The sweatpants might be interesting. He had, of course, dressed in loose-fitting clothes in preparation for the evaluation.
I explained about the pumpkins. Johnny seemed happy enough to delay it and carve pumpkins first. He sat next to me. Beverley was across from us. I was elated by his nearness yet I felt shy.
“Yuck!” Beverley stuck her tongue out and made a face, but dug her hand into the pumpkin’s webby innards and pulled up another handful of gelatinous goo and slick seeds. “It’s so cold and slimy! I like it and hate it all at once!” She giggled.
I knew exactly how she felt.
“Ready to scoop it out?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
I held the bucket while she had fun scraping out the sticky stuff. “We’ll dump this in the cornfield for the deer when we’re done.” I let her play with the stuff in the bucket while I used a big spoon to smooth out the interior of her pumpkin, then mine. Beverley preferred to squeeze the goo through her fingers in the bucket.
Johnny spooned all the seeds loose inside his pumpkin’s hull, then, upon approaching the bucket, announced he felt sick and acted like he was throwing up as he dumped the innards into the bucket and on her hands. Beverley thought it was hilarious.
Their faces were both lit with joy. It was a great moment, a memory to keep. After the first handfuls of pumpkin goo were flung at each other, though, I wondered why I hadn’t seen it coming.
“Now, kiddies,” I protested.
Johnny splattered goo across the front of my white V-neck shirt.
“Hey!” I said loudly, standing. I’d managed to keep my shirt and jeans clean until then.
They went stock still, busted little kids, the both of them. I stepped over and grabbed the bucket from him.
“If you’re going to include me in your mess-making, I have to have some ammunition too!” I held the bucket with my knees and grabbed handfuls out to throw at them. Shrieking with laughter, Beverley grabbed the bucket back and a bucket-stealing goo-fight began in earnest.
Beverley threw a handful and it landed in my hair. I gave a squeal and turned away, right into Johnny’s arms. In a perfect cartoon-hero voice, he said, “Don’t worry, Princess, I’ll protect you from the seed-spitting dragon!” In my ear he added, “But the one-eyed, seed-spitting monster you’ll have to take care of yourself.”
Orange goo splatted across Johnny’s cheek.
“That’s it!” he said, letting me go. Grinning, he chased her around the garage. Beverley screamed and laughed. When he caught her, he tickled her until he got the bucket away from her. He threw a handful at me. It splattered against my collarbone and slid down into my shirt, cold in my cleavage.
“No, no!” Beverley laughed. “The prince doesn’t turn into the seed-goo-dragon! He just saved the princess from it. Now she has to kiss him as a reward!”
Johnny quickly turned and offered her a high-five. “That’s a great idea,” he said, setting the bucket down to come to me. “You heard her.”
“Um … but—”
“Oh stop.” Johnny leaned in and tapped his unsplattered cheek. “Plant it right there.”
I made it a quick peck. “It still counts,” I announced quietly, “as one of the hundred.”
He winked. “Eighty-five to go.”
“Eighty-one,” I corrected.
He feigned confusion. “No, I’m sure I have eighty-five left.”
“Are you trying to steal them or are they just not memorable anymore?”
“I cherish each one, which is why they’re worth stealing.” He moved in like he might steal another.
Then goo hit him in the chest. Beverley had reclaimed the bucket.
Minutes later, saddened by how quickly the innards of three big pumpkins could run out, we heard, “You three are a fright.” Nana stood in the doorway, a spot of seeds centered on her cabbage-rose shirt and a deep scowl on her face.
“That’s perfect because it’ll be Hallowe’en soon,” Beverley said, giggling.
“It’s going to be dinner long before it’s Hallowe’en,” she retorted. “And all of you will have to get cleaned up first.”
“Aw, but we haven’t carved faces yet,” Johnny said.
“Tomorrow,” Nana said firmly. “Come on, Beverley.”
“Okay.” She trudged across the garage, but grinned at us from the doorway. “That was wicked awesome!” She darted inside. Nana shut the door.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Pumpkin seeds hung from my hair, spotted my jeans and shoes. Johnny was no better. “Kid’s got a good arm, good aim,” he said, picking seeds from his hair and trying unsuccessfully to flick them from his fingers into the bucket.
The goo in my cleavage was uncomfortable, so while he wasn’t watching, I started digging it out in a very un-ladylike manner. “Seeing her laughing just feels so good.” I thought of Lorrie; she would have approved of a pumpkin goo-fight. My eyes got a little moist, but I didn’t have a clean hand to wipe them with.
“Yeah,” he said, turning to me. Then, “What are you doing?”
“The goo got in my shirt. I’m just getting it out.”
“Can I help?”
“You wish.”
“Duh.” He waited. “You’re a mess.”
“You should talk.”
He brought the bucket over and started picking seeds out of my hair.
“Ow! You’re pulling!”
“Sorry.” He tried again. “It might just be easier if we took a shower and then cleaned up the drain.”
We?
I stared hard at Johnny’s chest and began picking seeds from his shirt and acted like I hadn’t heard the statement.
“You’re biting your lip,” he said.
I was. I stopped. “If we get cleaned up there’ll still be time to do a training evaluation, right?”
“Oh,” he said in a high, condescending tone. “So you have to start clean if you’re going to fight?”
“No.”
He put up his arms, hands lightly fisted, and bent his knees into a ready stance. “C’mon, then.”
I dropped my hands and shook my head as I said, “Johnny, I can’t just—” I lashed out quickly, knowing he wouldn’t expect it, and kicked him, following with a left-right-left that had him backpedaling across the garage. I dropped into a ready stance. “I protected new wæres from hostile wæreophobes.”
He grinned. “Yeah. But how often did you fight wæres?” Johnny came at me.
I kicked, ducked, and stepped past him. He went the opposite direction, grabbed the water hose from its coil hanging on the wall, unreeling it from the bracket, and turned the handle to the faucet it was connected to.
“No,” I said.
I heard the rush of water into the hose, but he hadn’t turned the attached spray nozzle on.
“Oh yeah. I said you were a mess. I’m just helping,” he said innocently.
“No,” I said more firmly.
He lowered the nozzle, snorted, and raised it again. “You’ve got a white shirt on. That’s almost a dare. I can’t help myself.” Water shot across the garage.
I lunged at him, squealing and laughing, hands out to block, and slipped past him to shut it off at the source. He blasted me from the back until the hose ran out of water. I unscrewed the hose from the spigot. Enough of that. It was cold.
“No fair,” he whined and let the nozzle and hose sag in front of his crotch suggestively.
I turned and faced him. My wet white shirt clung translucently to every curve I had. His jaw dropped. I let his distraction work against him and sucker-punched his mouth, pulling it at the last moment so I didn’t actually bloody his lip.
Though I’d slipped past his defenses, I wasn’t getting back out of range. He grabbed my arm and twisted me into a restraining hold, pinning my arms behind my back.
“Never pull your punches with me! You can’t hurt me,” he said. “If you train holding back, you’ll do the same in a real situation.” He rubbed his body against min
e. “I expect a full effort,” he whispered. “Every time.”
Taking his words to heart, I lifted my knees to my chest. He couldn’t hold me curled up in the air indefinitely. However, this position strained my arms and abs, and I wouldn’t be able to sustain it for long either. Johnny gave first, and bent forward. As he did, I pushed my legs down and threw my head back. My cranium caught him in his adorably cleft chin. I thought the blow would make him release me. Not so. He laughed and reminded me, “Wæres aren’t as fragile as humans.”
My mind raced, unsure what to do to get away. Different tactic. “When are you going to explain your partial transformation to me?”
His grip never loosened. “Maybe when you tell the Elders you’re the Lustrata.”
I wasn’t going to tell them and he knew it; that meant he didn’t intend to tell me. Angered, my struggling redoubled. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might have taken the hit, even if I’d landed it harder, and used my closeness to restrain me. Impressing him had been my goal, but all I’d managed to do was make myself look weak. I couldn’t break free. Still, I kept wrestling against his grip. I wasn’t giving up.
My frustration multiplied and I ripped his long-sleeved thermal tee—accidentally—in the process.
“Breathe normally,” he said.
“I am!” But I hadn’t been. More like grunting, growling, and snorting.
He released me and stepped back to give me room. “No … you’re panting.”
I was so embarrassed and mad at myself. I’d insisted I could fight and now looked like a wet fool. My unfriendly expression—or the wet shirt—won me a leering smile even as I took the ready stance. But Johnny didn’t.
He said, “Breathing is the way to control everything else.”
I broke my stance. “What?”
“Clap your hands for me.”
My hands went to my hips. “Do a dance and earn it first.”
“I’m serious, just one clap.”
I clapped.
“That was your somatic nervous system. The conscious part of your nervous system. Brain says, ‘do this,’ and the body does.” He suddenly threw a fist at me, but pulled up far short. “Did you blink?”
“Of course.”
“That was your autonomic nervous system. The automatic part. Now blink because you want to.”
I blinked.
“Blinking and breathing are on both sides, autonomic and somatic. You blink naturally without thinking about it hundreds of times a day. But if your eye feels dry or itchy, you can consciously take over and blink away.” He paced to my left, turned, and began crossing to the right.
“Now, your autonomic nervous system has two branches, sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic side is responsible for fear responses. Fight or flight. It gets your lungs more open, your heart pumping. But rest and repose is the parasympathetic system, and after a round of the sympathetic side dealing with a high intensity situation, the parasympathetic side can kick in with an aftereffect that makes you not only tired, but you may even get all distant and aloof.”
“Okay, I had expected to be tired after all our exertions.” I made it sound dirty.
“Right.” He swallowed hard enough that I heard it. “But that’s physically tired. This is another level. This is your nervous system, not just muscles, and you have the power to limit this reaction—to a point.” He paused. “Breathing is something you have the ability to consciously control. And by doing what is called ‘tactical breathing’ you can exact some control over the nervous system’s response. Three to five deep breaths—”
“I do that in my meditation. Cleansing breaths. Slowly in, deep.” I filled my lungs, knowing that doing so would put even more impressive curves under my clinging wet shirt. “And then slowly out.”
“You know, I think I’ll watch you practice that deep breathing just a little more.”
I said nothing, just breathed deep for him.
“Then you’re already conditioned to do this, just apply them—I mean it—apply it in a new way. If your sympathetic system is making you scared or angry, those breaths will lower your heart rate. You will be calmer, and your ability to proceed with greater clarity will increase. Afterward the parasympathetic side effect will be lessened because you didn’t lose control and let the sympathetic side completely take over.”
I wondered if there was some correlation between the way a vampire’s stain worked and the functioning of the nervous system.
Johnny checked the ripped shoulder of his shirt. I stole a glance at the front of his sweatpants. Either he must’ve been wearing tight undies or my wet shirt wasn’t having an effect.
“In the field, the other night I freaked out and my legs got heavy. I couldn’t run anymore. How am I supposed to keep that from happening when I have to breathe hard to run?”
“You crossed your personal line and couldn’t stay in the zone.” At my quizzical look, he explained, “Your heart rate went too high for your body to actively maintain that level. It’s like your heart just isn’t as effective and the oxygen isn’t getting where it needs to go. This happens to everyone, though at differing points. Once you max that line, you’re going to fall apart. With exposure to such situations in training—and this is what we are going to do—you can teach yourself to react better, to stay in the zone, and to maintain cognitive control.” He removed the torn thermal tee and tossed it aside as he assumed a ready stance and motioned me onward. “Again.”
We circled. My eyes went to the Celtic armband tattoos. Just above his navel, amid the dark hair, was a seven-pointed star, a fairy star. Above that, stretching across his pectorals, was a pair of wings sprouting from a circle on his sternum. In the circle was a five pointed star, a pentacle. Beneath the circle, tail feathers balanced the wing images. They were beautiful, but it was his naked chest, and not the tattoos, that awakened my desire.
Johnny leapt at me. I retreated, dodging blow after blow, finally ducking under one to go into a cartwheel across the garage. Taking up the rake leaning against the wall, I went at him with the handle horizontal like a staff. The rake end was aluminum, lightweight, but the fanlike shape created drag. I swatted with the handle end from the left, flipped it, and swatted with it from the right; faked a switch back to the left and cracked him in the shoulder with it.
“Ow!”
“Sorry,” I said.
He turned and sprinted across the garage. I went after him, but he spun back with a shovel in his hands, blocking my strike with its thicker shaft. It was heavier than my rake, with metal on both ends, but being a wære he handled it with no problem and the more substantial shaft cracked my rake handle.
Johnny used this against me and backed me across the garage one step at a time, pushing the shovel’s shank against my cracked rake handle. My rake was going to snap at any second. I kind of wanted it to, so we could be done with this, so I could put my hands on his body and—
Suddenly, the rake broke. The world slowed but my mind was still fast.
I pulled the two rake ends apart and struck at him, backing him up two paces before I sidestepped and shoved both the pieces into the D-shaped handle of the shovel. Using the broken rake pieces like handlebars, I swung myself low and past him. My momentum and the sudden weight on the shovel made his grip weaken. As I stood I pulled my broken handles with me, forcing the shovel in his grip to twist, then all of it clanged to the floor.
Johnny turned to face me and time became normal again.
“Time slowed down,” I said, hands making the time-out gesture.
“That’s good, it’s normal. Your brain goes into survival mode. It screens out anything not directly pertinent to surviving. Things slow down. Sometimes the sounds are so loud you can’t function. And sometimes your hearing fades until you can’t hear the sirens or the shots being fired all around you. Sometimes you’re the one firing the shots. You can’t hear them, you can’t feel the recoil, but you can hear the jingling of the shell casings falling on the
cement at your feet.” He seemed far away. “And then your ears don’t ring afterward and you wonder if it was real at all.”
“Johnny?”
He blinked. “Yeah?”
“Is that a memory?”
“I don’t know.” His hands ran over his dark waves of hair and he turned away. He sounded angry as he whispered, “Why can’t I remember?” Everything about him—his posture, his tone—was so male. His skin glistened with sweat and his muscles were hard and ripped.
I wanted him. I wanted to take him in my arms. I wanted to wrap myself around him. I stepped in front of him, put my hands around his face, and pulled him into my kiss. He yielded without delay.
“What the hell are you two—”
We spun to see Nana at the door to the house.
She took in our positions, his shirtlessness, my wet shirt, and the broken rake and shovel in the middle of the wet garage floor. “Oh,” she said, the hint of a smile leaking onto her face. “I don’t think I want to know.” She shut the door.
Her amusement rained down on me like an instant cold shower. For me, the moment was gone. When I turned back to Johnny, however, he was peeking down the V-neck of my shirt. Though caught, he grinned broadly. “You missed some seeds.”
“I know.” I backed up and started digging out what was left of the pumpkin mess in my cleavage.
“I take it you dislike gooey stuff on your chest, huh?”
I choked out a laugh, doubting that even a muzzle could keep this flirt-addict’s dirty mind from being heard. “It was drying and getting all flakey and icky in there. But now that you’ve used the hose, it’s more like snot.” I pulled the last wad of it out.
“I will remove that particular fantasy from my list, then.”
I threw the pumpkin goo at him.
CHAPTER NINE
I couldn’t sleep.
After showering and dinner, my eyes didn’t want to stay open and, though it was early, my bed was the right place to be. Then, with the clock glaring twelve-twelve, sleep deserted me. I woke with sore muscles. Getting comfortable wasn’t likely.
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