Early Departures - Joey Quintero, Nico Pontevecchio

Nico jumps when the door to the visitors’ area hisses open. 
He wasn’t paying attention to what was going on in there.
He’s been huddled up in a little ball of misery and hurt feelings under the window for…approximately eight minutes, according to his watch. 
He scrambles to his feet just as Joey closes the door behind her. He’s sure she noticed, but she doesn’t comment on it.
“You’re…uh…you’re back early.” His voice is rough and wet and he clears his throat harshly.
“They had to take a bus here and if they don’t make it to the stop by seven, there won’t be another one for an hour.” Joey shrugs. “Mauri’s got his learner’s permit but they don’t have a car.” 
Just another thing in the long list of reasons even the best parts of the mentor program get hung up in real life struggles. Joey was supposed to have an hour with her family. Between her pre-visit jitters and her family needing to get home safely at a reasonable hour, she barely got half of that. 
“They said they’d stay, but I don’t want them waiting that long in the dark, or walking home.” She says nothing about calling a cab or a rideshare, and Nico can understand why. Last time they were alone in a vehicle with someone driving them to a destination, Joey got bitten and infected. Statistically, late hour rideshare driver is a pretty common job for vampires, and not all of them are ethical about it. It’s not like the bus is a whole lot better, but the bus driver doesn’t know where you live. 
Shortly before he got Joey assigned to him, Nico had heard about a coven where drivers identified marks and then some of the other vamps pretended to drop off deliveries, showed up as contractors, or otherwise conned their way inside the places. 
He’s not sure Joey heard about that scam, she wasn’t involved much in the vampire world before her turn, but she’s also smart enough to have figured out the potential for it on her own. 
Nico makes a mental note to ask around the office and see if anyone’s planning on swapping a vehicle soon. It’s a little bit overstepping the boundaries of his official job description when it comes to his mentees, but he’s pretty sure that making sure Joey and her family get their full visitation time falls under the general bullet point of supporting his mentee’s social wellbeing. 
This is upsetting him a lot more than it should, given Joey seems not exactly happy with the situation but at least resigned to the idea of losing out on some time with the people she just reconnected with. 
“What happened to you?” Joey asks. 
He’d been planning to slip out to the restroom for a few minutes, wash his face, and pull himself together. But he’d also expected to have about ten more minutes. He’s sure he looks like a mess.
He shrugs. “Nothin’. We oughta get going.” When they step up to the exit door, he wipes at the tear tracks on his cheeks as subtly as he can with his hoodie sleeves.
Neither of them say anything much as they walk to the van parked in Chimera’s visitor lot. Joey mentions a few tidbits of news from her family, but she’s more subdued than he’d expected after how well the visit was going. Right up until they had to leave early.
He’s not sure if it’s having their time cut short, or if it’s his fault for letting her find him so obviously in distress, or some combination of both that has her acting like this.
But he’s going to find out.
He waits until they pull out onto the street, into the slowly moving river of traffic. Joey is staring out the window at the lights and the buildings they’re passing, blinking slowly every few seconds.
Nico sighs. “I know your thing is being okay for everyone else. But I also know you’ve been desperate to see your family for weeks, and now you missed out on half of it.” 
Joey shrugs, but doesn’t look away from the window. “I told them to go catch the bus. They all should get home as soon as they can at night.” It’s the same kind of painful self-sacrificing practicality that made her lock herself in a silver-laced crypt for two weeks as a fledgling. He still doesn’t know how she managed that. 
A moment of post-feeding clarity and an available hunter burial site, according to her file, but still.
“I’ll ask around the office. I know a couple of the others have been talking about getting newer cars, and maybe one of them would be interested in selling the old one outright instead of trading in.” It’s hard for vamps to get leases, too. More often, they own vehicles outright.
“I can’t just let you find Mauri a car. You’re supposed to be helping me, not everyone in my family. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“Joey, sometimes I think you are your family. You won’t let yourself be okay until they are. Everything I know about you is that you put your own best interests dead last compared to your siblings or even your aunt. So if I want to stand a chance o’ helpin’ you, I have to help them first, so you’ll let something good happen for you too.” 
“Why are you trying so hard for me?”
“Because I called Ricky again while you were in there.”
“Did he answer?”
Nico just shakes his head. “Nothing I do or say is gonna get him back. But your family wants you in their lives. And that’s worth hangin’ onto every single moment of. I don’t want you to miss out on one.”
Joey bites her lip and looks down. “No wonder you’re so upset I had to cut the visit short.” She looks up at him. “I get it. But  I learned a long time ago not to feel sorry for myself about the things I don’t have, and to just be happy for the things I do. If I hadn’t figured that out, I’d be a lot worse off.” 
It sounds better than tearing his heart out over and over every time he hears a voicemail. But that same attitude is what put Joey in a blood coma in a place no one would have found her for maybe decades. 
Maybe the best course is somewhere in the middle between stubborn refusal to give up on what you want, and acceptance of the circumstances life throws at you.
He’s beginning to think Joey’s going to do him as much good as he’s going to do for her. 
“I’ll take the help with the car on one condition,” Joey says. “You come meet my family at the next visit and tell Mauri all about the plan yourself.”
It’s definitely unorthodox. 
But if it gets Joey to accept a little more help from him, he’ll go for it.
“Okay. I’ll clear it with Lawson first, but I don’t think she’ll veto it.”
“We’ve lost a lot of family. And you’re kind of part of mine now, so I think it’s only fair they all get to meet my mentor and boss. Tía Patricia was already asking all kinds of questions about you. She worries a lot.”
Nico can only imagine how that woman is going to cross-examine him. But he’s honestly sort of looking forward to it. Besides, setting her mind at ease is going to make things easier in the long run.
“Also, I think you should know. You called your sister an annoying pest.”
The look Joey gives him is the most murderous he’s seen her yet.
“What was that about my sister?”
“You called her a ray of sunshine.”
“I’ve been calling her that since she was a baby. She was always smiling. Even when she wasn’t feeling good or had to stay in the hospital.”
Nico shakes his head. “Clearly you haven’t come across the vampire meaning.”
“There’s a vampire meaning?” Joey is genuinely at a loss.
“If you hear a vampire call someone a ray of sunshine, it’s not a compliment,” Nico explains. “It’s a small but persistent annoyance.”
Joey stares at him for a second then bursts out laughing. “That…makes a weird kind of sense.”
“You don’t have to tell her if you don’t want to.”
“Are you kidding? She’s going to think it’s hilarious.”
“In that case, I look forward to witnessing this.” Without a panel of shatterproof silver-treated glass and an intercom system between them.