by Rae, Nikki
I can’t shake the uneasy feeling that begins to creep its way into my stomach. My heart begins to pump faster once again and I’m aware of each pulsing beat slamming against my nerve endings, jumping against my bones. It’s like I’m running into a wall while holding completely still, and instead of feeling the pain of the impact, I’m waiting for it, only for the whole process to start again. And again. And again.
“Sophie,” Myles says, cautious. “Take a breath.”
I shake my head again while letting air into my lungs at the same time, just to prove that I’m breathing because I have to and not because he told me to.
He loosens the grip he has around my arms, but not enough to let me go. Not enough so I can get away, walk through the door, and run far, far away from all of this.
I squeeze my eyes shut, my jaw aching from clenching my teeth together so I won’t start crying yet again. “I can’t,” I whisper. “This is so fucked up.”
Myles finally lets go of me but I’m too weak to move by myself now and he has to help me sit back down. “Tell me what you’re feeling right now,” he says. “Please?”
I swallow, not able to speak around the lump in my throat.
“So you don’t want to drink it at all?” he asks. I can tell he’s trying not to push, but he kind of has to in order to try and fix whatever is wrong with me.
I shake my head.
He pulls up another chair so he can sit in front of me but I’m too overcome with shame to look into his eyes. “What about in general?” he asks. “If you don’t think about drinking blood.” Myles places a hand on my knee. “You don’t crave it?”
I stare at the white tiles beneath my boots and think that if I try to drink what’s in these cups, there’s a good chance the contents will end up on its pristine surface.
“What do you mean?” I whisper.
Myles shifts in his seat, thinking, I guess. I still can’t look at him, but a part of me is extremely grateful that he hasn’t taken his hand off of my knee. “Do you suddenly feel cold sometimes and catch yourself thinking about a particular person? When someone human touches you, do you feel yourself trying to absorb as much of their warmth as possible?”
I think about the past few days. People touching me. How Jade placed a hand on me when Evan showed up and how warm it felt. Myles’ hand on my leg right now reminds me of that, only his touch is more of a lukewarm imitation.
“That’s good,” he says to himself. “It means your body’s reacting the way it should now that’s it’s turned.”
I sniff. “Then why doesn’t it work?” I ask. “Why does it make me sick?” I brave a glance up at him and he’s staring right at me.
Then his hand leaves my leg, only to reconnect again at my face. He takes my chin and carefully lifts my head so I have no choice but to look at him. He brushes his knuckle across my cheek even though the tears have stopped. I expect him to answer me. I expect him to tell me how we’re going to figure all this out or how eventually, my body will accept what it needs and that I have nothing to worry about. But he doesn’t say anything. He just holds my face in his hand, staring into me as I stare into him. His eyes are oceans keeping me afloat. I could stare into them forever, as long as it means I’m no longer thinking or feeling anything but calm and the overwhelming warmth that fills me.
It starts at my jaw, where his fingers are, but it begins to spread. It isn’t like anything I’ve ever felt before. It’s not like I can compare it to being in the sun, but it’s warm. Like the sun is blooming inside of me and radiating outward.
Myles takes his other hand and smoothes it through my hair, letting it linger at the back of my neck. “How’s that?” he whispers. “Better?”
I nod slowly, soaking up his touch like I’ve been starving for months and he’s come to feed me. For all I know, that’s exactly what’s happening.
“Close your eyes,” he murmurs.
This time, without hesitation, my eyelids shut.
We sit in silence for a long time then. The warmth coming off of his palm is hot enough to fuse to my face but it doesn’t hurt at all. It’s not exactly heat, either. Not all of it.
That’s what I’m drawn to initially, but what I want runs deeper than that. So much deeper. I can’t form it into one coherent thought, let alone words. It’s something that runs through me, crashes around me, engulfs every part of my mind, body, and whatever is left of my soul.
Somewhere, I can feel Myles’ hand slip down my neck even more, coming back around to settle on my shoulder so that his fingertips rest on my collar bone for a few seconds before he spreads them apart, his palm against my bare skin. This sets a jolt of static electricity through me, but not like when you get shocked. This isn’t on the surface. Everything is inside of me, centuries, galaxies, monuments and ruins.
I feel every movement his body makes as if they were my own. As if it’s my legs standing up, my knee against the chair, pushing me closer to the table. It’s almost like it’s my lips against my own forehead, my hands against my own skin.
Myles’ hand leaves his mark, sliding across the bone beneath it so slowly, but my body aches for him to go slower, to make this last longer. His hand moves to my hair, to the base of my skull, gently grasping the hair there.
“How about now?” he asks. His voice is hoarse, like he’s straining against the weight of not only me and him, but thousands of other people. Like at any moment, the world will come crashing down on top of us and we won’t be able to do a thing about it. Part of me wants that. A really big part. I have to clear my throat a few times in order to get any type of response out.
“Good,” I whisper, though it sounds more like a plea.
“Okay,” Myles says after a while. His hands have not left me; his warmth has only grown. “In a few minutes, I’m going to tell you to open your eyes, okay?”
I want to shake my head and protest. I want to cry at the thought of looking at anything right now. At feeling anything but this. My heart begins to pump in overtime yet again. My head begins to pulse with the same pain as before. It’s all happening too fast.
“Don’t panic,” he says, a hint of amusement lingering in his voice. “Everything is fine.”
A surge of warmness floods through me then and my back becomes less rigid against the wood of the chair and my hands relax at my sides.
“That’s better,” he says. “See? Everything is okay.” He takes a breath and I feel like the air is filling my own lungs. “I want you to hold out your hand in front of you, palm up. Can you move enough to do that?”
It takes me a while to figure out what the question means, but once I realize that I have control over my limbs, I nod.
“Okay,” he says. “Do that now.”
Slowly, like it doesn’t even belong to me but is being pulled by an invisible string, my right arm raises, my fist unclenching into an open palm.
“That’s really good, Sophie,” Myles says, and the praise is enough to make me start crying for some reason. I am so indescribably happy that I’m making him happy right now.
“Now what?” I whisper, wanting to feel more of that joy.
“Don’t worry about what I want,” he says, maybe sensing the reason behind the question. “Listen to your body,” he says. “Don’t judge it. Don’t try to stop it. Just let it take what it wants.”
I hesitate and at the same time the heat begins to dissipate. For the longest second of my life, I’m the coldest I’ve ever been. A chill runs through me so deeply that I’m convinced for that entire second that I really am dead. That there is nothing left that is living in me at all. But as soon as I melt back into his touch, it disappears. I am warm once more.
“Don’t try to stop whatever you’re about to do,” Myles says. “Whatever it is, you’re not going to hurt me or yourself or anyone else. You don’t have to hide what you feel. It’s safe here.”
Myles continues to say things like that; things that put me at ease the longer he’s talking. His voice i
s an instrument that sings to me, the part of me that is unreachable through any other means. I don’t have to be afraid. I don’t have to hide. Whatever is inside of me can be set free and do what it needs to do so it, along with the part of me that is still hanging onto my humanity, can survive.
“I know what you’re feeling right now,” Myles says so quietly that if he spoke any softer, I wouldn’t hear him at all. “We’re connected,” he whispers, and I hear him move so he’s behind me. “My pain is your pain. Your joy is my joy.” He pauses, and I want him to continue. My head leans back against the seat so that the back of my skull is resting against his chest. One of his hands slowly strokes my hair, encouraging me as my hand snakes farther away from my body and closer to the cups on the table.
“Open your eyes,” he says, so close to my head that it’s like he’s inside it. “Open your eyes and do what you need to.”
Without an ounce more of hesitation or thinking, my eyes open, everything in front of them spinning before turning a cool grey. I don’t even see it when my hand grasps onto the first glass, which is cold, but doesn’t send the same chill through me as anything had before.
Of course, there’s an undeniable moment of fear, making the grey splinter and burn before Myles speaks. “No thinking,” he reminds me.
I reach for a light blue mug instead and it’s too far away so he slides it in front of me. I don’t move. I stare at the dark liquid. It smells like salt and brown slams me so quickly and so strong that I have to shut my eyes. My head pounds. My tongue is dry.
“Tell me what you’re going through right now, Sophie,” Myles says softly.
I take in a deep breath and when I let it out, it burns in my lungs and down my throat. My hands are twitching on the table. I want to find something to wrap them around. And squeeze. Hard. I want to feel something beating between them, something full of life.
“I want everything to be quiet,” I say out loud. “I want...”
“Keep going,” Myles encourages. “You know what it is.”
“I want to hurt you.” I shake my head. That can’t be right. “No,” I correct myself. “That’s not what I feel.”
“You want to hurt someone?” Myles suggests.
I can’t respond to that.
“That’s okay,” he says. “That’s normal.”
“Normal.” I repeat the words, but they taste like ashes in my mouth.
“That throbbing in your head,” he continues. “You want to feel it in your hands, right?”
I nod.
“You want to feel it in your chest.”
I place a hand over my heart. “I do feel it in my chest,” I say, but the beating underneath isn’t strong enough. It isn’t what I need. “Kind of.”
He pushes the mug over to me a few more inches, and my hands, without my permission, wrap themselves around the ceramic. There’s a heat that fills me when I look into the cup now. There’s something inside of me that’s almost excited about what I have in my hands. Something in me is saying that this is what I want. This is how I’m going to feel better.
“You’re still thinking like a human,” Myles says, interrupting my thoughts. “That’s good, mostly.” One of his fingers traces the handle of the coffee mug. It’s close to my hand, but he doesn’t touch me. “But you don’t need to worry about that part of you right now,” he says. “All you have to worry about is that hunger you feel. Concentrate on that. Let it take over.”
My hands begin to shake as the thumping consumes all of the other sounds in the room. When I look up at Myles, I’m surprised that everything in Alex’s tiny kitchen isn’t shaking too. Pictures should be flying off of the walls, dishes should be crashing to the ground.
Myles’ eyes lock onto mine.
Go ahead. His voice is inside me now.
I gulp down the first cup and it’s smooth, like water. However, once I’ve swallowed, it’s back in my mouth and I spit it back into the cup.
Myles hands me a napkin and I quickly wipe my mouth. Everything is quiet now. The steady thump in my temples is gone. The colors have vanished. All I can hear is the rough crinkle of the paper napkin as I swipe at my lips.
“That’s okay,” he says. “It just wasn’t the right one.”
I stare at the other assorted glasses and cups lined up in a row.
“I can’t,” I say, my stomach burning.
“You can.”
I keep going, cup after cup. None of them stay down for long before they come back, into the cup and out of my body. By the time I get to the one with water in it, my eyes are swollen and my brain feels like it will dribble out of my ears at any minute.
“Can I please stop now?” I ask.
Myles’ hand is on my back, but with his free hand, he pushes the last glass over. “Just one more,” he says. “I want to try something different with this one.”
The words, combined with the red liquid spreading into the pink in front of me make me jump. I lean over until I’m on the floor, kneeling in front of him, begging.
“You have no idea how this feels,” I say. “You may think you know. You may think you’ve felt every possible form of pain or confusion, but you’re wrong.”
I hear Myles take in a breath. He lets it out, and when I think he’s about to speak again, he’s taking in another sharp breath. He’s angry.
“I have no idea?” he asks, and the calmness in his tone makes me more uneasy than if he were yelling. He takes in yet another breath. This time, it seems to steady him. He kneels down in front of me and stares me directly in the face.
“I know what you’re going through is horrible,” he says, letting out a gust of air. “I know that I can’t possibly fathom what it’s like for you because no one has ever turned and changed the way you have.”
What happens next surprises me most of all. His face twists up as if someone’s hit him in the side of the head or punched him in the stomach. He runs a hand through his hair and takes an extra long time when he blinks.
“But...” he says, just above a whisper. I can barely hear him. “But one of my vampires is slowly dying, and so is one of my best friends...and when they’re both gone, all I have left is you. And you hate me.” His voice cracks at the end of the sentence.
I open my mouth to speak, but he holds up a hand.
“You’re supposed to hate me,” he says. “You shouldn’t have to be stuck to me, to have to depend on me because I made you.” He swallows. “But that’s how whatever this thing is works...and I’m not going to watch you die.” He moves closer. “I can’t watch you die when everyone else around me isn’t going to live to see another year.”
I open my mouth again, but I can’t seem to find any words to let out. I can’t find the strength in me to scream anymore. I just can’t.
“So,” he says, the tone weaker now, fading almost as much as I am. “If you don’t want to drink the blood, that’s fine. And if you don’t want a donor, okay. But you have to try to get blood in you somehow. I’m not going to let you waste away and I won’t watch it.”
He gulps. “I can’t watch you die again. Please don’t make me.”
Suddenly, the tension in my hands and arms is gone. My jaw is unclenched. My heart has stopped pounding so loudly. “Myles,” I say. “I–I’m sorry.”
He shakes his head. “You have nothing to apologize for,” he says. “I’m the one who did this to you.”
Suddenly I remember what Evan said to me at the club: Do you feel your maker in your bones and your blood? Do you feel his pain over your own?
The truth is, I hadn’t even thought about what Myles was going through. I hadn’t even thought it was possible for him to be feeling the same things I was. For him to be hurting the way I’ve been. Maybe he isn’t, not in the same exact way. But who am I to say whose pain is worse? It’s true. He did do this to me. Maybe if we had never met, I’d still be human and not going through any of this right now. But it isn’t his fault that he did this to me. How can you let someone�
��s head slip beneath the waves when they’re drowning? How do you let them stay under when you can save them?
My hand finds his, which is cold against the already cool floor. He doesn’t flinch away when I squeeze his fingers. After a little while, I let go, sitting back in the chair. He sits down too, facing me. Before I can talk myself out of it, I take a huge gulp of the last glass of blood. As soon as it hits my tongue, I want to spit it out. When I get it down my throat, it burns, and my body threatens to choke it back up. As soon as it hits my stomach, I feel it. It’s cold and horrible. My body wants nothing to do with it. I only get a quick glance at Myles before he grabs my face. He stares into my eyes, and something behind his is different. When his pupils dilate, I can almost see into him.
“Listen to me,” he says quickly, but with the most authority I’ve ever heard.
The blood is coming back up slowly. My eyes start burning from the effort of trying to keep it down.
“You’re not going to vomit anymore,” he says. “Do you understand?”
The blood sits still, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t angry where it lays.
“Sophie,” he says, his voice softer, yet still commanding. “You’re going to hold onto that blood until it filters through your body, understand? You have no other choice.”
I swallow. He can’t be doing this. He can’t. “Myles,” I whisper. “Please don’t do this.”
“Just a few hours,” he says. “That’s all your body needs.”
I start breathing heavily, my heart hammers in my chest.