Love Bites Then it Sucks by Julie Steimle (best self help books to read .TXT) 📕

“Psst. Hanz.” Art tugged on Hanz’s arm, pulling him back a little as they went up the stairs to the next floor. Tom had made them walk the stairs rather than take an elevator, Hanz believed, to stall and quite possibly convince their stubborn friend that he was being ridiculous. “Hanz, hold on a minute.”

Hanz halted, though Andy stayed back with them, mostly to support and protect Art whom he knew and was clearly worried about as Art was the only truly normal person there. “What?”

“How did you get entangled in all this?” Art hissed at him.

With a heavy sigh and a glance to Andy, Hanz said, “Through Eve.”

“Your fiancée?” Art paled.

Hanz continued on, but explained as he went up to stay with the group. “Yeah.”

Art breathed hard. “How?”

Thinking, wondering what was best to say, Hanz weighed each word in his mouth before speaking. “I knew Eve since I was a kid. We practically grew up together.”

Art went breathless.

“But it was more like during summers as her family did not live in our town. They came to visit her grandparents—the Wilsons,” Hanz said. And since they had time, he decided to tell him the entire story. “Old Man Wilson was a nice enough guy. But the lady…” he shook his head. “’Gran’ Wilson just got worse after his passing.”

Art lifted his eyebrows, incredulous that Hanz would judge anybody.

“Gran Wilson was one of those pompous rich ladies that ‘magnanimously bestowed her charity’ on others.” Hanz made air quotes. “She had two kids. A son and a daughter. Her son’s family were chips off the old block. But the McAllisters, from her daughter, were pretty cool. The McAllister kids used to play with us whenever they visited, mostly to escape their cousins, the devil twins.”

Staring more, Art choked, perhaps wondering if they really were devils considering what he had just seen.

“We just called them the devil twins because they are these mean-spirited boys who always played the cruelest pranks—on our family in particular, though just around town in general. Little monsters,” Hanz explained. He then huffed, marching upwards. “Thing is, Eve was adopted by the McAllisters and just as cool as the rest of them. But Gran Wilson is rather clannish. And she never really accepted Eve. Thing is, the McAllisters didn’t even know Eve was a demon until after her fourteenth birthday.”

Art stumbled. “A… a demon?”

Turning around, Hanz gazed down on him. “Well, she didn’t know either. She was abandoned with them, and being real Christians they took her in. They just assumed she merely had a health condition—albinism, a rare form.”

“But a demon?” Art rushed up to get next to him, hissing low. “Hanz. How is that even possible?”

Gesturing to Troy, Hanz said, “How is it possible that there are vampires?”

“Disgusting life choice,” Art murmured, clearly not believing his eyes but obviously reconciled that the group he was with believed Troy had become a vampire… at least in that blood had been poured down his throat.

“That it is,” Andy said quietly, plodding onward.

Art glanced sideways at him ascending the stairs with heavier feet.

“If only we can convince Troy that,” Andy hissed. “He can keep on living. Eve gave him a gift by sparing his life.”

“I don’t understand that,” Art said. His bewildered stare on all of those marching ahead of him was like a guy dizzy after coming off a roller coaster.

“I’m glad you’re being honest.” Andy chuckled, slinging an arm around Art’s shoulder. “There is a lot that you are going to see that you won’t understand.”

“We don’t want you to get sucked in,” Hanz said, nodding to Art.

“How did you get sucked in?” Art hissed.

Andy weakly smiled at Hanz as Hanz said, “I told you. Eve.”

But Art looked distressed, like he had just lost a friend to drugs or something to that effect. “But how did she suck you in?”

“I told you. I fell in love with her.” Hanz then shook his head, sighing heavily. “Nah. I’ve always loved her.”

Art just stared.

Andy raised his eyebrows, a faint smile on his lips.

“I just didn’t know she was a demon until that Christmas when she spent it at my house with my family—when she was fourteen.” Hanz sighed. “That Christmas, when they visited, Gran Wilson had kicked her out into the snow—though I had not known the reason at the time. I saw her standing unprotected on the street in the freezing cold without coat and brought her home with me. And we agreed to let her stay with us that Christmas. I was already infatuated with her then. But… she was a freshman in high school, and I was out of high school working toward my mission at that time.” He glanced to Art. “It was before I met you. At the time I was going to night school and stocking shelves early at the store. It obviously wouldn’t have been appropriate at the time to pursue a relationship so…” He lifted up his hands, showing the hopelessness of the situation.

Both Art and Andy listened intently. The group ahead were almost a floor above them, as Hanz, Art, and Andy had slowed down, while Troy seemed eager to die.

“Eve….” Hanz shook his head. “My world had shifted that Christmas. I had woken early to put in a brief shift at the store to put out fresh stock and buy a present for her. I had the perfect gift in mind and I would be there with manager so I could buy it. But…” He heaved a breath. “But I looked out the window as I was changing clothes to go out, and I saw her with these huge bat-like wings, lifting up into the air one of her cousins who looked terrified. My bedroom is on the second floor, you understand. She was flying. Flying.”

Art’s eyes widened more. 

“It blew my mind,” Hanz said. Then he shook his head more, closing his eyes. “Our eyes met. She saw me. I saw her. And her eyes were as red as Troy’s are now. In that moment, I freaked out. I utterly freaked out. I admit it. The next thing I know, I’m sneaking down the stairs, trying not to wake the house, going to living room where she had been sleeping to make sure I was not hallucinating.

“She was not on the couch. Her blankets were empty. And when I went outside, I saw in the snow proof she and her nasty cousins had been there. I found blood in the snow, as well as broken boards in our back porch.” Hanz shook his head more, but he opened his eyes. “None of us in the family ever played on that porch as the wood was old and weak. None of us. So I knew none of us had broken it.” He met Art’s gaze and said, “My family had lived in an old derelict house at the time which my dad got out of a trade. Long story. We don’t live there anymore as it had termites and we have to move into a smaller house with hardly any room for all of us.

“The point is, I went to work with all this on my mind. I finished my shift, I got her the gift, and my mind was reeling over what I had seen. When I got home, she was back in her blankets on the couch, but I started to realize that I hardly knew anything about her at all.” Hanz continued upwards at a consistent pace. “I know I’m rambling… but, that morning I pretended for my family that everything was fine. I gave her the gift. We had a brief exchange where she confirmed that what I had seen was real. And she promised to leave me and my family be. She meant no harm. And when we parted…” Hanz sighed. “I felt off. Like I had done wrong. I was just trying to protect my family, but I was confused. Sad for her. And yet… I could not reconcile what I knew with what I had seen.

“I found out later—much later—that Eve had discovered her cousins snooping around our house that night for yet another prank and she had gone out because she smelled blood. I got this from Gran Wilson herself who wanted to paint Eve in the worst light.” Hanz shook his head again. “Funny thing was, she confirmed that Eve—though a definite demon—had merely rescued her cousin who had broken his leg trying to walk across our rotten floor boards—and took him and his brother to the nearest police station as the hospital was too far away for them to go by foot.”

Hanz closed his eyes. “I had been trying to reconcile what I had seen and what I knew ever since. I mean, our church does not talk about demons and monsters. We think of those kinds of things as evil spirits—specifically bodiless. So I had no explanation about what I had just seen—because Eve is flesh and bone, just like you and me.”

Art peeked to Andy and said, “Have you told anyone else about this?”

Nodding, Hanz chuckled painfully. “Yeah. I was careful who told, but I had confided in one church leader who after listening a while and praying with me about it, said something that gave me pause. And he said ‘We don’t know all the mysteries of God. Who does?’ He’s right of course. The Bible said no man can know of all God’s ways. We only get a portion of the truth. Nobody on Earth is ready for the whole of it. So, he explained it to me in this way, ‘Like a slice of cake, we get the portion we can handle and digest. But there is still the rest of the cake left which we can’t possibly eat’. So basically, Eve is one of those things beyond our capacity to understand. He also asked me to keep him updated. I had invited him to the wedding.”

“Wow,” Andy murmured. “Great analogy.”

Hanz nodded to him. “Yeah. Which got me thinking, when Christ said in the Bible not to judge, he meant it. Nobody has all the information. But unfortunately for me, that Christmas was last time I saw Eve before we met again in college, as the McAllister family stopped coming together to visit their grandmother. So I could not reconcile with her. Their mom still came, but the rest did not since the day Gran Wilson rejected Eve. If Eve could not come, they were not coming. That’s what her mom told me.”

“That’s amazing solidarity.” Andy nodded, impressed.

Nodding again, Hanz sighed. “Yeah. And that sums up the McAllisters in a nutshell too. They’re awesome people. Gran Wilson lost out, blind to how good Eve really is.”

“Good, but… she’s a demon.” Art peered at Hanz with one eye.

Nodding, feeling the ache in the legs as they went up yet another flight of stairs. “I’m not a genetic determinist, Art. Imagine being born to an addiction but not giving into it. Eve is half vampire, half imp. She would understand Troy’s situation better than anybody.”

“What?” Art looked like he had not heard Hanz right.

Halting, Hanz said to him, “She was born with a blood lust. She just never gave into it.”

“She rejected it, is what she did,” Andy said, nodding with appreciation.

“You know her?” Art asked him.

Nodding, Andy continued upward. “Sure do. She was born to kill me.”

Hanz closed his eyes. He hated remembering this part.

“What?” Art chased after him. “What do you mean?”

Andy replied with a great deal of patience, continuing his ascent. “Do you really want to go down the rabbit hole with this, Art? This