It's loud, and raucous. Needless to say, Jason's having some more crazy sex. He keeps the gloves on; it's a little bit of a mask. He licks her foot while he's fucking her, and suddenly he's fucking Liam. He doesn't even know his name. He stops, freaked out, and Liam asks what's wrong, in Dawn's voice. Not even the gloves can save him from the truth: she's a dirty girl, she's touched the darkness. She's the truth about him, wearing a Dawn mask. He whines, and drops beside her, shaking with a secret. "I hate that you've been with vampires," he says, and she's offended: how is that his business? How is that his problem? There's a list of reasons: "They're fucked up. They're freaks. They're fucking dead."

He asks her what's wrong with her, letting something nasty like that even touch her; it's not rhetorical. He wants to know what's wrong with a person who would let something nasty like that touch them, let it creep inside them. How can we be normal, boy and girl, with things like this inside us? Charlotte, Light & Dark: if Tara is everything I loved about Brenda, Jason is everything I couldn't handle. Easier to take because I neither respect nor find him all that appealing on a level beyond the aesthetic?

"For your information, that was the best sex I ever had in my life." (Problem number one: sex is all Jason has, and being good in bed is all he is.) "And who are you to judge?" (Problem number two: he's not.) "You fuck anything with a space between its legs." (Problem number three: exactly. He's the one on top, he kills sex with every kiss. This isn't about getting inside anybody, this is about what got inside him. I don't want to know who did this to him, the first attack, because it makes me sad to think about. Plus, if he's a survivor that makes the hot naked sex a lot less hot, which would be a shame.) He cries out, working backwards: "Best sex you ever had? You told me I was the best sex you ever had!" Right before he stopped calling, she notes, and coming to see her at work. She thought it was just burnout, when he got weird and closed-off, but that wasn't it: she'd just given him what he wanted all along. A place to be.

"And then I met that vampire..." Jason asks if it was Liam -- "Bald-headed, tattoos, crazy?" -- and she laughs. "No! Actually, he had a lot of hair. I met him in Shreveport at the vampire bar." And then she let him bite her? Let him inside? "Yeah, and I'm not... I'm not ashamed of that." Touching something new and dark, exploring ways of intimacy; she reassures herself and then tells him to get off the high horse. "Is that who you thought I was tonight? When you started rubbing up against me like a cat in heat?" She swears she knew it was him, touching his stomach and his cock, soothing him, but he's not having it. He gets weird. "You're a lying sack of shit! You would fuck that vampire, and let him bite you, if he showed up tonight." Jason's imaginary vampire, his nighttime double, that killed Maudette, that chased him into Dawn's arms, that's getting closer: What if it weren't a vampire at all?