clinked my teeth in agitation against the hard lip of the tea mug. Maybe it was time for me to ask the bloody question.
"What did Mundy and Magdalene mean about you being all emotional?"
"Nothing." Gary dug the pen nib into an already emphatic full stop at the end of his notes.
I was fed up with this game of don't-tell-Lissa-anything. "Are you drinking from someone?" I was almost certain that he wasn't, but not certain enough.
"Um. No."
"What does the 'um' mean?" It always meant something.
"Um..." His attention to the full stop, already about four sheets of paper deep, was impressive.
"You know you'll tell me in the end. You always do."
He grimaced at the truth of this statement. Even this mysterious thing he was doing in Ballarat, he'd eventually tell me. I liked that about him, that he never lied to me and when I asked him a direct question he eventually gave me an answer. Even when he didn't really want to. Maybe that was my secret superpower. Effective harassment.
"I won't be mad at you," I said. And I vowed not to be, whatever it was. It wouldn't be right if he was always truthful and I wasn't.
The look he gave me was sceptical, but he sighed.
"I tried it. Once."
My brain blanked for a moment, and then slowly ground into gear again. "When?"
"A couple of weeks after I asked you if I could - from you - and you said no. I thought it would help me think."
Oh. The way that he could think after he had healed the bite in my throat and discovered how blood made him feel.
"I see."
He flinched and soldiered on. "Only it wasn't the same. It didn't feel right."
Not the answer I expected, though it was anyone's guess what I had expected. "How so?"
"It just wasn't. And it was embarrassing. Nobody wanted to come out the back with me. They don't think I'm cool like the others. Magdalene was really pleased though. She thought it meant I wanted to join the club properly, at last. Anyway, she made one of the regulars go with me. It was awful. I mean, it, we, I…"
When he found the words he was fishing for, he couldn't look at me while he said them. "I hadn't bitten anyone before and I couldn't work out where to... to not hurt them, you know. Didn't know where I was supposed to bite and how hard or how long or anything. He gave up and told me to use his wrist in the end. I hurt him and he pulled back and the timing was all shot. There was blood everywhere and it was kind of humiliating."
"Oh," I said. And, oh lord! Gary Hooper: Worst. Vampire. Ever. Poor sod, I thought, even as I felt grateful that the escapade seemed to have ended there.
"I haven't done it again. It didn't really work for me. It faded so fast it was hardly any use at all. Besides, it's not like when I'm with you." Now that the whole story was out, he returned to his habitual matter-of-factness.
"Me? There was just that one time, and you weren't actually biting then."
"No. I mean like when we go to the flicks, or you visit me at home or like tonight. You make me feel like I've done blood when I haven't. I think better when I'm with you. I feel - more."
Of everything that had happened this evening, this was what had rendered me speechless.
"It's the invitation thing," he expanded as silence reigned, "What I've done. Do. At your place."
I felt stupid. It had been happening for months without my recognising it. I'd known him for only a short time before that first uninvited step into my home, so I took it for granted. He had seemed so frustratingly dispassionate and emotionally clueless, when clearly these things were relative.
Walking into my house uninvited had changed him. I'd kept saying I couldn't define how. Well, here it was, defined for me. Gary had defied his nature, and his nature had changed.
It was my turn to be barely articulate.
"So you... Do you? Is it...?" Well, that was getting us nowhere. "How does it feel?"
"I don't know," he confessed. "I hardly knew what I felt most of the time I was alive. And now, it's weird. It's like it only gets so far and then it stops. But it's, you know, there."
"Are you okay with that?"
"Yeah." A lopsided smile.
"You said you liked the not-feeling part of being a vampire," I recalled from a long-ago conversation.
"I thought so too. I'm getting to like it better. It's not so bad. You explain things and help it make sense."
"I do?" I would have thought I was the least helpful guide to being human on the planet.
"Yeah. I can't make things add up. You're like... you're all the missing values in the equation and when I'm with you it makes sense."
"Oh." What else was there to say? That maths-geek line was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me.
"So that's what it's all about," he concluded, "What they're saying. It's the threshold and being friends with you and all that." Gary waited for me to have something to say.
Impulsively, I reached across and ruffled his hair, grinning. He pulled away and dragged his palm over his fringe. "You're messing my hair!"
"As if you could tell the difference." I mussed his fringe again and he batted at my hands. Paul used to do the same, when we were teenagers, only he used to be much more annoyed and hit me a lot harder. Gary's hands simply darted around mine, barely making contact, then he ran his fingers through his light brown hair, yanking the front of it down.
"You're a pest," he said. A grin played at the corners of his mouth.
"Watch your movie."
"Drink your tea."
Later in the evening I ordered pizza. His keen sense of smell made the meal an olfactory delight for him, but one cruel twist of his condition was that he had almost no sense of taste, and he could ingest nothing except blood. Instead, Gary watched me eat while I gave him a running commentary on the pizza's flavours and textures.
Anchovies were something of a mystery to him, though they were easier to describe than olives to someone who had grown up in the culinary wastelands of 1960s Australia. Who hasn't eaten kalamata olives? Seriously?
And not just anchovies and olives; a whole world of edible delights were a complete mystery to him. Thai food. Avocados. Feta cheese. Hummus. Korean barbecue. He'd never even eaten a Golden Gaytime ice-cream. In the last few months I'd been making a point of trying cuisines he wasn't familiar with. Sushi had been fun, with that look on his face - half disgust, half wistful that he wasn't able to try it himself - when I explained that the fish was raw. He'd been the same about chicken's feet when I took him to yum cha once. I wasn't that keen on them myself, but he dared me to try them, so I did.
I'm not sure when it stopped bothering me, this food voyeur thing he has
