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But the next thing I’d known, I was in front of Amelia’s building, hoping to maybe catch a glimpse of her. After that it had been the easiest thing in the world to sweet talk the security officer on duty into letting me inside.
And then…
Well, she’d just looked sostressedwhen I found her that I’d invited her out for a drink before I could remind myself this couldn’t end well.
“It’s loud in here,” Amelia said right in my ear, presumably so I could hear her above the noisy music. Her warm breath against my skin, tickling the little hairs at my nape, should not have excited me as much as it did. She kept close by me, smelling like lilacs and sunlight, and looking like a dream—back when my dreams were still good. She was all buttoned-up and stern and accountanty, and Hades, I wanted tounbutton her, wanted to mess up that pristine desk of hers and lay her down on it, papers and books scattering to the floor.
Could she tell just by looking at me how badly I wanted to bury my face in her hair? To bury my teeth in her neck, too—if she would allow it?
I could all but taste the way her blood would coat my tongue. Delicious, and so pure.
The truth was, I wanted to do a lot of things with Amelia that she hadn’t signed up for when we started this arrangement, and had given no indication she wanted with me now.
It didn’t matter that our kiss had felt like all the good things the centuries had taken from me. Companionship, and warmth.Closeness with another person. My role in her life was limited in duration and scope. And that was how it had to stay, unless and until she said otherwise.
“Yeah this barisnoisy,” I agreed, loudly enough for her to hear me. Forcing myself to snap out of the haze of want her proximity seemed to bring out in me, I quipped, “I wouldn’t have thought all these lawyer- and banker-types had it in them.”
She laughed. I couldn’t hear it over the shitty bar music, but I could see it in the way her eyes crinkled at the corners and how her shoulders relaxed. And I could feel it, when she slipped her hand in mine and gave it a gentle squeeze.
“Let’s find a table,” she suggested.
I wasn’t sure why she’d agreed to come out with me. I’d been completely evasive in my reasons for dropping by.
And Istillcouldn’t understand why she was so unconcerned about me being a vampire.
But I wasn’t strong enough to look a gift horse in the mouth. Now she was leading me by the hand to a table in the back, her palm pressed against mine so warm and soft it took all my self-restraint not to moan in pleasure.
“How about here?” she asked.
I looked at the table. The floor beneath our feet was so tacky with spilt beer and devil only knew what else that my shoes stuck to it, but the table looked clean enough.
“Sure,” I said-shouted. “Do you want to sit here while I…” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder towards the bar.
Uncertainty was written all over her face. “I don’t really like beer.” Another point in her column. Even when I’d been able to drink beer, I remembered it tasting like unwashed asshole. “But maybe if they have some Chardonnay?”
The bar’s atmosphere suggested it didn’t carry things likeChardonnay. But then, a lot of the people there looked like they worked in fancy office buildings like Amelia’s. They probably hadsomesort of wine selection.
“I’ll investigate options,” I said.
She smiled at me, so warm and genuine it felt like the sun emerging after a century of slumber, and Hades help me, I was lost.
Amelia
Reggie came back carrying a bottle of white wine in one hand and two wineglasses in another. Even in this crowded bar, he moved with a kind of effortless self-confidence I didn’t think I’d ever seen outside of a movie. He gave the impression of a person so comfortable in his own skin that he legitimately couldn’t be bothered to care what other people thought of him.
Accountants didn’t move like that. Or at least, I didn’t. I think I was born worried about the impression I was making among the other babies at the hospital. My self-consciousness hadn’t lessened in the years since.
I refused to dwell on how hot Reggie’s self-confidence made him. Nothing good would come ofthat.
He placed everything on the table, then began to pour the wine. I watched the pale golden liquid fill the glasses, telling myself to focus on that rather than the large, capable hands doing the pouring.
“Here we are,” he said, handing me a glass and saving me from the direction of my thoughts. “One for you, and a decoy one for me.”
“Decoy?” I took a sip. The wine was actually pretty good.
“Decoy,” Reggie confirmed. “I can’t drink it.”
“Why not? It’s not that bad.”
