Molly didn't ask for his phone number just because she had all this extra RAM on her phone that needed filling but she also didn't hear from him for a couple of weeks.
When she did it was a phone call, not a text message, and the invitation didn't start out blasé and coincidental. He wasn't bored or out someplace wondering what she was doing.
After establishing that she remembered who he was, Nate decided to lead with: "I've been staring at LexisNexis so long I can barely see straight. How do you feel about coffee?"
Turns out ER nurses love coffee.
He has her meet him at one of the local coffeehouses around twelve noon on one of their overlapping days off of work. Which means he was running a complex database search on a day off. He does not wear his Broke Reporter Extraordinaire outfit when he isn't on his way to or from the office. He wears motorcycle boots and loose-fit jeans and a polo shirt. While he waits for her Nate stands outside in the sunlight and does not smoke a cigarette.
Lux would be proud of him. He's wearing a nicotine patch. Cheater.
Molly Toombs
Molly's days off work were odd, erratic things. When you work shifts that swing anywhere from ten to sixteen hours long, just depending on the night and how able the hospital is to pay its nurses overtime, the days you had off could come in multi-day chunks or could be as far as eight days apart from one another. Life as a nurse was an odd thing, and that was one big reason why Molly never got a pet for her apartment. Goodness knew how often the poor thing would get played with.
When Nate called yesterday he just so happened to catch her on a week where she had two days off in a row. She said that she would be free Thursday (tomorrow), and he proposed midday coffee. As it turns out, nurses love coffee, and Molly was all too happy to accept the invitation out. She'd remembered him after hearing his voice (she'd struggled for a second when his name came up on her phone, as much had transpired since she last saw the man), and sounded pleased-- almost relieved, really, that he wanted to meet up.
Truth be told, she was just overjoyed to be holding a conversation with someone that she could trust to be alive.
When Molly came around a corner and walked up the sidewalk toward the cafe, she spied Nate quickly enough and waved to greet him even though they were still too far apart to talk without yelling. She was dressed in a pair of intentionally frayed jeans with holes in the knees, cuffs rolled up to her ankle. She had on bright red flats and a black and white tanktop that fit loosely but was cut low enough to show off a bit of cleavage. She was a curvy girl, and very aware of how to dress her figure to flatter it the most. She wasn't drop-dead gorgeous, she knew that well, but she worked with what she had just fine, thank you very much.
The sunglasses she was wearing were inexpensive, with dark lenses and white plastic frames. She pushed them up into her hair (left down and curled loosely) and smiled her greeting to the man when she was nearer.
"Hey, Nate. Good to see you again. Thanks for inviting me out, I cannot tell you how bad I needed a distraction."
Nate Marszalek
"I mean, you can. We've got time."
Hard to gauge each other physically when the first and only time they've met so far was at a bar in the middle of the afternoon but Nate would have been easy to pick out of a crowd even if she could scarcely remember his face. He was taller than average and calling his hair a mop would have done it a favor. His eyes were dark brown against an Eastern European complexion and granted his face a warmth and intelligence he could just as easily have decimated by opening his mouth. Last time she learned he was quick with a quip while exuding an air of one who thought before he spoke. Aware of the weight of words.
He held the door open for Molly to go ahead of him and gestured - after you - if she hesitated. Chivalry alive even if it was lazy. The cashier inside assumed that Nate would pay for both of them and he did nothing to dissuade her of this. He ordered a large iced coffee and in a blaze of day-seizing got a piece of carrot cake to go with it. Dessert for lunch. Fuck it. Life is short.
Once they were back outside at one of the patio tables Nate sat down and dragged his hand down his face and waited until she was situated before he opened his mouth again.
"So, how you been? Pick up any more business cards?"
Molly Toombs
She shrugged and rolled her eyes a little when he said they have time. Sure, they had time, but she was reluctant to believe that he would want to go out on more coffee dates with her or even conclude the one they were having now if she told him why she needed a distraction. Instead she let that eye roll speak for her-- it wasn't sarcastic, or negative in any way really, not in Nate's direction at least. Instead it was kind of a 'oh this world we live in' gesture. She supposed he would agree with her-- he seemed run ragged and worn thin, like his work took a toll on him. She would just let him assume that what she needed a distraction from was work. That would make sense, after all.
Molly didn't protest to him holding the door for him, and instead thanked him and waited up for him to rejoin her before going up to the counter. The cashier assumed that Nate would be paying, he didn't argue, and neither did Molly. It was just coffee, after all, five bucks for a nice gesture wasn't much out of many peoples' pocket books. She ordered an iced latte, no syrup thank you, and tucked a couple of bills into the tip jar before they left the counter.
Once outside and settled into chairs around one of the small patio tables, he asked if she's picked up more business cards. Her answer was a laugh that was harsh enough a bark that it surprised even her. Since she was seated facing the sun she dropped the sunglasses back down over her eyes, but even with those dark lenses covering her baby blues he could read a mix of surprise and apology at how her laugh had come out. Her tote bag that doubled as a purse was leaned up against the legs of her chair, and she crossed her legs at the knee to get comfortable while she leaned back in her chair.
"As a matter of fact, two more. Each from questionable men in way-too-expensive suits." She sounded tired when she told this story, but it was the same sort of tired you hear from someone who is finally settling down on their couch at the end of a workday and talking to their spouse or roommate. It's different from the middle-of-the-shift-with-four-
"Are we suffering some kind of an influx of vicious men in suits here?"
Nate Marszalek
Nate was not an invisible presence on the Internet. If Molly ever found herself bored or in need of proof that the man was actually counted among the living all she had to do was run a search on his name and she'd find his page on the Denver Post website and the blog he runs. All day long he reads police reports and talks to victims and law enforcement and city officials and witnesses and family members. People who don't particularly like talking to reporters.
Lord knows what he does at night. Hunches over a glowing computer screen and makes sense of the statements and facts he gathers all day. Yearns for a way to infuse caffeine directly into his veins.
So when she barked out a laugh the man did not startle away from it. He had tucked into his carrot cake with the lack of consequence only young people can muster up and paused in his inhalation to chew and look at her with an appraising edge to his gaze. That wasn't the reaction he was expecting.
That wasn't the answer he was expecting either. He picked up his plastic cup and found it sweating. Took a huge swallow through the straw and laughed at her question. Might have thought it rhetorical had she asked it a month earlier.
"My source," he said, "is reluctant to confirm anything. You know that fire at the Richthofen a few weeks ago? Cops said it was white power groups infighting? She says that's bullshit but wouldn't tell me anything else. Only reason I got that much out of her is she told me her friend died in some..." He aimed his eyes up over Molly's head as he dredged up the phrase she'd used before he returns them to where he thinks her eyes would be if the sunglasses did not cover them. "... 'sharks versus jets' situation."
He took another huge swallow of his drink.
"Short answer: probably."
Molly Toombs
"Yeah, I saw something about it on the news at work."
That's how Molly usually caught bits of news. She, like an increasing number of Americans these days, didn't bother to foot the bill for cable television in her home. She had the internet for a reason, damnit. But still, she only skimmed world news and didn't pay a whole lot of mind to what was going on locally. She got tired of crime stories and fluffy human interest tales some time ago and didn't go back to reading local news since that time. The only way she really caught up on what was happening in the city was the snippets she would catch on the television in the emergency room or the nurse's break room. She knew there had been a fire, a considerable one, and that there would need to be repairs on the place. Beyond that, though, the details were lost.
Nate explained that what had actually happened wasn't what the police statement claimed, and Molly lifted her pencil-darkened eyebrows to express curiosity. She, too, took a long drink from her big plastic cup, but she stayed leaning back in her chair, happy to lounge and soak up the sun on her arms and chest for the moment. Even if they were talking about the darker, more grim parts of the city. You know, the parts they were both most accustomed to thanks to their careers and recent encounters alike.
"Shark versus jets, huh? That sounds catastrophic. Collaterally speaking, anyway. But," and she paused to put a finger under her sunglasses and scrub the corner of one eye with a fingertip. "what does that have to do with men in tailored suits?"
Nate Marszalek
It looked for a moment as if he would tell Molly he did not know and even then if he did not know that he would figure it out. Pluck is an attribute stitched to the insides of all the great fictional reporters regardless of gender but Nate had the drawling voice and sluggish appearance of a man either mildly yet chronically depressed or so exposed to horror that something like this did not pique his interest.
Yet he had been reading business and public record archives all morning. Probably with a kitten crawling over him while he tried to work on his laptop.
"A lot of things aren't adding up," he said. "I've met people under bizarre circumstances and they've gone missing later, or I've come across something that led me into a dead end when I tried to follow it. Or..."
And he sat silent a moment as he decided whether he really wanted to open this can of worms with her.
"A couple of nights before the Richthofen fire, I had an amazing lapse in judgment and decided to cut through City Park, downtown. Passed by a homeless woman bathing in a fountain. She was talking to this huge guy I'd never met before and had... blood, it must have been, on her hands. I kept walking. Passed by this other fellow... wearing a tailored suit. Just happened to be hanging out in the park. You know. As one does at night. No big deal." Sarcasm. His is so subtle that his inflection doesn't change. "I didn't realize the homeless woman was following me until the big guy yelled at me to turn around, so I turned around, and the chick hissed in my face and whirled around and tried to tackle the big guy. I figured he might need some help so I went to pull her off him and the fellow in the tailored suit, must have been... someone grabbed me by the hair. And I don't remember what happened after that very well. Got really sick. That source I was telling you about happened to be passing by and got me home. When my friend Shannon came over the next day and tried to get me to go to the hospital and when I wouldn't go she asked WebMD--"
He laughed without humor, the story ridiculous to hear in his own voice, everything that came before the part about Shannon consulting the Internet because he couldn't walk but refused to go to the hospital and then the fact that she had done that.
"Christ. She asked WebMD and all we could come up with was anemia. Or dehydration. Or cancer."
Molly Toombs
A lot of things weren't adding up, and Nate seemed to still be working through everything that he'd gone over for this story he was writing, and the investigation he was conducting to try and dig up enough dirt to have something to wrap his words around. Maybe he wasn't hunting for a ground-breaking article, or something that would throw him up into the national spotlight for uncovering some kind of police cover-up for what happened at the Castle. But he still needed to understand what happened, because he'd already started to look into it and things were fishy and now...
Well. Listening to him, Molly wasn't entirely unconvinced that one day he would just stop writing and become a P.I. instead.
But then came the story. About him cutting through the park. She wouldn't interrupt him with words, but she did participate with facial expressions where appropriate-- at first at least. He said he was cutting through the park at night, and she looked skeptical, like she was going to go ahead and tell him that it was his own damn fault for making such a poor choice. But she didn't, and she listened on. Her eyebrows went up with a silent what the hell? when he spoke of the woman washing what looked like blood off her hands, and the big man that was there with her, and the man in the suit...
She stopped participating with facial expressions now, and sat up more straight in her chair and looked at him seriously through her sunglasses while he finished his story.
He finished, laughing without much humor, and revealed that WebMD nailed his symptoms as anemia, dehydration, or (of fucking course) cancer. The way she waved her hand at him and the self-made diagnosis was impatient and hurried. The waving hand wrapped around the condensation-slick plastic cup in front of her.
"Let me guess. Pale, weak, tired, nauseated. Really weak, really tired, let me be clear on that."
She took a drink from her cup, then pushed it aside and leaned forward in her chair. Her elbows rested on the patio table between them, hands wrapped together and fingers interlaced, held in the air off to the left side of her face, like she was casually blocking her mouth from passers by.
"Do you remember what this guy in the suit looked like? I'm beginning to suspect we might have a mutual acquaintance."
Nate Marszalek
Through all of this Nate had managed to keep focused on the stories as they came into his inbox at work and had not been distracted overmuch by the weirdness seeping into his personal life. A few days called off of work and a few nights out where more questions were raised than answered did not jeopardize his position nor did it give him anything he could really use.
Only with time and enough strange situations could he start to fathom that he didn't know what was going on and he didn't really want to know.
Molly rattled off his symptoms and he brokered no surprise. Their first introduction had been at a bar and they had stabbed at each others' professions before hitting the truth. She was a nurse. Some virus had to have hit him out of the blue. That is what he suspected weeks ago and that is what he expected to hear in the late-summer sunlight drinking coffee beneath an overworked umbrella.
Then she leaned forward as if sharing in a conspiracy and Nate frowned. He had done this enough times that he leaned forward himself without prompting.
"He was my height, maybe a couple inches taller," he said. "Dark hair. Dark three-piece suit. I want to say he was thin but I don't remember. I only saw him for a few seconds as I walked by him."
Molly Toombs
She went on to continue describing. He said he only just saw him, but Molly reached anyways. Maybe a few things would ring true.
"Kind of a big hooked nose? Handsome in spite of it? Infuriatingly self-assured?"
There was a tension to her voice now, a bit of a pinching at her words. She didn't get high pitched or loud, she didn't talk more quickly or rush him or anything. But she was quite serious in this moment, and while she was waiting for him to answer she leaned down and reached into her tote bag. Her sunglasses started to fall from her face while she was looking down, but she caught them with a knuckle-bump to the bridge of the glasses atop her nose and straightened up again.
This time when she straightened, it was with a small book in her hand-- no more than two hundred pages long at maximum, with a blank hard cover that was faded and rubbed away with years of being shuffled back and forth between attics and book shops and cardboard boxes. It didn't even have a title on it, but she set it on the table and flipped open the cover anyways. The front page bore an old black and white illustration, a copy of an art style that came from centuries upon centuries before their time. The picture was that of some vaguely demonic looking being stooped over a frail, pale-skinned woman that curled defenselessly over a tree stump. The title of the book, above the picture: Vyrkolakas to Vampire.
"'Cause that's the one that found me last night. And a week prior to that too."
Nate Marszalek
As she fired off a triad of questions no enlightenment or recognition came to Nate's features. He did not agree with her when she asked if the interloper was handsome in spite of his nose but to the matter of his infuriating self-assurance the reporter laughed a dry doubting laugh and scratched at his eyebrow.
"Might be the same guy," he said.
He found the energy to pack away more of his carrot cake while Molly was bent over examining the contents of her bag. The icing was beginning to melt and if he had learned anything from eating MREs for most of his adult life it was not to fucking waste food. An easy enough habit to unlearn. Youth can unlearn all sorts of things.
When she passed off the book Nate reached out to accept it. A slim volume with nearly indiscernible type. He was charmed by the evil little woman on the cover but his amusement evaporated as soon as he saw the title. An echo of another conversation he could not recall in its entirety.
"Okay...?"
He looked up from the book and sought out even a hint of her eyes behind the plastic. Waited for the punchline.
Molly Toombs
There was a moment that felt kind of like a car crash that immediately followed the uncertain okay? and the searching stare that Nate cast across the table at Molly.
So he held the book in his lap and grinned a bit at her definition of oversharing. Molly looked down at the book in the lap next to her, twisted her mouth into a small frown, but did not protest. She let him slump in his chair beside her and speak quietly to her. They looked like a pair discussing conspiracies, like they both thought that they were going to be eavesdropped on. As if they had something interesting to say. Fortunately, most people were too concerned with themselves to care about the couple out on a coffee date chatting it up amongst themselves.
There was blood on his collar.
Molly's eyes flashed with enlightenment, with a hint of victory to boot -- Aha! -- and she shifted how she sat in her chair. It was good to know she wasn't alone, that there were other people In The Know too, but she didn't know exactly how to approach this. She had to tread carefully, but it was awkward to try. She didn't know how to tiptoe around subjects very well in the first place.
But there he was, holding the book up, raising his eyebrows, waiting on baited breath for her to confirm what he now was fishing for, what he was hoping someone else would say they believed too.
So:
"Okay, fine. I met a dead man walking home. This guy? The one I think you ran into too? I ran into him, and he was just being... antagonizing. Wouldn't let me pass, was toying with me just for the sake of it, because he was bored and had nothing else to do. I noticed that he wasn't breathing-- his chest didn't move, not even when he was talking. He didn't blink, his hands were cold to the touch, his skin was way too pale. He didn't even need to tell me or lead me into any sort of a conclusion, but there's no way he was alive, or even human.
"Nate," she said gravely, in a whisper, with eyes round and worried. "I think vampires are real."
When he met this woman at the bar, she was a bit overworked but seemed quite normal outside of that. Fun, witty, laid back. She seemed like the kind of gal that could be easy to get along with, that would be downright charming to take out on a date. She'd asked for his number outright, but only used it as a test of faith and a tool to deliver her own phone number to him in return. This was supposed to be a daytime date, sort of. A meeting up, a little more getting-to-know-you. A stepping stone.
But the Molly that sat across from him now, in this very moment in particular, housed none of the humor that was there the first time they met-- hell, that was there ten minutes ago even. Her rounded face was as serious as the grave. Her eyes, visible through the tinted lenses of her sunglasses at several angles, were intense and almost stern. Her lips were held together, she was breathing through her nose, waiting for his response, for his elaboration, for his confession of knowledge-- something, something...
But then her eyes widened, her lips pressed more tightly together, and looked all at once like she'd realized she made a very big mistake. So she held her hand back out for the book, but wasn't rude enough to snatch it away from him.
"Nevermind. I got caught up in all the reading I've been doing and overshared."
Nate Marszalek
If Molly had ever sat in the searchlight gaze of a person attempting to determine if she had lost her mind she would not find a direct relation to that gaze in Nate's eyes. He looked uncertain but the uncertainty was not aimed at the sanity of the woman sat across from him.
His were the eyes of a person who had seen some shit in his time and not been rattled by them. Staring at her as he waited for her to come right out and say what she was implying, Nate looked as if he did not want to know the answer but would not back away from it. He'd skirted real close to it enough times already.
And then Molly reached out to take back the book. One never wants to attempt to take away information from a journalist, and this particular journalist had a younger sister. Nate picked up the volume and did not exactly hold it up over his head but he did remove it from the table and then hold it beneath the table on his lap assured of the fact that a woman who had only met him once before would not make a grab for it there.
"That was oversharing?" he asked, a cut of humor stretching a corner of his mouth into half-a-grin. "Man, you got the same definition of oversharing as my guy down at the precinct house does."
He looked around to gauge their surroundings before Nate grabbed the arms of his chair and bodily swung it around the table so he was sitting right next to her. Despite the protestation from his back he slouched down in the chair so their ears and mouths were at the same latitude, so he could speak low without the people around them picking up on it.
They were all entranced by their own lives anyway. Their own safe, bloodless lives.
"The shirt I was wearing that night had blood on the collar. I'm willing to concede that he bit me. Alright? Maybe I'll even entertain the idea that he... drank. You know. I mean people with no prior history of outbursts, you hear about them taking PCP, meth, bath salts, whatever, and then they rip someone's face off or try to eat someone else's intestines. So I'm not afloat in a bubble of oh no that couldn't possibly have happened. But..."
He held up the book, and his eyebrows.
Say it, Toombs.
Molly Toombs
She held her hand out for the book, and he answered by closing it and sliding it into his lap. They were in public, and they were adults on top of that, so he wasn't going to make a spectacle of holding it over her head out of her reach. She didn't look like she was in a particularly playful mood right now, anyways, so even if he did think to dangle the book over her head she'd probably drag his arm down, steal it back, and then stop talking to him.
In a world with more monsters emerging by the night, it was better to keep your friends that you knew had a pulse close. They both knew that.So he held the book in his lap and grinned a bit at her definition of oversharing. Molly looked down at the book in the lap next to her, twisted her mouth into a small frown, but did not protest. She let him slump in his chair beside her and speak quietly to her. They looked like a pair discussing conspiracies, like they both thought that they were going to be eavesdropped on. As if they had something interesting to say. Fortunately, most people were too concerned with themselves to care about the couple out on a coffee date chatting it up amongst themselves.
So:
Nate Marszalek
Without a tie hung tired around his neck the reporter had nothing with which to fidget as he listened to Molly's story. And he did listen. She could see the interest and focus in his eyes as he watched not just her face but the world around them. Once he realized no one gave two shits about what they were talking about, low as they were talking about it, he sat up straighter. Used his arms and legs instead of momentum to sit up straighter in the chair. Like a man twice his age would move.
But he situated himself and handed the book back to her and then she got into particulars that make sense to him only because Nate had listened to professionals discuss the dying process and he knew what forensic pathologies looked for when they looked at pictures of dead bodies. He did not shy away from talk of death.
It was the fact that they talked of death in the context of someone who speaks and drinks and grabs with grave-cold hands that had his nostrils flare with a spike of adrenaline and a rush of things he had put out of his head because he did not want to think about them. Molly could see them in his eyes. It comes across as a shitshitshitshit moment near enough to panic that if she thought he was about to get up and walk away no one would blame her.
"Um," he said. Took a swallow of his drink because his voice came out sounding like cold metal. "That... doesn't make sense. You're... okay, the label. That's something someone made up. Right? It's just... mythology. Folklore. There are so many cultures with so many conceptions of what a vampire even is, and you're..." He gestured to her then. Hope in his tone. Holy shit, a professional. A source of information. "You're a nurse. Right? It's not... is it possible? It's not. How could a person be up and walking around and not have a pulse? You need a pulse to live. It might just be... I don't know, is it possible to have... like, a really low pulse, like where you just look like you're dead, and you're not? People used to get buried in Victorian times and then it turns out they weren't really dead after all. It happened in Russia recently. The lady had a heart attack and then woke up at her own funeral and had another heart attack and died. And this." He pointed to his neck, from whence the blood came that stained his shirt. "Is it contagious? If a person with this... condition bites another person is it... like if they don't breathe, they don't sneeze, right, there's no vector of transmission or whatever it is you want to talk about when you're talking about an epidemic--"
He was starting to panic.
Molly Toombs
Nate handed the book back after sitting up straight in his chair again. Molly accepted it back graciously enough, but immediately turned away to tuck it back into her tote bag. There was no reason to just leave it laying out on the wire mesh top of their table. With the book stored way Molly sat straight in her chair once more and turned to regard Nate.
As he spoke, his sentences became faster and the space between the punctuation of one and the start of another grew smaller. His eyes looked panicked, wide and white all around the edges. He'd taken a drink in hopes of wetting his tongue and throat, and while that would help with that specific complaint it would do nothing to slow the crescendo of hammering that his heart was working its way into. He wasn't going to slow down until he ran out of steam, and the intensity that grew in his voice, his posture, his body language she was sure would draw attention to them soon. And rightfully so.
Her solution to this was to lean forward and reach out to the man. If his hands were available, that was the first thing she'd go for. She would take both of his hands in hers and hold them with her fingers under his and thumbs on the backs of his hands.
If his hands weren't available for holding, she would put her hands on the outsides of his shoulders instead and rub his arms slow and soothing.
Either way, she's providing a physical anchor to bring him back down from the hysteria he was finding himself spiraling toward. Nate was a collected guy, difficult to phase because he's seen some shit and too exhausted to get worked up over anything half the time anyway. Molly, though, seemed to have him beat in who could stay calm the longest. At least today, in this exact situation she did. Her face was even, eyes holding his, and her voice was quiet and calm.
"It shouldn't be possible, you're right. But they're real and they don't seem to care if they're supposed to be or not."
She let a moment pass for her words to sink in, but not long enough for him to interject and start rambling again.
"I can't tell you how they are what they are. I don't know that. But I promise you they don't have a pulse, even a light one. They don't breathe. I don't know how it spreads, either."
When he seemed that he'd calmed down enough, if that time had even come at all yet, she'd let go of him and lean back into her own space once more. She'd use her voice, her words, her logic now instead as a way of bringing him back down.
"I've done a lot of reading on the matter, and you're right-- there's a lot of myths and versions from around the world. But the kicker is that there are shared traits, and I think those might be the universal rules. Like how they can't handle sunlight, and how they hate fire, and how they feed on blood and don't age and all of that. Most of the myths agree that you need to get bitten to turn into one, but..." She gestured with a sweep of her hand toward the sun, then back to him. "Clearly, nothing's happened. I mean, have you gotten feeling better or worse in the days following that night in the park?"
Nate Marszalek
Nate was not a man inclined to panic and the fact that he started to now could have meant just about anything. He had had too much caffeine or he was already not sleeping well enough or he was beginning to question his sanity as it was and now that he had confirmation of the presence of some semblance of an explanation his brain didn't know what to do with it.
If he were mentally ill the panic would have continued beyond the touch to his hands. He would have had to fight to calm himself down and even then the fact that a stranger had her hands on him might have driven him further into it. But Molly reached for him and she took up his hands in hers and he realized he was losing his shit and he stopped. Took a deep breath through his nose like he'd forgotten he needed to do that. His fingers shook for a second or two after she grabbed them but then she felt the trembling stop. Felt the veins in the backs of his hands push against the veins in her thumbs. Silent pulses crying out their vigor and their vitality like to assure each other they weren't alone, they weren't alone.
So she told him what she knew. He frowned to tamp down the urge to ask more questions, frowned like to fight off a visceral reaction, and he nodded as Molly sat back. Okay. Acceptance. She's not insane.
He had no room to call another person insane for discussing elements of the supernatural in daylight conversation but she had no way of knowing that. Ignore the pallor of his skin and the darkness beneath his eyes and the tired way he has of moving. That could be anything. Depression makes grown men with healthy senses of humor look like they would rather be back in bed.
To the matter of how he felt after the attack:
"I feel fine now." Nate drew and released another heavy breath and looked back at her. Still dubious but not outright denying what he was hearing. "What happens when they go out in the sun?"
Molly Toombs
The touch did what she needed it to, and for that Molly was grateful. Externally she appeared to be the cool, calm and collected individual in this conversation. In that moment, at least. She was the anchor to calm, and had cast a chain out to bring Nate back down with her. The truth was, though, that his climb toward the frantic had sent her blood pressure on an upward arc and her sense of calm to a precarious state of wobbling balance.
If he hadn't responded positively to her efforts to stabilize him, then her own demeanor of sensibility (well, if you nevermind the actual topic of conversation here) may have snapped. She may have stood up and left him. She may have become upset with him and responded with anger. She might even have simply started to cry.
Thankfully, none of that had to happen, and instead the pair of adults were able to sit back comfortably in their chairs and continue enjoying their drinks. Or, at least, this is what Molly did. Condensation sweat was wiped from her cup with a napkin that was previously pinned under it, and then a drink was taken from her iced latte.
"If you feel fine now, then I doubt anything passed on to you. If it was an infection, or if it was just getting bitten alone that did you in, you would have to have started feeling something by now." She pondered this for a second, then added: "Plus, there'd probably be a lot more of them by now if getting bitten was all it takes. I mean, they eat people to stay alive, right? If they do it that frequently, it would've spread at some World War Z rate."
Then, to his question about what happens when a vampire meets sunlight: "There's a few theories. Some say they turn to dust, others say they burst into flame. I wanna say one said they'd turn to stone, but there was some story about trolls meeting sunlight that implied the same thing so..." She raised one hand up along with her shoulders when she shrugged. "I can't say for sure. I just know sunlight's bad."
Nate Marszalek
This was the first victory they could claim. Given the depth of the waters that lay between them and complete understanding of the problem, into which they waded without knowing, they could not know if they would have another victory. All they knew was that Molly told Nate of the existence of creatures cursed to rue the sunlight and thirst for blood and Nate began to panic and Molly talked him back from it.
"Trolls aren't real," is all he had to say on the matter of what sunlight did to those particular mythological creatures. His voice was more tired than it had been the entirety of their conversation and he reached up to rub his temples with his thumb and third finger. Snorted at the ridiculousness of that statement at the center of a conversation about other monsters that supposedly didn't exist.
No exhalation of an invective but Molly could hear it in his breath. That was all she could hear in his breath. Nothing else about his life or the source of his panic or the quickness with which his brain sought to deny what he heard and the ferocity with which he fought that urge to deny it. For all his profession relied on him to ask questions the fact remained that if he believed everything he heard or sought to treat everything he heard as news he would be writing for the National Inquirer and not the Denver Post.
The way modern journalism is headed he may not be writing for the Denver Post for too much longer either. Print media is dying and the only thing that got him the job in the first place is the fact that he knew how to type and could provide numbers when asked how many people read a blog that had started as an upper-level final project.
He took his hand away eventually and drank more of his iced coffee. As good a sign as any she could have hoped for was this: he maintained eye contact after that. If he had thought she was crazy he would not have done that much.
"Alright," he said. Walk it off, Marszalek. "I'm going to go ahead and assume there's no widespread knowledge of..." He can't even say the word. "... these things existing. Right? Like if I woke up one day and I was pulseless and wanted to eat my neighbors I'd keep that to myself. Jail's pretty sunny. So... they're not... necessarily something we need to worry about. Right? Because I gotta be honest, my woodworking sucks."
Molly Toombs
"Who's to say they're not real too?" She posed the question as a rhetorical, but even though it was spoken through a small lip-curling grin, there remained a flash of 'what if?' in her expression. After all, that vampire she ran into had told her there were other monsters out there in the dark-- terrible things. Anything you could imagine, he said, and it's probably real. That opened millions of doors of possibilities, and Molly was terrified (but, if she had to admit it to herself, the tiniest bit thrilled) by what that implied.
They moved on, though, away from the topic of trolls. That wasn't where they'd discovered common ground today, after all. It was the Undead.
"If there was widespread knowledge, then it would be in the medical textbooks." He had rubbed at his temples, looked exhausted, and Molly felt for him.
She was quiet for a moment, appearing introspective, thoughtful, lost somewhere in the middle distance. Then when her eyes sharpened back to the world in front of her, it was with a new light of resolve. She pushed her chair back and stood, bringing the plastic cup of mostly-consumed latte with her.
"Look, we need to talk more. Share what we know. I can lend you some books, if you want to read up on this. I went out on a bit of a literary shopping spree after everything I learned." She cleared her throat a little before continuing on. "I'm going to go see someone, ask what he knows, 'cause I feel like he might be able to share some insight. I'll call or text you, alright Nate? Or you can call or text me, whatever. But next time we meet, I think it should be at someone's apartment. Privacy, I think, is important for stuff like this. That way we don't need to look over our shoulders and worry about people overhearing and making their judgments."
She stooped down, grabbed her tote bag by the straps, and looped it up over her shoulder.
"Please don't up and vanish, okay Nate? I need someone around to talk about this with."
She banked on him needing that too, and waited for the affirmation she was certain would come.
Nate Marszalek
No one in earshot paid attention to them. A trio of middle-aged women at the table behind Molly were gossiping about their husbands and a group of administrative types in summer-appropriate business casual attire had pushed together two round tables to spread their lunchtime work spread out before them and a couple younger than Molly and Nate had their fingers intertwined and were murmuring and laughing at something on the male's iPhone.
Beyond earshot they did not look. The day was warm and the patio teemed with people and not until Molly stood did the more observant among them glance at the activity at their previously quiet table. Nate sat as if he did not intend to leave just yet but then Molly kept talking and he pushed himself back and stood with some stiffness. Put his hands in his pockets as she said she was going to go see someone.
And then she asked him not to up and vanish and he laughed a laugh tinged not with sadness exactly. Beleaguered acceptance, maybe. Like he ought to have said that to more than his fair share of other people and never did and it haunts him. Hauntings are easy to ignore if one grows accustomed to the lack of sleep and inability to relax and the increasing inability to open up to other people for fear of others deeming one insane that hauntings bring.
"That makes two of us," he said.
He picked up his half-finished drink and his crumb-sprinkled plate and walked with Molly to the door. Held it open for her again and deposited his plate and fork in the bus bin and took his drink as far as the front door before he decided he wasn't going to finish it and dumped it into the trash. Once they were back outside he pushed his hair back from his face and jerked his head towards his motorcycle. That was where they parted ways.
"My apartment isn't totally empty. I'm sharing it with a kitten. She doesn't mind her own business and I can feel her judging me with her eyes but at least she can't talk."
Foot in the door. Alright, Toombs.
Molly Toombs
She stood, and Nate stood as well. This movement stirred the attention of the patrons on the cafe patio along with them, but it did not longer for long. They glanced curiously, to see what was going on, but when it was determined that they weren't about to watch a couple have a fight in public they decided they simply didn't care that much and went back to their own business. The young ones to the video on the iPhone, the businessmen to their work, and the women to their gossip.
They went inside, Nate deposited his plate, and then they were outside once more. They'd gone past the patio, away from the people with whom they'd been sharing a similar space for the past fifteen minutes or so. Nate nodded his head toward a parked motorcycle, and a humored grin spread across Molly's face. "Nice," was all she had to say to the fact that he got around on motorcycle. He didn't seem the type. She pegged him for a Geo Metro kind of guy-- because it was cheap, it's been paid off for the last five or six years, and the gas mileage wasn't so bad. She always imagined douchier people to be the ones that drove motorcycles around town.
He said his apartment wasn't empty entirely and made a jest about the kitten he owned, and Molly's grin turned to more of a genuine smile instead. "Oh that's fine. Kittens are amazing at filling gaps in conversation while we no doubt refer to all of the books I'll bring."
Foot was in the door, and the rest of her slid past in no time at all.
This would be where they parted ways. With a 'Call me,' or 'Text me,' to remind that they needed to schedule some time to get together again. To share experiences, for Molly to report her findings from this source that she was going to visit tonight. For Nate to do whatever it is that journalists do-- investigate, badger people, dig around until you find something.
He would leave on his motorcycle, and Molly would go on foot, as was her way.
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