“Gee, I don’t know, Nick,” she said, sarcastic. “Maybe for cover? Maybe because he doesn’t want us to know he hired a bunch of ghouls to drain all of your blood?”
Nick opened his mouth, about to argue.
He shut it when he realized she might be right.
Farlucci had him unconscious below the rings the night of the fight.
He could have taken him then.
But he’d known Nick didn’t come to the stadium alone. He’d known Nick had people waiting for him, people who knew where Nick was. He’d probably known at least one of them was a cop. Farlucci also had Tom encourage Nick to go to that club.
It would have been a hell of a lot easier for Farlucci to play innocent if Nick got grabbed at the club, versus if he disappeared from Farlucci’s clubhouse right after a fight.
Farlucci knew Nick was a Midnight.
He knew Nick’s friends would be looking for him.
Guilty or innocent, Farlucci continuing to try and negotiate with the NYPD to have him fight for his club made sense. If he hadn’t been behind it, he likely still wanted Nick to fight. If he had been behind it, going forward was good cover, as Wynter said.
Farlucci could even have been using the contract in an attempt to find out where Nick was now. If he was behind the vampire deaths, they would want to know where Nick was hiding out, who was sheltering him, whether he’d recovered, what he remembered.
Who he remembered.
No, Wynter was right.
It was way too early to scratch Farlucci off the suspect list.
“You see?” Wynter said, as if she’d heard his thoughts. “Why are you doing this, Nick? They tried to kill you––”
“That’s why,” he said, giving her a slightly harder work. “That’s why, Wynter.”
“That’s stupid,” she said, undaunted.
He opened his mouth to argue that, then closed it.
She wasn’t wrong.
Still, he felt like he felt.
When he looked at her next, she was staring at him in the towel.
He felt some scrutiny behind the look, like she was trying to make up her mind what kind of shape he was in. At the same time, he could see more there, enough that he felt himself reacting to her eyes on him. He couldn’t help thinking that she seemed to be looking at him the same way he’d been looking at her a few seconds before.
“What is it?” he said, speaking aloud before he knew he meant to. “What is it between us, Wynter?”
When her eyes slid up, locking with his, he swallowed, even though he didn’t need to swallow.
“Are we ever going to talk about it?” he said.
Her expression went from angry and frustrated to something closer to puzzled.
Then he saw her frustration return in a rush that heated her cheeks.
Despite that, he couldn’t help but be touched by her confusion, and the intensity of feeling he saw and felt behind it. It touched him, and brought up empathy in him, and resonated with his own confusion enough that he had to fight the impulse to grab her, to pull her into his arms.
“Talk about what?” she said, pulling his eyes back to hers.
Her eyes grew bright as she watched him look at her.
“What would we talk about, Nick?” she said. “The fact that you can’t make up your mind if you’re going to run away from this or not?”
Her words hit like a gut punch.
He felt his jaw harden.
He fought with what to say.
He tried to decide if she was right.
But he already knew she was right.
He wouldn’t insult her by denying it.
“Have you eaten?” he said instead.
She blinked, then scowled at him.
“Wynter,” he said. “Let’s go downstairs.”
Something about his awareness of her bed––right there, in the periphery of his vision, with new, clean sheets––was making it harder to think around her than usual.
She stared at him, that confusion worsening in her expression.
Then, right as the frustration he saw in her eyes glinted into real anger, she turned her back on him, and headed for the stairs. He watched her walk, realized he was staring at her ass, and made himself look away again.
He watched her go, and fought not to dart after her.
He made himself stand there, biting his tongue instead, maybe so he wouldn’t do or say anything to make it worse.
Some part of him still grappled with… this.
Most of him grappled with it.
The parts of him that didn’t grapple with it, that understood it and had no issue with it, would have fucked her and bit her the first day he met her, probably the instant they were alone together. The rest of him didn’t even know what to call this.
Whatever it was, he couldn’t deny the sexual component.
Sex was the easy part, though.
Sex wasn’t the part that was bothering him.
He could pretend it was, but he knew it wasn’t.
He tried to convince himself it was the part she cared about––that sex was the reason she was angry with him, and confused, and emotional.
He told himself she just wanted to fuck him. He told himself it was an unacknowledged vampire fetish, or, even more likely, some kind of seer’s sex-crush––which he knew they were prone to. That, or some combination of the two things.
She struck him as a lot more seer than human in the way her hybrid genetics manifested.
Fixation. That’s what the seers he knew used to call it.
She was just fixated on him.
That’s what he told himself.
Fixations were superficial. They were about sex––fucking. They were like hyper-intense, light-infused crushes, a human crush times ten. They were crushes exaggerated all out of proportion due to seers and their crazy emotions and aleimic––or living light––reactions. Because vampires had similarly insane emotional reactions, her fixation on him was making him crazy, too.
She would get over it.
That’s what he told himself.
But he knew that wasn’t it––not for either of them.
He knew it the same way he knew she wanted to strangle him right then, that he’d confused her and hurt her feelings, even as he still somehow managed to turn her on, if only by being an emotionally-stunted jerk while wearing only a towel.
He knew all that and he sympathized more with her position than he did with his own, even though he knew the more rational elements of his confusion were smarter than both of them––meaning him and Wynter’s more seer and vampire sides.
That part of him knew they could deeply hurt one another, given what they were.
That part of him screamed at him that he should know better, that he’d been down this road before. That part of Nick remembered how he always, without fail, picked the wrong fucking person for himself. He picked the ones who didn’t want him back, or who did want him but were bad for him… or who did want him, but he was deadly for them.
That part of him told Nick this was a mistake.
That part of him told him he was an idiot, and an asshole.
The rest of him didn’t care.
The rest of him knew whatever was between them, it was more than sex, more than a crush, more than some blood thing, more than either of their races.
That scared him a hell of a lot more, truthfully. It also made him question whether he was using the excuse of faux “rationality” to avoid getting hurt.
Was he really that much of a coward?
He glanced at her bed, frowning.
He’d come here, half-crazed, and he hadn’t fed on her.
How had he managed to not feed on her?
He focused on the trunk at the end of her bed, and saw his clothes, folded, where she must have left them. Not just his shirt and pants. His coat was there, also cleaned, and his boots and socks were on the floor at the foot of the chest.
Staring at all of it, it hit
him that she expected him to leave.
She expected him to put his clothes back on, and walk out her door. She thought he would get dressed, make some kind of half-assed apology at the bottom of the stairs, express some kind of awkward gratitude even as he backed away, making his way to her front door.
She expected him to bail.
She thought he’d come here when he was at his lowest point, but he would leave now, running away like the coward he was.
Still staring at the pile of washed and pressed clothes, he realized he should do that.
He should do exactly what she feared he would do.
He knew he should. He knew all the reasons why he should.
Just like he knew he wouldn’t.
He wouldn’t do that.
Standing there, the reality of that truth hit him, nearly paralyzed him.
He’d been lying to himself.
Worse, he’d been taking her along for the ride.
No wonder she wanted to punch him half the time.
She was entirely right about him––even as she was entirely wrong about him. She wasn’t wrong about the contents of the more dishonest corners of his mind, just the fact that he actually believed any of it enough to listen to it.
As much as he played games with himself, trying to convince himself he might still walk away from all of this, that he might still do the right thing, that he might still stop this before it went too far, before either of them could walk it back…
He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do that.
That door had closed.
Whatever it looked like on Wynter’s side, whatever Wynter was still telling herself, or weighing, or trying to convince herself––on Nick’s side, the decision had already and irrevocably been made.
The door had closed.
Irrationally, nonsensically, inexplicably… it felt like it had been closed even before he met her.
Chapter 16
You’re Like Seers, Then?
He walked down the stairs cautiously.
He left his coat upstairs.
He left his boots and socks upstairs.
The house was warm, so he left one of his shirts upstairs, too.
He wore a white T-shirt he’d had on under the dress shirt, and his black pants. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he smelled something from the kitchen, then heard her bare feet on the tile floor.
Shifting direction, he walked down a narrow hall to the lit doorway at the end. Reaching it, he just stood there, watching her.
She had a row of containers open in front of her.
It smelled like Chinese food.
His stomach growled.
He’d loved Chinese food as a human.
She glanced over. He saw her eyes flicker up and down him in silent appraisal. He saw a glimmer of surprise as she took in the T-shirt, the pants, his bare feet.
She kept her face mostly expressionless when she returned his stare.
“Are you hungry again?” she said.
Thinking about that, he nodded.
He started to walk towards the cooler, which he realized stood on the counter across from the sink, but she waved him off.
“No,” she said. “Go sit down. I’m not cooking, just heating up take-out from last night.” She jerked her chin towards the door where he’d walked in. “Is the living room okay?” she said. “I’d rather sit on the couch.”
He motioned towards the containers that were steaming.
“I can carry things,” he offered.
She gave him another surprised look, then nodded back. “Okay.”
He walked up to the counter in the middle of her kitchen, a slab of dark blue stone that he would have sworn matched the darker shades in her eyes.
He scooped up all four of the containers that smelled warm and like Chinese food and walked them out of the kitchen and down the hall. Realizing he didn’t remember any of this, he poked his head into an open doorway as he passed, glancing over what must be her office.
Like her office at Kellerman, it was full of books.
He saw another fish tank, too, only instead of goldfish, like her tank at Kellerman, this one appeared to be full of turtles.
She had more plants here than she did at Kellerman.
Vines and exotic-looking flowers covered three different window sills. The windows themselves were long, horizontal and narrow, letting in pink and orange and red-tinted sunset light from the west, where they faced.
What first appeared to be an old-fashioned globe took up residence on a stand by her desk. He saw the virtual satellites rotating around it then, and realized it wasn’t an antique, just designed to look like one. When he blinked, glancing at the land masses, he saw virtual depictions of the domed protected areas, and lit up tracks that were probably real trains currently traveling between the domes.
“Do you like it?” a quiet voice asked.
He turned, glancing at her.
She stood directly behind him.
He looked down at the tray she held.
A large, heat-capture mug that smelled like blood stood in a sun design in the center of the tray. Around it fanned a glass of wine, two small bowls of what looked like soy sauce and duck sauce, and two glasses of water.
He smiled.
“I like it,” he said.
She smiled back tentatively, then tilted her head to motion down the hall.
“Come on,” she said. “I’m starving.”
She sat on the couch, and he sat next to her.
After a bare hesitation, where he watched her open containers, peering into each one in a way that he could almost see her weighing which one she wanted to eat first… he decided it wasn’t enough. He didn’t just want to sit next to her.
Without saying a word, he picked her up.
She let out a half-yelp of surprise––
But then he had her in his lap, between his legs, and he’d slid under her, so that her food was still in front of her, still in easy reach. He wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her snug up against him, but leaning forward enough that he would be a better chair for her while she ate. Once he had her situated, he felt her surprise turn into disbelief.
She turned her head, craning her neck to look back at him as he tightened his arms around her, sliding his hands under the thin material of the green shirt.
That quirk was back in her lips.
“Is this all right?” he said, gruff.
She laughed.
“Go ahead,” he said, jerking his chin towards the table. “Eat.”
“Aren’t you going to eat?” she said.
Realizing she was right, that he hadn’t really taken into account his own hands and mouth, he frowned. Seeing his expression, she laughed again.
Sliding down and through his lap, rather than out of it, she pushed his legs apart, sitting on the rug under the table and couch. Leaning into his thighs, and resting her head on his crotch, she looked up at him.
“What about this?” she said. Quirking another smile at him, she added, “If you’re hell-bent on feeling me up while I eat, you can do it from the top of my shirt.”
He grunted a laugh, then wrapped his hand into her hair, jerking her head back instead. Leaning down, he lowered his mouth to hers.
His fangs pressed against his lips from behind, but he fought to ignore it, using his tongue and lips instead, going deeper when she kissed him back.
After a few seconds, she wrapped an arm around his neck, pulling him closer.
He let himself fall into it… he didn’t know for how long.
When he grew conscious of the smell of Chinese food again, when he remembered her saying she was hungry, it finally occurred to him to end the kiss. He lifted his head reluctantly as the thought sank in, and she let out an overt groan, not hiding her disappointment.
“Fuck,” she said, half-murmuring it.
When he looked down at her, her eyes were closed.
“I told myself I dreamt that, last time.” She cle
nched her fingers tighter in his hair. “I told myself I was half awake… that I was still dreaming the first time you kissed me. I told myself it couldn’t possibly have been as good as I remembered.”
He kissed the side of her mouth, stroking her hair back from her face.
“Eat,” he said, kissing her cheek. “You’re starving. Remember?”
She sighed.
He raised his head when she released him, and he watched her sit up.
She was still leaning against his inner thigh as she grabbed what the container of what looked and smelled like sweet and sour pork. She picked up a pair of chopsticks and sighed again, then dug into the vegetables and artificial meat.
He watched her eat for a few seconds, then leaned over where she sat, grabbing the organic heat-capture container that smelled like blood.
Flipping open one side of the container, he took a long drink, leaning back into the couch. He sank into the cushions, drinking from the mug when he thought of it, watching her eat, closing his eyes occasionally. He wondered if she’d want to watch a movie with him when she finished.
He wanted to watch a movie, and make out periodically.
He wanted to stay in here after she was done eating, and hang out on the couch.
And yes, he wanted to feel her up and make out––
“Do you want to watch a movie?” she said, looking back at him.
He laughed.
She smiled with him, but he saw the puzzlement in her eyes.
“What?”
“Yes,” he said. “I want to watch a movie. You pick it, though. I mostly want an excuse to grope you on the couch, so I can’t promise I’ll pay a lot of attention.”
She laughed, half in disbelief.
“Did you pop a few Quaaludes while you were upstairs?” she said.
He frowned at her, puzzled. “How the hell would you have heard of Quaaludes? Those had disappeared by the time I was old enough to know what they were. As a human, I mean.”
“They’re making them again,” she explained. “Didn’t you hear? It was some kind of nostalgia thing… they brought them back.”
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