I don’t know why that memory of Luca had come to me, but I just kept remembering it throughout the day. I could almost feel the sun on my skin, the soft breeze blowing about while his mid-length curls fluttered away. His face becoming all so serious all of a sudden, his glare at me becoming so judgemental as he got up and took his glass to the kitchen, his long legs sauntering away while I just sat there, perplexed and marinating in the mystery of that entire moment.

I quickly brushed that thought away as I prepared myself for the rest of my day. For the most part, my room was my sanctuary, my safe place where I could just be myself without anyone asking me questions or making sure I was okay. Here I could just lounge for hours, take some time to work on a new drawing for my art wall, a secret hobby of mine that I just wanted to keep sacred, or just scribble away in my journal about whatever I was feeling, listen to music or just sit at my window which stared directly into the garden out back, the beautiful flowering trees and the swing that had been lonely for years now as they swayed with the wind.

I’d just let my mind travel as far as it could, imagine I was in a field of flowers just running free and wild with no restraint. Sometimes I’d imagine other people with me, Luca, my mom, or my dad, our neighbors. I always wondered how my life would have been if maybe perhaps I had a sister, or a brother, a sibling would have probably made things different. It always ended with me wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t made that mistake and that’s where I stopped. I didn’t wanna go down that road.

Mom and dad were downstairs and on Saturdays we usually had a big lunch outside, made up the table and everything and then watched a movie later. At this point it had become more of a routine that we just sleepwalked through, a chore because no one had enough guts to suggest something else or that everyone just do whatever they wanted.

Today I felt like doing something else. I wanted to take a walk or something, just go out and pretend I was in the field of flowers that I always imagined myself in. The weather was great and the sun was bright. It would just be me and the breeze all day. Maybe I would take one of dad’s books from his study and just lie on a blanket somewhere and read away. Or I would just go out to the Grounds Cafe and have breakfast for lunch in the little deserted grungy place. Let my thoughts just echo for the day. I knew where this feeling was coming from but I didn’t want to say it, I didn’t want to jinx this newfound pocket of freedom.

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‘Can we do something else today?’ I asked.

‘Like what?’

Mom was in the kitchen making final preparations for lunch and Dad was in the living room, nose deep in the paper. He looked up at me with expectant eyes. He did not look older than 35, 40 at most, because he’d slowed down his aging a bit as he was turning 51 at the end of next month.

My parents were actually considered to be pretty young among our species. The other vampires that did not have the Obsidian power in them could not procreate, but we could, the catch was that it took an incredible amount of trying at times. My grandparents had my dad in their mid 300s after trying for centuries to have children and my mom was older than my dad.

I however had apparently taken little to no effort to conceive, as I kept on hearing. I was born only a year into their marriage and then after that there had been nothing. Because we were true born vampires, we could control how we wanted to age, slow it down or speed it up unlike the ordinary vampires whose aging immediately halted as soon as they became undead. It was something you had to learn otherwise you'd risk hurting yourself in ways you couldn't repair. Such were the perks of having the Obsidian power inside of us.

True born vampires also did not need to feed on blood as often after the first two months of birth, but the Obsidians that weren’t true born had to feed at shorter intervals, twice a year or so, while we took longer and the ordinary vampires, well we know how that goes.

‘I don’t know, I just wanted to go out today, it’s a nice sunny day,’ I said.

‘Where would we possibly go in this place, you’renot really missing out on anything out there, just the same old stuff,’ Dad said.

‘We could go to the city for a change, bowling or something or a movie. A real movie. Or I could just go and eat out by myself for a change.’

As soon as I saw him put the paper down I knew what was coming. I wasn’t surprised, just mildly disappointed.

That’s how the story went. I was really just low-key a prisoner here. I couldn’t do anything unsupervised and that really just summed up my entire life.

‘Right, so prison as usual,’ I said as I got up and headed back to my room, leaving my dad protesting in the living room.

He was saying something to me, telling me to come back, but I just filtered his voice out in my head. I couldn’t take another long afternoon of pretending that things were okay, acting as if I didn’t have invisible shackles on my feet. It was all so frustrating. I spent the entire afternoon in my room. My mood had entirely shifted, that pocket of freedom flew out the window.

There was only one place that they couldn’t stop me from going, the creek. I would always just slip out from my window under their noses, I’d always been swift that way. In a split second I’d already be cutting through the trees in the back and evaporate into the night.