I hear a quiet thunk. It is just above the level of my head as I lean against the door, so I bet it was his head, coming to rest against the wood. I press my hand to the door, wishing I could feel him through it.
My mind is spilling over with words. With truths, explanations, apologies for all the wrong things I’ve said in the past. But I’ve said the only thing that matters and the door between us is still closed.
“Where did you go when you left the Grill?”
I bite my lip. Sometimes I wish Damon were a little dumber. “I called Stefan and asked him to come over.”
“Yeah,” Damon says in a casual voice that feels like a hammer breaking my bones. “Blood sharing is a lot more fun when you can enjoy all the benefits.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“You thought you could do a blood test to see who your soulmate was,” he says sarcastically.
“You don’t understand, Damon. You’ve always known exactly what you wanted. You can’t imagine what it is like on the other side of that.”
He doesn’t answer. I didn’t really expect him to.
“He tasted like–”
Damon cuts me off, his voice climbing so I could have heard him through ten oak doors. “What makes you think I would ever want to hear a fucking word of that?”
“Short version, I promise,” I beg. “He tasted like family, like my friend. That’s how he’s always felt. I just didn’t know there was anything out there like what I feel for you, and once I did, it was too late to go back without being too much like her.” I rush to get it all out before he can stop me.
“You are so young, Elena.” His voice is trembling with rage. “A thoughtless toddler who likes to build towers of blocks just because you love the sound they make when you knock them back down. You want to be a good friend to me? You want to do something for me?”
“What can I do?” I whisper.
“You can leave me the fuck on the ground this time.”
“You’re not going to open the door, are you?” I ask, the last of my hope slipping away.
“Not a chance.”
This is the answer I’ve earned. And he’s right. I should leave him to whatever peace he can find. I just can’t accept that after everything we’ve been through, it’s come to this.
I may have been thoughtless. But I’m also desperate.
“I know I deserve for you to hate me, Damon. I know I deserve that, because I was stupid and cowardly. I made the wrong choice, and I made us live with it for a year. Please don’t make us live with it forever.”
The door doesn’t respond. I can picture him slouched on the other side, the pain clear in his eyes since there’s no one to see. I almost yank the door open, but it is his choice. I have to let him make it.
I grind the insides of my cheeks between my teeth, swallowing the sob my body is convulsing around. Even crying is different as a vampire. As a human the sob would eventually break, my body gasping for air. As a vampire, my chest curls into itself in a collapse that can go on forever.
There’s no sound from the other side of the door and I owe it to him to take my meltdown somewhere else. I set my body back on top of my legs and point them toward my car. I’m not sure if I’m going to make it and once I get there I can barely find the door handle through my tears. And then I can’t find it at all because Damon’s body is in front of it.
His hands are cradling my face, because Stefan always hugged me, but Damon has always wanted to see me and touch me at the same time. He was never satisfied with one or the other.
My hands come up and cover his and he looks like he’s about to bolt. “I’ve got you,” I tell him fiercely. “I won’t let you down. Not ever again.”
Chapter 5: Native Language
DAMON
I want to believe her and kiss her and fuck her on the hood of her car right here in the driveway. I don’t move.
Instead, I ask an incredibly stupid and self-destructive question.
“What did you see in my blood?”
Elena smiles tenderly, still wiping tears from her face. “You.”
That doesn’t make any sense. “How did that change anything? You already knew me.”
“Yes, but…” she seems to be searching for the words. “Sometimes it isn’t enough for something to be true. Sometimes you need to hear it at the right time too. Or maybe it just got too strong to ignore because I’m a vampire.”
I narrow my eyes a little, unconvinced.
“Damon, I only thought I’d last another year or two before somebody killed me. I didn’t want to be remembered as a fickle bitch and I thought it would be worth it, to save Stefan, to make sure he’d be okay.” She searches my eyes. “To make sure you’d be okay. I knew if I could keep him going through everything Klaus did to him, you’d at least have each other after I was gone. If I was selfish and tried to steal what little time I could with you, I didn’t think you and Stefan would be able to get along after I was inevitably killed. When I became a vampire, it changed everything.”
I wish that didn’t make sense. I wish I would have stayed behind the door. I can’t trust myself out here, where I can see her.
“I saw other things too,” she tells me. “How you felt about me.”
She starts blushing.
I know what that means. This is more familiar ground for me.
“What else did you see, Elena?” I ask, deliberately lowering my voice.
She tries to pull her hands away. I let them come away from my face but keep our fingers woven together. She’s really red. Who knew vampires could blush so brightly?
“What did you see in my blood?” she asks instead.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” I bargain.
She glares at me. I grin.
I like teasing Elena. This declaration stuff makes me suspicious because, yeah, we always end up back at Stefan, but flirting is a game I know how to play.
“You first,” she says and I see uncertainty in her beautiful face.
I touch her cheek, caught with a tenderness I know I shouldn’t show.
“Why the worry?”
Her hands squeeze anxiously in mine. “You didn’t take much blood,” she says finally. “You pulled away. I could only stop myself because I was worried about you, that’s how good it was.”
“You taste amazing,” I tell her. I’m doing such a great job of holding out so it won’t gut me when she changes her mind again.
She gives me a look. “That’s cheating, Damon.”
I make a dismissive face. “You’re intense, that’s all. Serious guilt complex.”
“Too intense for you?” she says with the most enchanting mixture of incredulity and worry.
“Intense in a caring-for-everyone-and-everything kind of way,” I tell her. “It’s terrible. It’s like where I’d be if there were about fifteen of you. Sleep deprived and totally nuts.” I smile at her to soften the blow. “Really, really sexually frustrated.”
“Like you even remember what it’s like to be sexually frustrated,” she bursts out.
I look up and down her gorgeous body, noticing that she changed into a skirt at some point since we left the Grill. I wonder if my blood got on her clothes. “Oh, I think I might recall,” I drawl. “Your turn.”
She looks upset. “You’re trying to distract me with sex. Because you don’t believe me.”
“Elena, is it really hard to get why being around you would make me think about sex?”
“No, of course not. But it’s also not hard to understand why I’d love you.”
She catches my chin with her soft little fingers and her touch wreaks havoc on my ability to pretend I don’t care that she’s a bipolar baby vampire and she can decide she feels a different way about me every fifteen seconds while meaning it with every scrap of her being.
“When you took my blood, you must have felt it,” she whispers. “How could you not? It feels like you’re all that’s in my veins, how could you not se
e yourself?”
I laugh. “Elena, you love every squirrel in the forest. I got that out of a teaspoon of your blood.”
She’s looking at me in a way I can’t remember her ever looking when she was human, those soft brown eyes fired with a focused intensity that’s all new.
“Take more,” she orders.
This is the look of Elena knowing what she wants. No wonder it’s unfamiliar. She grabs me by the front of the shirt and flips us, slamming me against the car and her body into mine.
God, she’s hot. Why am I resisting?
I’m buried in her neck before I take another breath and I’m not pulling away early this time. I’m not sure I could if I wanted to. Her blood settling into my body feels like the ring of fine crystal as it announces the toast to come.
She’s changed. How is that? Less than a day…or not changed, but more resolute. She’s right. I am all that’s flowing through her veins.
You don’t get pictures in blood, but you get everything else and I’m floating on all her impressions of me: noble, evil, scary and sexy, roughly kind, frustrating and always a little out of her reach.
I’m only vaguely aware that her back is against the car now and I’m crushing myself against her, high on this concentrated version of Elena and everything she feels for me.
She’s clutching at the muscles that line my spine, shuddering with pleasure and it feels like Denver all over again but if Jeremy shows up this time he can buy a ticket to the show because I’m not stopping.
I slow down, just sipping, making it last so I can enjoy all the textures of her personality, the new, sharper edges that I think are from her transition, and the endless, endless love in her.
Too soon, I’ve taken as much as I should. She still needs to feed properly. I take the last bit of her spilled blood onto my tongue, and press a kiss to the wound, feeling the skin heal under my lips.
My head lies heavily on her shoulder. We’re sitting on the ground now somehow, my legs on either side of her hips.
Elena’s arms are around me, thin but strong, one of her hands holding my head into her neck and the other one pressing tightly into my back. She never holds me like this unless someone is dying. Rose. Or me.
I don’t know what to think, can’t process at all. There’s a whole lot of beautiful flowing through me, her blood like a drug that glows under my skin.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” she whispers. “I mean, you can know someone loves you, really believe it. But feeling it like that is a whole different experience. Humans never get to do that at all, do they?” She kisses my temple.
I’m torn between lying with her and basking in the sensation of her touch and her blood, and an urge to run away with every scrap of speed I can push out of my body.
This changes everything.
I pull back and look at her like I’ve never seen her before. I haven’t, not the her that loves me.
She smiles tenderly and runs her fingers through my hair. “Hi.”
I get up and walk away.
My legs are pretty unsteady, but I would crawl if it meant I could have a whiskey bottle in my hand at the end of this journey. I can’t trust this, can’t trust her not to tell me everything I want to hear and take it right back in the morning.
Elena zips around in front of me as I’m reaching for the doorknob. Fucking vampire speed.
“Damon, I’m trying to do the right thing for once,” she says, exasperated. “But you make it really hard when you run away every time you take my blood.”
She clenches her little fists and I can see in the movement how hard she’s trying not to flash the familiar deer in the headlights look and take off because she can’t handle me, can’t handle what’s between us.
I kiss her, and I make it good because I’m a bastard like that. Because I’m a sucker like that.
With her blood still on my tongue, I’m as shaky as a fourteen-year old girl and it’s her hands balled up in the front of my shirt that hold me steady, her scent that spins my head and makes me want to break things. I want to build her a house and steal her away on a boat and throw myself through a window and drink and drink and drink, from people and bottles and anything until I’m safe from what she can do to me.
Maybe I’m the one who can’t handle what’s between us.
My hands lock around her arms and I hold her back, tearing my lips away from hers. I have the superstitious feeling that every second of pleasure now will translate into hours of pain later and I’ve already run up quite a tab.
“Jesus, Elena, what are you doing?” I groan.
“Loving you, goddamn it!” she shouts back in my face. “And so far it’s not going so well!”
I’ve never seen anything so fucked up as us, but I have to laugh at that.
“Well, no shit.”
“Why did you chase me for so long if you didn’t want to catch me?” she asks, frustration pouring off her.
I shove a hand through my hair and eye the door to the boarding house behind her. “It’s not that, Elena.”
“Then what is it? You said you weren’t disgusted by my blood, but then you just took off again.”
That catches my attention and I look back at her to see a tear slip down the curve of her cheek.
I frown and catch the tear on my thumb.
“Nothing disgusted me, Elena. It was–” I shift my weight and drop my hand. “I don’t know. A lot to take in.”
“I just…you said you loved me all those times, but then you didn’t after you took my blood and Stefan told me that vampires see who you truly are in your blood.” She’s leaking tears too fast for me to stop them now.
“Elena, stop. Take a breath. If you’re going to be a vampire, you can’t be crying all the time. So take a couple breaths and think about something else.”
She takes a shaky breath. “I can’t think about anything else right now, Damon, this is kind of important!”
“Come on, Elena, look at me. Do I look like you disgust me?”
“No,” she sniffles, her face all crumpled like a little kid. “But you wouldn’t want me to know, because you’d feel bad!”
I roll my eyes. “Don’t give my conscience so much credit. You make me crazy, scare me and piss me off and get me horny as hell, but you don’t disgust me.”
She sniffs. “I make you horny?”
I laugh. “Maybe once you blow your nose.” I pull a handkerchief out of my pocket and hand it over.
“No one carries these anymore, you know,” she says, and blows her nose.
“Old habit,” I tell her and sink down on the front steps. It’s been a long fucking day. “Plus, you’ve got to mop up the blood with something.”
I’m trying to figure out how to tell her what I tasted in her without sounding like a total emo pussy.
I can’t. So I just go the safe road and stick to what I told her earlier.
“Like I said. You give Stef a run for his money in the self-blame department.” I give her a sideways glance and decide to rile her a little bit to get rid of the tears. “You should probably go over there and repeat the blood test to make sure you guys aren’t soulmates. ‘Cause I think you should probably get married in a Catholic church, and spend the rest of eternity regretting everything together.”
It works. Elena punches me, a little too hard, and starts giggling. “Oh God, that’s so true. That’s exactly what we’d do!”
“You’d have had a suicide pact after two months I wasn’t here to play comic relief,” I say, leaning back on my elbows to enjoy the sight of her laughing. It’s been a little rare lately.
“I know,” she says, looking guilty again.
“Stop it or I’ll make you say a Hail Mary,” I threaten.
She giggles. “You don’t even know how to say a Hail Mary.”
“No, but I bet you do.”
She stops laughing and she’s looking too carefully at me again.
“That’s not all you saw. I know you saw, or tasted or what
ever, how I feel about you.”
I rest my elbows against my knees and look at her. She’s beautiful, even with tearstains on her cheeks and her eyes a little shadowed from lack of blood. If I were Stefan and loved to talk about my feelings I would probably know what to do now. But I’m not, and I don’t.
Her eyes narrow just a hint and I wonder what she thinks she’s figuring out about me.
“Touch me,” she whispers.
Her face is an intoxicating blend of confidence and trepidation.
I literally have no brain at all, because I answer that by saying, “Why?”
“Because I love you,” she says as if I’ve asked her to explain the color of the sky. “Because I want you. Because I want to be with you and I want you to stop looking at me like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
What I want to say is that Stefan’s going to be really pissed about that when she goes back to him, but I must still have a cell or two rattling around upstairs because instead I drop my eyes to her lips and say in a rough whisper, “Where do you want me to touch you?”
I’m rewarded by her pulse picking up speed, and her eyes widening a little as she swallows. I take her hand and pull her to her feet. I duck my head close to her neck, inhaling the scent of her skin and her blood and just a touch of vanilla-peach body wash from her shower this morning.
My self-destructive streak is back on its A-game, for sure.
She’s already trembling, but I’m picking up as much anxiety as lust from her, so I don’t touch her. Anxiety can be good, because it feeds anticipation. But before I touch her, I want her begging for it, not closing her eyes and biting her lip.
Instead, I let my breath caress her skin, knowing that as new as she is to vampire senses, it won’t take much more than this. Her chest is already heaving in response, her hands clenched at her sides. I duck to her other side, my lips almost but not quite touching the hollow at the base of her throat, the sensitive tendon that runs from her neck to her shoulder.
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