca,” said Aoife very seriously, not sure if that was a compliment or not, and stepped out of the room to see to the next patient.
* * *
“What the Hell is your problem, Sophia!?” snapped Doctor Whipp. “Do you think it’s remotely appropriate to talk to a patient that way!?”
“Do you think it’s appropriate to talk to a colleague this way?” Sophia retorted immediately, and Aoife stood in the middle of the corridor with her arms crossed across her chest, her tablet pressed against her breast. Her feet felt rooted to the spot, and she could feel her face frozen as Whipp shouted up into Sophia’s face.
“She’s scared, she’s in pain, she feels ugly and unattractive and just wants — ”
“And those are all fair things to feel, but she doesn’t get to sexually harass her fucking medical providers!” Sophia’s voice was nearly sing-song on the last line, and Aoife watched the Whipp’s cheeks turn a plummy red as he clenched his jaw. He cast his gaze about, and his eyes landed on Aoife.
“Aoife, what are you doing hovering in the middle of the corridor!? Haven’t you got work to be doing?”
“You’re in the way,” said Aoife, hearing her voice come out flat and toneless — worse than usual. But she was talking, and that was good: she was talking. Words were coming out, in a sentence. Sentences. “Maybe you should have your temper tantrums in an exam room instead of in a doorway.”
Whipp’s eyes widened, and his volume tripled.
Aoife was very glad she still had the dampening charms over her ears from talking with Mr DeLuca.
* * *
“I don’t know what to do with that boy,” muttered Ephraim as stood in the lift together, heading up to the ward.
“Sophia seems to think a slap might help,” said Aoife.
“I saw the side of his face, Aoifele, didn’t seem much like it helped to me,” said Ephraim.
“He’s a normal angel, right?”
“Normal?”
“He wasn’t a baby, he didn’t, um… grow up. Doctor Whipp Fell as an adult, has always been an adult.”
“Yes,” said Ephraim.
“You always told me anger, extreme anger, if it’s not from injustice or pain or… or righteousness, that it can be from fear. Someone who’s afraid, they yell, and shout, and scream. That anger and rage are scary, but they’re as much a sign of vulnerability in another person as tears or trembling.”
Ephraim was smiling — it wasn’t a big, happy smile, didn’t have lots of teeth. It was a gentler, close-lipped smile, and his eyes were crinkling at their edges.
“I have told you that, haven’t I, Aoifele?”
“He said I looked like a little mouse,” said Aoife.
Ephraim stared at her. “Ollie?”
“No, no,” said Aoife. “Carmelo DeLuca, the patient with syphilis we admitted today, the vampire.”
“Oh,” said Ephraim.
“Do I?”
“In English, people say mousy, and it means, ah, a drab colour of the hair, but yours is darker than that, hm? Richer. And I don’t think you look shy in the way that people say to mean mousy.”
“But?”
“But I see what he means,” allowed Ephraim, and then laughed when Aoife rolled her eyes.
“What’s he scared of, Doctor Whipp? Women?”
“Oh, everybody, I think,” said Ephraim. “Everything and everybody. When he started his residency here, he’d have panic attacks, start breathing fast, would faint. He didn’t do that today — he shouted at you and Sophia.”
“Sophia, then me,” said Aoife. “He was shouting at her because she corrected a patient after she tried to compliment her by saying something about her breasts. He started panicking, I think, when he realised he wasn’t in the right for yelling at her — that was when he shouted at me. I was just there, and he thought he could yell at me instead.”
“And he couldn’t, I take it?” Ephraim asked, looking at her thoughtfully, analytically.
“He demanded why I was just standing around, He wanted to start shouting, I think, and criticising me. But I said it was his fault that I was standing there, because he was blocking the doorway. And I said he was having a temper tantrum. I called it that.”
Ephraim huffed out an amused sound, and they stepped out of the lift and moved down the corridor together. She had to take twice as many steps as Ephraim did to keep the same pace, because his legs were so much longer than hers.
“I know it’s not a temper tantrum,” said Aoife. “I know he’s scared of something. But it wasn’t reasonable, or okay, what he was doing. I know I embarrassed him. Provoked him, upset him more.”
“He was being unreasonable — you told him so. Yes, perhaps the tantrum comment wasn’t as fair as you’d like it to be, but it wasn’t an unfair criticism, I do not think, Aoifele. He’s your superior, and Sophia’s, but this gives him no right to act this way, not with you, not with anybody.”
“You sent him home?”
“Yes.”
“Is he going to be at dinner tonight?”
“No.”
“You should invite him,” said Aoife. “Show him there’s nothing to be scared of.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Is it okay if my reasons are selfish?”
“Sophia seems to think you and Ollie might be, ah…” The old man trailed off significantly, and Aoife wrinkled her nose, which made him laugh again. “I thought she might not be exactly accurate.”
“She and Danny are very preoccupied with my dating prospects,” Aoife said. “They talk about my love life as if it’s some sort of battle that needs strategizing. Perhaps they should turn their attentions to Doctor Whipp instead.”
“Is that why you want him at dinner tonight?”
“I wasn’t as scared as usual,” said Aoife, “when he shouted at me. I don’t want to be scared of him — I think it will… help me. If he’s at dinner as well.”
“That seems a good reason to me,” said Ephraim, and made sure she could see his arm clearly as he slowly reached for her, and then squeezed her shoulder very hard. Aoife smiled.
“Do you know Mr DeLuca?”
“I’ve seen him sing, three or four times, I think — he’s a beautiful tenor. He sings marvellously.”
“You like the opera?”
“No, not really,” said Ephraim. “But the things we do for the ones we love, hm?”
“I don’t think I love anybody but you,” said Aoife.
That was the wrong thing to say, apparently, because it made Ephraim arrest in his tracks and look at her very emotionally indeed, his hands clenching up slightly, his shoulders rising. He didn’t like it, always, when she said she didn’t really feel attached to her family, to her parents, to her aunt.
“I’m going to go take Mr DeLuca’s sexual history now,” said Aoife.
“You’ll need another tablet to write all that down,” said Ephraim. “He was in one of the first productions of Dafne, you know — that’s, what, five hundred years of his being a tomcat?”
“That’s not how tablets work,” said Aoife, and walked away.
* * *
After an hour or so of sitting with Mr DeLuca, Aoife came away with a long list of sexual partners, many of whom did not have phone numbers or email addresses that Mr DeLuca was aware of. Most of his partners had particular places of work that he did know the names of, though, or would be contactable through other people.
Some people who were as sexually active as Mr DeLuca struggled to keep track of where they’d met their partners, or didn’t know their surnames or their places of work or their contact details, because they were one-night stands or they might have been drunk, or because they were sex workers of some sort, were otherwise working semi-anonymously.
Mr DeLuca did not have anonymous sex — a lot of the people he mentioned having sex with were experts in their fields, like him, were other opera singers, or were dancers or other performers. He might not have had their phone numbers, but he had their full names, sometimes their multiple middle names, their children and their spouses and their families, where they worked, what clubs and communities they were members of, what churches they went to if not their home addresses.
“YOU ARE A VERY SWEET GIRL,” he boomed again before she readied herself to go. “DO YOU HAVE A HUSBAND YET, SIGNORINA?”
“No, sir.”
“AH, OF COURSE, YOU ARE MUCH TOO YOUNG TO BE CHAINED TO ONE MAN,” he said immediately. “OR ONE GIRL, HM?”
“… Mr DeLuca — ”
“IRENA, SHE SAYS I WILL BE HERE SOME TIME, HM, I NEED TO BE OBSERVED A WEEK OR TWO. YOU COME TO ME IF YOU WANT ME TO INTRODUCE YOU TO HANDSOME YOUNG MEN, YES? YOU LIKE OPERA?”
“I don’t know, Mr DeLuca, I’ve never — ”
“I GET YOU TICKETS, I GET YOU TICKETS TO THE OPERA, AND TO ANY SINGER YOU WANT, HM?”
“That’s very kind, Mr DeLuca, but I’m not really looking for… singers, at the moment.”
“BUT THE OPERA!? A YOUNG LADY ALWAYS WANTS TO GO TO THE OPERA.”
“Does she? And, um, I don’t know if I can accept gifts from pati — “
“I GIVE YOU THE TICKETS,” said Mr DeLuca dismissively. “IRENA, SHE WON’T MIND.”
Aoife smiled, her hands on her knees, and then she exhaled. “I’ll get this contract tracing stuff sent off, Mr DeLuca.”
He was singing so loud to himself as she departed that the windows were rattling.
* * *
Ollie Whipp and Aoife sat across from each other at dinner.
“You okay?” Aoife asked.
“Like you care,” said Ollie.
“I care,” Aoife said. “I wouldn’t have slapped you, but I think that’s why Sophia did it. So I wouldn’t have to.”
“You think it’s okay that she hit me?”
“No,” said Aoife. “But I think it’s kind of funny.”
Ollie stared at her, his jaw dropped, and beside him, Colleen Pike, the clinical lead at Caer Afon, laughed before taking a drink of her wine. She was in her forties, and she was part vampire, and part fae, too. There was a very faint purple undertone to her skin, and her teeth were a little sharper than most, though she didn’t actually drink blood.
She was mousy, Aoife thought — not in personality, exactly, but in the colour of her hair, which was in a lank bob around her head.
“You’re right, Ephraim,” she said. “I do like your girl.”
Aoife smiled down at her lap. “Would you pass the salt, please, Ollie?”
“Fuck off,” snapped Ollie, but pushed the salt toward her.
Aoife found she didn’t feel scared at all.
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