Page 87 of Fangs with Benefits

‘Darling.’

‘You aren’t supposed to call me darling,’ she reminds me.

‘Sorry then, yes, my colleague?’ I try again. I feel her smile against my chest, and it gives me immense satisfaction.

‘How many times have you been in love?’

The question feels dangerously close to territory we promised not to tread, but as we’ve established, I can deny her nothing.

‘For a long time, love was easy to come by and difficult to avoid. I fell in love many times in many ways,’ I tell her. My mind conjures hazy images of them; a cook in the kitchens at the manor house who worked with my mother, the painter boy in Italy, a woman who sculpted, another who sang opera. I fell in love briefly with a vampire called Celine, and her lover called Joseph, and then there was Ada.

Ada was a quiet thing with curious eyes who loved science nearly as much as she loved to dance with her sisters, and I loved to watch her laugh.

‘There was Ada,’ I say. ‘She was young, just twenty-two, but her family considered her practically a spinster. I lived in the cellar of a church near her home. There was a lake between us, and I spent many nights skipping rocks on its surface. Ada said the sun sparkled on it in the day. She found me there one evening, and I fell in love with her instantly.’

Molly stays quiet, hanging on each word of the story.

‘We met there each night for weeks. After a time, she discovered my secret, and then, a while later, she convinced me that she wanted to be with me more than she wanted the human life her family expected for her.’

I feel at once transported to that night, the agony and bliss of her confession, her plea to make her like me. I feared she’d regret her choice, come to resent me, but oh how I wanted to have her by my side, nights and days talking through our endless lives.

‘I tried to dissuade her, but she was sure,’ I say. ‘She was so excited.’

Molly’s thumb stills its circles on the back of my hand.

‘I was excited too. I was in love and besotted by the thought of not being alone in my immortality.

‘It was supposed to be simple. She drank my blood, told me it tasted horrid.’ Ada and I had giggled about it then, both so nervous and excited, like it was our wedding night. ‘She wanted to die by drowning, said she’d always been curious about it since her studies as a child. I’d seen vampires turned in all sorts of ways, any death would do. So, she walked into the lake, dunked her head under the water and didn’t come back up.’

I close my eyes, wishing I could remove from my memory the stillness of the water, the moments ticking on as my gut churned with dread.

‘Only it wasn’t like it had been for me or my siblings or any of the other vampires I’ve seen turned. It was–she’d gone under smiling, so hopeful, and then, when I pulled her to the surface, she never woke.’

Molly wraps her arms around me, pulling our bodies flush together as if she can anchor me to her through these memories.

‘I killed her,’ I whisper, and my eyes are full of tears that are more blood than water. ‘She trusted that she would live forever and she died instead.’

‘Oh, Elijah,’ Molly says, her own voice wobbling as she embraces me. ‘You didn’t know, you couldn’t have known.’

‘She could have lived another sixty years.’

‘Or she could have died the next morning–natural causes or a house fire–that’s the thing about mortality. It’s so damn fragile, a gift we all take for granted until it’s not ours any more.’

We hold on quietly, our wounds of love laid out plainly for the other’s inspection.

‘You’ve been punishing yourself,’ she says, not a question. ‘Can’t you forgive yourself?’

I bring the back of her hand to my lips, and don’t say what I’m thinking; that neither of us can.

Texts between Molly and Devi on 10 December 2026

Molly: yo

Devi: Yo yourself

Molly: you know how Elijah is kind of weirdly ancient for a 34 year old?

Devi: yes