First Taste
Ever since that run in with Toby and the subsequent feral need to feed which had resulted in an altercation with a do-gooder, Nathan had been laying low. He knew that there would be consequences and he rather liked having his head on his shoulders and didn't feel like defending his right to exist as a supernatural creature from anyone let alone a scrawny youth looking for revenge.

It had taken days of recuperation for Nathan to return to his normally composed self, to be the cold blooded killer that thought before he acted. A further day before he was able to walk on his own speed without the thirst crawling under his skin, driving him onwards to feed at whatever cost.

But now that he was recovered Nathan allowed his wanderings to take him away from safety and deeper into the city, right into the depths of a busy bar. It wasn't sleazy in the way most bars he frequented were, it was full of life and easy to get lost in. Something Nathan appreciated; there was something to be said for being able to get lost in a crowd. It had at times saved him from extinction.

He flicked the dying embers of grey ash from the end of his cigarette and picked up his glass, sipping at the amber coloured liquid as he watched the crowds move. Nathan was tucked away in the shadows, eyes light and watchful as they went from face to face, observing. People watching, fascinating thing, especially when nobody realised they were being watched.

Some people were too intoxicated to realize much of anything, including their noise level. Such was the case with the group of ten or so 20-something women having a birthday party. Technically the get-together began at a restaurant, but once dinner was over the ladies decided to go out for a few drinks. They'd been shrieking and giggling and spilling things for going on two hours now.

Their behavior firmed up Francess Penn's opinion that there was nothing more embarrassing than a drunk girl. Especially a drunk older sister. Beatrice had pulled in a favor to get her sibling invited to the birthday girl's bash, but it wasn't going too well. Most of the girls were very posh types, fairly superficial, and thought that the youngest Penn was a little on the weird side. They didn't outright say it, but it was obvious on their faces. Francess shrank more and more into herself until she felt concave. Finally she abandoned the table and stuck herself in a corner with her coca-cola.

She jabbed her straw at the bobbing ice cubes. Once in a while she peeked at what they were doing, simultaneously disliking them and wishing she could let go and behave the same way. But she couldn't. She just wasn't wired like that. She pulled on the collar of her unstylish button-down shirt and then stuffed her hands under her thighs. It was an awkward way to sit, and it made her shoulders hunch up.


The birthday party drew Nathan's attention, causing a predatory tilt of his head followed by a slow and careful assessment of their intoxication. It would be easy to lure one away, too easy.

He watched how three in particular crowded together and gestured towards a corner, giggling amongst themselves and making comments not easily heard above the noise. Nathan's eyes went past them and to the corner, lifting an eyebrow as he was sure he recognised the girl sat by herself in the corner.

"If it isn't my out of body Francess," he drawled with a chuckle as her face finally clicked into place. Nathan pushed away from the wall and navigated the crowd with an ease that was both supernatural and inhuman.

He slid up against the wall beside her quietly and tipped his head to regard her through a few loose strands of hair. "Fancy running into you here, Francess."

It was a good thing Fran was sitting on her hands, or else she might've knocked over her soda. As it was, she stiffened and jerked away, tipping herself off balance, so that she had to snatch a hand from underneath her thigh and grapple for a handhold on the seat. "Get away!" she said. Even though it was a distress call, it was uncomfortably loud. The sniggering girls thought that oddball Fran was dissuading a would-be suitor and kicked their cocktail-stupid laughter into higher gear.

Despite the fear making her queasy, she still registered that and was ashamed of herself for noticing it.

"You might as well leave, because I'm not going anywhere with you this time," she said, straightening up her spine and hoping she looked grimly determined instead of petrified. Francess silently thanked god she'd emptied her bladder earlier on. "So it's really a waste of time."

Nathan glanced at the girls then turned his eye back to Francess. "What makes you think I want you to go anywhere with me, Francess?" And if he drew out her name - lengthening the syllables with that Scottish rich accent of his - it wasn't deliberate.

He tipped the glass to his lips and took another sip of the liquid, tasting it on his tongue before letting it disappear down the back of his throat. "What's wrong with a little conversation? Hm?" Nathan pushed away from the wall and walked around the table before resettling in a chair next to Francess, cigarette in the hand that rested back against the leather.

"Friends of yours?" He asked, casually gesturing to the group of girls.

"No," she said, blinking too fast. Francess scooted her chair a few inches away. "Do they look like they'd be my friends?"

It was a valid point. Beatrice was the only one there she knew, and she was three sheets to the wind. Too drunk to realize her baby sister was sulking in a corner with the Scottish undead.

"I mean... do I look like I'd be friends with them?" she corrected quietly. She held on tight to the glass of soda. A droplet of condensation squeezed out from under her palm and skated towards her wrist. If it got in her sleeve Fran would have a case of the shivers, so she let go long enough to wipe it on her skirt.

"Besides, it's not completely dumb to think you'd ask me to go on a walk for 'coffee', is it?" Francess gave him a pointed look. As she sat there, a case of the creepy-crawlies walked down her back and she wondered over how sitting next to Nathan was so different than sitting next to Avery. She guessed this was how it felt to rub elbows with Evil.

Wait, Avery! If her memory wasn't spazzing, then Mr. Tartan-Wearing Vampire Guy had once gotten a meal stolen by Avery. Better not bring that up now, lest he decide she'd make a good replacement.

Nathan's lips twitched in the corner, deciding to keep his less than kind thought to himself and let the silence speak for itself. Francess might have been naive about people but she wasn't stupid.

"You could have said no," Nathan pointed out above the rim of his glass as he took another sip. "But you didn't." He leaned forward and rested his glass on the table, tilting his head at her. "And you had a very interesting out of body experience if I recall correctly."

He lifted the cigarette to his lips and took a drag before his fingertips snagged on the ashtray to bring it close enough to knock ash out into it.

"Shh!" Francess fluttered her hands and her chest turned pink. She looked seriously distressed. "Don't tell anybody about that, okay? Not even by accident." The way she was talking, it would've required a special hearing device to catch her words from a table away, or a lip reader.

Francess sucked lightly on her bottom lip. Now that the surprise had worn off, it was a little humiliating to sit next to Nathan, not because she'd fainted and shown him an out-of-body experience, but because she'd been foolish enough to think he liked her. Fran was not an ugly girl by any means, but she was hardly the cosmopolitan sort that men in leather jackets hit on. Even if she secretly thought of this one as Euro-trashy.

"I would've said no if I realized you wanted to kill me, just so you know," she added in her defense. Mouthing the straw, she took a sip of her coke in the hopes of being less stare-worthy. Just blend in, Francess... people will get bored and look at the drunk girls again. In fact, that moment was sooner than she originally guessed, as one of the women flashed the bartender to get a free drink.

"God, you'd think she was at Mardi Gras," she mumbled, bewildered. Was a free beer really worth showing your breasts to an unkempt guy behind a bar? She hoped so, but didn't personally know because she was underage.

"It'll be our little secret," Nathan assured her. "I'm very good at keeping secrets, Francess." He rested his cigarette in the ashtray as he shrugged out of his dark coat, pulling the sleeves of his shirt upwards to expose muscular forearms and a thick leather band across his right wrist where his watch sat.

He eyed the cigarette and decided against taking another drag, picking up the filter end to stub the residual red embers out into the clear glass. "And I might not have killed you," Nathan pointed out. "I don't always kill the people I feed from." Look at Rebecca for instance.

Nathan's tongue curled around the sharp edge of a tooth as his lips pulled apart into an amused smile, watching the woman's display and listening to Francess' comments. "I'm guessing by your earlier frantic comments nobody else but me knows about your interesting reaction to stress?"

Francess didn't believe he'd have spared her measly life for a minute, but she was hardly going to provoke an argument based on why he'd have no reason to let her live. "Well... people know I faint," she said, poking her straw into the spaces between ice cubes in a pattern. "It's hard to miss I guess. That's the stress part. The rest seems to happen kind-of randomly whenever I'm unconscious or sleeping."

She eyed him. "Nobody ever saw me before. In spirit form I mean," she hedged. "They just... they see right past me, or maybe a glimmer? Not a girl-shape." A quiet moment passed and she almost reached for his stubbed cigarette to fiddle with it. "I'm reading books about it though."

A question she had mulled over quite a bit came to mind. "How come you didn't bite me?"

Nathan was silent for a moment; the sound of the music and the conversation washed over the shadowed pair as they just sat there and looked at one another. It was easy to get lost in the chaos, vanish into the noise and just forget anything existed outside of it.

"Curiosity," he explained. "Your ability to step outside of your body interests me. It's not often I'm interested." He shrugged and picked up his glass, taking a sip from it again. "It's also been a long time since anybody's surprised me."

The corner of Fran's mouth twisted. "Wow. That must be--" Looking into her glass she cut herself off, automatically censoring herself from being rude, but then remembered he was a murderer and decided to hell with it. "Really unfulfilling... to never be interested anymore or have anybody take you by surprise?"

She moistened her lips. Probably the main reason she didn't like those women at the bar was because they were predictable; dim-witted and unfunny and cookie cutter and predictable. Except for Beatrice, of course, who could be startlingly strange when nobody important was watching.

"If you could die of boredom, I bet you'd be dust already," she added. She looked at Nathan, who smelled slightly of liquor. As much as dying freaked her out, the giant abyss of immortality scared her worse.

"More than likely," Nathan commented with a wry smile.

He finished off his drink and turned the glass over, watching as a thin circle of condensation and whiskey formed around the edges. "The world has changed but the people? Remain very much the same. Like your non-friends over there."

He swept his eyes in their direction. "Every night they do the same thing, live their lives a certain way and nothing will ever change. They'll do exactly what you expect and will think nothing of it."

Nathan inhaled a breath, catching something lingering on Francess but he couldn't quite put his finger on what that something was. "Do you enjoy your life, Francess?"

Since she was feeling contrary, she nearly pointed out that Nathan was predictable, too, at least if he went around terrorizing and eating people each night. But he caught her off guard with the question. It was bizarre to contemplate her life's satisfaction with a creature that was likely to volunteer to end it, but since she was nailed to her seat (she couldn't exactly leave if he might follow her outside) she went along.

"Sort-of," she answered. Francess pulled on a lock of her hair, winding it around her fist. "I'm not usually so morose," she explained, something in her inflection stilted, suggesting a passive intelligence. "Most of the time I'd say yes, but I've only ever known this. I mean, I always lived in one house and went to one school and worked at one place. I don't really know why, but lately... you could say I've started pondering what I could be missing." Almost immediately guilt set in, because her parents had worked hard to give her a good place to grow up and she didn't want for anything critical. But there was something missing. Maybe it was adventure. Francess knew she only had herself to blame for that. She wasn't bold enough to launch her own.

She shrugged stiffly. "It looks like I've got the opposite problem as you. You've seen too much and so everything looks the same, and I've seen too little." Francess chased the thought with a sip of watered-down coke. She was beginning to wish she was old enough to order a real drink, if they were gonna have a conversation that deep!

Nathan reclined back into his seat, withdrawing into his own personal space rather than impinging on Francess' like he had done earlier, easily and without hesitation.

"So why did you come out tonight?" He asked, curiosity getting the better of him. "To experience something, maybe? But it doesn't appear you're doing much... experiencing." Nathan glanced back at the group and returned a smile that was given, watching the woman flush and turn away to giggle with one of her friends.

A one-shouldered shrug. "My sister dragged me out," she admitted, her bearing suggesting disappointment, though she was more upset with herself than Beatrice. "I have a habit of building things up in my imagination. I pictured all us girls hanging out and laughing and being friends." The tension on her hair was painful so she unwound it and settled it on her shoulder. "When I picture myself in future situations, hypothetical ones, I don't think it's really me I see. It's who I wish I was. And so I get excited and think it'll be a good time, but when I arrive, I'm still me."

Francess felt heat spread across her cheeks. "My sister says I'd have fun if I relaxed and stopped being self-conscious, but it's not that easy. When I think up things to say, being myself, I get weird looks."

"That's where most people drink," Nathan remarked. "Use the alcohol to strip away their layers of insecurity and let go of the inhibitions that hold them back."

He reached across and picked up that abused strand of Francess' hair, eyeing the ends of it before he tucked it behind her ear in a casual relaxed movement as if it didn't mean anything at all.

Nathan rummaged out his pack of cigarettes and flipped it open to grab another cigarette, grateful that he could smoke as much as he wanted without fear of cancer and other ugly side effects. "Relaxing is easier in the company of people you like."

She nodded. "I guess I don't like them much... Which makes me a hypocrite for feeling bad that they don't like me."

Francess considered asking him not to smoke, but couldn't get up the nerve. Instead she watched his fingers and said, "I'm only twenty so I can't order a drink. I'd be too embarrassed though, because I wouldn't know what to order." Maybe one of those drinks with the fruit in it, but even she was hip enough to realize those were girly drinks. "I used to be too embarrassed to order at the drive-thru. I kept thinking about how my voice would sound inside the kitchen, you know, on the loud speakers."

Because she was curious and he seemed the sort to know the answer, she asked, "What kind of drink would you start with?" Maybe she could defray some of the future discomfort.

Nathan ducked his head and tucked his hands around the flame of his lighter as he lit his cigarette. He tossed the lighter onto the table and leaned back into his chair, tipping his head back as he inhaled another mouthful of smoke.

"If I had never drank before?" He asked, smoke curling around the corners of his mouth. "I suppose I'd start with something gentle at first. Try an alcopop or a light beer to begin with and then steadily work my way up to something stronger."

Francess tipped her chin down and gave him a lost look. "Alcopop?" She tried to pick apart the word and figure out what it meant on her own. "Is that when you mix alcohol with... pop? Like a rum and coke?" It was the only idea she could come up with, so she hoped it wasn't ridiculous. Even if he was a vampire, she didn't fancy the idea of seeming idiotic around him.

She wasn't sure she'd like beer. Mr. Penn drank it while he watched sports on the tube and the smell got caught in his moustache. Fran had vivid memories of her father getting excited over the Bears winning football games; he'd swoop her into a crushing hug and kiss her cheek, and always his beer-soaked moustache would leave a damp spot on her cheek. She waited until he wasn't looking to wipe it on her shirt.

"Something like that," Nathan said with a nod of his head. "Cocktails are good for masking the taste of alcohol." He eyed the bar again and considered getting himself another drink, it wasn't as if he could feel the effects after all.

He tapped ash into the ashtray and leaned down to brush something away from the tears of denim that stretched across one of his knees. "Why? You wanting to try one?"

Fran's eyes widened.

"Whoa. I don't know if that's a good idea. In sex education in school, they said to never let a man bring you a drink because either he'd put a roofie in it or he'd wait until you were passed out and then... you know." Fran's mouth felt very dry. "Not that I'm saying you'd want to do that, I was thinking more about your fangs than your..."

The brunette wilted in her chair.

"Okay sure, a drink would be okay."

Nathan lifted his eyebrow and refrained from smirking at her train of thought. "I'll be right back," he said as he left his cigarette in the ashtray and got to his feet. He'd even left his jacket behind.

The vampire disappeared into the crowd and slid up to the bar, speaking lowly to the bartender. He ordered himself a brandy and a glass of cherry schnapps for Francess, it was a nice easy drink for somebody who had never touched alcohol before.

Money changed hands and Nathan came back through the crowd, threading through people confidently.

While he was gone, Francess contemplated bolting for the door and running pell-mell to the train station. Two things stopped her: Beatrice and her realization that once again, she'd be smothering her burgeoning sense of adventure. So Fran cleared her throat and weathered the storm of nerves. In a way, she thought, it'd be easier to take her first real drink in front of Nathan instead of a friend. It wasn't as if she liked the vampire, so if she had a lame reaction, it wasn't a big deal.

She was fumbling with her ponytail holder when Nathan came back holding two glasses. Furtively she glanced at Bea to make certain she wasn't looking, though her sister was more likely to wolf whistle and cheer her on than call their parents.

"Thanks," she said, twisting the elastic band around her fingers. It occurred to Fran that she should offer to pay, but considering he'd viciously attacked her once, maybe they could call it even. "What is it?"


Nathan rested the glass down in front of Francess and sipped at his own drink. "Cherry schnapps," he explained before resettling in his seat. "A real gentle introduction to the world of alcohol."

He lifted his own glass. "Bottom's up, kid."

She picked it up uncertainly and brought it closer to her mouth. "Wait! Am I supposed to sip it or just... throw it back?" Francess sniffed it and blinked. It reminded her of cherry cough syrup.

"If it was a shot you'd throw it back," Nathan pointed out. "Pretty sure you're supposed to sip at it but hey if you want to down it in one be my guest." He rubbed a thumb over his lower lip to catch a few beads of brandy that had escaped the glass. His eyes tracked a couple erratic movements across the dance floor and he picked up his cigarette again, taking another damning drag of nicotine.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Francess gave him a mock-dirty look and steeled herself. No nose-plugging for her. After drawing in a deep breath as if she was going underwater, she took two large sips of the drink before the alcohol content really registered. A tremendous shudder made it impossible to keep going, anyway. Fran's face twisted. "Bleh! Oh my god, I can feel it burning down my esophagus!" She touched her chest and followed the liquid's path into her belly. Almost immediately her face felt hot.

"Jeez, how do people become alcoholics?" she wondered. Her mouth felt stripped; this stuff was stronger than mouthwash! It didn't taste bad, exactly, it just scorched. If this was a mild drink, she had serious reservations about building up to the kind that went in a shotglass.

Nathan watched her reaction out of the corner of his eye and laughed, dimples reflecting the humour that shone in the eerily bright blue eyes. "The first drink is always like that but after some time you get used to it and it gets easier."

He shrugged his shoulders and took another healthy sip of brandy, enjoying the burn rather than being put off it in the same way Francess had been.

Francess had never trusted foods and beverages that people said you had to 'acquire a taste' for. Why bother? But she guessed it was a necessary evil if you wanted to get tipsy. She had no designs on being wasted; it didn't sound promising since even the word was unpleasant. She attempted another sip of her drink and it wasn't as shocking as the first time, but she still shivered.

"How long before I start flashing bartenders?" she asked, half-way joking, since his laughter didn't seem to be at her expense.

"You would definitely need more that." Nathan smirked at her from around the rim of the glass. He gestured to the group of girls Francess had come with. "You would probably have to drink as much as they have and then maybe you'll be flashing bartenders." Although he had a hard time imagining Francess doing anything of the sort.

Nathan lifted an eyebrow as one of the girls took it upon herself to clamber onto the bar and dance. "I stand corrected," he remarked. "Clearly they've had enough drink to do pretty much anything that comes into their heads."

She followed his eyes and saw the spectacle unfolding. A dark-haired woman in a mini-skirt was teetering on the bar on her knees, doing the kind of dance rarely seen outside strip clubs or rap videos. Francess covered her face with her hands and moaned.

"That's my sister," she grieved between her fingers. Poor Fran didn't know whether to go and rescue Bea or shrink beneath the table. She kept her face covered, hoping not to see anything raunchy in her peripheral view, and began to take swallows of her cherry schnapps, not in hopes of joining Beatrice but to drown the horror.

Nathan watched as the men around the bar hooted and hollered, encouraging the woman to do everything and anything she could possibly do on such a narrow space. "She certainly isn't shy," Nathan commented as he pulled his gaze away and slid it over to Francess, watching as she practically disappeared behind her hands.

On the bright side it appeared that Francess was no longer repulsed by the cherry schnapps, the joys of alcohol.

There were days when Francess wondered if her sister came from an alien planet. As awkward as she felt, Fran knew she had more in common with her parents than the wildly independent Beatrice did. Their upbringing had opposite effects on the sisters: one rebelled and the other was a wallflower.

As she got closer to the bottom of her glass, Fran's world began to go a bit wobbly. She did her best not to look buzzed in front of Nathan, which involved holding very still and really concentrating before she said, "We don't have much in common."

Except for long legs. As the public display continued on the bar, more and more of Beatrice's showed, because she kept hiking up her skirt. It must have been sisterly radar, because the older woman chose that moment to look up and spot Francess in the corner.

"Francie! Hey! C'mere!" Beatrice waggled her fingers and laughed. "That's my l'il sister!"

The girl in question sank back against her chair in mortification. Unfortunately the wall didn't swallow her. She cut her eyes at Nathan. "I better go before she takes her top off," she said. "If pictures end up on the internet, Dad'll kill her."

Nathan noticed the legs because he might be the undead but he was still a man and he liked legs. "Good luck with that," he shared as he watched Francess' sister wiggle around on the bar itself. "It might not be as easy to get her off the bar as it was for her to get on it."

He picked up his drink again and took another sip, happy to sit right where he was and watch the display happening at the bar.

"Mmmph." Francess scooted out of her chair and smoothed her skirt into place, preparing herself for a struggle. Before she left, though, she caught him looking and frowned. "Stop perving, that's my sister!" She held a hand up in front of Nathan's eyes and then marched across the room, determined to stop her sister's sexy dance, especially since she knew there was a vampire looking.

"Bea! Get down, people can see your underwear!"

Nathan snorted at Francess' attempts at getting him to stop 'perving' before he merely finished his drink and rested his cigarette in the ashtray. The night was still young and there were plenty of places to go, he'd already stayed here too long.

The vampire left his seat and took his coat with him, the only traces he had ever been there were the empty glass and the still burning cigarette.