Trisha always hated this nondescript cafe in some out of sight, out of mind region of Downtown Detroit.

Whether it was the stale coffee that never quite hit the spot the way she’d hoped it would, or the similarly stale customers who would carelessly run along through here either in the mornings or late in the afternoons; making orders for their cappuccinos and their lattes or any other sundry items their menu happened to have in on that day just because their prices were a cent or even a dollar or two lower than the ones being served at the nearest Starbucks.

Her co-workers were nothing to write home about either, with only about one or two exceptions, give or take.

Most were in exactly the same boat that she was at the time; paying their way through the best years of their twenties hoping that thousands of dollars in student loan debt and wage slavery would amount to something better. Others had nowhere else to go but down and were just hanging on to whatever job they could find to keep themselves off the streets or out of prison. Hell, she’d met trailer trash and recovering crackheads with more courtesy and class in this line of work than some of the regulars she served who drove around in sports cars and tipped twenty bucks per meal.

Of course, that also meant she met the occasional tryhards and rejects who probably should’ve been in prison or were on the fast track of going to prison, or at least the nearest psych ward, once something or someone tipped them over the edge for one petty reason or another. Being an adult just really wasn’t good for some people’s mental health, to say nothing of their moral fiber.

But alas, all this reminiscing had left a bitter taste in Trisha’s proverbial mouth.

She was hardly one to judge others for their failings when the first person she murdered was a divorced father of two who made himself into her midnight snack after he’d slowly but surely confessed to cheating on his wife for years and not regretting a single moment of it because the side chick had made him cry each time she made him cum - the sex was that good - and never once mocked him for it.

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He might’ve been a pitiful horndog, but did he really deserve to die like a crook? Sucked dry and tossed into the Detroit River with cinder blocks around his ankles? He even started crying once her teeth were in his neck and his blood was being swallowed down her throat.

She knew for a fact that the pain of her bite was like nothing he or any of her other meals had likely ever felt before in their lives; four little razor blades of bone being inserted near to or even into their jugular veins. But it was a fleeting trauma, washed away in less than a minute by the euphoria that overwhelmed them both.

For her, it was the thirst; that gnawing urge from deep in her stomach all the way up to her tongue that just needed to be fed. An addiction in every sense of the word where the high lifted her up over her sorrows and back into the sun’s warmth.

A baptism of blood that washed away her many, many sins.

And for them, it was an all-consuming acceptance; that feeling of being not merely wanted but needed by someone else in the most profoundly personal way. The moment her fangs pierced flesh, all boundaries were lifted and her lips became a wide open invitation for them to just pour their souls into hers.

Before her current predicament, the only time Trisha had experienced that same depth of connection was about a year or so after a really messy breakup where, hoping to distract herself from the grief, she decided to randomly reconnected with a former friend of a friend who - despite having left things on pretty poor terms some years ago - nonetheless gave her the time of day and didn’t turn her down when she started coming on to him after about a half hour of literally crying on his shoulder.

Somehow the pity fuck that followed felt more full of emotion and tenderness than any sex she’d had up to that point; an affectionate and very physical affirmation of her significance as both a person and a lover, something she desperately needed to feel in the wake of her ex leaving her.

If she’d had tears left to cry that night, they would’ve come at around the same time she did.

The same couldn’t be said for the night he found her, or all the nights that came after, just before she died.