Dead End Dating Read Free

West Fourth Street, near Washington Square Park. Long fluorescent bulbs crisscrossed the ceiling and showered the inside in bright white light. Signs dangled here and there, advertising various services, from BINDING to CUSTOMIZED BUSINESS CARDS . Printers whirred and copy machines ka-chunk ed. The sharp smell of paper and ink mingled with the various scents of humans, vamps—both made and born—and Others who filled the store.
    “It’s not like I’m borrowing money,” I pointed out.
    “You’re using our paper. And our ink. Both cost money.”
    “That’s one way of looking at it,” I said to Max.
    He was tall, with short, dark hair, rich brown eyes, and the typical vamp aura that oozed sex appeal. He’d been twenty-three when he’d lost his virginity and stopped aging. Fairly young for a born vamp since most couldn’t physically have sex (the motor started and the engine revved, but there was no shifting gears into drive) before the age of twenty-five (the dormant period usually required for a certain gene that controlled both the aging process and the ability to orgasm). When the gene reached maturity, the flood gates opened. It was hello Mr. Orgasm and bye-bye aging.
    Thankfully, it didn’t take regular orgasms to keep the process at bay; otherwise I’d be dust by now.
    My brother was one of the few vamps whose first orgasm had come sooner. He’d been a ladies’ man ever since, his appeal multiplied by the fact that he had an extraordinarily high fertility rating—a little number that reflected how likely he was to hit a bull’s-eye when it came to procreation. While a vamp’s fertility rating meant squat to a human, it made him all the more sought after by his own kind.
    Likewise, we female born vamps had our own measure for success—the orgasm quotient, or OQ. Not to be confused with the ever-popular OC, which I’d never actually gotten into on account of the fact that I watched very little television. The OQ was the number of times a female vamp could orgasm during a single sexual encounter. The higher the number, the more likely she was to conceive.
    I know, I know. Are we a bunch of rabbits, or what?
    “Let me get this straight,” Max told me as he watched me punch in an obscene number of copies. “There’s another way to look at this situation that doesn’t involve you mooching off of Moe’s?”
    “I’m not mooching off of Moe’s. I’m extracting payment from you.”
    “For what?”
    “Keeping my mouth shut.”
    “You never keep your mouth shut.”
    “What about when you moved in with that stripper for six months? And pretended to be human? I still can’t believe she bought it. Then again, I don’t think she was dealing with a full deck.”
    “Diane was very smart.”
    “If you consider her bust measurement in lieu of an IQ score.”
    “Okay, so she wasn’t that smart. She had stamina and endurance.”
    “I hate to break it to you, but humping a pole isn’t an Olympic sport.”
    A small smile touched his lips. “Not yet.” He turned his attention to a pudgy blond guy who dumped an armload of office supplies onto the counter.
    While Max rang up the customer and bagged his purchases, I gathered my stack of pink flyers. The moment he handed over the man’s change and turned back to me, I shoved the advertisements at him. “All you have to do is put one in every customer’s bag.”
    He shook his head. “Dad will blow a major gasket if he finds out I’m helping you.”
    “He’ll blow one anyway when he finds out his oldest, most reliable son isn’t so reliable, after all.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Before the stripper, there was that nun from the church over on Forty-sixth Street.”
    “She wasn’t a nun, and it wasn’t a church. It was a Catholic girl’s school. She worked in the office.”
    “What about that custom jewelry designer? What was her specialty again? Jeweled crucifixes?”
    “She admired the shape, not the religious connotation.”
    “What about