12
Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable. Sometimes we have to bare our souls to our vampire mates and say, “Yes, I’m invincible and immortal, but you can still hurt me.”
— Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less
Destructive Relationships
We’d underestimated how far the silver had sprayed. I could see faint misting spatters of the grayish liquid along the far wall of the shop. Suddenly very weary, I wondered how long it would take to clean up the mess. Not that I was much help in that department, anyway. Andrea and Dick forced me to sit across the room, farthest from “ground zero,” with an ice bag on my cheeks, while Andrea wet-vacuumed the carpet. Dick was wearing a surgical mask and elbow-length rubber gloves to wipe down the bar with disinfectant.
I sat there, feeling sort of useless, as Gabriel came roaring through the front door, his eyes wild. From the panicked, crazed look on his face, I thought he’d finally snapped and was going to go to all bunny-boiler on me. But when his eyes connected with mine, there was such powerful relief there that I couldn’t be afraid. He bounded across the room and tenderly cradled my blistered face between his palms, poring over the damaged skin. Even though I was still mad at him, even though I still had enough of my pride to sting at the thought of him seeing me in full Freddy Krueger mode, I threw my arms around him and buried my face in his neck.
“It’s OK. It’s OK.” I sniffled. “I’m fine.”
I relaxed into Gabriel’s arms and let him rock me gently back and forth. I knew things weren’t settled yet. We were going to have to have a lot of long, long talks about trust, fidelity, communication, and not dropping one’s sexual partner’s naked ass onto concrete. But for the moment, I was willing to skip it all. I just wanted someone to care whether my face disintegrated or not. I don’t think that’s a violation of feminist principles.
“What is he doing here?” Andrea demanded, giving Gabriel the Glare of One Thousand Suns.
“I called him,” Dick muttered.
“You what?” Andrea cried.
Gabriel lifted his head from my shoulder and growled at Dick, “How could you let this happen?”
Dick looked sheepish. “I can’t watch her every minute, son. How was I supposed to know she’d be attacked by ground shipping?”
The two of them shared a look over my head. Gabriel made several threatening faces. Dick responded with rude gestures. Eventually, they looked like two inebriated mimes having a dance-off.
“Would someone clue the scabby girl in on the conversation?” I demanded.
“Dick was supposed to be watching you,” Gabriel admitted. “He’s been watching you for me for a while now.”
“Well, that explains why you’ve spent so much time at the shop!” I took a swipe at Dick, who lithely stepped out of the way toward Andrea. She smacked him in my stead. “I do not need the Dick and Gabriel Secret Service Detail!”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Gabriel whispered. “It’s not that I didn’t trust you to take care of yourself. Between the letters and the pranks, I was scared. I just wanted to protect you.”
“Which is probably what put me in danger. Jackass,” I said, halfheartedly slapping at his arm.
“I love you. Love you so much,” he whispered into my neck. “I don’t know what I would have done if you’d been … I am a huge jackass.”
“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I told him, ignoring Andrea when she said, “That’s just sad.”
“She’s fine,” Dick said. “Really, Gabe. She’s going to be OK. She’s a tough little nut.”
“Dick saved me,” I told Gabriel. “Without him, I would be a little pile of Jane ashes waiting to be vacuumed up.”
“Thank you,” Gabriel told Dick. Dick seemed to be waiting for a punchline, so Gabriel repeated it. “I mean it. Thank you.”
Dick would have blushed if he was capable. Instead, he made a study of the floor.
“Can I see the device?” Gabriel asked.
Dick retrieved the box, which we had wrapped in a clear plastic bag.
“The label was intact, undamaged,” Dick said, showing Gabriel the address flap. “You couldn’t even tell the box had already been taped once until you took off the second layer.”
“So, whoever it was would have had to monitor our Dumpster closely enough to wait for a barely damaged Amazon.com box with an intact label to be thrown away?” I made a face and then winced at the pressure on my burnt cheeks. “You know, I think I’m more upset by that than I am the silver thing.”
“The silver is very pure,” Gabriel observed. “I can smell it, even from here. Colloidal silver tends to be higher in concentration than the mix used in defense sprays, and this seems to be a particularly potent batch. If this had sprayed you directly in the face, instead of Andrea, you might not have survived. It would be like someone who is allergic to bee stings stepping on a hive. Your healing ability would have been overwhelmed, and you would have been stripped down to the bone. Young vampires rarely come back from injuries like that.”
“Didn’t you say your new friend Courtney runs a sterling-silver shop?” Dick asked.
“Who’s Courtney?” Gabriel asked.
“I met her at the Chamber of Commerce.”
“You belong to the Chamber of Commerce?”
“Hey, I haven’t been sitting around moping after you. I am a very busy and important woman.” Andrea gave me a smirking yet disapproving look. I amended, “I moped a little bit.”
Dick rolled his eyes. “Someone who runs a jewelry business would be pretty well versed in the different forms of silver, especially high-concentration stuff.”
“Oh, come on, guys, don’t do this,” I whined. “I really like Courtney. Well, that one, at least. I just want one normal human friend without a frightening agenda. Please don’t take that from me.”
“I think that hurts my feelings,” Andrea muttered.
“Besides, I think we all know who—” I was interrupted as Emery sauntered from the rear of the shop. He stopped and sniffed delicately at the harsh disinfectants, shuddering.
“What’s that smell? It smells like burnt popcorn in here,” he said, gagging.
“Emery, how long have you been here?” Andrea asked.
“I just arrived, Andrea, dear,” he said, offering her an overly gooey smile. “I came in the staff entrance.”
“It was locked,” Dick noted, his jaw set as he pulled Andrea just a little bit closer.
“I borrowed a key,” Emery said in the dismissive tone he always used when talking to Dick.
“You’re going to give that back now,” I told him, not bothering to disguise the irritation in my voice.
Emery ignored me, his eyes sweeping over the disheveled room. “What happened?”
“Someone sent Jane a can of aerosol silver, which sprayed all over the shop,” Dick said, watching Emery carefully for a reaction.
“Did it get on any of the more important books?” Emery demanded with a shriek. “Does liquid silver stain? Have you contacted your insurance agent?”
Sadly, that was exactly the reaction I’d expected. I sincerely looked forward to the day when Dick revealed their blood connection to Emery … and then Dick took his great-great-grandson out to the woodshed for an old-fashioned ass-whoopin’.
“And I’m fine, thank you,” I muttered. I felt a low growl rumble deep in Gabriel’s chest. I placed a restraining hand across his shoulders. As much as I appreciated Gabriel’s indignant response, Emery couldn’t help that he was raised to be a socially clueless tool. Plus, spilling Emery’s blood would probably damage more books.
“Well, of course, I’m concerned for you, Jane, but obviously, you’re fine,” Emery said, giving another delicate shudder at the sight of my ravaged face. “But who knows what kind of damage this little prank has done? Who knows how many books have been ruined?”
“We’re not really worried about that right now, Emery,” Andrea said. “We’re just grateful that Jane’s all right.”
“Of course, you are. You’re such a good friend, Andrea.” Emery pressed Andrea’s hands between his. Dick’s eyes narrowed into dangerous little slits.
“We’ll start checking the books just as soon as we have all this cleaned up,” Dick told him. “Why don’t you head on home to the boardinghouse or the malt shop or wherever you wholesome types spend your evenings?”
“But I can help,” Emery protested. “You probably want to clean the silver off the books as soon as possible if you’re going to salvage them. Besides, it wouldn’t do for poor Jane to stumble across a book soaked in silver months from now, would it? We can’t have those sorts of hazards just lurking around the shop for her or our vampire customers. I’m willing to examine every single book if it means making the shop safe for Jane … and her friends.”
“Andrea and I can handle it,” Dick told him.
“Wouldn’t it be better to have an extra pair of hands helping you?” Emery countered. He gave Andrea a long simpering look. “Besides, it’s obvious that Andrea is shaken by the incident. I’d like to pitch in and help her however I can.”
“Emery, look.” I stood on wobbly legs. My head swam, and the floor tilted toward me. “I don’t feel so well.”
“You’re going home,” Gabriel told me as he caught my elbows and kept me from smacking my head on the floor. “Dick, would you mind closing up?”
I was too dazed to object or hear Dick’s response. Dick and Andrea could figure out what to do with Emery. I let Gabriel lead me to his car and tuck me into the passenger side.
I stared out the window, unsure of what to say, as he drove me to River Oaks. When we got there, he let Fitz out to run and took me to the upstairs bathroom, where he carefully stripped me out of the silver-laced clothes. While Gabriel ran bathwater, I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror and was relieved to see that it no longer looked like raw hamburger. I had a few shiny, pale pink patches across my cheeks and nose, like a human recovering from a bad sunburn.
Gabriel let me slip in under the bubbles, and I closed my eyes to avoid looking at him while he ran a sponge down my still-healing arms and legs. He poured some of my “fancy” antifrizz shampoo into his palm and massaged it through my hair. Apparently, he didn’t expect me to talk about my feelings or how awkward it was for me to let him see me naked again, especially with my fabulous shiny pink healing burns. It was just as well. I wasn’t sure how I felt about him seeing me naked again, with or without shiny pink healing burns.
When he tilted my head back to rinse my hair, I caught him staring at my face. You’d expect someone in his situation to be sneaking looks about eight inches south, but he was wholly concentrated on my face. The burns must have been worse than I thought.
“I know, it’s bad,” I told him. “But I’m feeling a lot better.”
“No, you’re almost completely healed. I just—I’m trying to take in as much as I can before you’re strong enough to drop-kick me out the door.”
“Why are you being so sweet?” I asked.
“Because you’re letting me,” he said, a sad little lopsided smile tilting his mouth. “I’m so sorry.”
“I missed you, too. But I didn’t do anything wrong, ergo no apology.”
“I can live with that.” He nodded, gently pouring warm water over my head. “I would like you to consider moving to my house for a while, Jane.”
“I couldn’t do that. It would feel weird. And I don’t think living together would be right for us at the moment. There’s too much going on.”
“Well, then move into Andrea’s place, at least until the threats stop.”
My eyebrows arched, the new skin around them stretching tight. “Andrea’s place, where Dick lives? You must be scared.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“I’ll be fine. And I’ll be much more careful when I open the mail, I promise.” He gave me a withering fatherly look. “I’ll let Andrea open the mail from now on?” When that didn’t satisfy him, I huffed. “I’ll take it to the airport and have it X-rayed?”
“I will be spending a lot more time at the shop with you,” he said. “You don’t even have to acknowledge my presence. I will just sit in the back and watch you, to make sure you’re safe. Wherever you go, I go.”
“Like a stalker.”
He nodded. “Yes. Jane, I don’t care what capacity you let me have in your life. I just want to be there. And if that means I have to keep my distance, I’ll do that.”
I sighed. If ever there was a time for me to lay all my cards on the table, this was it. Naked, wounded, and vulnerable. “So, here’s my basic problem with us, the reason I can’t seem to relax into a relationship with you, the reason I find problems where none exist and I push you away. I—I can’t figure out why you’re with me!” I exclaimed, clapping my hand over my mouth. I hadn’t meant for that part to come out. I had meant to say, “You lie and hide things from me.”
Gabriel pried my fingers away from my lips. My hands trembled as stuff I’d been feeling for months tumbled from my tongue. “I know that makes me neurotic and sad, but I can’t figure out why you want to be with me. Every other woman in your life is exotic and beautiful and has all this history. And I’m just some drunk girl you followed home from a bar, some pathetic human you felt your usual need to protect, and you got stuck with a lifetime tie to her because she was dumb enough to get shot. I can’t stand the idea that you feel obligated to me. I know I’m insecure and pushy and spastic, desperately inappropriate at times and just plain odd at others. And I can’t help but wonder why you would want that when there are obviously so many other options. I can’t help but feel that I’m keeping you from someone better.”
I let out a loud, long breath. It felt as if some tremendous weight on my chest had wiggled loose and then dropped away. No more running. No more floating along and waiting. My cards were on the table. If Gabriel and I couldn’t have a future after this, it wasn’t because I held back from him. Now I could only hope it didn’t blow up in my face in some horrible way.
I wasn’t sure my face could handle much more.
Gabriel sighed and cupped my chin, forcing me to look him in the eye. “I didn’t follow you that night because I wanted to protect you. I followed you that night because you were one of the most interesting people I’d met in decades. You had this light about you, this sweetness, this biting humor. After I’d only known you for an hour, you made me laugh harder than I had since before I was turned. You made me feel normal, at peace, for the first time in years. And I didn’t want to lose that yet. Even if it was just watching over you from a mile away, I didn’t want to leave your presence. I followed you because I didn’t want to let you go. Even then, I saw you were one of the most extraordinary, fascinating, maddening people I would ever know. Even then, I think I knew that I would love you. If you don’t love me, that’s one thing. But if you do, just stop arguing with me about it. It’s annoying. ”
“Fair enough,” I conceded. “Why the hell couldn’t you have told me this a year ago?”
“I’ve wanted to. You weren’t ready to hear it.”
The water cooled. Gabriel helped me out of the tub and wrapped my robe around me. I snuggled up under the covers and pulled him under with me. He held me close for a long, silent moment before I finally said, “Tell me about Jeanine. Tell me everything. I won’t get mad, no matter how bad it is.”
Gabriel turned me to face him, stroking my hair. “I met Jeanine on one of my first visits to Paris. Her family had old money, very old. Her parents died when she was young, leaving her to be raised by a criminally indulgent grandmother. Jeanine’s mother had been prone to ‘spells’ during which her grandmother attended to her every need. So Jeanine learned early on that being weak and sickly was the fastest way to get attention. Batteries of doctors, nurses, and maids catered to her every whim around the clock. And yet they could never find exactly what was ailing her. Her symptoms shifted like the sands, leaving her grandmother frantic that she would lose another beloved girl. Jeanine was never forced to study subjects she found boring, never forced to meet family or social obligations she found unappealing, never made to do anything that didn’t suit her down to her stamping little foot. The end result was a girl with a woefully limited education, little empathy, and no apparent conscience.
“She spent so much time pretending to be ill that she convinced herself she was. The whole of Paris society spoke in quiet admiration of this ‘pale rose’ who only braved the trials of public appearances every so often for the opera or an important party. She was beautiful. Mahogany hair, always curled into the latest fashions. Bottomless eyes the color of bluebells. Her skin was so—”
“I get it. She made tuberculosis hot,” I said crossly. “On with the story.”
In a slightly less admiring voice, Gabriel assured me, “I found her to be manipulative, spoiled, and not nearly as wan or silly as she wanted us to believe. She was what you would have quite freely called a pain in the ass. But she was also very clever. Most of her ‘incapacitation’ was spent reading.”
“I thought you said she didn’t study.”
“Oh, she read what suited her. Romance novels, Gothic horror. Unfortunately, some of her library included Gothic romance tales, Varney the Vampire and Carmilla. ”
“Those are pretty hard-core books for the time,” I commented. “Surely, well-bred and invalid young ladies did not read lurid lesbian vampire fantasies.” Gabriel arched an eyebrow at me. “Not that I’ve read them … Moving on.”
“As I said, her grandmother was indulgent. She would go to any lengths to lift poor Jeanine’s spirits, including discreetly procuring naughty books. Jeanine recognized what I was right away. She approached me, throwing herself in my path wherever I went, the ballet, parties, even a late-night card game at a friend’s home. It was becoming a joke among my friends. Her grandmother encouraged the infatuation, because she seemed to think that whatever got Jeanine out of bed and into the world was a good thing. One night, Jeanine cornered me at a ball and told me she knew my secret, but not to worry, she wouldn’t tell a soul. All I had to do in return was to make her what I was.”
“She wanted to be turned?”
Gabriel muttered, “For someone who spent so much time on her deathbed, she was terrified of death. The idea of becoming old and not having the choice of being confined and ill was horrible to her. She thought by becoming a vampire, she would finally be free from illness, stronger, able to get out from under the control of her grandmother, whom she began resenting long before. I refused, told her she was mistaken. I even used my burgeoning powers to wipe all thoughts or memories she had pertaining to my being a vampire. But her obsession ran deeper than my reach. Within a few weeks, she was back again and more determined. She was everywhere. I switched hotels endlessly to dodge her. She excelled at knowing my schedule before I did. Everywhere I went, there was a note from her, cajoling, wheedling, promising me her undying devotion, endless love, and companionship.”
“That sounds vaguely familiar,” I said dryly.
He sighed. “Finally, she found the hotel where I was staying. I came home one morning to find her on my bed.”
“Slut.”
“Fully clothed with both wrists slashed,” he added.
“Ew.”
“She was on the brink of death. She had just enough breath to whisper, ‘Help me, please.’ I knew it was wrong—”
“But, being unable to pass up a damsel in distress—which is a bit of a pattern with you, by the way—you intervened,” I said, cupping his chin in my hands.
“Yes. I felt it was my fault she had done this. I hadn’t been forceful enough in dissuading her. I could have done more. There was no blood left to take from her, but I gave her my own. Afterward, I felt used, angry, helpless. I’d panicked and turned someone who was going to be an undead terror. I was ashamed of what I’d done. I knew what sort of evil she would be capable of, and yet I still couldn’t bring myself to destroy her, to keep her from rising and walking the earth.
“I slept—on the floor of the hotel room—and when I rose that night, I took her to the home of a friend, a fellow vampire. A woman, Violette, who was three hundred forty years old at the time and less likely to be manipulated by Jeanine. I hoped that when she arose, Violette would prove to be a mentor, a stabilizing influence. By that time, I’d booked passage to China.”
“Dramatic,” I noted.
“Necessary,” Gabriel countered. “Jeanine is a prime example of a vampire who changed not at all after she was turned. She’s just as neurotic and self-absorbed now as she was then. She’s the only hypochondriac vampire I’ve ever met. She travels with a humidifier, for God’s sake. She’s so convinced that every place she goes will be her ‘final resting place’ that she carries all of her possessions with her in a moving van.”
I snickered, but he continued, “And when vampirism didn’t change the way she looked at herself, the way she felt, she blamed me. She believes she’s a lesser vampire. She said that I didn’t turn her properly. She believes she’s still weak and sickly, so, obviously, she didn’t get enough of my blood. She wants me to try to turn her again .”
“Is that even possible?” I asked.
“Once your transformation is complete, that’s the way you’ll remain for the rest of your existence. The point is that I did turn Jeanine completely. I gave her more than enough of my blood. She refuses to believe me. I’ve tried to talk some sense into her, to teach her restraint, but when she doesn’t get what she wants, her tantrums turn out to be massacres. She became convinced that the only ‘cure’ for her condition was the blood of those who had lived in high altitudes, so she drained every nun in a convent in Tibet. She’s butchered hospitals’ worth of doctors because they can’t find any way to help her.”
“She’s spent almost one hundred years trying to track me down, doing what she can to isolate me, ruin my friendships, my relationships with women. She’ll become dormant for a few years, while she ‘recuperates’ at a mineral spring or a monastery or some other supposedly curative location. And then she’ll get restless and start up again. When it became clear that she was beyond my help, my focus became keeping her away from the people, the places I cared about. That’s the reason I’ve spent so much time bouncing between the Hollow and, well, the rest of the world for the last century. She says I owe her, that I made her, and now I’m responsible for what she’s become. And she’s right. She’s my creation. The blood of every person she’s ever killed is on my hands.”
Gabriel pressed his face against my shoulder, cringing as if he expected me to start screaming and hitting him. I waited a beat before saying, “So, really, I’m not the craziest girl you’ve ever dated. That’s a relief.”
“Your grasp of the weight of this situation is amazing,” he retorted.
I shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
“So … you’re not angry?” he asked.
“Of course, I’m angry!” I exclaimed. “I’m freaking furious with you right now. If I was up to full strength, I would kick your ass from here to Sunday. I can’t believe that this is what you kept from me all these months. I thought you cheated on me! You let me suffer and mope and go months without seeing you because of some issue with a bratty childe? You and your stupid overactive conscience! From now on, you are going to gauge the severity of your actions by answering the question, ‘Would Dick think this was a good idea?’ and if the answer is no, that’s when you know you’ve done something really, really wrong. Either way, just tell me about it so we avoid these dramatics. If you had told me about this months ago, I would have helped you track her down and lock her in some vampire nut ward.”
“That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want you to know what I’d let happen, that I wasn’t even trying to stop her anymore, just outrun her. I shouldn’t have lied to you. And it kills me that I hurt you in a misguided attempt to protect you, especially when it seems that isn’t doing any good. All I can say is that I panicked. I was ashamed. I was trying so hard to cover my tracks that I lost sight of what was important—you.”
“Why were you ashamed?” I asked.
He lifted my chin, meeting my eyes. “I was a coward. If this had happened to you, you would have stopped her. You would have gone after her with both barrels and talked her into submission. And when you left me in that hotel room, I was torn between wanting to drop to my knees, tell you everything, and beg your forgiveness and wanting you to leave, to get away so you would be far from Jeanine and her madness. I thought I’d feel better once you were home, but I was decimated. I sat in that hotel room for a week, unsure of what to do, where to go, how to feel, all the while hoping you would come back but knowing that you shouldn’t.”
“Technically, decimated means ‘the reduction of a military force by one-tenth,’” I pointed out.
“Mmm, I love it when you do that.” He sighed, pressing his face into my hair. “I haven’t had anyone to correct me or fill my head with useless trivia for months.”
“You poor soul,” I muttered, smiling despite myself. “Besides, I wouldn’t say you’re a coward. You pushed a tree on top of a guy for me.” I laced my arms around his waist and pulled him against me. “So, you were wrong.”
“I was absolutely, unequivocally, undeniably, one-hundred-percent wrong,” he agreed, accenting each word with a soft kiss on my throat.
“Which would mean …”
“That you were absolutely, unequivocally, undeniably, one-hundred-percent right,” he said, again with the kissing.
“You know, a woman waits her whole life to hear those words.” I sighed. I straightened, lifting my head. I looked up into his face and caught a flicker of uncertainty. “What? What’s with the face?”
“Well, I can believe Jeanine sent you letters,” he said. “And maybe even rubbing your house with exotic, unpleasant fruit. But the silver, that seems rather aggressive for her. She’s absolutely phobic of any sort of silver, claims she’s more sensitive to it than most vampires because of her delicate constitution. For her to send it to you, she must be getting desperate.”
“Either that, or I have another stalker,” I wisecracked. “Oh, crap. You said you’ve turned three people including me. Who was the third?” I poked him when he didn’t respond. “Total honesty.”
“It’s a much shorter story. I met Brandley in the 1950s in London. He was a young medical student, brilliant. He spent most of his time in a lab, studying vaccines. From the moment I met him, I could tell that he was very ill. There was a taint to his scent, an undercurrent of decay. Leukemia. But when I thought of what he could accomplish, how he could benefit mankind when he had unlimited time to conduct his research, I gave him a choice: impending natural death or everlasting life. He took it. I was so careful turning him, staying with him until he rose, coaching him through those first few days. And at first, it was wonderful to have a companion, someone to hunt with, to talk to. Like yours, Brandley’s learning curve was quite steep. He adjusted beautifully to his new life. But unlike you, Brandley had an enormous aptitude for cruelty. He had no interest in study or science when he could spend his nights drowning in the blood of his victims. I tried to teach him patience, pity for his food, but for him, the meal seemed incomplete if they survived.”
I chewed my lip. “Should we worry about Brandley coming after us, because I don’t want to go through this whole bratty demon stepchilde thing again.”
“Brandley’s dead. He was killed by an angry Welsh mob who objected to his tendency of feeding off their very young daughters.”
“Are you sure he’s dead?” I asked.
“Well, they cut his head off, so, yes.”
I was quiet for a long moment. “You have really, really bad luck when it comes to vampire children, don’t you? I mean, how could you have worked up the nerve to turn me? Because it could have gone just horribly, horribly wrong.”
“Who’s to say it hasn’t?” Gabriel muttered. “And stop using adverbs twice, it’s insulting.”
“Seriously, why would you put yourself through that when you’d had such terrible experiences as a sire?”
He kissed me, pressing his lips ever so softly against mine. “Because you were different. When I told you that your goodness and your innocence set you apart, I meant it. I’d had reservations when I turned Jeanine and some reluctance about turning Brandley. But when I saw you, bleeding and dying, I knew without a doubt that you deserved a second chance, that you would make the most of your vampire life, without cruelty, without being petty or selfish. You’re the best part of me, Jane, the gift I could give the world to make up for past wrongs.”
“That’s either incredibly beautiful or a lot of pressure to put on me.”
Gabriel snorted. “I love you.”
“I love you, too. Idiot.”
“Agreed.” He sighed. “I’ve never had a lover I’ve met as a human and known as a vampire. I’ve never made love to someone I sired. I didn’t count on my feelings of love and concern and responsibility twisting into such a confusing mess.”
“So, I’m your first?”
He seemed startled by the question. “Yes! The last thing on my mind was sex with Jeanine, and, well, Brandley was a man.”
“So, you’ve never …”
“No!”
I threw up my hands. “Hey, vampires are hypersexual creatures. Our boundaries are not like those of humans. And then, of course, there’s all that tension between you and Dick. You can’t really blame me for thinking—”
“Jane!”
I shrugged. “OK. You’re totally heterosexual.”
“You’re enjoying my discomfort right now, aren’t you?” he growled.
“Immensely,” I told him, snickering as I bit down on his bottom lip. “This is my proposal, simple and to the point: we track this Jeanine twit down and kick her ass.”
Gabriel sighed again, burying his face in my hair. “That’s my girl.”
I would have gotten into a long-term relationship years ago if someone had told me about the almighty power of makeup sex.
We talked long into the night about our months apart. We seemed to see it as a competition, who missed whom more. I described my bathrobe-encased moping. He countered with the fact that he let Zeb take him to karaoke night at the Cellar to sing sad break-up songs, including “There’s a Tear in My Beer.” I told him about my evening of drinking with Dick, carefully omitting the bar fight, for Dick’s sake. Gabriel confessed to keeping one of my T-shirts in bed with him so he could smell me while he slept.
“You are now officially a sixteen-year-old girl.” I giggled, stroking his back. “Wait a minute, what did you do with the panties you stole in the alley?”
“It’s best we don’t discuss that,” he said, nuzzling my collarbone. “We’ve already established that I missed you more than you missed me. Let’s leave it at that. I am the truly pathetic winner.”
“I wouldn’t call it winning, per se,” I said, shaking my head. “But I think I have you beat.”
“What can be more pathetic than sexually objectifying your New Kids on the Block T-shirt?” he asked, arching a brow.
I rolled, letting his weight pin me pleasantly against the mattress as I held his face over mine. “My body craved you so much that I couldn’t sleep for all the sex dreams I was having. Full-color, surround-sound, waking up in the middle of multiple-orgasm extravaganzas that tortured me every single night. I didn’t know whether to be angry at my subconscious for not being able to let you go or grateful that I was able to hold on to you even in that empty, barely satisfying way.”
Gabriel’s mouth went slack, and I think I heard his brain shatter like glass. He wheezed, “Tell me.”
I launched into detailed descriptions of my dreams, because I figured, why suffer alone? I told him about what was basically a reimagining of my losing my virginity in college, only it was Gabriel hiking me up against the stacks of the Russian folklore section of the university library. And we ended up christening the special-collections room as well as the reference section. He groaned when I told him about the one where he was my boss and I had to be “disciplined” against his desk for improperly filing a report. I recounted the scenario involving him and a pint of Chocolate Overload ice cream just to be mean. When I got to the Victorian dream, I left out the bloodier, upsetting aspects to focus on the setting and the fancy clothes. I stumbled over the, um, oral exam, because I was new to the dirty talk and couldn’t seem to find the balance between sexy-dirty and gross-dirty. Seriously, Naughty Jane can only keep up the fa?ade for so long.
“Don’t stop now,” Gabriel said, his eyes dark and slightly unfocused. “I’d like to know how this one ends.”
“It’s a little embarrassing,” I confessed, suddenly wanting the bed to open up and swallow me. I’d gone from wet and ready temptress to stuttering novice in three seconds flat. If I could have blushed, my face would have lit up like a flame. “I will say that you kissed me somewhere that you’ve never kissed me before.”
“Like in the backseat of a car?” he asked, his tone teasing.
“Yes, you kissed my Honda.” I snickered, slapping at his shoulder as he spread kisses in the valley between my breasts, the little dip in my belly button. When he nudged the tip of his nose to the lace waistband of my panties, my hips bucked up from the bed. “What are you doing?”
“I told you, I want to know how this one ends,” he said, peeling my underwear away. I let out a slow, jittery breath as the cool air hit my damp, trickling flesh. I made a noise between a yelp and a sigh when Gabriel’s tongue made that first long, achingly slow slide against me. Gabriel murmured, “How will we know if the dream was accurate unless we let it play out?”
My hips bucked up, pressing me against his mouth as his lips danced across my center. His hands slipped under my butt and lifted me closer, my legs slipping over his back. He nipped and kissed and teased while my body pitched. Hot spikes of pleasure coiled in my belly, stretching each nerve until every stroke of his mouth was almost painful. And just like my dream, the moment the tip of his tongue flicked at that little elusive pearl of nerves, I came, howling.
Pushing my thighs apart and settling between them, Gabriel slid up the length of my body, kissing and nipping until he reached my mouth. As his tongue, still tasting of my own arousal, swept into my mouth, he filled me to the hilt. Whatever breath we had left was released in one long sigh.
He spread my knees wide, tucking my ankles around the small of his back as he withdrew. I whimpered just as he snapped his hips and drove deeper. He brought me to my peak over and over and then pulled back, drawing out our release. I lost track of time, of rhythm, of anything but the delicious friction. Gabriel brushed his lips over my closed eyelids. My eyes fluttered open as his fangs peeked over his lips. He smiled, bending his head to my throat and delicately scraping his sharp teeth against my skin. I arched my neck. He sank his fangs into my skin, drawing blood to the wound with insistent, gentle pressure. I turned my head toward the palm cupping my face, biting down on the skin just below his wrist as his movements became more frantic.
He gasped as I swallowed the first mouthful of blood. The connection, the flow of blood seemed to open up some little window between us. I’d never caught so much as a hint of what Gabriel was thinking before. And now I could feel everything he felt—the love he had for me, his relief at being able to touch me again, the pleasure I was giving him. It was all laid open for me. And when I thought, “I love you, too,” he gasped again, as if he heard me. The thought sent him toppling over the edge and dragged me with him.
In my head, the lesser, dream version of Gabriel was sent packing with his stupid tuxedo jacket thrown after him.