Interview with the Kevin

By Mark Lesney

Danton is a 1200-year old vampire, blinded by the Medieval Church, who makes his life as a paranormal romance novelist. He writes about a vampire detective and “pretends” to his fans to be a vampire himself. But book sales are down because he has been without love for over 30 years and just doesn’t have that spark of romance left in him. Until he meets Kevin, a disbelieving young man, desperate for a job, who is brought in by Danton’s agent to try to lighten up his life and heat up his prose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NineStar Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370309511

Mark Lesney

I am a single gay man of a certain age, living with the obligatory cat. My only fiction credential before “Interview with the Kevin” is a semi-comic steampunk M/M romance novelette, “The Golden Goose,” published in the “Steamed Up” anthology, sadly now out of print. My non-fiction writing credits, however, are extensive. Currently, I am the managing editor of two medical newspapers, for which I also write routinely. For over 6 years my science and history articles appeared monthly in two newsmagazines, for which I was a writer/editor at the American Chemical Society. My credits also include science articles published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact. I have a PhD in plant pathology and a second PhD in the history of science. I have worked as a research scientist and university professor. But my love has always been reading and writing fiction—with science fiction/fantasy, mystery, paranormal romance, and historicals all grappling for my affections. I am now determined to pursue that dream intensely.

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A NineStar Press Publication

Published by NineStar Press

P.O. Box 91792,

Albuquerque, New Mexico, 871099 USA.

www.ninestarpress.com

Interview with the Kevin

Copyright © 2017 by Mark Lesney

Cover Art by Natasha Snow Copyright © 2017

Edited by: BJ Toth

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact NineStar Press at the physical or web addresses above or at [e-mail]

Printed in the USA

First Edition

October, 2017

Warning: This book contains sexually explicit content, which may only be suitable for mature readers.

Interview with the Kevin

Mark Lesney

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Interview with the Kevin

About the Author

Acknowledgements

With dutiful homage (and perhaps apologies?) to Anne Rice, and gratitude for her ground-breaking, The Vampire Chronicles.

Reclusive gentleman seeks male companion for assistance with the tasks of daily living. Must have a pleasant reading voice and no hang-ups regarding homosexuality or dealing with the blind. Excellent pay and benefits for the right individual. Must be willing to live in and follow a flexible hourly schedule including frequent night work.

It was the best I could do. I couldn’t very well have advertised the truth in the Washington Blade.

Sightless vampire seeks a willing Renfield for possible blood donations, unwavering service, as well as tips on modern MM romance. Sex optional, but desirable with the appropriate candidate.

Of course, the last interview of the week for the position just happened to be scheduled for Halloween—a holiday that was not only an embarrassment to my species, but worse, the eight-hundredth anniversary of the night when the minions of Simon de Montfort burned my eyes from their sockets. Not a time for celebration.

Diana, my agent, had screened out the worst of those who showed up before I even met them. Diana was fully privy to all my secrets, her long-since retired mother having been my previous agent. She weeded out the absolute dreck and the obvious hustlers.

And she scanned their resumes—it was too much to expect that they be delivered to me in Braille. She could have printed them out for me using my special printer, of course, but I hated dealing with those kinds of details. And since this was all her idea, I figured it was only right that she do all the work.

Beyond that, though, there was the inevitable moment when I had to deal with them myself. The majority of the applications were appalling. And quite sad, given the excessive number of them and how few even remotely fit the bill.

My address in the high-rent district in Georgetown had also gone a long way to attracting quite a lot of riffraff and opportunists. Much less hapless university students.

I was becoming quite at a loss and wondering if I would have to settle on a closely watched mind-slave for a decade or two—I jest, really—until young Kevin Daily sauntered into my library office and into my life.

Of course, that was after an entire morning of Diana lecturing me to be less picky.

You’ve just got to move into the modern era. You haven’t been to a gay bar in almost a generation, she complained. She was bustling about my office like a mad chihuahua, putting up hand-crafted Halloween decorations even here, after having filled the stairwell’s staid dark-oak panels with cardboard cutouts of witches and ghosts and jack-o’-lantern monstrosities.

My protests were in vain. Her daughter’s class had embraced her poor blind uncle’s case with the earnestness of any gaggle of eight-year-olds given a project in art class. Bethany—I refused to call my surrogate goddaughter Bettie, as she now wanted to be called—had told her teacher and all her friends about my dark and lonely mansion and how it simply must be brightened up for Halloween. The fact that I was blind and presumptively would not be able to see them seemed to matter not a whit to their enthusiasm.

It was a bad time. The bars were full of semi-closet cases, mostly in government service to a Republican administration. Most nights they smelled of their despair, I complained. And AIDS.

Being out was the exception then, not the rule, even more than a decade after Stonewall. After the mideighties, everything by then was AIDS. It’s not a pleasant memory, as much as I loved disco. Everywhere was the taste of death. The bitter taste of Eddie. That era saw the last time I could bring myself to feed directly off a human male.

Why do you expect me to start that all up again? I don’t need to do any research. My career is fine, I told her. "Anyway. I’ve sworn off sexual adventure. Much less that insanity called love. You need to stop switching the blood bags and trying to get me to feed off men again. The taste makes me…uncomfortable. Brings back memories. And since I’m not going to do anything about it, I wish you would stop!

"In any event, feeding off female blood has worked perfectly fine. The clinic provides more than what I need. The new bags don’t make it taste so much of plastic. And I never saw this obsessive need the rest of my kind have,