Page 91 of So Thirsty

I’d given up on romance. I’d already settled. I figured the only women over thirty-five who get to be swept off their feet are the ones in books and movies. In fiction.

But I’d thought vampires were fictional, too, so who the hell knows?

I get so dizzy spinning that I forget all the bloodshed of the last forty-eight hours and press myself against him. I squeeze his hand, his skin against my skin the answer to a prayer I was too shy or too jaded to ever conceive, ever utter, ever whisper into my pillow at night.

He holds my waist. He leans down and presses his forehead into mine, our noses almost touching.

“You should come with me,” he says. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

“I…I don’t know where I want to go.”

“Somewhere warm? Somewhere cold? The mountains? The desert?”

“I still don’t know how to live like this. With the thirst.”

“You wouldn’t need to worry. I would make sure your throat was never dry. You’d never crave anything. You’d have whatever you needed. Whatever you wanted.”

I wish I could stay in the fantasy. I wish I could believe him. “That sounds too good to be true. You can’t promise me all that. You can’t promise me that you wouldn’t get bored of me eventually. When I’m not new anymore.”

He tilts his head back, looking at me with a strange face.

“What?” I ask.

“You could be right. There’s no way for me to disprove that in this moment. But why would I promise you something with no intention of following through?”

I can’t tell if he’s being serious or cheeky. It’s an innocent question, and he’s not innocent.

“To use me.”

He furrows his brow. “Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. Because you like to play games. Because you’re a—”

“A monster?”

“A man was what I was going to say.”

He laughs. “Even worse!”

He spins me again, then pulls me in. “If I’d had any doubt about you, I would have drained you and let you die. And if I’d wanted to use you, I wouldn’t have let your first taste of blood be your own. You would have been forever bound to me, the one who turned you. Now you are bound to no one but yourself. And whoever you may choose.”

The wind blows, rattling the mast, my bones.

He reaches out and takes my face in his hands. Gently. Almost too gently. He traces the outline of my lips with his fingers.

“You’re beautiful,” he tells me, and somehow I believe it. I know it. I feel it. My skin sparks at his touch. Maybe he was right, what he said as we stood in the hallway of that terrible house. Maybe whatever this is between us is more than attraction. It feels like more.

There’s a gravity to it. To us. But it isn’t heavy, or constricting. It’s almost like walking with the wind at your back, a confirmation from nature that you’re going the right way. I let the feeling carry me. Push me toward him.

I kiss his fingers. His hands. His wrists.

He kisses mine. My left hand. My left wrist. He kisses the exact spot where he ripped the metal out with his teeth, extracting the painful remnants of my greatest shame.

He takes my hand and pins it behind my back. He nestles his face in my neck. He lets his teeth scrape the place where he turned me, and then he presses his lips there. His lips. His lips. His tongue.

My free hand reaches for his jeans, for his belt loop. I pull him closer to me and it still isn’t close enough. He lets my other hand go. He shifts my face so he can kiss me on the mouth. I wrap my arms around him, grab his back. Closer. Closer.

He slides his knee against my inner thigh, lifting up my leg, lifting me up onto him. His hand is on my hip, his fingers pressing down hard enough that I release a breath, a sound—one I’ve never heard myself make before —and it sets me off; it’s like gunpowder. The sound of me getting off gets me off. Discovering I’m capable of this kind of hedonism.