“No.” I let go of the album. “I only do it to convince myself I’m a good person.”
“Bullshit. By the look of this place, you can barely feed yourself, much less a bunch of dogs.”
“I always get what I need to survive.”
This time his gaze is steady. “Working for a hotshot PR firm in D.C.”
His X-ray eyes propel me off the couch and toward the fridge. “Those beers have probably settled.”
I hear him flip through several pages of dogs while I pop the tops of two bottles. One of them fizzes over, but I catch most of it with my mouth. “You want a glass?”
No answer. I glance over the counter to see Shane lingering on a page of photos.
“Are these sunrises or sunsets?” he asks.
“Some of both.” I move back to the couch and put the beers on the table, using two unopened pieces of mail as coasters. “My bedroom faces north, so in the summer I see the sun rise over campus.”
“So you’re a morning person.”
“I’m a morning person and a night person. So I have to be a nap person, or else I’m a tired person.” Great, now I’m rambling. That’s the second time I’ve mentioned my bedroom with no reaction from Shane.
He doesn’t pick up his beer, just stares at the sunrises. I take the opportunity to study his profile, at least the parts I can see beneath his hair. His jaw is sharp and defined, and his nose is like a ski jump—perfectly sloped with a little curve up at the end. If my nose were a ski jump, the skiers would all plunge to a tragic death.
I clear my throat. “If you stay here late enough, you can see it yourself.”
He looks at me then, brows drawn together. “I can’t stay until sunrise.”
His show, of course. “You go to work at three, right?”
“Right. Work.” He scans the living room. “Where’s your music?”
This time I say it with all the casualness I can muster. “In my bedroom.”
“Oh.” He focuses on the photo album again, but his fingers are twitching, and as he turns the pages, he doesn’t react to the pictures.
Here goes.
“Do you want to see what I have?”
He looks up.
“Music-wise,” I add.
He studies my face for a long moment, as if he’s not sure what he’ll find. Something about me bothers him, but maybe in a good way.
His hand brushes mine, and a tingling spreads through me. I let out a breath that sounds half-cough, half-hiccup. Very attractive.
I stand and head for the hall. “This way,” I say, as businesslike as a tour guide.
I move through the dark bedroom to turn on a soft bedside lamp, rather than expose my squalor to the harsh overhead light.
“No crosses in here either,” I say with a nervous laugh.
He sits on the floor in front of my CD shelves and contemplates their contents. “Your collection’s pretty kickin’.”
I wince at the outdated slang, then step out of my shoes and stretch prone across the foot of the bed, my head near the spot where Shane sits.
“They’re out of order.” He grabs a wide handful of CDs.
“What are you doing?”
“Fixing it.” He starts sorting them into stacks on the floor. “Alphabetical okay?”
“Really, you don’t have to—”
“I’ll start with alphabetical. Maybe later we can subgroup by genres.”
Shane must have read the section of the
Truth about Vampires
pamphlet that said they’re obsessive-compulsive. He’s putting on a show for me, which would explain his use of the word “kickin’.”
Suddenly he stops and holds up a CD. Foo Fighters.
I try to be helpful. “That goes under F.”
“Dave Grohl’s new band,” he whispers.
“Not really new.” Shouldn’t he know that? “At all.”
“He was the drummer for Nirvana.”
“I know. I was alive in the nineties.”
“So was I,” he says with a touch of bitterness.
“Do you want to listen to that now?”
“No.” He sets it aside like it might poison him.
“Put something else in, then. Something soothing.” What I mean is, something seductive. Despite his idiosyncrasies, I can’t stop watching him, wondering what he looks like from certain other angles.
He puts in Nirvana’s
Unplugged
concert. After a moment of applause, the opening acoustic chords of “About a Girl” pulse through my bedroom. Shane listens for a moment, then reduces the volume.
“You think I’m crazy,” he says quietly, not looking at me.
“No, I think you’re funny. But honestly, the joke is getting a little old.”
“I don’t blame you for not believing I’m a vampire.” The last word comes out stilted, the way someone might pronounce a foreign phrase. “It sounds insane.”
“Hey, I know: I’ll tie you to my bedpost until sunrise. If you burst into flames, it’ll prove you’re not kidding.”
He jerks his head toward me, and I swear for a moment I see genuine fear. Then he blinks and turns back to the CDs. “Give me a hand here?”
I sigh and slide off the bed. “Sure, what better way to spend a Friday night?”
“There’s four stacks.” He taps each one in turn. “A through G, H through N, O through T, and the rest.”
“Is that a statistical thing based on the probability of band names, so that the piles end up exactly even?”
He looks at me with awe. “No, but that’s a great idea.”
I take a handful and start sorting. “So what system is it? It can’t be the same number of letters, because four doesn’t go evenly into twenty-six.”
He hesitates. “It’s stupid.”
“Tell me.”
“No, you’ll laugh.”
“I promise I won’t.”
He straightens out the CDs I just tossed onto the H-N pile so that their edges line up. “When I was a kid I had a magnetic play desk, Fisher-Price or some shit like that. The letters were in four rows, in different colors. I still see the alphabet in my head that way.” He looks at me. “In case you had any doubt I was a freak.”
Actually, it makes him seem more human. I hold up a CD. “What color was M?”
“Red.” He nods at my choice. “Mudhoney. Nice.”
Basking in the approval of a rock snob, I hide my smile and lean across him to put the CD in pile number two.
As I pull back, my arm brushes his knee—accidentally, of course. His sorting slows for a moment, then resumes.
Sitting together, our heights are closer, which means
he’s mostly legs. Long as they are, he crosses them easily beneath him. I like a man with flexibility.
I also gather from the way he handles the CDs that he’s left-handed. Probably right-brained, then, maybe a creative type. But odd that he’d fixate on letters, which is a left-brained thing. Makes me more suspicious.
“It’s weird,” he says. “I’m a big fan of the other DJs’ music, but they don’t get mine. It’s like they can’t hear it.”
I attempt a light laugh. “Must be lonely, living among dinosaurs.”
He doesn’t smile. “I’m turning into one, too. Every time I flip on the radio—not our station, but one of the regular ones—I feel lost in the present.” He frowns at my Limp Bizkit CD. “It doesn’t even sound like music.”
I take The White Stripes’ latest release off the U-Z pile. “Let me play you something good. Then you can see—”
I catch myself. I’m playing right into his game, acting like his reality is the truth.
“Wait a second,” I tell him. “If you’re stuck in the past, how do you know it’s the past? Isn’t it like crazy people don’t know they’re crazy, and if they do, they’re not really crazy?”
He leans back against the side of the bed and contemplates. “You know, you’re right.”
I grin. “See, I told you—”
“As long as it bothers me, I can’t be too far gone.” His voice is still serious. “The rest of them are so lost, they don’t even know it anymore.”
I sigh. “That wasn’t what I meant.” I lean past him for more CDs. This time I brush against him on purpose, and not just my arm. I risk a glance at his face.
Shane looks at me, then at the CDs, then at me again, and so on. Something’s stuck. I keep watching him. The rhythm of his breath turns uneven.
“Let me help you choose.” I seize his shirt collar and pull him to kiss me.
Our mouths meet, and his shyness dissolves. His arms snap me tight against him like a trap. The combination of his hands, lips, and tongue sends an urgent heat rippling through me, obliterating all thoughts but
must have
and
now
.
Shane presses me against the side of the bed while his hands roam down to my hips. With no effort, he lifts me onto the bed, where I’m crushed beneath his body. Our breath comes loud and fast against each other’s mouths. The crowd on the CD applauds again.
His hand in my hair, he pulls my head to the side. His mouth moves to my neck, and I stiffen. How far will he take this vampire fantasy? His teeth slide against my skin, making me shiver, then travel down my shoulder.
I slip my hands under his shirts and peel them both over his head. He tosses them away, then unbuttons my top quickly, without fumbling. I stare up into his eyes, which have darkened in the low light. The confusion in them has vanished.
I pull him close. His flesh presses cool against mine, like an evening breeze. The music pulses around us, and I feel each pluck of guitar strings as if they were my own nerves.
Shane draws back a few inches and watches me closely as he runs a finger down over my rib cage, toward the top of my skirt.
“Ciara.” From his lips my name sounds like a hiss. “Tell me what you want.”
I slide my fingers through his soft hair and cup his jaw in both hands. “I want you to make me scream.”
The rest of my clothes disappear, with maneuvers so deft they seem to slip off of their own will. I hold my breath and watch his mouth descend on me.
No teasing, no tempting, no taunting—he knows what I need and that I need it yesterday. As I ride one crescendo after another, my voice hits notes I thought were beyond my register. I yank the sheets loose from the mattress and wish for some other anchor to grab on this endless roller coaster, and then—
Pain.
My scream cuts off as my breath stops. Something bit me. My first thought, which lasts about a quarter of a second, is that someone put a scorpion into my bed. My next thought—another third of a second—is that I should warn Shane.
The pain spikes deeper into my thigh. I try to pull away, but his hand is holding me hard to his mouth, and that’s when I realize—
“No!”
My free foot kicks him hard in the head. As he jumps away, his teeth tear at my flesh.
I slide back toward the wall and feel a thick, warm liquid on my thigh. “
What did you do
?”
Shane’s face looms in the lamplight. Blood drips from his lips, which part to reveal a set of fangs that—
Fangs.
All my muscles seize into stillness. My mouth opens but emits no sound.
“Let me drink you,” he growls, eyes glazing like a junkie’s. “No one will see the mark there.”
A second wave of pain turns my fear into blind, invincible wrath. “That fucking hurt! Get out!”
“Please ...” Shane crawls up the bed over my legs. “It’s so good, the way you taste when you—”
“No!” I whack him hard across the face.
In a pounce faster than I can see, he grabs my arms and pins me to the bed beneath him.
His face hovers an inch from mine, jaw trembling and nostrils flaring. “That. Doesn’t. Help.”
Stupid, stupid—I just provoked a wild animal. My brain flails for the rules of dealing with aggressive dogs. It’s the only reference I have, but my life depends on it.
I force my body to stop struggling. My gaze goes beyond him, breaking eye contact.
I am not prey, I tell myself. I am not prey.
Shane’s breath rasps against my skin. His hair drapes in tangles over his eyes, but I can feel them burn into me. His hands shake as they tighten on my arms.
I stare through the ceiling and try to will my heartbeat to slow. A drop of something warm hits my upper lip, and I hold back a whimper as I smell my own blood on his breath.
Finally Shane’s grip loosens. He gives a long, slow exhale, then rests his forehead on my chin. “That helps. Thank you.” He rolls off me with what seems like a mixture of reluctance and relief. His fangs have disappeared.
I start to shake. The air conditioner feels like it’s pouring thousands of tiny ice cubes over my skin. I get up, slowly, to search for my clothes, keeping an eye on Shane without looking directly at him. He sits on the other edge of the bed, one hand holding his head as the other blots the blood on his mouth with a tissue. I eschew the tank top and pull a sweatshirt from my closet.
“Well.” I swallow, to wet the desert in my throat. “It’s not like I wasn’t warned.”
“I’m so sorry I hurt you,” he says in a hoarse voice.
“You need to leave now.” Before I pass out.
“I can’t believe I did that.” His breath comes fast. “I lost control. I swear it won’t happen again.”
“No. It won’t.”
With shaky hands, he pulls on his T-shirt. “Let me at least help you clean it up, get you a bandage.”
“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” I say carefully, though I want to scream, “
Are you fucking kidding me
?!”
He stands, then snatches his flannel shirt from the floor. He hesitates next to the piles of CDs, as if he can’t leave them like that.
“Just go,” I say through gritted teeth, opening the bedroom door wider to hurry him. God knows what happens to people who faint in front of vampires.
As he passes me, he stops, and I wonder with horror if he’s going to ask for a good-night kiss. Instead he pulls a clean tissue out of his pocket and gently wipes the space between my nose and mouth. I see a spot of blood on the tissue before he crumples it in his fist. Our eyes meet, and an unwelcome shiver runs up one edge of my spine, then down the other.
“Forgive me,” he says.
I open my mouth to reply, but he cuts me off.
“Not now.” He shoves the tissue in his pocket. “Later, when I deserve it.”
As he turns to leave, he glances at my left leg, and the sight propels him faster out my front door.
I shut off the music (the concert has arrived at the un-nervingly appropriate “Dumb”), then limp to the bathroom
across the hall. A rivulet of blood runs from thigh to ankle. I swipe it with a scrap of toilet paper before it hits the floor. The wound looks bad, more from the tearing than from the punctures, which means that if I hadn’t shoved him away, I’d be in better shape. But with less blood. Possibly none.