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Women found him attractive. And he found women attractive. Anyone with tits and an ass was his type. Skinny meant he could hold them down with one hand. Thicker meant he could rest his head anywhere on them. Skin colour never mattered. You could barely see anything with the lights off anyway. And hair colour? Meh. It didn’t even matter if they had hair. As long as he could grab their head when he pounded into them he was happy.
But when he first saw her, it wasn’t the valley of her breasts or the swell of her hips or her insanely plump cheeks and lips that got his attention. It was the thick bandage around her head and the small cuts and scrapes all over her barely exposed skin. She was a mess. In every sense of the word. But she looked peaceful. Bobby had mentioned that she’d shown up out of nowhere. She was human, but not from this world. A nutcase. He’d thought. He could dig a crazy chick though. And there was no way she would last long in a house full of weapons and books on creatures that could kill her after torturing her. So he’d tried to take his shot at this enigma of a woman. It wasn’t like he was going to see her ever again.
How wrong he was, she’d ended up being a constant. Whenever he was left at Bobby’s by Dad, she was there. Bustling about the kitchen and trying to clean up whatever mess they’d made in the living room. She showed him how to use her iPhone as she called it, and taught him how to play video games on the tiny screen. He marvelled at the way the device could play music and a stressful round of Temple Run at the same time. She taught him how to connect it to her AirPods. Tiny little earbuds that connected wirelessly to a multitaskable phone with noise cancelling? He would have branded her a witch if he didn’t know she was from the year 2025.
Her music taste was questionable however. It wasn’t even the genre that bothered him. A lot of the women he’d slept with liked country and pop music. But with her music, they were in languages he didn’t understand. ‘It’s called Kpop, they’re singing in Korean’ she’d told him and then broke out into an intense dance sequence for thirty seconds. ‘This one’s Thai. That one’s Chinese. The previous one was Japanese, and that one’s a Filipino group, so Tagalog’ . The different languages she’s just spewed all sounded the same to him. But he could watch her bob her head and go through well practiced movements all day long. Her life seemed to be unstained by the creatures of the world. She knew they existed. And she’d sworn that she knew how dangerous they were. ‘I’ve seen it all. I know. Believe me.’ And yet she was cheerful, always humming, always squealing over a romance book.
It didn’t take him long to learn her mental state wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. She cried. Not just when her favorite character in some book or show died, but she cried in the bathroom when she thought no one could hear her over the noise of the shower. He never figured out how to comfort her, or how to even bring it up. She always looked so put together once she left the bathroom in her nightgown rushing to grab the book she was currently on. But he could wait in front of the bathroom door, hold her close if she ever came out crying. So he always sat on the floor, listening carefully for her sniffles and sobs in the shower.
When she’d picked up that bartending job, he’d been excited. His very own personal bartender. She’d asked him to taste each drink while she practiced. They’d started off tasting mildly right, but she was a quick learner, and soon she was expertly pouring drinks for him, Dad, and Bobby whenever they wanted. He only wished that she wouldn’t be such a prude and have a drink with them and not cut them off. But drinking was a choice, and he wasn’t about to force her to drink.
She was an excellent personal paramedic, he learned on their first hunt together. She could stitch wounds and change bandages with a few quick twists of her hand. She’d even set Sam’s dislocated shoulder back into its socket with a grunt and a shove. She was good at taking care of Sam. When Sam woke up with a start from his sleep, she would tuck him back in and softly pat him until he fell back asleep. She would sit with him all night on longer hunting trips in those damp smelly motel rooms and help him work through heaps of homework for his many AP classes. He sometimes joined them, keeping them company with a bottle of beer in his hand. But he didn’t feel the need to drink the whole bottle with her around. Watching her mind wander away and listening to her ramble like a drunk as she got sleepier and sleepier was entertainment enough.
She was more beautiful than anyone he saw regularly in his life. She was a prude when it came to men and sex, yes, but she liked dressing up. She didn’t mind showing off her legs, and on occasions she would bless his eyes with a deeper V neck, and even more rarely with a peek of her soft belly poking out from her tight jeans. Makeup was never something she wore regularly, but when there was an occasion she deemed important, she would cover up her acne scars, brighten her face with baby pink blush, put on a thin layer of lipstick, and grace her eyelids with the slightest hint of glitter. More often than not, he found himself staring at her. Her unicorn shorts slightly visible from under her ruffled skirt. Her straight thick black hair curling at the ends without any heat. The straps of her bra playing hide and seek under a larger necked shirt. And her stubborn refusal to buy another belt even though the ones she had were fraying. Everything about her made her seem hot.
As the months went by, he realised that his attraction to her wasn’t just that of a man lusting after a woman. He liked her. Liked her. The last time he was in bed with a woman he’d found himself wondering how it would feel if she were the one under him and not some random woman he brought home from a bar. How it would feel to have someone who knew about his life, about all the pain, and still lay next to him with a smile without a single judging thought crossing her mind. He found himself growing jealous of the men that she worked with at the bar. He found himself glaring at any man that dared to look at her in anything but a bartender-can-i-have-a-drink way even though he knew it was childish. She didn’t belong to him. And she certainly wasn’t looking for a partner. He’d seen the way her hair on her arm stood up as someone got too close to her, and the way she got a blank, almost murderous look on her face if someone’s hand landed on her. So instead of wallowing in his jealousy he took it upon himself to teach her how to shoot. He gave her a gun as a gift for her birthday, a stark contrast to the homemade apple pie she had handed him for his, even though she hated eating them herself.
She was softer than anyone he’d ever met. If he, Sam, Bobby, or Dad ever looked sad, then she looked like she would break into tears for them. And when she did cry, his heart broke for her. Yet she was stronger than anyone he knew. He could see her steel herself as she kept them all, broken as they were, company. She would pry out bottles of alcohol from under their hands and replace them with some weird stuffed animal project she was stuck on. ‘If you’re gonna get drunk then at least help me finish this,’ and that animal would find a place on her top bunk next to a bunch of others a few days later.
He liked it most when she read to him at night on the window seat Bobby had made for her in the living room. He could put the drinks away and let his mind wander as she read stories of princes and princesses in castles, fighting dragons, and knights sacrificing themselves all so that the prince and princess could get together. Those stories were stupid. Even she thought so, but they were entertaining and the imagery was grandiose. Maybe if there was a book written about them it would progress in a similar way. He could be the prince, and she could be the princess, but they could be their own knights, fighting their own demons. His favorite stories were the ones of school and college romances. It let him imagine what life could be if he hadn’t been brought into the world of hunting, if his mother had never been killed. He could introduce her to Dad and Mom over dinner and they could exchange kisses much to the chagrin of Sam. The books that really made him question her sanity were the ones where the woman fell in love with a monster, or slept with ten different men at the same time, or fell in love with her kidnapper. But he loved seeing her blank expression as she got to the sex parts, reading them almost robotically, but he knew she liked them from the intensity of her eyes on the pages. Maybe she wasn’t such a prude after all.
He would take his chance the next time he got an opportunity.