Sure enough, in the morning I was in the bed by myself. I lay there for a little, thinking. I'd had

little niggling thoughts from time to time, but for the first time the flaws in my relationship with the “vampire” hopped out of their own hidey hole and took over my brain.

I would never see him in the sunlight. I would never fix his breakfast, never meet him for lunch. (He could bear to watch me eat food, though he wasn't thrilled by the process, and I always had to brush my teeth afterward very thoroughly, which was a good habit anyway.)

I could never have a child by him, which was nice at least when you thought of not having to practice birth control, but... I'd never call him at the office to ask him to stop on the way home for some milk. He'd never join the Rotary, or give a career speech at the high school, or coach Little League Baseball. He'd never go to church with me.

And I knew that now, while I lay here awake—listening to the birds chirping their morning sounds and the trucks beginning to rumble down the road while all over the city people were getting up and

putting on the coffee and fetching their papers and planning their day—that the creature I loved was lying somewhere in a hole underground, to all intents and purposes dead until dark.