He didn’t usually smoke cigarettes, but he was a bundle of anxious nerves that was pushing out of his gut like a demon barreling out of a closet in a child’s nightmares. He bummed one off of a young woman who had obviously been on Broadway for a few hours, smelling of a ripe combination of cheap beer and Nashville tourist sweat. He smiled at her in the charming way he knew how to do because he could tell she was trying to make a connection.

He just wanted a Marlboro Red. Nothing more, nothing less.

He played the game of cheerful tourist and finally she popped one out of a ragged soft pack that had seen better days earlier in the afternoon but was now a curled, moist mess. She lit the cigarette touching his hand gently as a precursor for possibly something more and he thanked her, allowing the brief contact. Fortunately, a friend of hers yelled her name and she said she had to leave moving slowly toward the call.

She looked over her shoulder briefly at him before she disappeared down Church Street.

Little miracles, he thought as he headed toward Printer’s Alley. She wasn’t the one.

Karaoke poured out of one bar where frat boys were singing James Brown’s It’s a Man’s World. It sounded just as one would have imagined. He figured it was a bachelor party but was confused why they weren’t in a stripper club.

It occurred to him that he hadn’t eaten in two days. His last meal was in Memphis near the state university. Summer in the south was never one of his favorite times but Tennessee was an easy state to move within the shadows. He always saw the state as corrupt and lush. Beale Street was always good for a hot meal but he was avoiding the police after the incident in Little Rock.

The cigarette was nearly done. He threw it on the ground crushing it under his weathered cowboy boots as he turned down the side street. An older lady wearing an Elvis shirt looked at him disapprovingly and he smiled again, this time showing more menace than charm. She quickly scampered away toward the brighter lights of 2nd Avenue, not knowing why she was disturbed.

He saw the woman standing next to a doorway as he walked into the historic Alley. She was impatiently looking at her cell phone.

‘She’s the one,’ he thought. She smelled like light and sex and anger, all a lethal combination for him. It was something he always craved. Human emotions that fall all over each other in a swirl of chaos. He liked exposing the heat that lives within the souls of those confused, eager for danger but frightened of the blaze.

It was hard not to smile.

She spotted that he was gazing at her and deliberately put her eyes back on the phone.  He liked the way one foot rested on the brick wall and the neon lights from the Fiddle & Steel Bar flickered across her face. Her body language was open, something he liked in a woman.

As he approached her he became intoxicated, as he always did and it was hard for him to keep his fangs in his mouth as he looked at the soft, delicate curve of her neck.

He knew he wouldn’t need to be invited in on the street as tourists swarmed around him but he could only see her. He heard the twang of a fiddle from down the street as he moved toward her and the anxious feeling he felt earlier disappeared.

As she shyly smiled at him, he felt nothing but intense hunger and need.

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