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out of the examination room. Robert offered to take them the
rest of the way and asked me to show Lara to the human resources
office. It was a short walk, but I was happy to get the time alone
with her.
    “So, where did you go to medical school?” I
asked casually.
    “Case Western in Cleveland,” she responded.
“I was hoping to do my residency back in Ohio, but this was the
closest hospital that would take me.”
    “You have family back there?”
    Lara nodded. “My parents. I’m an only child
so I feel bad being so far away from them. They helped put me
through med school, and I was hoping to at least be able to keep
them company.”
    “You’ll be so busy this first year that the
time will just fly by,” I reassured her. “You’ll probably find a
position back home before you know it.”
    “Yeah. So what’s with the Doogie Howser
nickname?” Lara asked, eager to change the subject. “You been
putting up with that shit from Dr. Little for long?”
    “He means it as a term of endearment,” I
responded defensively. “Besides, I have lots of different nicknames
here. Doogie Howser, Dr. Awesome, The Love Doctor…” I finished
slyly.
    I was typically never awkward around women,
even those as beautiful as Lara. It has been my experience that men
are more confident with women when there is an age gap. A thirty
year old man would feel at ease with a woman in her early twenties,
for example. As I was easily 600 years older than any woman I met,
confidence was never a big issue for me. I wrote off the series of
unfortunate faux pas as an effect of sleep deprivation. To my
surprise, Lara did not seem disturbed by my comment.
    “With lines like that I have my doubts,” Lara
joked. “I’m thinking the love doctor is going to have to do
a lot of healing thyself if you know what I mean.”
    Lara winked at me before entering the office
for human resources. I stared at the closed door for a moment,
thinking about how amazing she seemed after only a few minutes of
conversation. The fact that she pulled off a sexy wink without
looking awkward was fascinating to me. I had never known anyone
under the age of sixty who was able to make winking look like a
natural facial expression. The puzzled look I received from a
passing oncologist snapped me out of my fantasy. I cleared my
throat awkwardly as I realized I was standing in the middle of the
hallway, and I quickly moved towards the nearest elevator.
    I felt relieved when I made it back to my
isolated office in the basement of the hospital. I had become a
doctor specifically to see and treat patients, but that was not the
reason I had accepted my current position. The social aspect of the
job had taken a back seat over the last decade as I increased my
efforts involving my pet project. It had started as a fantasy many
centuries earlier then gradually developed into a working theory.
With the hospital’s hematology fellowship as my cover, I was in the
process of running practical experiments. There was not enough time
left in my shift on that day to start anything too involved. I
resigned myself to type up the notes I had dictated into a small
recorder earlier in the week.
    I had been living as a vampire for two
centuries before I had a startling realization. The religious and
mythical aspects of vampirism were so prevalent that I had always
accepted them at face value. Vampires were possessed by demonic
spirits, and they killed humans because of an inherit desire to do
evil. This was, of course, horseshit. When I started studying
science, I realized that the “evil” I was doing was done commonly
by many other species in the natural world. Hematophagy, drinking
the blood of another creature, is practiced by some fish, leeches
and worms. Even mammals like the appropriately named vampire bat
survive off the blood of others. The only odd part of the process
was that it was being performed by some human beings. With this new
knowledge, I became convinced that my condition