How was it possible for her to make me feel this way? Did she feel even a little like that when she looked at me? Somehow, I doubted it. But I wished and hoped that it could be true. That she could feel about me the same way I felt about her.
But I wondered if, like Josie, she was utterly indifferent.
“That may be true,” she said quietly then, drawing the words out through her full lips and savored against her tongue like she was tasting them. Her eyes seemed to flash again, and a shrewd, small smile came over her face. “But then again, wouldn’t it have been far better for you if she’d never led you on in the first place? Wouldn’t it have saved you a broken heart if you’d never fallen for her?”
I considered that, staring into her dark, beautiful eyes that utterly consumed me. I tried to find words for what I was feeling, grappling with how to best describe it to her. “Well…yes. I guess,” I said with a shake of my head. “But I really can’t regret loving her.”
“Why ever not?” She sounded genuinely surprised, her eyes widening and her brows rising.
I chewed on my lower lip and stared down at the surface of my tea again. The steam seemed to curl upward toward me like a beckoning finger, drawing me closer…closer to Elle. I ignored it, lifting the mug and taking a tiny sip. It burned my mouth and all the way down into my stomach. I sighed out, wincing. “Well,” I repeated, drawing out the word, “I don’t think any love is ever wasted.”
“Even if the object of your affections don’t love you back?” she said, her voice flat, a single brow raised now. She sounded sarcastic, like she was egging me on, but I shrugged, sticking to my guns.
“Even if they don’t love you back,” I replied with finality. “I mean, I learned a lot about myself in that relationship. I learned what I want out of love. I learned what things make me feel content and loved and happy. And now, in my next relationship, I’ll know exactly what to look for in a woman. And I grew as a person by loving Josie, by being in a relationship with her. I’m not the same woman who fell in love with her. She changed me in good ways and bad ways, but I am changed because of her, no matter which way I look at it. And that needs to be honored. She changed me because I loved her.”
Elle looked surprised for a long moment, then the steely mask slipped back down over her face. “In all of my hundreds of years of loving,” she said, leaning back in her chair with a smirk, “I’ve never looked at love quite like that.”
I held the mug close to my nose and inhaled the steam and the fragrance of the jasmine petals mixing with the green tea. I probably wouldn’t be able to taste it anymore since that first sip had apparently burned off a lot of my taste buds, but at least I could still smell it. “Really,” I told her with a small shake of my head. It was obvious that she wanted to enlighten me, though I was dreading hearing her philosophy. “So how did you think about it?” I asked, bracing myself.
She lounged back in her chair again, her smirk deepening. “That women are beautiful creatures. Works of art, really, every one of them,” she said, rolling a shoulder in another elegant shrug. “And that one must revere them like an artifact of art, loving and appreciating every last nuance.”
I shook my head. It was a nice metaphor, and perhaps a nice way of looking at things. But it didn’t really work. “But when you look at a piece of art,” I told her, setting the mug down with a clunk on the tabletop, “you’re not really participating in it. The only one who ever participated in that piece of art was the artist who created it. Someone who looks at art just…looks at it. They’re not part of it. And they can appreciate the hell out of it, but the art is never touched by them.”
Her eyes grew darker, her face becoming stony. “Who says I want to participate in anything beyond…certain acts of appreciation? And you must trust me when I say that I very much have been a participant…” She leaned forward, her words becoming low and dark, her eyes flashing with a dangerous light. “I’ve loved more women than you can possibly imagine, Cassandra,” she hissed.
My breathing had become ragged, and her words twisted deep inside of me, piercing me through like a knife to the gut. Yes, I knew she’d probably had a lot of women. But she considered the number herself to be uncountable? Great.
I don’t know why it hurt me so much when I thought about the fact that she’d loved so many. It shouldn’t have meant a thing to me. That isn’t why I was here, after all—I was here so that murderous vampires out to get me couldn’t lay a finger on me. So that I’d be safe. That Elle and I had made love, that we were attracted to one another…that didn’t mean anything.
Liar, liar, I thought to myself, taking a deep breath of jasmine-scented air. The tea continued to unfurl between us, steam rising between us like smoke as we stared one another down.
A long, drawn out moment sat silent between us like that mug of tea. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, frustration rising inside of me.
“What do you want me to say to that?” I answered then carefully, keeping my voice quietly neutral. “Should I be impressed? Like the fact that you could seduce a large number of women is something that I should be in awe of?”
I don’t think she was expecting that reaction. Maybe she was expecting me to swoon over her past, as if knowing how seductive she’d been to others would make her doubly seductive to me. But it didn’t. I stared at her, my heart pounding inside of me as she considered my words.
“Jealous?” she asked with the smallest of smiles.
Maybe I was. But there was something else in me, too.
“Maybe,” I replied truthfully. “But mostly I wonder why you slept with so many. Did none of them ever mean anything to you along the way?”
She sat back in her hair slowly, her face becoming stony as she shook her head and answered immediately, without consideration: “No. Not ever.”
“Why?” I replied. My heart was hurting enough—I could have stopped this, switched the subject, but I had to know. I was in this far, and I needed to know.
“Because,” she replied simply, the words flat and utterly lifeless, “when you love someone, you lose them. You always lose them. And love is not worth that pain.”
I stared at her dumbfounded. “But…” I spluttered, but she was already shaking her head, not looking at me, but rather staring at the sparse and unornamented fireplace that remained unlit and empty at this far end of the room. It was built of cement and looked like it had never had a fire burned in it since it was created.
“You’re…what. Twenty-three? Twenty-four?” Her head was to the side as she laughed a little, a humorless sound that came out more like a low and throaty bark. “You’ve loved one person? Maybe two? You cannot possibly know what it’s like to love someone and to lose them forever. To love so deeply and utterly that you are part of them, and they are part of you, and then they are snatched away…” She was practically snarling at this point, but I didn’t shrink back. I leaned forward, my hackles up and every bit as furious as she was.
“How can you assume anything about me?” I hissed back. “You don’t know anything about me at all, about what I’ve loved and lost. And to assume that I’ve not felt pain because I’m ‘only’ twenty-three…that’s ludicrous and stupid.”
“Any pain that you might have thought that you experienced could not possibly compare to what I’ve been through,” said Elle, all calm and genteel again, but her eyes betrayed her. They still flashed with a vibrant fury.
“And that is childish,” I declared, sitting back in my chair.
We stared each other down.
Alec chose that exact moment to poke his head around the corner from the hallway that led out of the dining room. Like the first room in the house, the dining room was a massive misuse of space, with its enormous ceilings and single table in the center of a warehouse sized room. The hallway was a fair distance from us, but I could still see Alec’s white-blonde head as he peered around the corner and tried to be subtle. And failed.
“What is it, Alec?” growled Ell
e.
“Good tea?” he quipped, grinning at me.
Elle gave him a single pointed look, and he came around the corner, waving his hands with a quick shrug. “All right, all right, I really came all the way down here to see how you were doing. Feeling anything yet?”
Elle lounged back in the chair, shaking her head. “I’m a little tired, but it’s mostly just normal hunger pangs moving through me. I’m going to try to distract myself. How do you feel about making me a nice, juicy steak?”
“I would normally tell you to drop dead,” said Alec sweetly, “but since you’re embarking on this ludicrous mission, I’m going to placate you—”
“Make it rare, Alec. And quickly,” said Elle tiredly.
“Okay, okay,” he muttered, glancing to me with raised eyebrows. I shrugged and snuck a glance at Elle. She had her eyes closed now as she leaned back in the chair. Maybe she wasn’t feeling well, or she was being a little more affected by these “hunger pangs” than she was currently letting on. I shrugged and nodded at him in what I hoped conveyed a reassuring sentiment of “I’ve got this.”
Alec paused for a long moment, but then nodded grimly, turned on his heel, and went back down the hallway.
I ran my finger around the rim of my mug of tea, watching Elle carefully. The way she lounged back in her chair was a position of raw sensuality and power, as if she radiated confidence, and at the same time the fact that she didn’t care about anything, but there was a slight downward curve to her lips, and her fingers kept up their methodical drumming on the arm of the chair. She wasn’t letting on something.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her quietly.
She grimaced, then, her eyes opening to regard me with a dark, piercing gaze.
“Come here,” she whispered to me.
I sat up straight, staring at her with wide eyes. She held my gaze, and said nothing else.
Slowly, carefully, I straightened and stood, pushing the chair back with my legs. I made my way around the edge of the table, and then I was standing next to her, my hands nervously folding and unfolding in front of me. God, I wanted her—I wanted her desperately. But that probably hadn’t been what she had in mind.
Or was it?
“Sit down,” she said, and—holding my gaze—she patted her right thigh.
Feeling a flush rise through me, I did as she told me to do. I sat down on her lap and stared into her face, feeling my chest rise and fall quickly as I tried to keep my breathing steady—and failed.
She placed a tender arm around my waist before she pulled me close, snaking her other hand around my neck and into my hair and pulling my face to hers. The kiss that she gave me was savage and wild, and I returned it with as much ferociousness as she showed me. The arm around my waist moved, and then she was pushing her fingers up and under the waist of my shirt and against my bare skin, her cold fingers grazing me there, making me gasp as her mouth moved down, down…
And that’s when she stopped. Her open mouth stopped on my neck.
Elle kissed my jugular tenderly, with a fluttering caress now against the back of my neck with her fingers as she traced a path down with her other hand, drawing one long finger down my neck and under the collar of my shirt, brushing against the skin she found here. I shuddered against her as her tongue lapped gently on my neck, so cold against the warmth of my skin, but her cool and my heat again began to rise together.
Her kiss drifted lower along my neck.
And I stiffened as I realized how close she was to the two small wounds she’d made when she’d bitten me.
They still hadn’t healed. I’d wanted to ask her if they would, or if they would remain open…forever. I’d wanted to ask her what could possibly exist in a vampire to create wounds in a human that would never heal. But it hadn’t seemed like a good time to bring up any of this when she was telling me that she was going to try to give up drinking blood.
But now her mouth was there, dangerously close. She paused as I stiffened, and we remained exactly as we were—me seated in her lap, pressing myself against her, and her one hand under the hem of my shirt, her other hand under its collar, and her mouth open and a hair’s breadth away from the open wounds she’d caused, the blood pooling against the surface of my hot skin.
She sighed out, long and low, against me, and then she straightened, pulling herself away from me so that she could lean back against the chair again. Her eyes were darker now, almost black, and—as before—her incisors had lengthened to razor sharp fangs that seemed to shimmer in the low lighting from the industrial lights far above us. A tremor ran through me at seeing the fangs, but I quelled it and remained exactly where I was.
She let go of me, then, her hands drifting down to rest carefully on the chair’s arms.
Elle looked up into my eyes.
I stood—or rather, sat—my ground. Even though her dark eyes had taken on a slight tinge of red. Even as she ran her tongue over her lips and teeth, breathing out heavily as she tilted her head back, her eyes rolling into the back of her head as if she’d just tasted something perfect.
She sighed then, sighed and shook her head, opening her eyes to consider me. “Why aren’t you afraid of me?” she whispered, putting her head to the side a little as she stared at me unblinkingly.
I gulped down air. Honestly? I had no idea. I really should have been afraid of her. I pretty much assumed that anyone with a pulse would have been afraid of her in that moment, because she was giving me the look that she’d given the men who had come after me that night. The look that read that I was in very great danger.
“I trust you,” is what I said, then. I sat there in stunned silence for a moment. It had just tumbled out of my mouth, those words, but they were the truth.
I did trust her. I had absolutely no reason to trust her, but I did.
That was…odd. I’m not very big on trusting anyone. Not even my closest friends. I guess it stems from what I went through with my mother and then the foster system, but trust, for me, has to be industriously earned. And it has to be earned constantly.
But now here was this woman. This woman who had turned my life upside down, this woman who had bitten me and marked me, this woman who had saved my life but had probably ruined many others (she was a vampire, wasn’t she? How many people had she killed in her many years alive?), but regardless of all of this, I knew in my heart of hearts that I had to trust her.
I grimaced as she shifted forward at the waist, a small smile playing over her mouth that curled up wickedly at the edges, showcasing her sharp fangs. “You’re very brave,” she whispered to me, her eyes drifting over my face, down to my neck again with such an intensity of desire that I felt heat rise in me, through me.
“I’m not,” I told her, my breathing coming fast. It was the truth. I do my best to be brave, but oftentimes in life, I’ve taken the cowardly way out.
It felt important, in that strange, electric moment between us, to be utterly truthful.
Her eyes found mine again, and she let out a small sigh. “I wish you feared me,” she whispered. Something flickered behind her eyes, something pain-filled and hard. “So many have feared me, and it has made things…easier.”
“Easier?” I repeated.
Her gaze flicked from my eyes down to the small wounds in my neck—the wounds that, I knew, had warm, fresh blood rising to their edges, blood that probably called to her in ways that I would never be able to understand. I could feel my own pulse beating in me, so the blood probably trembled along the edges of the wound, drawing her like the force of gravity.
She cleared her throat. “I think you should know that I first saw you the day I came back to Boston,” she whispered. She didn’t meet my eyes, her low, gravelly voice sending a chill through me. I blinked, my eyes widening.
“But when did you get back to Boston?”
“The day you were attacked.” She met my gaze now.
I bit my lip. I didn’t understand. “Of course we met that day…” I sho
ok my head. “That’s when you saved me—”
“No, no.” She sighed, leaning back and placing one languid hand beneath her chin as she considered me. “I saw you at the bar.”
“Queenie’s?” I choked on the word, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was nodding, staring me down intently. I thought about what Queenie’s was actually like. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great bar, but it’s a sports bar. There was not a single part of me that could imagine the handsome, elegant Elle prowling along the row of leather stools at the bar while a Red Sox game was blaring out of the many flat screen televisions along the wall. “What were you doing in Queenie’s?” I asked her incredulously.
She didn’t pause or think about it for a single second.
“I was looking for you,” she whispered.
We stared at one another, my heart pounding so quickly through me that all I could hear was the thrum of the blood moving in me, and the sound of our breathing, close and quite in the enormous room. Elle kept her gaze locked on me as she shrugged elegantly, stretching a little as she placed a cool arm around my waist again. She didn’t wait for me to ask.
“From the moment that I stepped foot onto American soil again, I felt you,” she said simply. “And you drew me to you. So I found you.”
“How is that possible?” I asked her, searching her gaze. “How could you feel me? Is this…is this a vampire thing? But if so,” I muttered quickly, not giving her a chance to answer, “what does this have to do with me? Why me?”
Elle shrugged beneath me, raising a single brow as she held my gaze. “I don’t know. I don’t know about any of this. I’ve never felt this sensation before, and I can assure you that I’ve never heard of any other vampire speaking of such a thing. Humans are, to most vampires, a convenient form of sustenance and little else. Most vampires,” she continued with a small sigh, “think that they are much, much better than the human race. That the humans are here for our pleasure and our drink and nothing else besides. I have thought that way,” she told me seriously.
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