by Kallysten
Dare I?
By Kallysten
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2007 Kallysten
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written consent of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The right of Kallysten to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First Published 2007
All characters in this publication are purely fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Edited by Mary S.
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Dare I?
Anna is just about to thread the gold hoop of her earring through her earlobe when her doorbell chimes its three tones. Her heartbeat picks up instantly, and at once her hands start shaking too much for her to put the earrings on. She lays them down on the dresser, gives the mirror a final glance to make sure she looks good, and hurries to the door. She doesn’t even try to calm her thoughts. It never works.
The door swings open to reveal Chase. His smile widens when he sees Anna, and the butterflies in her stomach fly a little more erratically. His hair is windswept, and the light in his eyes tells of the joy of hunting. It was this same light that attracted her the first time she saw him. In the following weeks she was sometimes scared of it, just a little, but she has gotten used to it and to what it means. It has only been eight months, but sometimes she feels like she’s always known him.
“Ready, lovely?” he asks, offering her his hand, palm up.
With him, the question is far from innocuous. Once, in the middle of winter, he took her to the beach, and built such a roaring fire in the sand that she never felt the cold, even when their clothes fell away. Another time, he taught her to ride a horse after she had casually mentioned a few days before that she had always wanted to try horseback riding but had never had the chance. He told her he had a surprise in mind for her this night. She has been wondering what it was for almost two days.
She slides her hand into his. “Ready.”
He uses his hold on her hand to gently pull her over the threshold and into his arms. Immediately, his mouth descends on hers for a quick but fiery kiss that makes Anna melt. A little lightheaded, she rests her cheek on his shoulder for an instant and closes her eyes. She can’t imagine what her life would be like today if she had never dared to take that first step toward him.
* * * *
A bit of lettuce and a crouton dangled precariously from her forgotten fork as Anna stared in turn at the two women in front of her, who continued to eat their lunch as though one of them had not just said anything remarkable.
“What do you mean, I don’t know how to have fun?” she asked Jessie. “Of course I do! I’m having lunch with two of my friends in the best restaurant in town!”
Jessie’s mouth was full, and Carol took the opportunity to answer in her stead. “And when at the best restaurant in town, you order a Caesar salad and a glass of water.”
Anna looked down at her plate before glancing at her friends’. One had ordered some fancy fish in a red sauce that looked delicious, and the other was finishing a plate of shrimp prepared in five different ways. Compared to that, her salad did seem a little bland but that didn’t mean anything.
“You always order a salad,” Jessie pointed out before Anna could protest that she hadn’t been very hungry. “It doesn’t matter where we go, that’s what you order. I love you girl, but you can be really predictable sometimes. You need to learn to shake things up!”
“You’re not getting any younger,” Carol added, and on Anna’s dark look she grinned. “OK, none of us are. But getting older doesn’t mean we can’t do anything fun anymore or have to eat like rabbits!”
Anna let out a quiet snort at that, drawing a reproving glance from the passing maitre d’. She felt herself blushing as she dropped her eyes back to her plate and speared a piece of lettuce with a little too much strength. She winced at the sound of her fork hitting the porcelain plate.
“And what is it that you do to have fun, Miss Soon-To-Be-Happily-Married? Other than deciding twice a week on a new color for our dresses?”
Her tone was snippy, and Anna regretted her words as soon as they passed her lips. Bitterness at soon being the last of her group of friends not to have a significant other had surged out of nowhere. She was usually good at hiding how much she hated being single again, but to be put on a defensive stance had made that tightly controlled jealousy come to the front. She glanced up at Carol, ready to apologize, but her friend merely smiled at her with a slight shake of her head that said more than words could have. Then her eyes widened and took a devilish glint as she leaned forward over the table, looking in turns at Anna and Jessie.
“You want to know what Johnny and I did last Friday?” she whispered. “You’ll never guess!”
Jessie and Anna shared puzzled glances.
“We went to The Edge!” Carol continued after merely a second, her excitement piercing through her quiet words.
Anna’s eyes widened. There were a few dancing clubs in the city, but On The Edge was the most famous—or infamous—of all. Elsewhere, vampires were tolerated as long as they didn’t show their fangs; at The Edge, though, as the club was nicknamed, they were openly welcomed by an owner who reportedly lived with not one but two vampire lovers. Many humans who went there returned with bite marks on their throats and stories of intensely erotic if not always sexual encounters. But as much as Anna looked, she could see no scar on Carol’s neck, and it was hard to believe that the glowing bride-to-be would have slept with a vampire.
“You went to The Edge with Johnny,” Anna repeated, still incredulous and just a little bit in awe. “Did you…you know…meet vampires?”
Carol’s eyes were sparkling. “Of course. The place is filled with them. They even serve blood at the bar! It was pretty weird to see. And when we were dancing, we kept trying to guess who was a vamp and who was human. I danced with one while Johnny was getting a drink but the vamp left when he came back.”
Unable to find anything to say, Anna just stared at her friend. Like many people, she was caught somewhere between fascination and fear where vampires were concerned. She had never been in contact with one, at least not as far as she knew, but she had heard about them, rumors tangled with facts, gossip that made them seem murderous monsters and misunderstood creatures in turn. To know that her friend had been in such close contact to several of them…
“See, I went before I started dating Brian,” Jessie said suddenly, her voice as quiet as Carol’s had been. “So I could try the full experience.”
Very conspicuously, she extended her left arm on the table between Carol and her, palm turned upward. She drew back the bracelets that always hung loosely at her wrist and revealed two round scar marks, a shade paler than her skin.
“You didn’t!” Carol gasped. She sounded as shocked as Anna felt herself, both at the bite mark and at the fact that their friend had kept this a secret so long. “Before you dated Brian—that’s at least four years ago, and you never told u
s?”
Jessie shrugged, grinning abashedly as she pulled back her arm and shook the bracelets free. “I was a bit afraid of what you’d say,” she confessed. “It was just the one time, and all she did was feed from me.”
“She?” Anna and Carol exclaimed together.
“Maybe there was some inappropriate groping too,” Jessie added, and at her friends’ look she burst out laughing. “Just kidding!” Another devious grin and she ran a thumb over the inside of her wrist, a gesture that Anna realized she had noticed before without paying it much mind. “Maybe.”
They were beginning to attract pointed looks from the tables around them, so they tacitly stopped talking about vampires and finished their lunch in near silence. Anna couldn’t help thinking about what her two friends had revealed however, and she didn’t know whether she was mostly shocked or intrigued. Dozens of questions were filling her mind, and she wanted to ask what it had been like to dance with a vampire, or to be bitten by one. She kept looking at Jessie’s wrist until her friend noticed and caught her gaze with a tilt of her head and a slight frown; after that, she tried to keep her eyes on her food.
It wasn’t until the three friends had left the restaurant to go sit on a bench in a nearby park that the subject of vampires crept up again. It was a beautiful autumn day, and it felt a little strange to Anna to be talking of vampires with sun cascading warmly over her.
“What was it like when she bit you? Did it hurt?”
It was Carol who had asked, though the words had been burning Anna’s lips for a little while. Sitting between them, Jessie smiled as she answered. “It hurt a bit, yeah, especially at first. But then she started pulling on my blood, really slow and hard, like she wanted to give me a hickey, and that was…” She was quiet for a few seconds as though struggling for a word. “It was incredible. And more arousing than it had any right to be.”
The three of them laughed at that, startling a few birds at their feet into flight. Even as she laughed though, Anna couldn’t help but wonder. How could a bite be almost painless, or even arousing? There had to be something she was missing.
“I’m almost jealous all I did was dance,” Carol said good-naturedly after a few seconds. “But seeing how Johnny was glaring at me just for a dance…” She grinned. “Then again, there wasn’t an inch between the vamp and me while we were dancing. And speaking of arousing…I could tell that I wasn’t the only one enjoying the dance.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I swear, that guy was huge. If I hadn’t had a two-carat ring on my finger…”
More laughs ensued, but Anna’s sounded forced to her own ears. Her friends’ earlier teasing that she didn’t know how to have fun was coming back to her with their revelations, and she wished suddenly that she had had something equally daring and titillating to share. The feeling redoubled when they looked at her and Carol said:
“Your turn to share, missy. Any dark secret you kept from us? You said you knew how to have fun…”
She let the sentence hang in the air, and Anna felt the need to defend herself. “I do! I have fun all the time!” Her friends’ eyebrows rose in a similarly intrigued fashion, and Anna struggled to find something to say. Anything at all. Long seconds passed and she was unable to come up with anything.
“Maybe you should go to The Edge,” Carol teased. “You’re a free woman, nothing to hold you back if you catch a nice specimen.”
The wink she added made all of it so suggestive that Anna smiled despite herself.
“You should!” Jessie said, clapping her hands gleefully. “Then you can tell us what we missed!”
Carol giggled. “It’s not truth or dare, it’s dare and then tell the truth!”
Once again, they dissolved into fits of laughter, yet Anna was a little relieved when the topic changed back to more solid ground—the new color Carol had chosen for her bridesmaids’ dresses this week. And even though she continued to participate in the discussion, a nagging idea remained at the back of her head. Did she truly have no adventures or audacious acts to share with her friends? She wasn’t the prude their words had hinted she was, there had to be something she could either reveal to them or remind them of, something that would prove them she was as adventurous and daring as they were.
When they said goodbye in the middle of the afternoon, Anna was still thinking about it, and she was muttering to herself as she drove back to her apartment. They were wrong; she knew how to have fun. Just because she didn’t have anyone with fangs in her past didn’t mean that she couldn’t enjoy herself. And the more she thought about it, actually, the more she became sure that her friends’ interest in vampires was a little weird. In truth, she was worried for them, and not at all envious.
It would have been nice if she had been able to convince herself of that last point.
* * * *
The traffic light in front of Chase’s car turns red and he stops, applying smooth pressure to the brakes. Anna swallows a sigh. She wishes they were there, already, wherever ‘there’ is; impatience is killing her. Judging by the smile at the corner of Chase’s lips, he is all too aware of it.
“So, how was your day?” she asks, both to occupy her mind and to try and ferret clues out of him.
“I had a late hunt last night, so I slept in pretty late. Caught up on some paperwork after that. Pretty boring day, as they go. What about you?”
The light turns green again, and the car starts as smoothly as it stopped. A turn on the right; could they be going to On The Edge?
“I went out shopping with the girls.”
She keeps under wraps that the three of them tried to figure out what special thing Chase could have planned. A few of their guesses are already proving to be wrong as the car continues toward the edge of town. His apartment, maybe.
“I thought you looked even more delicious than usual.” He glances at her, and the heat of his gaze is scorching. “The dress is new, isn’t it? And you did something to your hair.”
She gives him a coy little smile, pleased that he noticed. But then, he always notices.
“You did say tonight was special.”
His smile weakens a little, and he keeps his eyes on the road as he says, “It is.”
She wants to question him more, but he parks the car and in a flash he is out, walking around the hood to come open her door. She was right, he brought her to his apartment. She stomps on a hint of disappointment as she takes his hand and stands to follow him up the staircase. They don’t stop at his floor however, and climb three more flights of steps to the rooftop. He proffers a key, unlocks the service door and guides her out, then locks again behind them.
Right away, she sees it, and she has to stop to take it all in. On top of a black plastic tarp, just a few feet in front of her, in the center of the roof, is a large airbed. She counts three blankets on it, one covering the bed, the second rolled as though a pillow, the last resting, folded, at one corner. Next to the bed on the tarp she sees Chase’s CD player. In the center of the bed rests a tray, and as she approaches she can see the small champagne bottle covered in water droplets, the two glasses next to it, and a small closed container. Chase has walked ahead of her and he kicks off his shoes before climbing on the bed. He uncovers the container, unveiling strawberries. By the time Anna finally reaches the bed, he has poured champagne in the two glasses, and the ambient light of the city is just enough for her to see the tiny bubbles in the glass he offers her. The sounds of the street seem muted, somehow, and then completely covered by the music rising from the player. It’s all perfect beyond anything she can express.
“I spend so much time out at night,” he murmurs as she sits next to him, “but I never look up to the sky anymore. I thought maybe you could teach me to see the stars again.”
They both take a sip from their glasses, then lean in to share a kiss. Anna has a feeling he won’t see much of the stars tonight either.
* * * *
By the time night fell, Anna’s annoyance had turned into resolve.
She would show them. The thought kept echoing through her mind as she dug through her closet for that cocktail dress she had buried in there months earlier when moving in the small apartment. She would show them they were wrong, and that she knew how to have a good time. They had made it sound as though she had never had fun in her life. It was ridiculous. She had been to dozens of parties in college. She had been out just about every night, and had only stopped when she had started working and needed to be up early every day. Then she had met Tim at Jessie’s wedding, and since he had never been one for dancing they hadn’t gone out much. She had missed going to clubs a lot, and…
The truth hit Anna abruptly and knocked the breath out of her. Clutching in her hands whatever dress she had been pushing aside, she took two steps back and sat on the edge of her bed, her legs practically giving out under her.
As much as she had tried to convince herself she had, she had not missed going to clubs, not one little bit. The excuses had rolled off her tongue with ease for years now, first her job, then Tim, but if she stopped for a moment and actually examined what she had felt when declining invitations, the regret she expected was not there. Instead, all she could find was relief.
She had been relieved not to have to go out and dance; relieved not to have to pretend she enjoyed it, as she had done throughout four years of college to blend in with her dorm mates. It had taken her a long time to feel comfortable with her body, and while she now trusted she looked good, even with curves that some might have called superfluous, she had once dreaded to feel eyes on her, and parties had sometimes been torture because of it.
Were her friends right, after all? Was she truly unable to have a good time?
During their last argument before their break-up, Tim had thrown to her face that she was the most tedious and boring person he had ever dated. She had rejected the accusation as just one more jab destined to hurt her, but maybe Tim had been right too, maybe she was boring.