Free Walking Shadows by Narrelle M. Harris

know,
there."
    "Are you okay with that?"
    "Yeah." A lopsided smile.
    "You said you liked the not-feeling part of being a vampire," I recalled from a
long-ago conversation.
    "I thought so too. I'm getting to like it better. It's not so bad. You explain things and
help it make sense."
    "I do?" I would have thought I was the least helpful guide to being human on the
planet.
    "Yeah. I can't make things add up. You're like... you're all the missing values in the
equation and when I'm with you it makes sense."
    "Oh." What else was there to say? That maths-geek line was probably the nicest thing
anyone had ever said about me.
    "So that's what it's all about," he concluded, "What they're saying. It's the
threshold and being friends with you and all that." Gary waited for me to have something to
say.
    Impulsively, I reached across and ruffled his hair, grinning. He pulled away and dragged his palm
over his fringe. "You're messing my hair!"
    "As if you could tell the difference." I mussed his fringe again and he batted at my
hands. Paul used to do the same, when we were teenagers, only he used to be much more annoyed and
hit me a lot harder. Gary's hands simply darted around mine, barely making contact, then he ran his
fingers through his light brown hair, yanking the front of it down.
    "You're a pest," he said. A grin played at the corners of his mouth.
    "Watch your movie."
    "Drink your tea."
    Later in the evening I ordered pizza. His keen sense of smell made the meal an olfactory delight
for him, but one cruel twist of his condition was that he had almost no sense of taste, and he could
ingest nothing except blood. Instead, Gary watched me eat while I gave him a running commentary on
the pizza's flavours and textures.
    Anchovies were something of a mystery to him, though they were easier to describe than olives to
someone who had grown up in the culinary wastelands of 1960s Australia. Who hasn't eaten kalamata
olives? Seriously?
    And not just anchovies and olives; a whole world of edible delights were a complete mystery to
him. Thai food. Avocados. Feta cheese. Hummus. Korean barbecue. He'd never even eaten a Golden
Gaytime ice-cream. In the last few months I'd been making a point of trying cuisines he wasn't
familiar with. Sushi had been fun, with that look on his face - half disgust, half wistful that he
wasn't able to try it himself - when I explained that the fish was raw. He'd been the same about
chicken's feet when I took him to yum cha once. I wasn't that keen on them myself, but he dared me
to try them, so I did.
    I'm not sure when it stopped bothering me, this food voyeur thing he has going. The way he
watches me eat, and asks for a blow-by-blow account, used to be very unsettling. Somewhere along the
line it became fun. I wondered if he remembered the taste and texture of things, the sensation of
heat or cold, the sting of spicy food, the salty satisfaction of hot chips.
    He told me the main food he remembered was his mum's Lemon Delicious. She used to make it for him
on his birthday because it was his favourite. I suspected I would have liked her.
    Between flavour adventures with Gary and finally eating properly at home with Kate, I'd managed
to put on a little weight, which accentuated my natural pear shape. That didn't bother me as much as
it used to, when my ex-boyfriend had provided a daily critique on the things he didn't like about my
figure, personality, habits and intelligence. I had long since concluded that being single was a
significant step up from being with a jackass.
    I fell asleep on the lounge during a 1950s musical featuring someone improbable as the love
interest and a glorious amount of tap dancing.

CHAPTER 7
     
    Gary must have carried me to bed at some point. I woke up briefly as the bedroom
door closed, then promptly burrowed into the bedclothes and fell back to sleep. Having done me a
courtesy, he didn't really deserve the incoherent abuse he got when he knocked on my bedroom door at
about 6am. He