Thursday night was a busy one, for both Nick and Maura. Things were breaking on one of the recent murders, and Nick realized he probably wouldn't be home until uncomfortably close to sunrise.

Thursday was the night Maura drew up staff schedules and there were a couple of private events coming up. Though nobody much needed the extra money, having accumulated centuries of wealth, the staff competed for private gigs to feed their insatiable craving to mingle with mortals who had no idea of their vampire nature. Go figure, it was like a con game without a payoff (since "sampling" was strictly forbidden). Maura figured that, as was the case with mortal con artists, the bigger thrill was in the con. How many vampire double-entendres could be crammed into an evening had become a favorite sport during such events. In addition she had to supply Miklos with needs for the wine and liquor orders; and she was abjectly grateful Vachon had offered to do the inventory for both. Maura's original position of "security coordinator", aka bouncer queen, was gradually absorbing the role of general operations, but unpredictably. Maura increasingly found herself being handed operational tasks that Janette had formerly kept in a tight grip. Whether she was inspired by increased trust or boredom, Maura couldn't tell, though it was likely a combination of both. The added work appeared on Maura's plate at Janette's whim, and no sense discussing the matter with her. None of it was beyond Maura's capabilities, she just wished she could get a bit more advance notice. Tonight Janette had announced she would be attending a hiring fair for area nightclub owners, and wished to take advantage of the opportunity to troll for new staff. Yeah, right, she was more likely trolling for fresh young good-looking "cocktails". Maura sat at a corner table now that the crowd had thinned out, trying not to piss off too many coworkers before trying not to order too much (or too little, or too cheap, or too expensive) booze.

"Hey Maura, your cell's singing," Vachon called from where he was undertaking inventory.

"Swell," she grumbled as she went to grab her purse from behind the bar. She knew it had to be Nick. "This better be good, I'm up to my neck here."

"And a tasty neck it is. Sorry Sweet, you're gonna have to hitch a ride tonight. I'm swamped too. Things are breaking on a case and it's gonna keep me most of the night."

"Okay, thanks for letting me know. Glad things are going your way for once." It had been a hard slog for a couple of weeks. It occurred to her "breaking" might also mean dangerous – danger of exposure more than anything – so she added "Watch yourself. And guess what, I love you."

"Yeah, yeah, write me a poem," he teased, mimicking her less romantic side. "See you at home."

She'd dropped the phone in her purse, and the purse behind the bar, and immediately collided with a tall man who'd been standing nearby.

"Hey, sorry," she said reflexively before glancing up, but didn't expect to recognize the voice that responded, "No problem, it was all my fault." After this long, the somewhat affected resonance still rang a bell. Though by this time it was probably second nature to him, practice making perfect. Maura stepped back and took a better look. Shit. He'd grown his dark hair out some, and had a stylish (of course) Van Dyke beard, but he still affected the head-to-toe black leather and Goth amulets look. Still darkly handsome, and knowing it every minute.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" She swore more from surprise than hostility. Maura had long ago decided that their relationship was a mutual screwup; two people after the wrong thing from the wrong source at the same time. Though she'd admitted too that it was she who fooled herself, where he merely settled for what he could get.

"Too much time on my hands," he was obviously joking, then added mildly, "I don't know, Maura, I was just wondering how you were, if you'd found what you were looking for when you left me."

"I didn't leave you, Jerry, I left the illusion." She knew that he knew exactly what she meant. To his credit, he didn't contradict her.

"I won't dare say I was looking for 'closure'. How about just fulfilling my eternal curiosity?"

Maura turned to go back to her "work" table and Jerry followed at a neutral distance. "More like your curiosity for the eternal. Look, I have a shitload of work here and neither the time or interest to jog down memory lane." She sat down and looked at him. "I really hope you didn't come all the way cross country to re-examine our history. It's a little late in the day for that. Besides, I'm living with somebody. Permanently, so far as we can tell. So unless you're collecting material for your memoirs you wasted the price of a plane ticket."

Light dawned, and Jerry smiled ironically. "Ah, so it is the good detective."

"What are you talking about?"

"That detective I spoke to last night." He could see she was genuinely confused. "I'd heard," he didn't have to explain how, "you were employed here, but your boss wasn't up to telling me how to reach you. Instead she sent me to talk to 'a friend' at the local police precinct, a Detective Knight. He wasn't any more help than Ms. DuCharme, but he did ask me where I was staying and told me he'd send the information on when he 'saw you again'. I had the feeling he might be more than a friend."

Why the hell hadn't he told her? To cover her consternation Maura told Jerry, "So you've found mind-reading lessons in the Community?"

Suddenly the smooth manner dropped, and he was the Jerry he'd always been when nobody else was around to be impressed. More like her, in some ways, than she'd ever care to admit. "Get a grip, Maura, I didn't need magic powers. You think your boyfriend won't react when your ex shows up asking questions?"

Fair enough. "Well he didn't react enough to tell me. Oh sit down for christsake, let's call off the Noel Coward scene, huh?"

He sat. "It's a little worn out, I guess. The truth? I don't know why I came. Maybe 'too much time on my hands' is the truth. Writing my memoirs might not be a bad idea, but who'd read them?"

"You've always had your audience." Jerry wrote small-press books about the Goth scene: city guides, style books, one analyzing the popularity of Goth in contemporary society. The latter had done rather well. He didn't want for money, in addition to the huge sum he'd inherited from the wealthy grandma who was the only family member who didn't consider him a freak. She'd liked to think of him as a "scholar".

"Still do. I keep waiting for the fashion to pass but maybe all that crap I wrote is true, this is a function of post-modern society, and maybe the lines between mortal and immortal will eventually intersect."

Not soon enough for him, Maura thought to herself. She never really believed his obsession drove the writing and research, rather that he'd come upon his vampire fetish after delving more deeply into the Goth culture than he'd expected to go. Kind of like a narc who becomes an addict.

"Would it be rude to ask how your new life agrees with you? Not that I have a 'right' to know, but I have a willingness to understand."

Well, Maura thought, he certainly seemed to be, if not changed, at least recognizing the significance of two years' time. In fact if he'd seemed too changed, too enlightened and positively altered, she'd have been very suspicious. That stuff only happened in the movies.

"Yeah, why not. I can finish all this bureaucratic crap tomorrow I guess. It's not as if we're strangers. The short version is that I came to Toronto straight from Vancouver. Not because it was the farthest away I could get, but because it was the first flight available when I hit the airport. I had to get out fast before I lost my nerve."

"Was I that big an asshole?" He paused. "Maybe I was, or a big enough one that last night. Always trying to be clever."

"Who knows, maybe in your twisted way you were finally being honest. No, sorry, that's not quite fair. Maybe you were finally trying to make it clear to me what we were, and weren't."

"Like maybe not the love of anyone's life, more like a pleasant association born of mutual needs, misrequited?"

"Well put. Trust a writer… anyway that sounds as right as anything. You were the first man I'd met who I didn't feel like I was selling myself to, even though I knew you wanted something a little more than me myself. It was no secret, you didn't exactly lie."

"Sins of omission, maybe."

Now that was something she hadn't left behind… god knows she and Nick were masters of that. "I guess. Done is done, there ain't no shoulda or coulda,"

"Ain't nuthin but is."

"My words come back to haunt me." She felt a growing ease in Jerry's company, born of familiarity. Hey, it hadn't all been bad. And he did know her, even if it's not all he wanted. "Look, don't get me wrong. I didn't show up here as a victim. I wasn't running from you, or anything about myself that I could hope to leave behind me. I was running, I dunno, to whatever I hadn't found in Vancouver. Trouble is when you keep looking for something all you seem to find is where it isn't. Like your car keys, you always find them in the last place you look."

"And you found your friend Nick in the last place you looked?"

She laughed now, as if catching up with an old friend. He was that, wasn't he, at least? "Trust me I wasn't 'looking'. Janette hired me on mere faith, knowing who and what I was and having no better prospects at the time. Nick and she go way back. He comes here a lot, we met, got to know each other, and the band played on. Kind of like you and me." She and Jerry had met quite by accident in a Goth (vampire) bar.

"And he doesn't know anything about your, uh, unique condition?"

Maura squirmed a bit. He knew so much about her life already there seemed to be little to hide, Jerry was obviously already aware of the Community and equally obviously not considered a threat by the Enforcers or he wouldn't be sitting here. Still she held one thing back

"No. He has a blood condition himself with endless food allergies, and a horrible allergy to sunlight, which is why he works the night shift and why he's a regular here. Nick knows I get a little weird at a certain time of the month but he writes it off to pms. But Janette, and everyone employed here except me, are part of the Community, and have accepted me as one of their own. It's not hard to keep it from anyone who shouldn't know." There. She'd let him know she had a measure of protection without exposing Nick, a thing she instinctively knew might raise problems with Jerry's obsession.

He was quite honestly stunned by the knowledge she was living with someone who wasn't qualified as a real "protector". "But you seem so well…" He'd known how she'd looked when he'd met her, alive but dissipated, well-used by her "protector" and his cohorts.

"Dumb luck, man. Janette retains a bit more humanity than most, though not so's she'd admit. Oh she happily indulges her natural instincts, but her mortal past made her more prey to sympathy than others. I'm no threat or rival to anyone here so they accept me. Let's face it, Jerry, I have way more in common with them than with 100 of mortals."

Inside, Jerry was abloom with pleasure at the discovery that Maura was considered a true part of the Community and not merely a food source. If she lived among vampires, odds are one of them had fed on her at some time. That she'd established a symbiosis between mortality and these eternal beings… he hadn't harbored a breath of expectation of this. He felt his foot, metaphorically, creeping closer to the door. And his thirst – no pun intended – for inclusion and thus definitive knowledge was closer to being satisfied than he dared imagine. His earlier books would pale in comparison. Be honest, he told himself, you know exactly why you came here.

Maura read his silence as disbelief of a more regular sort. "Who'da thunk, huh, after a life on the run and swapping blood for safety I'd find a place among vampires where I don't have to? Dumb luck, like I said, to be honest I think Janette introduced us to seduce Nick away from his lust for solitude and guilt. He's had what you'd call "a checkered past" and he hates what he's done and what he's been. I think I've been able to pry him away from the latter. As for the former, we all have ugly shit in our past. A guilty conscience won't allow us to go back and undo it."

"Isn't that the truth. If it did, we could just go back and you wouldn't have left."

"Don't go there, okay? What did I just say?"

"Right. Well like I said, I haven't the right, only the willingness."

Finally Maura reached out and laid a hand on his. "That makes a big difference, Jerry. I mean it."

His smile was born of far more than gratitude. That Night Crawler had sounded pretty out-there when he suggested this visit, but his radio-shrink advice (given after program hours on the phone) was so far proving pretty right-on.

"Yo, pseudo-boss lady, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here." Vachon was locking up. Maura realized with a start that they were the only three left in the club.

"Sorry, Vash. I'm good to go." She gathered up her papers and told Jerry, "I'll give you a call at the hotel."

"You up for coffee somewhere?"

She was halfway to the office. "Vachon's my ride, Nick's stuck working most of the night."

"I'll drop you home," he offered.

She thought a moment. Nothing he'd said or done betrayed the least inappropriate interest. "Well… Nick won't be home for hours. Okay. It'll give Vash a night off. He's been running me home most nights for the last week."

Vachon was hanging up the keys when Maura came into the office to file her stuff in the "to do" box.

"Vash I won't need a lift tonight. Jerry's gonna drop me."

Vachon had noticed that Maura had spent the best part of the last hour talking with this stranger. He wasn't one of them, of that Vachon was sure. "You sure?" The "who is that guy" was silent.

"It's okay, Vash, he's an old friend. From Vancouver. You remember I told you that's where I came here from."

"You also told me you ran away from a guy named Jerry." Vachon wasn't liking this much. He considered Maura a good friend and wasn't inclined to entrust her to a suddenly reappearing ex boyfriend, even a mere mortal.

"Not 'ran away', Vash, I just left. He never threatened me or hurt me." Not physically anyway. Her friend and coworker appeared unconvinced. Maura grabbed his arm and shook him. "Vachon! If you don't stop acting like a neurotic mortal the Enforcers are gonna come for you!"

"Okay, okay," he relented. He caved whenever she played the "you're just like a mortal" card. "You're not near my age, but I guess you're over 21."

"You know it. 'night, see you tomorrow. And thanks for caring," she gave him a kiss. "Don't think I don't appreciate it."

As it happened the coffee shop Maura had thought of was closed and she wasn't up to searching for another. "Why don't you just dump me at home and I'll call you like I said."

"Maybe we can invite your Nick out, as a witness to coffee anyway."

Reminded of Nick's "sin of omission" Maura replied, "Yeah, why not. He and I have some talking to do, but it's a good idea."

When Jerry stopped outside of the converted waterfront warehouse he kept both hands on the wheel as he said good night. No sense making Maura nervous.

"'night Jerry. I will call, really. I haven't had a chance to hear anything about what you've been up to." She'd fallen completely into the notion that they were simply old friends catching up.

"I'll wait to hear from you. Good luck with Detective Protective." This triggered an easy laugh.

"Good call. He errs on the side of caution, not that that's a bad thing. Later."

She hopped out of the car and closed the door. Jerry watched as she used a key to enter the building through a freight elevator.

Later was fine by him. Waiting was fine by him. He had time.