(It's wrong that I was flattered he'd come to me with this. And I knew that. And yet I was taking a couple of seconds to bask in my pride in the wrongness. And now, to business.)

"Prob'ly you should be talking to Jessica about this," I tried, knowing it was lame and that it wouldn't work. I was suddenly super interested in the moss green velvet clogs I'd mentally assigned to Goodwill.

"Prob'ly that hasn't done any good and you damn well know it."

"Prob'ly that sounds about right." My! These hideous green shoes certainly were fascinating. "Uh, you know it's not personal, right?"

Nick-No-More threw up his hands, accidentally tumbling two shoe boxes off my fainting couch. "Right. Of course. Because her refusal to marry me isn't at all personal."

"Well." I crawled over to the tipped boxes, righted them, then crawled back to my corner. "It isn't."

Like a lot of us, Jessica spent her adolescence observing marriage: her parents', and her best friend's parents'. To say she came away unimpressed is like saying I disliked buying pumps at Payless. Because I really, really dislike it. And the marriages she was ringside for were awful.

I tried a new one: "It's not you, it's her?"

He was rubbing the bridge of his nose the way my mom and my husband did when I was accidentally driving them to a migraine. "I know you're trying to help..."

"Oh, I am!" Sorta. I could bend a sympathetic ear, if that was the phrase. I could commiserate. I could get Jessica alone (ambush her on the way to the kitchen, maybe?) and talk Nick-Now-Dick up. He's a great guy, he'd be a good dad, you know he doesn't love you for your money, I didn't rape him in this timeline so his thoughts and impulses are his own, oh my God are you really having another spaghetti squash it's four a.m. for Christ's sake. It was all true and it wouldn't make any difference. Jessica wouldn't marry Call-Me-Dick-Dammit because she loved him, not because she didn't.

"I've been thinking about this for a while, and I think I've got a way that you can actually help me."

I glanced up, startled. I'd planned on more There, there, girls are stupid, you didn't really want to get married anyway, right?-not an actual plan. "Yeah? Great! Shoot. Uh, not literally."

"Talk her into it."

I blinked. (Which was weird. Like gasping and sighing, I don't think I had to blink. I didn't have to pee, or menstruate, or sweat. Was I blinking out of force of habit? Note to self: ask Marc.) "Yeah, I sorta have been. She's not going for it."

"No, I mean talk her into it. Just... you know." He wiggled his fingers at me. "Use your vampire thing and make her want to marry me."

For a few seconds I didn't know what to say. So I just sat there in the middle of a litter of shoes, staring at him and blinking on purpose, because I was pretty sure I didn't have to blink as a biological function. There was a tangle of responses in my brain.

1) You pig! That's a terrible idea, dumb shit. What the hell is wrong with you? Bad enough to think it, but then cough it up out loud? Are you really asking your girlfriend's best friend to rape her brain until she marries you? Have you lost your fucking mind? Huh? Have you?

2) Y'know, you don't remember this, but you hated me in the old timeline for using my "vampire thing" on you. So the irony here... it's so huge.

3) You pig! That's a terrible idea, dumb shit. What the hell is wrong with you? Bad enough to think it, but then cough it up out loud? Are you really asking your girlfriend's best friend to rape her brain until she marries you? Have you lost your fucking mind? Huh? Have you?

"I'm not going to do that" is what I settled on. He shivered and I wasn't surprised; I could almost feel the temp in the room drop as I spoke.

He was nodding before I'd gotten going out of my mouth. "Yeah, stupid idea."

"Really stupid."

"Awful."

"So, so stupid."

"Don't know what I was thinking."

"I don't think you were thinking. And we're gonna pretend you weren't thinking it. And that you didn't think it and then talk to me about doing it."

"Doing what?"

I pointed at him and smiled. "Exactly." Time to ease up. I couldn't take the good of the changed timeline, like Dick-Not-Nick liking me and wanting to live with us, and then blast him because even though he didn't remember the bad, I sure did. "Look, I'll talk to her again, but in-" My phone did the Stewie ringtone from Family Guy ("Mom. Mom. Mom. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mama! Mama! Mama! Ma! Ma! Ma! Ma! Mum! Mum! Mum! Mum! Mummy! Mummy!") and I shoved a shoe box aside and picked it up. Nick had waved and was already heading out the door so I answered. "Hi, Mom. What's up?"

"Your husband," she breathed. "He's here! And it's daytime!"

"Yeah, uh, I need to bring you up to speed again." To her credit, my mom didn't sound terrified. But then, she had no idea how deeply insane my husband now was.

My mother was clever and loving and open-minded beyond belief. She hadn't given a tin shit that I'd been turned into a vampire, she was just relieved she didn't have to see me dead and buried. And I tried to keep her in the loop, because one thing the TV and movie vampires do that drives me nuts (more than one, but there isn't time to go into all of it) is, they kept their loved ones in the dark to "protect" them. And it never works out for them. At all. Not even once. Not ever. Once I realized I was a vampire and likely to be one for centuries, I decided to keep loved ones in the loop. If bad things happened, it wasn't going to be because of some silly contrived Big Misunderstanding That Caused the Whole Disaster and Could Have Been So Easily Avoided, Oh Well.

Still, there was only so much of the "so anyway, I killed the devil and the Antichrist is sulking and also, Sinclair can bear the light now and that's pretty much all the news until the next disaster looms" story I could tell her. Open-minded was one thing, but I didn't want to terrify her. More, I mean.

"You did say so," she agreed. She was practically giggling into the phone. Mom was not a giggler. A chuckler, a guffawer (when the mood was right), a laugher, a chortler. No giggling. "But hearing it and seeing it... he brought your puppies over! To play with BabyJon!"

"They're not my puppies!"

"You should see them all playing in the yard. Clive's here, too, and they're just having the best time. It's so cute!"

"Okay, that's it. This has gone far enough." I was on my feet before I realized I'd moved. "I'm on my way, Mom. Just hold on until I get there."

"Why? What's the matter?"

"Stay alive, no matter what occurs. I will find you!" I hit End and shoved my feet into the nearest shoes.

Time for the madness to end.