by Amy Sparling
“Long story,” I say, exhaling as I snuggle against his chest. “I’ll tell you in the morning.”
***
When I open my eyes the next time, Theo is watching me, his head propped up on his elbow. My eyes widen. He looks like a new person. Still the same guy, of course, but new. Like he went to a spa or something. I hadn’t realized he’d had dark circles under his eyes, or that his skin was paler than usual until now that all of those things are gone. Theo’s dark hair is shinier, swooping over his head like a JQ model. His skin is tight and golden again, his golden eyes sparkling in the morning sunlight.
“Hey beautiful,” he says, flashing me a wide smile. He dips down to kiss me and I jerk away, putting my hand over my mouth. His brows flatten. I’ve offended him.
“Sorry,” I say under my hand. “Morning breath. You are not getting anywhere near these lips until I brush my teeth.”
He chuckles. “How about I go get us breakfast?”
I nod, still keeping my lips protected with my hand. “I’ll be kissable by the time you get back.”
Once he leaves, I jump out of bed and brush my teeth with a fury, using my mouthwash twice to make sure I will taste good. Then I run the brush through my hair and dab on some lip gloss. Theo’s already way out of my league and the last thing I want is to have him see me looking like a disgusting morning-breath zombie.
Riley is still asleep and I’m about to nudge her awake when Theo returns and renders me speechless. He seems taller, his muscles more pronounced. His jawline, fuzzy from stubble, is sharp. And those eyes. Theo looks like a fucking Roman God and now I can’t concentrate.
“Why do you look so good?” I ask, the words falling out of my mouth before I can think of better ones that make me sound more educated.
He sets the breakfast tray down on the table. “Um, thanks?”
“I’m serious,” I say, abandoning my sleeping best friend while I walk over to Theo. I grab his cheeks and press the skin backwards and forwards. “You look amazing. I mean, you’re always crazy hot, but damn. Something’s changed since I last saw you.”
“It’s um,” he says, tapping the necklace under his shirt. “The new donation. I should have seen the signs coming days before I passed out,” he says with a sigh. “I was too caught up in—other things—” he says, giving me a flirty wink, “—and I didn’t pay attention to my own body. Normally, I can feel when I need a new…blood transfusion.”
Ugh. It’s so weird to talk about using live humans as immortality lifebloods, and it’s even weirder to call it a blood transfusion for the sake of keeping up the lie. I wonder who is wearing Theo’s bracelet now. I wonder how long they have, what they accepted as payment in return for giving their life to Theo, a man they don’t even know.
“Well, let’s not let that happen again,” I say, playfully poking his stomach, and even that seems harder than usual. “You scared me.”
He kisses my forehead, his lips lingering on my skin. “It won’t happen again.”
Riley stirs on the floor, then sits up and yawns. “You’re back,” she says, raising her hands above her head in a stretch. “We have something to show you. Wait—” She blinks. “Damn, you look good, loverboy.”
If anyone else had said that to him, I’d be seething with jealousy, but Riley can get away with it. She’s the kind of best friend who can speak her mind, appreciate a hot guy, and not try to steal him away from you. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have her by my side.
“He got some rest,” I say, emphasizing the last word. “Now he feels a lot better.”
We eat breakfast and spend time sneakily catching Theo up to date on the ancient Greek book and our new translator computer. It takes a while, since we have to whisper some things and write out the more complicated things on the dry erase board. Theo hasn’t seen the book before, but he doesn’t think it’ll amount to much simply because, in his words, “Alexo is too careful to leave something like that laying around.”
Still, we’re going to translate it anyway because it’s the only lead we have. It takes about an hour to eat breakfast and explain everything with Riley and Theo. There’s something special in the way Theo is acting, even when we’re talking about serious topics. He keeps looking over at me, that smirk I love on his lips. It’s like he can’t stop looking at me, and I start to wonder if there’s something in my teeth. A trip to the bathroom tells me there’s not, and that I look pretty much normal. So why is he being like this? He can’t possibly have missed me as much as I missed him over the last two days. He was busy getting a lifeblood and trying to feel better and all I did was wait around and miss him like a pathetic dork.
When we’re done catching him up on what’s been going on, he tells us to hide the book so we don’t get caught with it, but we have a better idea. Riley has her digital camera, which has no access to Wi-Fi because it’s really old. We snap a picture of every page of the book and then load it onto our new laptop.
Keep the laptop hidden Theo writes on the board. No one will be snooping in your rooms, so it should be fine here. Just don’t let anyone see it.
I take the board from his hands and erase his message so I can write: don’t worry we’ve got this.
He leans over my shoulder as I write, and when I look up at him, he kisses me. Just like that. Riley makes this exaggerated gagging sound and shoves the last bite of toast into her mouth.
“Okay guys, I’m out of here. There’s so much sexual tension in this room I think I’m gonna vomit.”
Theo laughs and I want to bury myself in a deep hole and never resurface because she’s totally right. Normally Theo and I can’t keep our hands off each other, but it’s extremely bad today. He’s acting head over heels for me, and I’m loving every second of the attention, even if I don’t know what caused it. As soon as Riley leaves, Theo walks over to my door and locks it. Then he takes out a small roll of electrical tape from his pocket. I watch him curiously as he puts several layers of tape over the small speaker on my wall tablet.
“Not foolproof, but if we whisper we should be fine,” he says in a whisper to prove his point.
“Genius,” I say at a normal volume. Now I’m getting all kinds of ideas, like buying some of that foam from soundproof music booths and taping it over the tablet. Of course, it’d look suspicious if Alexo or Malina ever saw it. Maybe we can make something removable to take off when we leave the room.
“You are so beautiful when you sleep,” Theo says, his head tilting as he watches me from across the room.
“You’re being extra flirtatious today,” I tell him. I put my hands on hips and glare at him. “What’s your angle?”
“My angle is that I’m totally crazy about you.”
I break into a smile. “That’s good to know.”
“Yeah?” He saunters toward me, that grin of his turning sultry and his eyes softening. I can practically feel the dirty thoughts floating through his mind.
“Mmhmm,” I say, still trying to keep my cool, but now he’s so close and so handsome that it’s hard to stop my knees from wobbling.
In a swift motion, Theo scoops me up, his hands under my legs and neck. I squeal as he carries me to the bed and then lets me fall on top of the plush mattress. My whole body warms as he slowly crawls onto the bed, lowering himself on top of me. His hands are on either side of my pillow, his lips just inches away.
“Come here,” I whisper, and he does.
His kisses are ravenous, his body grinding against mine with an urgency I’ve never felt before. I grab his sides and feel the muscles ripple under my fingers as he bends down and trails kisses down my neck. The scruff on his jaw tickles, but his lips feel amazing.
“I still think you seem different,” I whisper against his shoulder.
“You could say I’m energized,” he whispers back. His hand slides under my back, pulling me off the mattress and closer to his body. My skin tingles from the heat of our skin, until everything feels electrified. He presses a
kiss to my collarbone and then moves lower, kissing down to the top of my bra, and then to the front clasp in the middle.
I am fully on board for whatever comes next, but he stops. His lips are pressed to my cleavage, one hand under my back and the other bracing himself on top of me. I exhale slowly, trying to get my thoughts to stop being so fuzzy with desire. Theo slides up and kisses me on the mouth. “Just testing my self-control,” he breathes, a grin playing on his lips. There’s some glitter from my lip gloss on his lips and I reach up and kiss it off of him.
“What if I don’t want you to have self-control?” I ask, trying to be sultry and flirtatious.
“You do,” he whispers back just before he kisses my neck. “We haven’t been together very long, love.”
“So?” My voice is breathy. I can’t concentrate with him so close to me, with our bodies pressed together and all of these annoying clothes in the way.
He rolls to the side, leaning on his elbow while his other hand gently slides down my ribcage, to my thigh and then back up. “I come from a time where men could wait longer than a few weeks,” he says, his eyes turning serious. “What we have is real, Cara. There’s no need to rush anything.”
I swallow. Now reality is back, slapping me with the coldness of real life. “I guess you’re right.”
“You’re a virgin, right?” he says, although I’m not sure if it’s a question or a statement.
I nod and look away. There’s really no point in lying to him. He’d see right through me. “All the more reason to take our time,” he says with a gentle smile as he runs his fingers through my hair.
“Won’t that drive you crazy though?” I ask, staring at his shirt because I can’t meet his eyes. “You’re a guy...and guys like… well…”
“There’s more to us than sex, Cara.” He frowns. “You drive me crazy, but in a very good way. Besides, there’s still so many things I want to learn about you. I don’t even know your favorite color, but I’m guessing it’s pink because of that bike out in the garage.”
“I guess it is pink,” I say. “I’ve never really thought about it. What’s yours?”
“Hmm… blue,” he says after a moment’s thought. “The kind of blue in a deep ocean.”
“I like this game,” I say as I snuggle against him. “I don’t even know your last name.”
“Theodore Price.”
“Theodore? That’s cute.”
He rolls his eyes. “Makes me sound old. I’ve been Theo most of my life. I don’t have a middle name because my parents didn’t seem to care about those things.”
“Did you have any siblings?” I ask.
“An older sister. She died of pneumonia when she was six.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He shrugs. “I don’t really remember it. My old life was so long ago. And it was a harsh, unforgiving life at that.” His lips brush against my forehead. “I’m happier now, with this life.” He swallows. “Tell me about your family.”
“I don’t know who my dad is,” I say simply because this is the sort of sad thing that everyone considers to be a tragedy but it doesn’t really bother me. “Mom was a drug addict. She left me at a McDonald’s one day, and the state took me and put me in a foster home. My uncle Will adopted me when I was twelve and then I lived with him until recently. My life has kind of been pointless so far. I hope I can change that soon, but with the way things are going…” I look at my bracelet. “I might die having never accomplished anything.”
“You won’t be tethered to that forever,” he says quietly.
I run my fingers down his shirt and then up his arm, to his jaw and down his neck until my fingers touch the silver chain of his necklace. “What else would you like to know?” he asks.
Maybe it’s the closeness I feel with him in this moment, or it’s knowing my room is sound-proofed with the tape, but I say exactly what I’m thinking. “Who’s your new lifeblood?”
“Well, it’s a guy with cancer,” he says quietly. “I don’t really want to talk about that though.”
It feels like a massive rejection and I can’t keep the pain off my face. “Cara,” Theo says, nuzzling against my cheek. “It’s—” He sighs. “Talking about that right now just pisses me off because of things that don’t have anything to do with you.”
“So why can’t you tell me?” I ask.
His lips press into a flat line. “Kyle talked my ears off while we were gone. He wouldn’t shut up about the benefits of getting a girl lifeblood, like how they do with you and the others.” His expression hardens. “I told them when I joined the clan that I’d use my own lifebloods and that I wouldn’t conform to their ways. They agreed, and now I’m being pressured to change. Normally Kyle is a cool guy, but he just wouldn’t stop trying to talk me into it. I get the feeling Alexo was pressuring him to convert me.”
“Why would they care?” I ask.
He presses his lips to my forehead before talking. “They see it as a sign of not being fully committed to the clan. I hoped things were going to work out, but now it seems like I need to conform to their ways to be seen as one of them.”
“Are you going to?”
He gives me a look like I should know better than to ask such a thing. “Of course not. But that’s the problem. If they start questioning my loyalties to the clan, we’re going to have a problem.”
“You are loyal to the clan though,” I say, peering at him while he stares at me, a serious look on his face. “Right?”
He smirks for a flash of a second and then he’s back to looking serious. He glances back at my taped over tablet and then says quietly, “Not exactly.”
Chapter 14
Silences stretches out like a rubber band between us, and although a million questions are going through my mind, I don’t want to speak and snap the rubber band. Theo watches me curiously, and it’s like he’s both dying to know what I’ll say and also somehow relieved that he just confessed this to me.
I lean forward. “You’re not loyal to the clan?” I whisper. A thousand feelings flit through me at once, but the biggest one is fear. Of him.
I can’t even imagine what this clan will do to a member who isn’t loyal. They kill us humans if we figure out what’s going on, so the punishment for an immortal is probably worse. Theo doesn’t say anything, but now I can’t shut up.
“This isn’t good!” I whisper. “What if they find out?”
I put a hand on his chest, feel the steady thumping of his heartbeat pushing against my fingers. “But we’re in the clan together,” I say, my voice still a whisper. “Why wouldn’t you be loyal to it?”
To me, I think.
Theo reaches for my hand and pulls it off his chest, then brings my knuckles up to his lips. They are soft as they graze the back of my hand.
“You deserve answers,” he says.
And then that’s all. He doesn’t say anything else, like, oh I don’t know, the answers he’s referring to. He’s insane if the thinks I’ll be okay with this.
I sit up and pull out my pony tail then fix my hair again. I need to keep my hands busy or I’ll start strangling him, or screaming, or I don’t know what. “Well, are you going to tell these answers to me?”
“Of course.” He smirks, then dips his head into a slow nod. “But not here.”
Sliding off my bed, Theo stands and stretches his arms above his head. “Let’s go for a hike today.”
“A…hike?”
He nods, then brings his elbow across his chest to stretch it out. “I need some sunlight and wide open spaces. And you.”
He leans over the bed, to where I’m now sitting, and stretches over to kiss me on the lips. “Get dressed and I’ll come get you in half an hour.”
“Will I get answers on this hike?” I ask, giving him the stink eye, both because I don’t like waiting for important information and a hike sounds kind of, well, athletic.
He taps my nose with his finger. “Of course.”
***
> Chef packs us a lunch in this really cute woven basket with wooden flap top. It’s exactly the kind of picnic basket you see in children’s books, and I never even knew they were real. This one is fancy though, the red plaid lining is actually covering a gel pack so it keeps the food cool. Theo loads it up in the trunk of the Camaro and then we ride out into the wide open spaces on the outskirts of Austin.
Since it’s ungodly hot outside, I chose to wear a pair of white shorts and a light pink tank top. I opened a new pair of Nike running shoes from the box and put them on for the first time since I ordered them online. When I think of hiking, I think of cargo pants and walking sticks, ugly hats and a compass. I didn’t want to look that dorky, so hope my outfit is decent for hiking. Of course, what I really hope is that Theo isn’t actually making us go hiking.
Theo’s hand rests on my bare thigh as he drives. I look over at him and take in his outfit—tan cargo shorts and a blue T-shirt. He looks like a regular college guy, maybe one who plays sports. It’s so weird to think that the rest of the world sees a normal, super attractive guy when they look at Theo. And I see someone who’s a hundred years old, with even more secrets than that.
“How much further?” I ask after fifteen minutes of riding in a comfortable silence. As long as Theo’s hand squeezes my thigh every few minutes and he looks over and smiles at me, the silence is never awkward.
“Not much,” he says. He lifts one finger off the steering wheel and points toward the horizon. “There’s a state park up there with great hiking trails.”
We pull into the park and it’s mostly empty. Two decked out SUVs are parked at the end of the lot, and they’re the kind of car that screams: My owner does a lot of hiking.
We’re in a sports car, and I feel like that accurately portrays my hiking ability.
Theo slips a backpack over his shoulder and then grabs the picnic basket.