Page 11 of Road Trip with a Vampire

“Drunk?” I spluttered. The idea of stern, taciturn Peter being drunk after downing a soda was so deliciously incongruous it broke my brain a little. I knew that different vampires had different abilities, and that daylight affected vampires differently, but this…

Well. Just when I thought I’d heard everything.

I vowed to myself I would see it with my own two eyes if it was the last thing I ever did.

“Drunk,” Peter confirmed, grimly. Then he cleared his throat, clearly wanting to change the subject. “Anyway, I’d be a terrible baker.”

“Okay, no bakery,” I conceded. It probably wasn’t a good idea to expose him to more humans, anyway.

Then I got the perfect idea. “How do you feel about some light cleaning around the studio?” Robert, the elderly man who cleaned for us, had been struggling to keep up.

We needed the help—and if Peter was looking for something to do, he could come in a few nights per week and pick up the slack.

Even as I made the offer, I wondered if Peter might find it beneath him. He might not have known who he used to be, but his demeanor suggested he wasn’t used to cleaning up after others.

Peter’s expression, though, turned hopeful. “You’re offering me a job?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “It’s evening work, which should be good for your schedule. Also, we can’t pay you much. But like you said before, you don’t need the money.”

He paused, considering. “I’ll think about it.”

“Sure,” I said. “Take your ti—”

“I accept,” Peter said. “I’ll start tomorrow.”

Peter showed up for Fit Flow every night the rest of the week.

Each time, it was harder for me to ignore just how well his athletic shorts showed off his sculpted ass and muscular thighs.

Especially when I had to get on the mat next to him and guide him into the correct positions, which happened often.

I refused to creep on one of my students, but his body was a damn work of art—and while I was determined to remain a consummate professional, I wasn’t made of stone.

For the most part, though, Peter’s attention in these classes wasn’t on me but on getting the poses exactly right.

If sheer force of will were enough to master yoga, he’d have had it down in no time.

Only time and patience with oneself could accomplish yoga mastery, of course, but Peter needed to arrive at that conclusion in his own time.

Meanwhile, our studio had never been cleaner. I hadn’t even noticed that certain things had been dirty until after he’d finished cleaning them. I never saw Peter do the work, but it was obvious he was spending hours every night cleaning, attacking dust motes like a Christmas elf on a meth bender.

Maybe he’d been in the military when he was human. I couldn’t think of another explanation for his extreme attention to detail.

I was contemplating that when I walked into the small room at the back of Yoga Magic for my weekly meeting with Becky and Lindsay. They were already there, waiting for me.

“Good, you’re here,” Becky said when I sat down. The circular white table we crowded around took up most of the space in our unofficial conference room. “Linds and I were just about to go over the plans for the Goat Yoga Extravaganza.”

Oh gods. “We’re seriously going forward with that?”

Becky looked at me. “We’ve been over this.”

We had. “I still don’t like it,” I said. Goat yoga was one of many current trends that made no sense to me—like paying attention to the British royal family or getting into internet fights over K-pop bands. But then, people rarely consulted me when deciding on the newest craze.

“You have great ideas,” Becky said carefully. “But Lindsay and I are better at staying on top of what’s popular than you are.”

She wasn’t wrong. I networked with other Northern California yogis and took their classes to keep my skills sharp, but social media and its role in launching new trends bewildered me.

Probably a side effect of having been born hundreds of years before the advent of the desktop computer, though I’d never polled other four-hundred-year-olds to get their opinions on TikTok.

“It’s too late for us to back out,” Lindsay pointed out. “Two days ago, a Bay Area YogaTok influencer with over a million followers posted that she was coming. The rest of our tickets sold out in fifteen minutes.”

I stared at her. The space we were renting accommodated a hundred people. “Fifteen minutes ?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Becky repeated.

“Also, back up a second,” I said. “There are yoga influencers?”

“Yes!” Lindsay said brightly. “Our million-follower person’s handle is GoatYogaIsTheGOAT. She devotes her account to visiting and promoting goat yoga events.”

“Her profile picture is adorable,” Becky added.

I sighed, feeling every minute of my age. While others might see goats as cute, novel friends, I’d forever associate them with Massachusetts in the winter of 1793, when I’d run out of heating fuel and slept with farm animals to keep from freezing.

The smell would stay with me until my dying day.

But if I wanted Yoga Magic to remain competitive in this crowded industry, I had to stay on top of what my students wanted. Even if what they wanted, according to my partners, was barnyard animals.

“It’s okay,” Lindsay said. She took my hand, giving it a sympathetic squeeze. “This stuff is hard to keep up with.”

If she only knew. “Right,” I said. “Well, I guess I should spend some time between now and the event researching what exactly…uh, goat yoga is.”

“Goat yoga is exactly that,” Becky said, unhelpfully. “I’ll send you YouTube links so you can see examples.”

“If a goat shits on you, it’s good luck,” Lindsay explained.

“Naturally,” I said dryly. “Is there anything else we need to discuss, or can I get ready for my next class?”

Becky and Lindsay exchanged a look.

“Before you go,” Lindsay said, a gleam in her eye. “I saw that Peter guy again last night.”

I swallowed. “Peter’s been taking a lot of classes,” I said, aiming for breezy . “And he’s handling some of the custodial work Robert can’t manage.”

“I didn’t see him in the studio,” Lindsay said.

My heartbeat kicked up.

I’d seen Peter outside the studio, too. Only twice, and both times at Perky’s, the coffee shop down the block from Yoga Magic. Each time he’d been poring over his journal with an intensity of focus that could have started a fire, oblivious to me watching him.

Aside from that, I didn’t know how he’d been spending his time when he wasn’t here. But I hadn’t heard about any mysteriously exsanguinated bodies cropping up, so whatever he was doing, he was staying out of trouble.

“Oh?” I asked, doing what I hoped was a passable impression of someone who wasn’t interested in this conversation in the slightest. “Where did you see him?”

“When I walked by the laundromat last night,” Lindsay said.

So he didn’t have laundry facilities wherever he was staying. A flash of sympathy went through me—before I remembered I didn’t care.

“He wears boxers,” Lindsay continued. “Or at least he was washing several pairs of them. One of them had flowers. I wouldn’t have guessed him the floral-print type.”

An image of Peter wearing nothing but floral-print boxers flashed unbidden in my mind. I gripped the pencil I was holding so hard it snapped in half.

“Oh,” I said, chucking its remains into the trash can behind me and trying for casual. “That’s…interesting.”

The shrewd look Becky gave me told me I hadn’t pulled off casual at all. “So what’s his deal?”

“How would I know?” I grabbed another pencil and began fidgeting with it. “I don’t know anything about him.”

Lindsay and Becky exchanged another look before Lindsay asked innocently, “So you don’t mind if I ask him out?”

I could tell she was trying to get a rise out of me from the tone of her voice and the twinkle in her eye. My blood went simultaneously hot and cold all the same.

“Don’t,” I said tersely.

“Why not?” Lindsay asked too innocently.

“Because…” I said, struggling to find the right words. How did I warn my friends away from the vampire without telling them that he was a vampire? “He’s a…a walking red flag.” True enough.

“I thought you didn’t know anything about him,” Becky pointed out.

Crap . “I know enough to know he’s the last person in the world you’d want to date.”

“She also knows he’s hot,” Lindsay stage-whispered to Becky.

My face was on fire. “He is not hot ,” I stammered. Which was, of course, a bald-faced lie. But it felt important to contradict everything Lindsay was saying right then.

“Even if he’s nothing but red flags, I’m not looking for anything serious,” Lindsay said. “I’m asking for his number the next time I see him. Unless you’re calling dibs, Zelda.”

My friends were both openly smirking at me. I felt like I was walking directly into a trap.

“I am not calling dibs ,” I said. “I just think you can do better.”

Becky snickered. “Whatever you say.” Then she looked at her watch. “All right, ladies. Scott has softball tonight, and I need to handle dinner for the kids. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Scott was Becky’s neurosurgeon husband and one of the nicest men I’d ever met.

“And I have to go teach.” Lindsay stood from her chair, then kissed the top of my head with a loud smack . “See you later, kiddo.”

I don’t know how long I stayed in the conference room after they left, trying to understand what had just happened.

The only reason I was so unsettled by Lindsay asking Peter out was that he was a vampire.

Right?