The cold was coming from within this time. The heart was freezing, which made all else numb and limp, like a ragdoll, as responsive to straight-down gravity as her shoulder-length hair. He just stood there, watching; he had determined long ago, when this moment came, he would have no choice. Well, there was a choice (her eyes explicitly told him): to watch her freeze to death or to not watch. If he looked away he may as well leave the room; he may as well pussy out.
The shack was isolated, and no one would be looking for either of them. It had been her choice: this way. The perfect spot to die, her playhouse from the childhood she cherished most, outside her grandmother's house. Now half-fallen in, the house once stood tall in her mind and in reality, a staple of the neighborhood. A carpenter was hired to construct a house for the grandkids. There she had studied insects. There she had kissed a boy, and hated it. There she had made mud pies. It had been around this time when she had realized: "My blood runs cold." She talked to her cousins about it. We are different. We have to protect what we own, our own, our gift. Our blood.
Poor Simon. Simon was never going to understand. How would anyone ever? Someone deserved a shot though, and she had given him her best one yet, hoping for the arrow to sting and leave a scar long after her death. The ritual had been a simple blood offering: she bade him taste, lick, swallow her insides up while she was menstrating. He lapped it up. He wanted more. He ended the night in a sprawl, and covered, smeared red. She showered and finished. She blew out the candle.
Now he lit a cigarette as the first tear dropped.
"I'm going to die," she had told him in the car.
"And I'm going to watch you die," he had said, too abruptly for her taste, or for her current mood. But this was what she chose. Her cousins told her a long time ago.
"You won't die. You can't die until you choose to. But I'm going to live forever like grandmother."
Katie didn't want to live forever; she had never. Simon and this new job had been the last big shot at life. Big shot, lol. A job at a low class daycare making nine an hour. Oh, and a bum boyfriend with a decent dick, if she needed a dick, which she didn't. But she did need to share her blood with someone, in order for her to do her next big thing in life: death.
So Simon smoked (what he was good at) while Katie died and Simon watched.
Horrified. Horrified and hurt, yet decidedly cold, Simon smoked. And Katie hadn't told him. Could Katie talk now, she would tell him. That he couldn't die. Now he would live forever. He smoked for what seemed like ages, watching the veins clench and her neck lengthen in what would have been agony for her; the expression on her face showed her enjoyment of the sensation. The arrow had flown, pierced his heart forever, into his very DNA. He walked away after ten minutes of no movement.
"Just leave me there," she had said. "You can pull off my clothes and fuck my corpse if you want, just don't leave any pubes or police will be looking for you in a couple days."
"They'll probably look for me either way. People knew we were seeing each other. People don't just go to an old shack and die mysteriously."
"People like me do. You're not like me, you never have been. You are doing this because you love me."
He did this because he had to. Because her spell over him, in a very technical sense, prevented him from doing wrong in her eyes. Those cold dead eyes, which had looked at him only barely, ever, and never at the right moments.
