by L. J. Smith
“All right. I’ll make it quick,” Damon said in a dazed way. Then: “This will sting at first.”
“I know, I know.” Bonnie felt Damon’s breath on the back of her neck. He was holding up her hair, exposing her neck to the darkness. She shuddered, not because it was cold. Then she felt the touch of his lips there on her spinal cord, cooler than she would have imagined. He kissed her lightly and a wave of feeling went through her.
Damon, you let that girl go right now!
It was a voice from above like all the cliché’s for heavenly voices. It was otherworldly, like faraway bells, like silver. But its command was unnecessary. Damon had already dropped Bonnie and caught her, still falling, this time facing him.
Elena didn’t want them to.
Bonnie . . . over to . . . house . . . Damon . . . be ashamed!
Elena was fading but her meaning was clear. Damon however, did not look in the slightest ashamed.
“You’re still a baby, baby,” he told Bonnie lightly, and flicked her nose with his finger in a most insulting way. “Actually,” he went on, “I had already decided not to before she even spoke.. You’re not ripe yet. Blood always tells, and I can tell you’re not ready from here. Still—” He leaned over and graceful as a cat, licked the tiny wound on Bonnie’s chin.
She felt his tongue as a strong silkiness, not at all raspy like a cat’s tongue, leaving a coolness behind it that turned to warmth.
Bonnie groped for some response. It had to be a good one, since she’d just been rejected. But while she was still fumbling for swear words bad enough, Damon winked and said, “Don’t burst a blood vessel trying to make me too mad. After all, some day you will be ripe. And I’ve got a good memory.” And then, while Bonnie was still groping for some response, he took a step back and was gone, blending in with the darkness.
Stefan
“Bonnie? Bonnie!”
She appeared almost immediately, on her own two feet, and looking entirely unharmed. Well, maybe not entirely. She’d been crying.
“Where is he?” Stefan caught her shoulders and almost shook them. “Damon!”
“He appeared, made some scary noises and then he left. Elena’s voice shooed him away.”
“I don’t believe you. You’ve been crying.”
“Oh, well—you know Damon. He always manages to say the exact thing that hurts most.”
Stefan gritted his teeth. “Why did I let him come over here? I could have stopped him on the other side of the Atlantic—”
“That’s all past,” came Meredith’s voice from behind Stefan, and when Bonnie heard it she got a shock. Meredith’s voice was . . . different. Meredith’s aura, when she stepped into Bonnie’s view, was different, too.
He didn’t—he couldn’t have made her a vampire in that short a time, Bonnie thought—could he? But that wasn’t it. Meredith’s aura wasn’t at all like Stefan’s, or Damon’s, either, it was still human. But it had changed in some fundamental way. Meredith was even cooler, more rational—more distant than she had ever been before.
She’d received a shock, Bonnie could tell that. And she was thinking about it.
Bonnie wanted to run to her and hug her and hug her until her warmth made its way through the thin layer of ice that seemed to coat Meredith’s body. Had Stefan done this to her? Stefan’s aura was certainly sorrowful, but Meredith wasn’t angry with Stefan. What had happened between them?
“Next shift,” she said, in the high light voice of someone trying to distract them all.
She took Stefan’s arm in hers and started toward the light of the door, almost dragging him along. She couldn’t help being playful and ditzy, but she allowed her personality full rein.
And her anatomy only helped: diminutive stature, that mop of strawberryblond hair; not to mention her heartshaped face with its delicate features and those huge cornflower colored eyes.
And she seemed younger than the rest—or she could seem young. If she wore lose sweaters to cover her blossoming young femininity, and chattered in a quick, high voice without ever censoring a thing that came into her head, people forgot how old she really was and were tempted to muss up her curls while saying that she really was charming or adorable—and entirely forgetting that she was over eighteen.
But there was another Bonnie beneath that one, and even another still beneath the Bonnie that liked fast cars and fast boys, and that was the one her friends would recognize the most easily. It was this deepest Bonnie who had envied Elena and Stefan, not for their fairytale relationship, but for the stability that she could sense in it. A Bonnie who was, at heart, a woman, and who had been one for a long time.
And Damon had just thrown a challenge to the womanly Bonnie. She could feel the hurt, hot rage burning inside her as she walked with Stefan up the staircase, his arm in hers. Elena? she called. She was furiously calculating if the plan that had just occurred to her might possibly hurt anyone.
Elena?
Silence.
Can you hear me?
Silence.
Elena there’s a Plan B I want to try with Stefan, but I don’t know if you’ll be mad.
I’ll forget about it right now if you’ll be mad.
Nothing. Bonnie tried to think other colors and forms in her mind, to “change channels.” Sometimes it worked.
Elena, if I don’t hear from you I’m going to try it. I can’t think of anyone else that it might hurt, and it might do Stefan some good.
Still no “presence” from Elena.
Bonnie’s heart sank suddenly. Are you leaving this entirely up to me? That would be just like you and Meredith. You would say it would help me grow up to know what I want.
Silence all around her. No one present except herself and Stefan—alone together, as they said.
All right, then. I’m taking you all on. This is my responsibility, and only mine.
Which was all part of being a woman.
Stefan was watching her. He had seemed startled by her eagerness from the beginning, but probably putting it down to wanting to get it over with.
But now, with the door shut and locked behind him, he was watching her, with distinctly worried eyes. As she walked around the room and ended up on the worn, creaky old couch, his aura was burning a puzzled yellow. She wondered whether to feign nervousness, and then decided she didn’t have to feign it. She looked up at him, with her stillwet, stillcornflowerblue eyes at their widest.
Plan B was what the girls called a blitzkrieg plan.
“I tangled the tie of my windbreaker before, and now I can’t see to untie it,” she said.
And that’s the absolute truth! she thought. Yes, if you don’t ask exactly when ‘before’ was.
He untangled it, necessarily standing close to her. All boys were tall compared to Bonnie, but Stefan was just the right height for leaning her head against his shoulder, and so straight and slim and somehow pliant—like a ninja or a panther or something that had to be ready to move in any direction at once. And he smelled wonderfully good. That was one of the most important things to the deepest Bonnie: smell. And another, which he also had, was voice. Stefan was a virtuous knight, faithful to the memory of his Elena—but he also had a voice that could melt butter right out of the refrigerator.
Yes, we have no problems here. I’m attracted to him. But—could he ever be attracted to me?
Bonnie slid off her windbreaker, and then, watching Stefan under her eyelashes, undid the one big button of her jade green sweater, and began to pull it over her head.
Stefan—as expected—made an incoherent noise of protest. That was one advantage she had. She was a gabbler. She could talk the hind leg off an elephant given the chance, and Stefan was a polite listener who didn’t like to interrupt.
“It’s okay, silly, I’ve got another top on underneath it,” she said and finished shrugging the sweater off.
This was technically true. She had a camisole on underneath it; a very pretty cream colored one, with knots of ribbon and lac
e decorating the bodice. She usually wore it with a sweater when the weather could change suddenly and she could whip on a lighter top over it.
She just hoped that Stefan didn’t know enough about modern women’s underwear to recognize it as notexactlyoutdoorwear.
Especially when the only thing under the camisole was Bonnie.
It seemed that Elena had neglected this area of his education. Bonnie mentally wiped sweat off her forehead.
“It’s a pretty top,” Stefan said. “But the evenings are chilly up here—”
“It shouldn’t take long. And we’ll keep each other warm,” Bonnie said. Oh, Lord, had she just said that? From Stefan’s expression she had.
“Bonnie—it isn’t—”
He didn’t even stand a chance against lips that had kissed the Blarney Stone.
“I know it isn’t,” she said. “But before we—before you take my blood”—it was good to get that in here at the beginning, to remind him of the debt he owed her—“I was wondering if we could—just sit together for a minute or two. So I could get used to you.
That’s the problem with Damon. He just looms and then grabs, and there’s no question about what he wants and when he wants it.”
That’s it! she cheered herself mentally. You’ve got him on the ropes; keep socking him!
The last thing Stefan wanted to be was to be like Damon.
“Of course,” he said, switching off the toobright lamp, and sitting down beside her.
The memory of Damon’s Don Juan maneuvers at the pensione, bringing in a new girl every night, sitting close to her on a soft, deeplyupholstered couch, and looking deeply into her eyes, while talking in a catvelvety voice about this and that, all slid right out of his mind. He was with Bonnie, little Bonnie, and he was making her comfortable before she did him the greatest favor a human could do a vampire.
Bonnie was looking up at him with eyes—while not Elena’s blueviolet—were a marvelous color all of their own. Pure, innocent eyes. She edged a little closer to him, still looking up. She seemed to find something fascinating about his face.
“Stefan?” she said softly. “While we’re—while you’re—you know—then we’ll be able to talk with our minds, won’t we?”
“We should. But I understand perfectly if you don’t want me to read your mind at all.”
“But I do—for a special reason.”
She was wearing some scent—or maybe it was just the scent of her skin. And that skin! Even more transparent than Elena’s; even less tanned. Stefan could spend all night tracing the blue, pale and darker of the veins that wandered beneath her skin. He was especially mesmerized by the veins in her throat; but he also found somehow that it struck him to the heart to see the blue lines at her temples, throbbing in rhythm with her heart. He knew he would never forget this moment, watching the utter vulnerability and utter trust he was being shown.
“Having been a telepath for—well, probably all my eighteen years,” Bonnie was saying (and chalking up another point to herself for having gotten her age in so neatly and unforgettably), “I’ve learned one or two things. And one is that I’m very good at visualizing. I was thinking that while we were joined by sharing blood, I might think of some pictures of Elena, some things we did, things that happened before you came along.” He hadn’t responded. Bonnie felt an awful plunge from her heart literally to the soles of her feet. Her pulse was suddenly hammering. What if he already had all he needed of Elena? What if old memories would only bring him pain?
But then she looked at his face. He was gazing down at her as if he were about to kneel on the ground before her. He lifted fingers to his lips, and she realized, tears rushing to her eyes, that it was to keep his upper lip from trembling.
He probably doesn’t want me to look at his face just now, Bonnie thought. She looked at her own lap instead, and at the four or five dark splotches teardrops had made on her jeans. She sniffled.
And then she felt pain, a crushing pain in each arm, as Stefan took hold of her arms.
“You’d do that for me? You’d let me read your mind—maybe even go a little deeper and watch the pictures like movies? I swear I wouldn’t be reading your mind. I’d be looking through your eyes and your ears at Elena. She’s the only thing I—” Stefan broke off and said something in Italian.
“Sorry?”
“I said . . . I was a clod. Only I can’t repeat a more exact translation. Bonnie, please tell me you know what I mean. Tell me it’s all right.”
“It’s all right—I suppose,” Bonnie said slowly.
Stefan stared at her, obviously wanting desperately to fix things, not knowing how to begin to go about it.’
“I’d like,” Bonnie said, feeding him his lines, “to think that you cared something about me. And not just as Elena’s friend, either. As Bonnie—as myself.” No one could have mistaken Stefan’s fervor. “I do, I do care about you.” His voice was muffled against the top of her head. “You are one of the few, the dearest friends that I have, and I love you.”
“Not really.”
“Yes, really.”
“You’re hurting my arms.”
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry.” She was taking a chance here: he might try to rub the pain away, or he might even have run off to find some homemade cure for aches’n’pains’n’therheumatiz. But instead he took her into his arms, exactly on cue, and Bonnie did the rest by shifting her weight so that she was sitting on his lap instead of beside him.
Stefan
What a cuddly bunny she was, this little lass that he could pick up with one hand. And how kind.
And what a witch.
He knew that Meredith could not have told Bonnie what it was he wanted. Damon couldn’t—even if Damon could somehow find out, the last thing he would want was for Stefan to get ahead of him that way, to have even more intimate memories of Elena than he did.
That left Elena, and Bonnie would have told him if it had been Elena’s idea. Scratch that, if Bonnie had known it was Elena’s idea. There was a core of bright warmth at Bonnie’s center that burned away any kind of black falsehood.
Maybe that was what kept her so warm. Here she was, dressed in less than he was, really, but radiating heat like a contented, purring cat. That last thought gave Stefan pause.
It didn’t seem right, for him to be dressed in his Tshirt while she was wearing only a camisole.
He had been startled when she’d taken off her sweater. But the next moment he had seen the gesture for what it was, a sign to convey familiarity and trust. The girls wore them all the time outside in the summer, it surely couldn’t be improper here.
He could never be sure whether his next move was the kind of noble gesture like that of the Victorian host throwing down knife and fork as a savage guest began eating with greasy fingers, or whether it was from far more human needs. He pulled back slightly and stripped off his own Tshirt.
Bonnie looked at him with wet, wondering eyes. He smiled a little and said, “It seemed I was overdressed with you just in the camisole. I can get an undershirt if you like—
but I promise you, in the name of all I hold dear—that nothing else is going to come off.” She nodded and shut her eyes, putting her head against his shoulder. Then she reached up and lightly ruffled his hair. “I always wanted to do that, from the first day I saw you,” she said. “And—this, too.” She stretched herself tall in his lap and lightly, softly kissed him on the mouth.
It took him a little by surprise. She was flushed, the blood glowing in her skin, radiating warmth, soaking from her into him.
When she shut her eyes and tilted her head back he didn’t need anyone to prompt him. He found that this cuddly kitten was also a very kissable young woman.
Moments flowed and floated. And then Bonnie said, rather short of breath, “Do it now. Don’t ask if I’m sure. Right here, now.”
And then there was a long time of pure rapture. Bonnie’s blood was sweet as honey and strawberries, and she wasn’t afraid or co
ntrolling herself, or holding anything back. She was giving the blood he needed for life itself without any confusion or doubt or anger. She even remembered—how could she remember anything?—to think about Elena, horseback riding, at a birthday party, gliding gracefully up to become Queen of some or other school function. More, she gave him the key; the mental combination, to her master memories about Elena. Now, whenever the two of them agreed, she could enter trance and he could rummage through her memories of Elena as he liked.
It was almost too much. It was too much. It enticed him to linger and linger, to let the strawberryhoney liqueur he was lapping, tippling, keep running down his throat.
“Sstefan?”
Dearheart. Bonniedearheart, he qualified, as if to show that he knew her.
Stefandearheart . . .
How can I ever thank you enough? Bonnie, I’ll go to my death happily tonight. I can never make it up to you, but I can certify that you’re already an angel.
I made you happy, then.
Can you have any doubt? This is what it can be when two . . . well, I won’t say lovers because we aren’t, not in the conventional sense. But this is what it can be when there’s no fear, only love.
And—you don’t think I’m just a little girl?
If I’d thought that you’d never have gotten your sweater off. You’re a woman, even if you’re still a girl. Some girls are. And some women of fifty are still girls.
She sighed and lapsed back. “I’m glad,” she whispered. “And you be sure that Damon knows it, too.”
What does Damon have to do—he began and then sensed something more urgent. He felt wonderful, yes, but when he calculated how much of her blood he had taken he nearly panicked.
“Bonnie?”
Let’s not talk just now, Stefan.
Bonnie, my titianhaired angel, we have to. I’ve done something awful. I took far too much of your blood. It can make you seriously ill, and there’s only one thing I can do to help you—if you consider it help.
There was a sluggish response.
He shook her. Bonnie, Bonnie dearest, don’t go to sleep!
Stefan kissed her on the mouth, hard, hoping that indignation or some other emotion would wake her. But Bonnie’s lips were soft and warm—and parted—under his.