Lessons of Love

LESSONS OF LOVE


I fell in love with Suzy in the fourth grade.

Like most schools, we celebrated Valentine's Day by exchanging cards with our classmates, drinking cherry Kool-Aid, and eating little candy hearts that were imprinted with sweet messages like "I Love You".

Suzy gave me a valentine card.

Unlike many of the boys, I had no problems being friends with girls. I had three sisters and felt quite comfortable with girls. I think I sometimes thought I was one myself. However, I don't mean I was a sissy. I played with boys and could catch, throw, or hit any size ball that the game required. But I thought girls were also fun to play with.

So when I opened Suzy's card and found it funny, it was natural to share a laugh with her. I probably said the kind of dumb things we said back then - "This is cool!" - and dissolved into the kind of giggling laughter only kids can enjoy. That's when I first noticed something odd about Suzy.

Suzy's laughter revealed her teeth, of course, and my roving eyes zoomed in on her canines. They were larger than normal and quite noticeable to me. "You're a vampire!" I said with a laugh. But I could see she didn't find my comment at all funny. I made a mental note to never mention vampires around Suzy.

Suzy's teeth were the only thing odd about her. Her blond hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and slender body all combined to make her the most beautiful angel in the entire school. In fact, Suzy was so sweet and lovable that I fell in love with her. Although at the time I only knew she was my best friend.

Suzy and I progressed through the educational system in lockstep, always attending the same school. Both of our families had settled in the older part of town, hers in a cozy brick bungalow and mine in a wood two-story built in the early 1900's.

Our house was old and odd-looking, but built solid and and very roomy. We needed the rooms (it even had a large basement) because we had relatives living with us.

By the time Suzy and I reached high school, we were lovers. We never did anything at her house, where privacy was hard to find. But in my old "mansion" there were plenty of nooks and crannies where a couple of whispering teenagers could kiss and snuggle. Maybe the word "lovers" is a little too strong, since nowadays it carries the meaning of full sexual knowledge. We were at the very beginning of a learning process and everything that happened to us was new and exciting.

We often touched each other through our clothes, sometimes with embarrassing results for me, but the first time I touched her bare breast we were up in the attic. It was spooky up there, but it was also a place where no one was likely to disturb us. She trembled a little as my hand slipped inside her blouse.

"Are you scared?" I asked.

"No, it's okay. I'm just shaking because it feels so good."

I think I could have gone further with my sexual exploration that afternoon, but we were both scared out of our wits when a huge bat exploded out of the rafters and went flapping out the open window.

"What was that!" Suzy screamed, jumping up and pulling her blouse closed.

"Just a bat," I said. It had frightened me, but only the suddenness of it. I had seen bats before and was not afraid of them. But the mood had changed, and after that Suzy never wanted to go up in the attic again.

For the next few years the lessons of love went on and by the time we were seniors, we were engaged to be married. We decided to get married the weekend after our High School graduation.

I haven't mentioned my father until now. He was a distant figure to me growing up. He worked at night and slept all day and I rarely saw him. He never played with me when I was small and I seldom even thought about him at all. It was my mother and sisters who had all my attention.

But on the night of my graduation, which he did not attend, after the celebrating was over and I was undressing for bed, he suddenly appeared in my room. He had never been in my room before, unless he had done so at night while I was sleeping.

He looked straight at me with unblinking eyes. "You know what you have to do?"

"Of course, Daddy" He didn't like me saying 'Daddy'. I guess I just wanted to assert my own independence by doing something he didn't want me to do. It was a small thing. And I knew I was a good son, even if he wasn't a particularly good father.


Finally the day of the wedding arrived and everything went perfectly. Suzy and I left the wedding in my Mustang and headed for a honeymoon in a mountain cabin only a few hours drive away. We both wanted to save our money for furniture and not spend it all on a fancy honeymoon. By then we were so intimate that there were few lessons of love left to learn, so we entered the cabin more like a married couple than newlyweds. There was that last thing to do, of course.

We lay naked in the bed and I admired again the smooth perfection of her young body. We gazed into each others eyes. "I love you," I said and sunk my teeth deep into her neck.

Her eyes glazed over and then rekindled with a small spark of life that grew into an intense light. I was awestruck. "Why did you bite?" she said.

My mouth fell open in surprise and my eyes grew wide with fear as her shining face with its nimbus of golden hair closed in on me. Her pink lips opened and she sank her teeth into my neck.

I drifted off into that trance that I had only heard about but never experienced. My last lesson in love, I thought, and I flunked the pop quiz.

* * *

Author's note: This was an entry in a contest about vampires, so I knew that was what the readers were expecting. If the ending confused you, it just meant that he was a vampire and didn't think Suzy was but then got the surprise of finding out his new wife already was a vampire, a stronger vampire, when he bit her. She didn't know he was a vampire but knew she was one, which is why she always tried to steer the conversation away from anything about vampires. The story didn't win, but it was fun to write even if it ended up being a bit confusing.