The Accidental Human

by Dakota Cassidy

  A twinge of jealousy skittered along her spine—irrational and pathetic, but there it was. Like she could evah compete with Tyra Banks. “You ogled Tyra?”

  “Uh, yeah. Sorry. But see, here’s the thing. I can do that because we’re uninvolved. Said half of the uninvolved couple is allowed to ogle others who are uninvolved with other halves of uninvolved parties or otherwise. It’s in the uninvolved contract.” He lifted himself over her, parting her thighs and giving her his infamous smug grin.

  Heath was doing his best to get a rise out of her, but he made her giggle girlishly anyway. He made her laugh. He made her smile to herself when she was alone—when she least expected it. He made her heart race when he smiled and even when he gave her that penetrating stare.

  Heath slipped his hard length into her, slow, lazy, meeting her hips when they rose upward in anticipation. A sigh slipped from her lips—a sigh of contentment, a sigh of completion. Her nipples beaded, tight, stiff, scraping against his smooth chest as he skillfully made slow drives of his cock into her.

  Wanda’s hands sought his hair, silky soft between her fingers, her thighs wrapped tighter around his waist as he ground against her, making that delicious friction with his pubic hair against her clit. Swells of heat rose and fell with each plunge he took, forceful, growing in speed until sweat broke out on her forehead. Her heart throbbed in time with his. Her legs grew weak from the tension in her muscles created by clinging to him, their bodies slid against each other’s in a slow, seductive dance.

  Her orgasm gripped at her gut, contracting the place between her thighs, growing with each thrust of Heath’s cock until the leisurely burn turned into a whimpered plea for satisfaction.

  Heath reared up, his chest muscles tight, corded, tense beneath her fingers. Sweat trickled between his pecs in enticing droplets. Her nails dug into his firm flesh, raking over them, gritting her teeth when she felt his cock pulse, then jerk inside her.

  They found relief together, in the tumble from scorching flames of heat, in the sweet, blessed respite of satisfaction.

  Heath collapsed on her, the heavy weight of him delicious, every inch of him glued to her. She was boneless beneath him, but her fingers stroked his hair, cradling him to her, savoring the scent of their lovemaking. Loving his heavy weight, spent on top of her.

  He kissed the sensitive flesh just under her ear. “I’m starving,” he mumbled when he’d caught his breath.

  “When aren’t you hungry?” she teased.

  “Never it seems,” he said, rising up on his arms. “And if I’m not careful, me and Jenny Craig are gonna be like this.” He crossed two fingers together.

  “You’re making up for all those years of not being able to eat.”

  Heath slid off her, slipping from the bed and wandering over to her dresser as she watched with sleepy eyes. He grabbed the plastic bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and unwrapped one. “I think you’re right, but as a vampire, I didn’t have to worry about gaining weight. As an almost thirty-seven-year-old human, I do.” He popped the chocolaty goodness into his mouth, once more closing his eyes, licking his lips while he savored his favorite candy.

  He was utterly unashamed of his nakedness—in the dim glow of the television, his silhouette was sharply defined.The rough cut of his jaw as he chewed, the bulge of his thigh muscles clenching and unclenching while he rocked from foot to foot, the way he ran his strong, sure hands through his blond hair made her pause and think, she could watch him eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups forever.

  And then her heart began to pound erratically from her place on the bed, watching him indulge in his favorite chocolate, her throat tightened, her hands curled against the sheet.

  If lightning bolts and crashing thunder were how falling in love was announced—that’s not how it happened for Wanda Schwartz.

  It happened watching Heath Jefferson do something as stupid as consume nine bazillion calories like it was a meal cooked by Emeril himself. It stole the breath from her lungs. It made her intestines twist and shake. It made her gulp for air.

  It made her reconsider asking Marty or Nina to turn her so she could watch Heath forever.

  Oh. Fuck.

  Heath came to her side of the bed, tugging the sheets from her. “Hey, I said I’m starving, woman—I say we go get a Whopper. All the uninvolved people are doing it these days.” He winked and chuckled, grabbing her hand and giving it a yank.

  For the briefest of moments, she clung to his fingers, letting his warmth suffuse her hand, hoping to fend off the tremble of what had just hit her upside her stubborn, foolish head.

  Her laughter was unsteady, her legs like soft butter when she let him drag her out of the warmth of the bed. She needed a moment to herself—a moment to adjust—maybe a lot of moments. “Why is it that I have to go with, Mr. Jefferson? You know where the Burger King is. It’s two blocks from here.”

  He dragged his jeans over his bulky thighs. “Because it’s almost eight, you haven’t had dinner yet, and I know I’ll have to lug something back here for you. It’s only fair you should help. I’m only one man, and I don’t know if I can carry two Whoppers alone. It can be a burden. So come on. Get dressed, and let’s go before it snows again or something.”

  Wanda bent forward at the waist, grabbing her own jeans and panties, pulling them on with thick, fumbling fingers. Heath held her sweatshirt out to her, kissing the tip of her nose when her head poked through the neck. “Why do we have to walk? We could just take the car.”

  Heath sauntered out to the living room to get his coat. “Because it’s good for you to walk.”

  “But it’s cold,” she protested, smiling and looking for the gloves she’d thrown off when she’d gotten home.

  “Yes, but that lets you know that—”

  “You’re alive. Yeah, yeah.” She pulled on her cap and jacket, smiling up at him. She reached up on tippy-toe and kissed the corner of his mouth. “I know how important that is to you ex-immortals.” Wanda pulled the door open with a tug, taking the stairs down to the curb in front of her house with light feet.

  Heath was right behind her, catching her hand, but Wanda stopped. “Damn. I forgot my purse, and if you’re a nice ex-vampire, you’ll go get it for me,” she teased. “It’s on the counter in the kitchen.”

  He mock-sighed, his face teasing in the light of the streetlamp. “Heath, do this. Heath, do that. Heath, can I have some of your Whopper? Even after I asked you if you wanted one, too, and you said no. Heath, watch America’s Next Top Model with me, but don’t eyeball Tyra with lust. You’re a pushy broad.” He smiled over his shoulder, heading back up the stairs at a trot.

  Wanda watched his retreating back, broad, filling out the new jacket he’d gotten at a thrift shop like it had been his from the start. And she loved watching him. She loved talking to him.

  She loved.

  End of.

  And she should feel horrible right now. She had no right to love Heath—not at this point in her life. She’d had no right to even get a little involved with him. This was exactly what she’d been trying to avoid in her quest for no strings attached. But he was like crack, and she hadn’t tried to stop injecting herself with huge doses of him. Oh, she’d done a lot of talking about how uninvolved they should be—but her heart clearly hadn’t had its listening ears on. And now this. Allowing it to go this far had been selfish, self-serving, wrong, wrong, wrong.

  But she didn’t feel horrible.

  She felt giddy.

  And cold.

  What the hell was he doing, searching for the Holy Grail? It was just like a man, she thought with a smile, taking the steps back up to her house.Whatever they were looking for could be right in front of their faces, and they’d still need a GPS system to find it.

  She found Heath standing in her doorway—unmoving.

  Wanda placed a hand on his solid back, and he jumped. “Hey, are you blind now? My purse is right there on the counter,” she teased then ducked around him and strode to
the kitchen to retrieve it from the counter, stopping short when she saw his face.

  A face that had a million flashes of different emotions happening all at once. His jaw clenched, unclenched, his tongue rolled along the inside of his cheek. His eyes grew dark with what could only be defined as rage in all its many facets.

  Alarm, fear, uncertainty made her voice quiver. “Heath? What’s wrong?”

  “You’re dying.” He didn’t coat his words. He didn’t ask a question—he said it with a tone that implied he couldn’t believe what he’d just said.

  Her stomach sank like lead.Yeah. There was that.

  He slammed the door behind him, striding across the floor to rear up in front of her, his big body shedding waves of palpitating fury, his fists making large balls on either side of him. “You’re—dying.”

  There was no use denying it. She hadn’t planned to tell him when this began, but after what she’d discovered tonight, Wanda knew she probably wouldn’t have let things go much further without telling him. She just didn’t want it to be now. Not now when she just wanted to be in love with him. Just for a few days—without her imminent departure hovering over them like some big ax of doom. “Y-yes. I am. How’d you find out?”

  His eyes searched hers with a gaze that left her cold. “Call me an interfering son of a bitch, but when you asked me to come back and get your purse, your doctor was leaving a message it sounded like you’ve heard before. Something like, ‘Miss Schwartz, please call my office. We’ve been unsuccessful in our attempts to reach you, and it’s imperative that you call us so that we can at least secure your comfort in the last stages of your life.’ He sounded a little like he was at his wits’ end,Wanda. Like maybe you’d gotten a message like that before.” His words were tight, his mouth a thin line of anger.

  Yeah, Dr. Eckert had called a time or two—or eight since this began, and she’d promptly ignored every call, filling only the one prescription he’d given her just last week. A thousand words stuck in her throat, like she’d swallowed a mouthful of honey and her well-rounded vocabulary was all glued to the stickiness of it. “I see.”

  His eyes went wide, then narrowed with yet more disbelief, outrage, simmering, ready to boil over into anger. He looked like he was barely holding on to his temper, and it would have frightened her if she didn’t know it was only out of shock. “You see? You see? Do you see, Wanda? It’s pretty fucking clear you’ve been ignoring the doctor’s calls. Why the fuck would you do that?”

  Because she didn’t want this to happen. Call it foolish. Call it the dumbest fucking thing she’d ever done in her life—but she didn’t want to spend a single second mourning, and that’s what people did when you were dying. They sent silent messages over your head, behind your back, with their eyes. They called each other privately to talk about you—they avoided making simple plans like next summer’s vacation, because no one fucking wanted you to be upset by them.

  She had nothing to say. No defense. There wasn’t anything a doctor could do for her. If he didn’t have the magic fucking death cure, then what good did answering his phone calls do? She knew how to make a list of things that needed taking care of—she didn’t need a doctor for that.

  Heath gripped her shoulders, his hands barely contained in his grip. “You planned to tell me this when, Wanda?”

  Did never count as when? Her shoulders lifted in a guilt-ridden shrug, and her eyes found the ground beneath her feet. “I-I guess there was no specific plan.”

  “Right,” he said tightly. “And can you see where that might piss me off?”

  “I can.”

  “And can you see how fucking unfair that is?”

  She winced at his barely contained rage. “I can.”

  He stared at her long, hard, and she couldn’t look away. She wanted to hide her eyes in shame, but she couldn’t. She deserved his heated glare. “Good. Because I’m so fucking furious with you right now for not just telling me the truth, for letting me find out this way, I could—” He cut himself off, stopping as fast as he’d begun.

  When she found her voice, it was stilted, wooden—a practiced speech she’d given her reflection in her mirror almost every time she was near one. “It was selfish of me, and I know it. I do. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel sorry for me. But it’s why I didn’t want to get involved . . . why I was resigning from Bobbie-Sue. I—didn’t want things to be awkward between us.”

  “And you don’t think a little thing like dying would be awkward, Wanda?” he roared, so loud, with such force, the loose strands of hair ruffled beneath her cap.

  She licked her dry lips, searching for something to say. “I don’t know . . .”

  But Heath wasn’t accepting her lame answers. “So you were just going to die. Die, and leave me to piss in the wind? What was going to happen to uninvolved us, Wanda? Would you just not pick up the phone one day when I called, and I’d come over here and land in the middle of your funeral? I didn’t deserve to know? Is that how uninvolved we are?” He spat the words, venomous, hateful truths.

  He was hurting, and it made her heart ache with sadness. Yet as heart wrenching as that was for her, the smallest bit of happiness crept into her tumultuous emotions, too. It meant Heath cared. How much, or even if anymore, was something she knew she shouldn’t ask. Not now. “I don’t know what I was going to do. I was still trying to figure it out. I—”

  His face was a mask of fury, hard as granite, enraged hacked off. “Yes you do,Wanda.You know exactly what you were going to do. You’re not the kind of woman who doesn’t think things through. You have a list for your lists.That’s what the Fuck It list was about. Don’t try and bullshit me.”

  She’d managed to move her hands to his arms just as he let go of her shoulders, letting his body go slack. “I was wrong. What I did was wrong. I should have made you go a long time ago—before that first night, but . . .”

  “But I’m good in the sack—so why pass up a good fuck?”

  This emotion she understood. It was one Nina displayed often when she wanted to hurt the person who’d hurt her—but it didn’t cut any less deep, and sadly, was nothing less than she deserved. Her fingers dug into his arms, frantic, urgent. “You’re angry. Please, please let’s not leave things like this. I don’t want things to end like this.”

  His response was cold—as hard as he could sometimes be. “No, you just want them to end.”

  No, no, no. She didn’t want them to end. But they had to. Had. To. How did you ask someone to stick around and watch you die when their life was just beginning? How did you explain the selfishness involved in inviting someone into a life that was going to end?

  In this very moment, she found herself waffling over her stern resolve to never ask Marty or Nina to turn her.

  Wanda wrung her hands, folding them and unfolding them. “Yes—no—I . . . I’m not ever going to get any better, Heath. But you have all these great things happening now.You’re doing really terrific at Bobbie-Sue.You have an apartment—a job.You can have a family someday.You said it might be nice to have children someday. You did. Just the other night. I swear I never thought you’d be interested in anything more than the—the sex, even with all the jokes about how we weren’t involved. I didn’t think, especially after what you told me about your past, that you would ever be serious about someone like me!”

  Heath’s eyes glittered, cold and dark.

  How could she possibly explain the kind of fucked-up logic she’d applied to this whole mess she’d made? “Everything is just beginning for you.You have a new life ahead of you. Go live it.”

  Heath turned on his heel, leaning forward, letting his dark blond head hang between his shoulders, gripping the edge of the table until it shook. His fist hit the table with a sudden, thundering clap. His words, when they came, were measured, filled with his absolute fury. “What you’ve done—or planned to do—explains a lot of things about whatever we have going on, but it doesn’t explain why you didn’t give
me just a little fucking credit for being a decent guy. Despite my past. Did you think I was the kind of guy who’d figure the hell with it, why bother fucking a chick who’s halfway to the grave? But then maybe telling me would have been just a little too involved for you,Wanda, huh? Uninvolved couples don’t share deep, dark secrets, right? Fuck buddies just fuck.” He took a deep breath. She heard him fight for control. Saw it in his stance. Felt the ripe thickness of it in the air.

  Tears, hot, unwelcome, slid from her eyes, pooling to the white tile on her kitchen floor. The pain that lanced every nerve in her body made more unbearable by Heath’s next words.

  “I can’t stay here and listen to this, and if I don’t haul my ass out of here, I can’t promise I won’t lose it. So I’m gonna go do something stupid and selfish—like get drunk, beat the shit out of some asshole—and then I’m coming back.” He turned to face her finally, and she wanted to throw herself at him, beg him to forgive her, but she knew now wasn’t the time. His body was rigid, his face a hot red. Everyone handled grief differently—anger was common, the need for space was, too, but it didn’t make Wanda want to shelter herself with his warmth any less.

  Yet she had to let him go, and hope—pray—that he’d come back and try to understand what she’d done. She silently prayed that he’d want her even if their days together had numbers attached. Or if nothing else, he’d just come back to make peace with her.

  Heath went to the door—clamping a fist around the knob, shrugging it open. Menusha ran to it, twisting herself around his legs. She loved Heath—loved to curl up on his big chest—hated when he left. He stooped to run a quick hand over her back before rising, his voice low, “This isn’t over by a long shot,Wanda. Not even.”

  Silence, in all its deafening sounds, crashed in her ears, beating like a distant drum when he closed the door.

  A million thoughts raced through her mind while she stood rooted to her kitchen floor—a crazy fucking list of things she could do to make this better. But she couldn’t focus on any one task. They became jumbled, semi-thoughts that came and went, and between those thoughts, there was only one that was clear.