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He came out when he was eight, technically. If you want to let him be a coward about it.
His first confession, fifth grade, crammed into line with all the other kids from his Sunday school, shuffling down the church aisle to the chipped, creaky booths with too-hard seats and air that made him yearn for the inhaler shoved somewhere in his amá’s purse. His shoes didn’t fit. Slim pickings at the local DSW’s sale section.
He felt something perpendicular to a weight slide from his shoulders when he heard the voice of the particular priest in the booth next to him: Father Baker. A slump-faced Scots-Irish man who didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and always looked at him a little too kindly when he translated for his amá. Baker’s voice was soft, the curve of a rumble tucked in the back. A smoker who quit in just the nick of time.
“Bless me father, for I have sinned,” he says, voice too high, cracks already beginning to appear, the future yawning abyss of puberty. “This is my first confession.”
He hears the rustle of fabric as Father Baker nods. “Yes,” he says, which is a little off script, but Guillermo is, like, ten.
He starts in English for the mundanities; stealing a desk neighbor’s colored pencils, forgetting to wash his dishes before putting them in the dishwasher to dry, catching a nap during silent reading time hidden in a restroom stall. Things he can say out loud and still feel like he’ll be forgiven for.
The language changes, though, as the list goes on. The way the boys who play soccer at recess smile like wolf pups, and how his stomach twists in a way that feels, from something in his core, forbidden. The number of times he’s watched Sixteen Candles and fast forwarded through any scene that didn’t have Michael Shoeffling. The creeping feeling that chronic, inescapable alienation from his peers has nothing to do with any secret specialness, or wondrous power like he’s read in books, but the simple fact that he is intrinsically wrong.
“I love you,” for him, has always been a confession. A sin. An admission of guilt.
So okay, maybe he’s tired. Maybe he’s done with the palatability, the cold sweats, the insidious wonder if it wouldn’t perhaps be better to just get it all out and over with. A calling by necessity to the taboo, the strange, the irreversible change both inside and out that leaves no room for argument about who he is. Maybe he wanted blood in a metaphorical way, and this is the real fucking deal, so fine. They’re not as big, but he’s got teeth.
And somehow that’s all led him here, standing in the dark on the other side of where he had slept only a few months ago, with a bundle of gauze in one fist and the meat of his palm in the other.
“Are you going to let me clean you up, or would you rather pretend you can eat this, too?”
He holds the bundle out, arm straight, elbow locked, in the direction of the cage. The lower half of Nandor’s face is still covered in blood from when he wrenched out his fangs on sharp edges of the cage’s bars. This happens nearly every night. Guillermo doesn’t want to think about why he keeps offering this with the same reliability.
Nandor blinks at him, slowly, eyelids moving at two separate speeds. “No,” he finally says, no preamble or epilogue. Guillermo lets his hand drop and sighs.
“Okay, well, I’ll bring you a change of clothes tonight. If you wouldn’t mind taking them off before you go mutilating your teeth again, that would be really great.” He makes a little face, mostly for himself, a bit because he knows Nandor will see. There’s no way to gouge out night vision.
“It is not mutilation,” Nandor snaps, body tense but still, “it is relieving myself of–”
“Oh my God,” Guillermo laughs, feeling a sharp pinch of satisfaction at the way Nandor winces. “Will you shut up? Do you think any of us believe that garbage?” He points towards the door. “Nadja took one look at your face and nearly threw up, and I’ve seen her flip someone’s ear to decide who had to go order drinks.”
“And you?” Nandor asks, reeling himself back with paper-thin calm. “You have certainly taken more than one look at my face.”
If he said that in any other context, I might legitimately kill him, Guillermo thinks. He swallows hard. “It’s not like I have any other choice. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re trying to help you, not leave you here to die.”
He puts a particularly pointed emphasis on that last phrase, pleased when understanding, then discomfort flickers in Nandor’s eyes. “You are keeping me from my family.”
Rage, cold and crystalline, shatters into the walls of Guillermo’s gut. He feels an eyelid twitch. “We are your family, I– your real fucking family!” The curse is good and heavy in his mouth. “Family, Nandor, if for some reason you need an example, doesn’t yank each other’s teeth out and force them to roleplay a bunch of eighties jukebox musical backup dancers, eating disorders and all! They care about each other! They certainly don’t just up and leave because they’re a little upset!”
“Ah, yes, like you?” Nandor shoots back, and Guillermo feels something painful and wet underneath his free hand’s fingernails.
“No,” he sneers in a low, steady voice. “That would require all of you giving a single fraction of an iota of a shit about me. But I came back. I always come back. My fucking apologies.”
“Why?” Nandor asks bluntly, and it’s so much worse than any insult he could have hurled in its place. Guillermo feels his throat close up– he’s not angry, he’s just tired.
“Yeah.” A bead of blood slides parallel to his pinky. “Good question.” He lets a weak, chilly laugh escape from his chest. “God. Isn’t it pathetic? You would know about what that looks like, wouldn’t you? You can say it. You always do.”
Nandor says nothing for a long, splintering moment. Another drop of blood bubbles onto the meat of Guillermo’s thumb. Then he huffs. “I only asked. We give you nothing in return.”
Guillermo knows a God that asks you to worship Him in the hope that He will never again flood the world; he knows a church that builds opulent halls of color and gold in order to pass around a dish and ask for tidings; he knows devotion in his very bones and mettle like no human creature could conceive. That was the first time something had changed in him. That aching desire to hang his love up like a deer carcass, and beat it.
“You’re right,” he says, and his next words should be sweet, they should be tender, but the bitterness in the shape of his mouth shocks even him. “I love you, and you don’t pay me.”
Nandor goes, if possible, even paler. After a beat, he slowly opens his mouth, but Guillermo waves a hand exhaustedly. “Shut up. You are really fucking hard to love, you know that, Nandor? Fucking Herculean. But I do, and it’s here, so maybe take some time down here to ask yourself why we live in a house with two other normal vampires, and I have never, not once asked them to turn me. Why every time you need me to, I come back. Because I’m not a dog. I’m stupid, but I’m not that.”
He shoves the gauze against the crescent-shaped cuts in his palm, smothering them and flexing his newly free hand. Nandor is silent. It’s almost a relief.
Guillermo distantly decides that’s sort of a mic drop, and he doesn’t get those very often, so he turns to leave. His footsteps echo like gunshots on the stone walls. The noise behind him catches his ear, but doesn’t slow his pace.
“Forever is a very long time, Guillermo.”
I know, he thinks. And if that doesn’t clue you in, then you clearly don’t want to be.