by Molly Harper
I giggled silently against the skin of his jaw. His feet were so cold against my legs, but I didn’t dare make a noise. Jane and Gabriel had superhearing.
I wrapped my legs around his hips, throwing my head back as my own wet, willing flesh came into contact with his hard length. He was ready underneath those basketball shorts. His hands drifted lazily down my sides and squeezed at my hip bones, a reassuring little touch. I liked that he didn’t push. That he seemed to enjoy every step as much as I did. He wasn’t rushing to the finish line.
This felt right. Not because I was his sire or because we were the only two super-rare vampires in this tiny little weirdo boat but because his lips were the only ones I wanted to be kissing. Everything about our relationship was complicated except for this. I wanted him, and he wanted me. This was the moment I’d wanted, that night in front of my dorm. This was where I’d hoped that flirting and fun would lead before everything went awry and I went into foster survival mode, and hmm, what was that thing he was doing with his tongue?
Ben climbed up the mattress to stretch completely over me. His hips cradled into mine as his hands spanned my waist, sliding under my butt and arching me up as he pressed between my thighs. I rolled my hips, chasing the sensation of feeling him against me. I moaned into his mouth, which seemed to spur him on, making his kisses more urgent. I tugged at his hair, breaking from his lips to kiss along the curve of his jaw.
He flicked his tongue against the skin behind my ear. I threaded my fingers through his hair, scratching my nails along his neck. My feet stroked his legs. I couldn’t seem to touch enough of him. I wanted it all, every inch of skin. I wanted to touch it, to taste it, to make him feel all the things he was making me feel.
His mouth tasted like cinnamon and sin. It was want, pure and simple.
We didn’t have much time before sunset. And that meant he was going to be in my bed when the others got up.
I rolled, pinning him down with my hips. My fangs sneaked out of my mouth, scraping against his nipple. He hissed but gripped at my shoulder, keeping me in place. I pressed those sharp points against his skin, testing and teasing until he was panting.
Panting myself, I slipped my own hand into the elastic of his shorts, pulling at them. He pulled back, watching me as I tugged at his clothes, his lips wet and parted. He nodded, pressing his forehead against mine and lifting his hips so I could pull his shorts all the way off. I’d just managed to get his underwear below his ass when something thumped against my door.
We both froze.
Fitz whimpered from the hall, scratching at my door. I could hear Jane’s voice, just outside, saying, “Is she not awake yet, buddy? Why don’t you give her a few more minutes? She had a rough one last night.”
My eyes locked with Ben’s, and I mouthed, Don’t think anything.
Fitz whimpered again, and I could hear his paws crawling up the door.
Jane sighed. “Aw, OK, buddy, but let her sleep. No chewing on her blankets.”
The doorknob turned, and Ben scrambled out from under me. He landed noiselessly on my floor and rolled under my bed. Jane opened the door just enough for Fitz to wriggle through and shut it behind him. The gray-brown blur of dog sprang across the room and landed on my bed with a flump, nearly dislodging me from the sheets.
“No, Fitz, off the bed,” I whispered as he attempted to cover my face in slobber. “Off.”
Fitz rolled to the floor, sniffing and searching until he found Ben. He yapped happily when Ben crawled out from under my bed. All traces of sexy times had disappeared. Ben looked ashamed and a little panicked.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “This was a bad idea. I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s OK,” I told him. “I wanted to.”
“I shouldn’t have,” he said. “Let’s just, uh, let’s just forget this happened, OK?”
Somewhere inside me, there was a witty retort that demanded to know what exactly Ben meant by that and required him to act more like a damn grown-up and less like my dad had just caught him rifling through my panty drawer. But what my brain came up with was “Uh . . .”
And with that, Ben stuck his head out into the hallway and checked for our housemates. I guessed the coast was clear, because he slipped past the door without another word and closed it quietly behind him. I flopped back onto the bed. Fitz propped his head on the mattress, huffing at me, trying to get my attention.
I rolled toward him, rubbing the top of his massive head. “What the hell just happened?”
Because dogs could not shrug, Fitz settled for licking my face.
Ben didn’t withdraw from my life. He didn’t avoid me. He did exactly what he’d asked me to do, which was pretend that the whole making-out-after-sleeping-on-top-of-me thing didn’t happen. He was perfectly friendly. He let me have the last Hemo Pop for breakfast when we ran out. He let me ride shotgun in Jane’s car on the way to work. He even held doors open for me. But he didn’t make eye contact. Our conversation was stilted and weird, like the sort of small talk you would make during a job interview.
I spent most of my time trying not to think about what had happened, because Jane did not need those visuals in her head. Also, I didn’t want to be grounded for having a boy in my room.
To avoid this mental pitfall when I was sitting just a few feet outside my psychic foster mom’s office door, I threw myself into work. I’d managed to tame my laundry cart of files. But more paperwork crossed my desk every night, and some of it was pretty damned interesting.
It was enough to keep me distracted and thinking of something besides Ben’s thrusty hardness, especially when a bright red—as in alarmingly red—folder with Ophelia’s name in bold block printing was delivered while I was on my lunch break.
At this point, I’d pretty much lost my qualms about looking through sensitive paperwork—though I will say that the sheer redness of the folder made me pause for just a second. The top sheet of the file was marked “Ophelia Lambert—Rehabilitation Progress.”
The report was pretty bland, discussing Ophelia’s progress on UK’s campus and her “lack of proven murders.” Who the hell wrote this? Did Ophelia have some sort of social worker she had to report to every week? I tried to imagine that vampire paper pusher. And it made me laugh.
Wait a minute.
I opened my “mystery drawer” full of loose papers that I had not yet figured out how to file. Most of them were reports that had fallen out of file folders when they were tossed into the giant laundry cart. I remembered a two-page printed e-mail with Ophelia’s name at the bottom, an e-mail that included a lot of cursing. Maybe that was supposed to go in this file? I shuffled through the papers until the all-caps cuss words jumped out at me.
I set the e-mail aside, just in case Jane wanted me to add it to Ophelia’s file. As I was shuffling Ophelia’s papers around, another monthly expense report from Tina slid out onto my desk. This one listed even more vampire students than the last. That didn’t make any sense. Students weren’t allowed to change their room assignments at this point in the year, so why was Tina requesting more money?
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was underestimating the number of students in my building. I mean, I’d been pretty busy with classes and having a life. Was this the sort of thing I should even be worrying about right now?
I frowned at the report and its overwhelming numbers, blinking out at my keen eyes like they were written in red neon.
It was either that or think about Ben and what he’d meant by “This was a bad idea.”
“Right.” I picked up my receiver and dialed Keagan’s cell, taking advantage of Jane’s absence to make a not completely kosher phone call. My suite mate worked evening shifts at the front desk at New Dawn to earn a student stipend—a whopping hundred dollars per month. It was enough to cover Keagan’s cell-phone bill and keep her dad off her back about our generation’
s “poor work ethic.”
Keagan’s voice growled into the phone. “If this is a telemarketer or that creep from my Psych class, I swear to God, I’m going to hang up.”
And that was when I remembered that the Council phones had a “ghost” area code that wouldn’t allow Keagan to see that I was calling from inside the state.
“Keagan, is that how you normally greet people on the phone? You were such a nice girl when I lived in your suite. Maybe I should move back.”
“Meagan! Are you allowed to call me right now? Are you OK? Wait, are you calling me from a landline?” she said. “Ew. Just because you’re working for moldy old vampires doesn’t mean that you have to use their technology.”
“I am calling you for a semiofficial reason, so I don’t think I’m violating the spirit of Jane’s rules. And also, I’m pretty sure you just used vampire hate speech. Like if we weren’t friends, I would file a complaint with the campus Anti-Deadism League and get you fired from your little front-desk job.”
“Well, it’s a good thing we’re friends, then,” she drawled. “I would hate to lose my lucrative future in customer service.”
“Sweetie, you hate customers. And service. You’re just too Southern to say anything about it,” I said, laughing, even when I saw Ben and Gigi come walking down the hall.
Ben caught sight of my wide grin and smiled back, like it was a reflex. And then he seemed to remember his sudden departure from our thrusty high jinks, and his face fell into a mask of detached politeness.
Gigi, on the other hand, was still waving and grinning. Honestly, that girl’s friendliness was starting to freak me out. I gave her a little waggle of the fingers and pointed to my phone receiver. Ben got no waggle. We would both have to get used to disappointment.
And because my vampire quickness allowed me to multitask like a boss, I balanced the receiver under my chin, opened my e-mail program, and started a new message to Ophelia. I made it short, something that wouldn’t ping on the Council’s “keywords sensors” on my communications.
Hey Ophelia,
I have a quick question for you about some paperwork. Can you give me a call? I’m sure that Jane gave you the number for my KidPhone.
—Meagan
OK. That should have satisfied my curiosity, right? That should have settled this growing sense of unease in my chest. But it didn’t. Something just short of anxiety gnawed away at me, making me feel like I was squirming inside my skin. So I pressed forward with my somewhat underhanded questioning of my friend.
“That is true. You would be doing me a favor.” Keagan sighed. “I’m assuming you’re calling me for some reason other than just distracting me from my very important mail-sorting duties?”
“Yes. Does Tina still make you run daily census reports?” I asked, picking up a stack of Post-its and my favorite red pen.
Keagan snorted. “Yes, at the end of every shift, I e-mail Tina a list of residents, sorted into living and undead columns on an Excel spreadsheet. Because there’s a huge chance of that number suddenly changing overnight . . . except for that day a few weeks ago when we suddenly had one kid jump into the vampire column. Sorry, that was insensitive.”
“Eh, coming from you, kinda borderline.”
“Thanks. Is there some reason you’re grilling me about random tasks from my job description?” she asked.
“I was hoping you might be able to do one for me?”
“What? A census report?”
“Yes, and I need you not to ask me any questions about it.” I winced, waiting for my friend to blast me for putting her in an awkward position and asking too much of her.
“OK.”
“Really?” I took the phone away from my face and gave it a skeptical brow lift.
“Yeah, it’s not like you’re asking me for names and social security numbers here, Meg. I’ve got to do this tonight anyway. You’re just preventing me from procrastinating.” I heard her clicking the keys on her desktop keyboard. “OK, we have one hundred eighty-three vampire students on the roster. And one hundred twenty-one human students.”
I wrote the number on my Post-it and glanced back at Tina’s most recent report. Tina was padding both columns by about thirty students. “You’re sure about that?”
“Nope, I just picked those numbers out of a hat. Because that’s how I make my own fun.”
“Fair enough, smartass.”
“And my work here is done.” I could practically hear Keagan raising her arms in a V of sarcastic victory.
“Can you do me a favor? Don’t tell anyone that I called and asked about this?”
“Yes, I can do this very vague and mysterious thing you’re asking me to do. Mostly because I don’t think anyone will be all that interested.”
“I’m serious, Keagan.”
“I know. I can tell. Are you OK, Meg?”
“I’m sure it’s just a problem with paperwork, but it’s part of my job to track these things down, so . . .”
“Gross. Your job is even more boring than mine.”
“That’s the glamorous life of the vampire.” I sighed. “So what’s going on with you? I feel like we haven’t talked much lately. And most of our conversations have boiled down to ‘Miss you so much . . . ah, I don’t know what to talk about with you now because our lives are so separate.’ ”
“It’s not that exciting around here—tests, classes, the usual. Nothing compared to dramatic death and vampire transformation scenes.”
“So gimme the campus gossip not included in that care package. Which I did appreciate quite a bit, by the way.”
“Uh, some girl freaked out at the haunted house fund-raiser and punched Carson in the nuts when he jumped out in front of her.”
“Carson probably did something to deserve it,” I said, remembering the time the handsy junior cornered me in the research library and tried to charge me a “hug tax” to get out of the stacks. I ended up knocking several volumes of Shakespeare analysis onto his feet to get past him.
“Probably,” she reasoned. “Professor Greene walked out of a class in protest after some guy turned in a three-hundred-word PowerPoint presentation instead of the twenty-page research paper he was supposed to do. Oh, and you know that fire off campus? The fire department went through the rubble and found three bodies in the basement.”
“Oh, no! Were they kids from school?”
“Not sure yet. Morgan is super-involved in the story for the school newspaper, so I’m getting so many details that I am having nightmares. The medical examiners haven’t identified them. But the coroner told Joanie—you know, the hyper girl who covers the police blotter—that the bodies didn’t have any ash or soot in their lungs, so they probably died before the fire. But that’s not even the weird part. The bodies were chained to the wall! Like something out of some creepy Eli Roth movie.”
“Ugh, that’s awful.” I shuddered but straightened in my chair when I saw Jane and Dick coming down the hall. “And I know this is a terrible moment to hang up on you, because you’re clearly distressed that your roommate is sharing autopsy reports with you. But I have to go, because my boss is coming. I love you, buh-bye.”
I dropped the receiver onto the cradle.
“Hey, Jane!” I said, smiling an “I wasn’t just making a somewhat personal phone call on company time” smile. I handed her a stack of phone-message slips, which she accepted with a hesitant frown. “Hi, Dick.”
Dick grinned at me and ruffled my hair, because he seemed to see me as some sort of vampire niece who would put up with this. I scowled at him, but that was short-lived when his “An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, But Only If You Have Good Aim” T-shirt made me laugh.
“Is that Ophelia’s progress report?” Jane asked, picking up the nuclear-red folder. She opened the file and scanned the papers inside.
“And this is wh
ere I bow out, because I’m not an impartial party when it comes to Ophelia.” Dick excused himself, kissing Jane’s cheek and ruffling my hair one more time before retreating to the break room.
“Yeah, do you remember an e-mail that Ophelia sent you a week or so before I was turned?”
Jane peered over the folder at me. “A profanity-filled rant where she told me it was none of my blanking business who she blanking had contact with when it wasn’t on the blanking campus that she rarely blanking left since I wouldn’t let her own a blanking car and if I had blanking questions I could blanking well call her myself? And then explicit instructions to go blank myself? And then, oddly, with the list of her contacts in the area attached?”
I read over the e-mail. “That sounds about right.”
“Yes, it was memorable. But I sent her back a response saying I had no clue what she was talking about. She didn’t reply, and I figured she was either embarrassed, which wasn’t likely, or had realized she was mistaken and had already moved on to the next person on her curse-out list.”
“And you didn’t punish her for being disrespectful to you?”
Jane waggled her hand. “Eh, considering Ophelia’s previous interactions, the ‘go blank yourself’ e-mail was actually pretty cordial.”
“Really?” I winced, mentally counting the number of creatively employed four-letter words. “So I’m assuming that this e-mail should be included in her rehab progress file?”
Jane nodded. “Yes, just mark it ‘Informational only, not for sentence consideration.’ ”
I gave her a little salute. “That sounds vaguely official. Do you want to include some note about what led to the ranty e-mail?”
“I don’t know what led to the ranty e-mail.”
“But I remember her talking about it. She said you sent Tina an e-mail asking for a list of her known associates in the area around the college. She was . . . not pissed, really, I think she was kind of hurt that you would be suspicious when she was making every effort to behave well.”