Page 107 of King of Hollywood
Felix’s fear of the sunlight for one.
His aversion to food.
The fact that he didn’t want to be recognized—probably for the same reason the-man-who-was-now-his-supper had complimented his movies. I realized now why the dark haired actor I’d seen on the screen at the drive-in theater had looked so familiar. Why I’d recognized Felix before I’d even known him. Why the movie star’s name was Lucky—the very definition of Felix’s name.
Why Felix dyed his hair. (He was harder to recognize that way.)
Why Felix hid. (He had been the King of Hollywood.)
Why Felix never ate. (I kept accidentally taking his boxes of blood away.)
Why Felix spoke like he was from another time. (Because he was.)
Why Felix covered his living room in posters. (They were his movies.)
Why his front hallway was full of framed letters. (Fan letters, more than likely.)
Why Felix had never been frightened of me. (He was a predator, himself.)
Why there was a coffin in the storage room, and Felix’s bed was dusty. (He slept there, not upstairs.)
Why Felix’s family was dead. (Of course they were, it’d been ninety years.)
Why he collected things. Things that reminded him of his life before.
His home was a time capsule and a prison.
Living in the limelight, there was no room for the abnormal. Felix had to have aged out, didn’t he? There was only so long a man could remain the same age without people noticing. I imagined, if I Googled Lucky, the movie star from the 30s, I’d find that he had died rather young.
Only he hadn’t.
Because he was standing right in front of me, with a stranger’s blood smeared across his lips.
He was standing right in front of me, with his heart on his sleeve, vulnerability quaking in his gaze—like he expected to lose me before we’d ever really begun in the first place.
There was no denying the truth.
The dominos had fallen. The results were in.
The love of my life was a vampire.
I should’ve been horrified, terrified—some combination of adjectives that were negative and awful. But…I wasn’t. I wasn’t. Because Felix may be a vampire, but he was also the man that I was desperately, terrifyingly in love with.
“Marshall,” Felix said my name, and everything that had been wrong inside me since the moment I’d seen that car in his driveway fell away.
His voice was brittle and quaking.
His hands shook.
“I’m a monster.” Felix’s eyes burned a hole into mine, tears spilling down his lovely, pale cheeks.
I wanted to reach for him.
I wanted to hold him.
I wanted to comfort him, and not once—ever—did giving him a cheeseburger cross my mind.
But first…
