“What are you doing?” I asked, my breathing already ragged.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, “But I do want to take your mind off the pain.”
My legs opened for him, and he brought his mouth and tongue to rest between them. He was right. The pain in my ribs disappeared after a couple of minutes of his delicate kisses. And when he brought me to climax using only his tongue, I felt myself start to float away on a sea of tingles and quick, short breaths.
Jared returned to his side of the bed when he was done, and I let myself lay on his chest, fully satisfied and strangely more alive than I had ever felt in my life. Jared’s heart was also pumping hard and fast against my ear, but it, too, was starting to slow, to calm down. Gently he drew his fingertips across my back, but then he stopped.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“What?” I asked, looking up at him.
“I touched your ribs. Did I hurt you?”
“No,” I said.
Thinking about it, I hadn’t felt anything—only the tickling sensation that came with the passing of his fingertips across my skin. I had expected a little pain, at least, had he touched the damaged flesh.
“Maddie, your bruise,” he said.
“Oh shit,” I said, after craning my neck around to check. The once purple, black, and yellow skin was starting to take on a healthy, peach color. “It’s… healing.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
From the moment I woke up and read the time, I knew my sleeping cycle was well and truly screwed. It was early afternoon, the morning birds had long since stopped chirping, and Jared was asleep next to me, his chest gently swelling and dipping. I rubbed my eyes and propped myself up on one elbow, pulling the sheet up to my neck before gently shaking Jared awake. He stirred after a time, then opened his eyes and looked up at me, smiling a sleepy smile.
“Morning,” he said.
“Afternoon, actually,” I said.
“Really?” He checked his phone. “Damn. Did it again, huh?”
“Yeah, this could turn into a nasty habit.”
“Or a great one.”
“No, a nasty one—and if it does, I’m blaming you.”
“Me? Why me?”
He sat up, and I leaned forward to kiss him lightly on the lips. “Because you’re the one who kept us up.”
“You would have kept us up longer. I acted decisively.”
I shoved his shoulder and turned my face away to mask the reddening of my cheeks. He was right. I had kept us both up, and I wasn’t sorry. The best part was, I wasn’t feeling tired. I almost felt like I could get up and run laps around the building.
“Are you working tonight?” I asked.
“Yeah, I am.”
“That sucks.”
“I know, but I get off at around nine. Maybe we can… hang out?”
I picked my phone up from the nightstand. “Yeah… that actually sounds really good.”
“You got any plans?”
“Wait a second…” I said.
“What is it?”
It was a message from Nicole. The preview on my phone’s lock-screen read ‘I have something for you. A letter. It arrived this morning. Thought you might...’
“Nicole wants me to go over to her place,” I said. “Says she has mail for me.”
“Your mail came to her place?”
“That’s weird. I haven’t forwarded anything to her house. Could be something that needed to be signed for, and they dropped it off at her place… but that doesn’t seem right.”
“Do you think she’s just trying to get you to come over so you can talk?”
I swept across the screen and read the message in full. It didn’t say much more than the preview had displayed. She thought I might have wanted to go and pick it up, and wanted to let me know she would be at her house today.
“She could be…” I said.
“You guys are close,” he said, “If you go over there to talk to her, I know she’ll talk to you. Maybe you can change her mind, or at least find out exactly what she’s thinking by siding with Tamara. She isn’t a hateful person. I know she wouldn’t suddenly start hunting vampires down.”
“She hung me out to dry. I know she’s not going to go after Jean Luc with a torch and pitchfork, but leaving me hanging like that was totally not cool.” I got up from the bed. “I don’t know what she really wants, but I’ll go and talk to her.”
Jared offered to drive me to Nicole’s and back, but I didn’t want him waiting around for me, so I let him drive me over and promised I would make my own way back later. Steeling my resolve, I went through the gate, walked up the short stone path, up the steps, and rang the doorbell. The seconds passed, and passed, and passed. Birds chirped. A wind chime tinkled in the breeze. I was beginning to think no one was home, but then Nicole unlocked the door and opened it.
She peered out from around the door, her face serious and cold, but also a little pale and tired. “You came,” she said, her voice flat and devoid of sympathy or compassion.
Hearing her voice brought more anger bubbling to the surface than I would have liked. I tried to keep it all bottled in. “You said you had something for me,” I said.
“I do.”
An awkward silence hung in the air. I had expected her to say something else after that, but she hadn’t. “So?” I asked, “Are you going to give it to me, or just look at me like that?”
Nicole opened the door fully to let me in. I stepped through, a little apprehensively, and immediately noticed the place was a little duller than I was used to. Jeanette usually kept the place sparkling, and the smell of fresh pine was never far from your nose. Now it was as if all the sparkle had been sucked out of the house, and all that remained was a stale, dusty shell.
She led me into the living room and sat down on one of the sofas there. I sat down on the armchair and looked at her. “I wasn’t sure I was going to come,” I said. “I didn’t think you had anything for me.”
“You thought I was just trying to get you over here to talk?”
“Why else?”
“I think I would have just told you if I wanted to talk.”
“So, you don’t want to go over what the hell happened the other night, at the party?”
“I don’t think I have to.”
“Someone shut and locked the bathroom door,” I said. “I was locked in that room and had to listen to everything go down, powerless to do anything about it. I couldn’t use my magick. If I hadn’t broken the toilet tank cover on the handle, I may have never gotten out.”
“None of us could use our magick.”
“Exactly. People are only talking about the vampires, but no one’s talking about the reason why we couldn’t use our magick. How the hell could they have done that to us?”
“We’re talking about it.”
I swallowed. “We?”
“The witches,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We’re trying to figure out why it was none of us could use our magick when we needed to.”