Draw-String Hoodies
Avery must have had a bruise on his chin. He was sure of it. Connor certainly punched hard enough. The next evening, as soon as the sun set, the vampire had headed out. He wandered aimlessly for almost an hour before deciding where he wanted to go. On a whim, he hopped on the Red Line, transferring to the Blue Line and backtracking to the Logan Square stop. He couldn't go to Francess' apartment, because of Connor's directive from the night before. He turned instead down Milwaukee, and made his way to what he'd come to think of as 'Francess' theater'.

The vampire remembered what she had told him about being promoted, and he smiled to himself as he pushed past the front doors. Avery paused to look at the lit up posters displaying the coming attractions, then turned toward the concession stand.

Completely clueless as to who had walked in, Francess was in full-on Assistant Manager mode. During the evening shifts, she served as the senior employee at the old Logan Theatre, and got to put together staff schedules for that shift as well as supervise closing responsibilities. Her additional functional area was to supervise concessions sales, which seemed like a Very Big Deal to Francess, because the majority of the theatre's earnings came from food and beverages. Francess rarely reached for what she considered 'exalted' status; once she was named flute section leader in her high school marching band and actually threw up under the imagined pressure. So it was important to her to exceed expectations. Her goal for her first month on the management team was not to receive a single complaint from a customer.

Which led to the 'developmental moment' she was having with a young employee behind the snack counter. Remembering the series of VHS manager training videos she'd been forced to watch, Francess led him away from the customers before launching into a corrective yet positive explanation of filling popcorn buckets up to the brim, and how it was nice to offer to layer the butter, and not to get chintzy with the seasoned salt.

Still flushed from the exhilaration of her confrontation, she turned away from the employee, wondering if she could sneak to the bathroom and put a damp paper towel on her face without anybody noticing. It wouldn't do to look like she was cracking under the pressure. That's when she caught sight of Avery.

"Hey," she mouthed, gesturing in a none-too-subtle way for him to meet her by the wax palm tree.

The vampire broke into a grin when Francess spotted him, and he crossed the carpeted lobby toward the fake shrubbery. He felt a little covert as he sauntered casually over to her. "Are you busy?," Avery asked, his voice low. He forgot for a moment the confrontation from the night before as he studied Fran in her work uniform. He hadn't seen it since the first time they met. Glancing at the tree, he added, "I brought you a plant, but you weren't home."

Avery tugged on the strings from his hooded sweatshirt and smiled at her.

"I've got a plant?" Francess broke into a smile and crossed her arms, mostly to control her urge to reach out and play with his hoodie strings, too. Maybe see-saw them back and forth, or cinch the hood tight around his face, until all that peeked out were his giant eyes. It would be so cute. "Does it have a name?" All plants deserved names, Francess thought. Once you named something, it became more important to take good care of it. She wondered what kind of name Avery might come up with.

The brunette's eyes alit on a dark spot on his chin. Off her train of thought, she said, "Oh, you have a smudge on your--" Francess slipped her sleeve cuff over her hand and reached up to help him.

"It's a fern." Then he caught on. "Ohh. Well, I think he looked like a Pierre. Kind of squat and a little haughty. I suppose you could put a red kerchief around him." Francess' hand came up to his face, and he knew she wouldn't be able to get the 'smudge' off. Avery didn't flinch away, though. "It's not really a smudge, so much as it is a...bruise," the vampire explained weakly. He had been about to tell her Connor did it, when he stopped short. As aggressive as the other man had been, Avery couldn't do that to Francess. She seemed so happy to have her own apartment, and a roommate; he wasn't going to put her in the middle.

It wasn't in Fran's nature to assume he had a fight, partly because she didn't travel in such circles, and partly because she was clumsy enough to imagine a mundane injury. "What'd you hit it on?" she asked, looking sympathetic. Once she had tripped going up the stairs in her parents' house. She was carrying a laundry basket and some jeans fell out and wrapped around her shoe. Francess struck her chin and bit her tongue hard enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room. With Avery, she was picturing something similar. The comment that Rebecca had recently made about a vampire jumping him didn't immediately occur to her.

Instead of scrubbing at his chin, she put the pad of her thumb on it. A soft touch.

He looked at her softly, and not just a little bit sadly. Avery wanted to make something up, like he was stacking heavy books at the store and one fell on him. Something like that. But he glanced down and met her gaze, and felt her thumb on his chin. He really wanted to be the kind of person who didn't get into fights. "I didn't. I had a disagreement with someone. They lashed out. It wasn't really a fight, it was...a lapse, I guess." The vampire shrugged softly, not wanting to move much so her hand wouldn't drop from his chin.

"I don't mean to be evasive, you know," he remarked off-handedly. "I mean, I've gotten into fights before. Bad ones. I would have told you, but I didn't want to scare you. Or make you change your mind about me."

If Francess looked crestfallen, it was not because she thought bad of him. It was concern she felt, the sharp kind that put a bad flutter in her chest and made her eyes burn. "A lapse?" Perhaps it made her the odd person out, but Francess couldn't remember ever having that kind of lapse. Well, maybe in third grade, when a boy put chewing gum in her hair, but it was an extraordinary circumstance. "That's the kind of thing battered women say on the Oxygen network," she said, and immediately felt terrible about it.

Francess shifted on her feet. "I'm not going to change my mind." That part was spoken with a little more oomph, because Avery needed to be convinced of her feelings, even more than she did. It was strange, because logic dictated it should've gone the other way around. To prove a point, she leaned closer and gave his chin bruise a careful kiss. So what if buttery popcorn kid saw his Assistant Manager making time with a guest.

Avery began to speak, then paused, looking slightly confused. "What's the Oxygen network?" The question was forgotten, however, as she reassured him. He smiled softly at the kiss, his fingers lifting to trail through her ponytail. "I'm not going to get you in trouble, am I? Like...public displays of comfort in the workplace?" He wanted to slide his hands down to her waist and kiss her properly, but there were moviegoers trickling through the lobby, and a handful of other theater employees.

Instead, he leaned forward and planted a soft kiss on her forehead. No one ever got in trouble over a forehead kiss, right?

"Are you kidding? I'm the law around here," Francess said with bravado, although the very thought of being reported to the General Manager made her knees knock. Also it was hard to pretend bravery when one wore a vest and neck tie as part of her uniform. So just in case they were being spied on, she picked up the skinny trunk of the wax tree and repositioned it to provide a sort of jungle-y cover. "There." Now she allowed herself to pick up the drawstring of his hoodie and twirl it around her fingers. "You look cute in this," she said, lifting the cotton ends and running them softly down his nose, crinkling hers at the same time. "I'm still worried about you... just because you look like you got in a playground fight doesn't mean I'm not worried about the sort of person who would hit you."

He wrapped an arm around her, his gaze slipping down to the string in her hand. "They're not a bad person. They do good things. He was just upset." The 'he' slipped out, but that didn't mean anything, right? It could be anyone, anyone male. Avery wondered how he could explain. "A girl died, from a vampire attack," he said carefully. "This person witnessed it. I said something insensitive without meaning to, and...I think he was just upset at all vampires in that moment. Including me." Tilting his head, he brushed his lips over her cheek.

"It hurts," Avery admitted. "Not the punch. The words he used, and the fact that I represent the thing he hates, even if he doesn't hate me."

"Well it's kind-of like being racist," she said, with her fingers all mummified in the ends of Avery's drawstrings. Francess tipped her head forward, so that it touched his, feeling very comfortably intimate in their secret corner behind the tree. She had always liked private nooks. The silky weight of her ponytail fell over her shoulder. "Or I guess... species-ist, which is hard to say." The concept of Avery as some bloodsucking fiend was so foreign to her; he was the nicest person she knew, and he wasn't a technical 'person'.

Francess withdrew her fingers from their cotton casing, and the drawstrings looked like curly fries. "He shouldn't discriminate. It wasn't you that hurt her. That's like..." Francess searched for an apt comparison, but found it difficult. "If I saw a man rob a bank, and later on I saw you, and you had big wads of cash in your pockets but I knew it wasn't you that robbed that bank, and I hit you anyway because you could be a bank robber." The ludicrous nature of that example wasn't lost on Francess, but she was at a loss for any better way of describing how unfair she thought it was.

"Yeah, it wasn't very fair. And I think he realized that, deep down." Avery listened to her hypothetical example with a serious expression, and it was sort of true. Connor had already looked angry before Avery had even said a word. "But you know when someone says something that's even just a little bit true, and it hits too close to home? He accused me of not caring about the girl who was killed. I do care, it's sad and that's what wasn't fair. But I can't fall apart with grief over it, over someone I never met. I mean, I thought about it, and I even sort of tried, but...I couldn't. And that's what makes me fear that he was right."

The vampire brushed his hand against hers, fingers blooming open to press against her palm. "Of course I'd be devastated if something happened to someone I knew and cared about. But things happen, things that are no one's fault except the vampire who kills an innocent girl. And I'm not the one who did it. Does that make me horrible, for thinking that way?"

"No," she said, shaking her head. "If you grieved for every person who ever died, you'd be depressed forever. I mean... you'd be so caught up in the death part, there'd be no joy in being here." Though what Francess claimed made sense to her, it was somewhat difficult to empathize. She couldn't even watch the local news, which she called the 'murder hour' even though it was only thirty minutes, because all those stories of bodies being found on the corner of This Street and That Avenue, and didn't anyone have any information, gave her stomach aches. Sometimes after watching, she'd get so caught up picturing the gory details she'd start crying. It was a weird cycle of masochistic thinking.

But not everyone was wired that way. Especially Avery, who'd been around for many decades, and had to be somewhat numb to the concept of death. All those losses tended to pile up on a person's psyche. Francess remembered how her maternal grandmother had been before she passed away. Adele Adams outlived her parents, her husband, and all four of her siblings. Each time a funeral came around, she sank deeper into some kind of geriatric depression. And that was only one regular lifetime of loss! If Avery didn't learn to compartmentalize it, he'd be absolutely morose.

"Who was it?" Francess finally asked. It was unlikely that a stranger knew Avery was a vampire. Did more people know about his situation than Francess realized?

It was a lot harder to keep quiet when asked directly. Avery's eyes shifted to rest on some discarded chewing gum that had been stuck to the wall. "He's what you would call a demon fighter, I guess. I don't know him that well, only met him somewhat recently." The vampire turned back to face Francess. "The important part is that I avoid him for a few days, let him cool off. I'm not about to provoke him."

He shook his head slowly, and smiled almost dazedly. "I haven't even asked how you are. How's work going? You seem like you're handling things well." Avery had spotted the little tete-a-tete with the popcorn kid.

The brunette's mouth twisted into a frustrated frown. She peered through the leaves of the artificial plant, making certain that no one from the snack counter had crept over to eavesdrop. "Yesterday," she whispered, "Somebody put a fake severed finger in the nacho cheese, just to mess with me." The outlandish behavior of the mysterious employee was a source of more embarrassment than anger for Francess. "How would you even sever a finger while melting cheese? I totally knew it was a fake."

The minor incident was handled with a hardy-har from Francess, who played it off like it was a joke in the Halloween spirit. But she wasn't stupid. She knew a good hazing when she saw it.

Francess squeezed his hand. "Wait'll I figure out who did it. I didn't survive grade school bullying without learning a trick or two. Revenge will be mine!" She rolled her shoulders slightly backward. "Besides... she who controls scheduling is a force to be reckoned with."

Avery's smile widened. "Good use of logic." His head tilted slightly. "You were bullied in grade school?" He gazed over toward the snack stand shrewdly, as if he were her political adviser and he was devising ways for her to avoid a potential coup. "So you could make them work Friday nights. But you don't want to wield that power too much. It'll lose its effectiveness, and there might be a worker uprising. I think your best bet is subtle, while remaining unruffled." He nodded solemnly.

"You could always find out who's willing to suck up to you. Use them for inside information. Find the nacho finger perpetrator."

All the rest of what Avery had said evaporated into thin air. Francess wrinkled her forehead, and it was a sore temptation to burst into laughter. She covered her mouth, but then she mumbled, "Did you just say finger perpetrator?" She could be adolescent with the rest of 'em, and that particular word combination was blatant enough for even inexperienced Fran to pick up on as dirty. The effort to keep a straight face meant that she turned quite red.

Swallowing back her reaction, she tried to focus on what else he said. "Of course I was bullied. I had braces and an early growth spurt and hand-me-downs." And this was all before her stint in the high school mime troupe, which would've been serious fodder for popular kids. "Does that make me less appealing?" Probably. She should learn to keep less cosmopolitan factoids to herself, Francess decided.

"Yes, I -- ," he broke off, realizing it was amusement that she was doing a poor job of hiding behind her hand. Avery raised an eyebrow, trying to keep a stoic expression and failing. He gave up and grinned, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. "Right, moving on. I was picked on, too. Nothing too harsh, but there were very few people exempt from at least some form of ridicule. That's just how kids are, I suppose." The vampire gazed at her seriously, and he dipped his head to plant a kiss on her lips.

"I find you quite appealing, and it's just reiterated every time I see you."

"Really?" A rhetorical question. Francess was all modest smiles, ducking her head and pinching the fabric of his sweatshirt. She alternately tugged the right side, then the left, testing the bagginess of the garment. "It looks warm in there. Can I put my hands in it?" Without waiting for a response, both hands dove into the front pocket of his hoodie, where they linked together.

"I should bring you my sweatshirt and beg you to wear it for a couple of days. Then it'll smell like you," she said, wondering after the fact if that sounded creepy. She was almost certain it did. Creepy and youthful. Those were the sorts of things couple-types did in high school. She supposed things like that still appealed to her because she hadn't had the chance to outgrow them. "It's not pink or anything," she added.

He grinned, slipping his hands in after her. If anyone saw, it would look a little weird, like there was a small raccoon in the front of his hoodie. As it happened, people seemed completely oblivious to any whispers issuing from an ordinary looking fake tree. "We could switch. This is my favorite one." It was blue, his favorite color, and incredibly soft from countless washings with fabric softener. His mother had always used it, so he used it too. "I'd trust you with it. And you would make it even better." Avery smiled inwardly at the thought of having something around daily to remind him of her.

"Even if it was pink," he added. "I wouldn't mind."

"That's very brave of you. However, it's dark green." Francess was glad she bought it in a large. Most mediums wouldn't work because she had long arms. Unable to resist the offer of a temporary switch, she said, "So it's a deal. My sweatshirt for yours. When should we make the trade?" When put like that, she was reminded of action movies where hostages were taken and later exchanged for duffels of cash, although in this situation there wouldn't be an ink bomb.

A person approached from behind the tree, but as it turned out they were headed for the bathroom and not to interrupt the interlude.

"Oh," he said. "Well, do you have one with you? I mean, I have a t-shirt under here, so I could just change out of it and puts yours on. If you had one." Avery wondered if he was sounding too eager. "Oh! You still haven't seen my apartment, but I've seen yours. You weren't there though, so I talked to Connor." The vampire glanced around, before leaning in to whisper conspiratorially, "I said the plant was for both of you, but I really bought it with just you in mind."

Francess laughed and pinched his stomach lightly. "You're sneaky." She couldn't wait to see Pierre the Fern. As long as she hung it from a hook near the windows, fat Ivan shouldn't be able to eat the leaves. The cat would eat anything. Once he had tried to eat a cactus and gotten a needle stuck in his gums. That was an adventure. "It's in the breakroom," she said. "I can go get it... I guess that means I have to take my hands out of your uni-pocket."

"Or we could both walk there very carefully, but it might look a little suspicious." Avery nodded decisively. "Yes, you may have to." He pushed a palm frond away from his face. "Do you want me to stay here? I mean, I can remain hidden. No one would ever suspect the tree." Gesturing to the fake trunk, he added, "I could even carry it with me, like in a cartoon. You know, walk sideways and whenever anyone looked, I'd stop." He knew he was just being silly, but it was fun anyway. The past few days had been far too serious.

"Okay, I have an idea. I'll hover outside the men's bathroom, and you bring me the shirt. Everyone will be none the wiser."


"Well sure." Francess shrugged and extracted her hands from his pocket. "Except... people might wonder why you're hovering outside a men's bathroom like George Michael." She stepped out of their nook and set the plant more squarely in front of Avery. Some of the fake moss in the bottom spilled out, like grass from an Easter basket. "But they'll probably just report you to the Assistant Manager."

After giving the snack counter a quick glance and being satisfied things were progressing smoothly, she took a plain door marked 'Employees Only' into a back room. A few seconds later Francess reappeared with a dark green sweatshirt bundled up. She had taken a lint roller to it that afternoon, so it was pleasantly free of residual cat hair and passed her quick inspection. Going back to where Avery waited, she held it up. "Here it is."

Avery glanced around, then held up an index finger. "Just one moment." He grabbed the bottom of his sweatshirt with his fingers, and lifted. His white t-shirt got stuck to the slightly static-y material, and his voice came out muffled as his head got covered by the hoodie. "I hate when that happens." He could feel cold theater air on three inches of exposed stomach, and quickly slipped the blue sweatshirt off his head, adjusting his t-shirt with one hand.

Turning the blue hoodie right side out, he handed it to her and took the green one. The vampire pulled it on, his hair ruffled with several hanks in the back standing straight up from the static. He gave her a smile. "There. Switch complete."

When his shirt rode up, the pale skin caught Fran's attention and she stared. His stomach was part of Avery she hadn't seen before, so she was terribly curious and it was a sore temptation to reach out and touch the shadowy place near his hip bone, or put her palm on the light trail of hair beneath his belly button. Thankfully she was too stuck in place to molest him. Then his head emerged from the neckline and she blinked to get her eyeballs on something safer. Like an illuminated movie poster on the wall. Brainscan, the remake.

"Thanks." With jerky hands, she draped the blue hoodie over her arm and looked down, feeling a blush start to burn her ears and then creep up her neck. "I gotta go, a movie's getting ready to let out. Thanks for coming to see me." She pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

Francess did a stiff, hurried walk around the end of the snack counter, trying to deflect people from looking Avery's way by inquiring into the supply of hot dogs.