“Let him kill me, T,” he said pitifully. “I can’t live like this.”
Each word stabbed at my heart.
“You can’t mean that,” I whispered. This was the Drew I knew. This was the Drew that I once thought I loved. It was there, in his eyes, on his face. He was sincere. And he was miserable.
“I do.” He turned his eyes to Bo. “Do it,” he encouraged. When Bo didn’t make a move, Drew gritted his teeth and spat, “Do it!”
Bo looked to me and I shook my head, hoping he wasn’t considering honoring Drew’s request. He dropped his eyes from mine before sliding them back to Drew.
“Bo, you’re not—”
I didn’t even get the words out before Bo disappeared out the window with Drew in tow. He handled him like a rag doll, like Drew wasn’t an incredibly strong vampire himself. Bo was just so much more powerful, more powerful than even I’d known.
I knew I didn’t have enough juice to make it to the window, much less outside to follow them, so I lay over on my side and held a hand as tightly as possible over the gaping hole in my neck.
I felt the slow pump of blood oozing between my fingers. I couldn’t press hard enough to make it stop. And I was so tired, much too tired to keep holding on.
As the light began to fade from my view, I was thankful that Drew hadn’t managed to turn me. Not that I wanted to die, but I thought becoming a vampire destined to live eternity in mourning and heartache was the less desirable outcome.
I closed my eyes, the cold from the floor seeping into every cell of my body as I lay there, waiting to die. I heard noises again, still far away. I managed to open my eyes just long enough to see Bo striding toward me. Quickly, he bent and scooped me up.
At that moment, I felt complete, like all was right with the world. I would die in Bo’s strong arms, with his tangy scent in my nostrils and the image of his once-again fully human face burned onto the backs of my eyes. There was nothing else I could’ve asked for, unless it would have been for more time.
He carried me to the bed and tore open his wrist, holding it to my mouth.
“Take it, Ridley,” he said softly. “You need blood to heal.”
“I can’t be a vampire,” I managed. “I don’t want to- to…” I stammered. I was just so, so weak.
When my lids fluttered open once more, I saw an expression of hurt and worry on Bo’s face. I wasn’t sure why it was there, but I wished for it to ease. He was too beautiful to feel pain, or at least that’s the way it should be.
Bending his muscular arms and curling me up to his mouth, I felt Bo’s tongue as he tasted the blood at my throat. When he lowered me, I saw that his eyes had already begun to pale again at just that small taste.
“Finish it. I’d rather you do it.”
“Ridley, if there’s any venom in your blood, it’s not much. Not enough to turn you. Take my blood. I can’t lose you, too,” he said quietly, his eyes closing briefly, as if in pain. “Please don’t do this to me.”
He held his dripping wrist to my mouth once more and I opened, wrapping my lips around his warm skin, suckling his sticky sweet blood until that familiar need to sleep stole over me.
********
Of all the terrible ways to wake up from such an emotionally and physically traumatic experience, my mother’s drunken screeching was probably one of the worst. “Ridley, why didn’t you do something?”
Mom’s harsh, slurred words penetrated the thick soup that had invested my head. I battled through it until I managed to crack my eyelids and look around the lamp-lit cavern of my bedroom.
Memories of what had happened rushed in quickly and I sat up, searching the shadows for Bo. My nose, now even more sensitive to his scent since drinking his blood, detected hints of him lingering in the air around me. My ears prickled with the sounds of someone moving lightly across the grass in the front yard, just past my still-open window. But more than what my five senses could detect was the sharp visceral knowledge that he’d just left, that he wasn’t yet very far from me. That tie to him, that bond to his body, his soul, his presence, was once again firmly and strongly intact.
I took a moment to savor it, closing my eyes and relishing the way his blood sang in my veins, hummed along my nerves. I could almost feel him behind my eyes.
But then something unpleasant jolted me out of my introverted musings.
“Ridley, answer me!”
With a sigh and a roll of my eyes, I scooted off the bed and opened the door.
It wasn’t until I was halfway out into the hall that I remembered what I must look like, all covered in blood. I knew that my marks would be healed for the most part, courtesy of Bo’s amazingly powerful blood. But his blood couldn’t shout out stains like good ol’ detergent could.
Glancing down at my sweatshirt, I was surprised to see that I wasn’t wearing a sweatshirt at all. And the yoga pants I’d put on were gone as well. I backed up and hurried into the bathroom for a quick peek.
My neck was a bit red and it looked like it had been scratched more than anything, but the blood had been carefully wiped away. I parted the neck of the men’s button-up flannel shirt I was now wearing and saw that even my chest was clean, free of the rivulets of blood that had gushed from my torn throat.
Heat erupted and spread across my chest and down my arms, making my ni**les tighten and tingle. Bo had changed my clothes and cleaned me up, and even now, just thinking about him touching me, taking my clothes off and replacing them with clean ones, made my body warm as if I could still feel his gentle hands on me.
In the mirror, I could see that my pupils were dilated and my lips were slightly parted with want. An ache started at my core and radiated through me, and I bit my lip to keep from moaning. With my enhanced connection to Bo, sometimes my intense physical attraction to him could be a bit of a bother, especially at times like this when my mother was apparently on a drunken rampage. I took a deep, clarifying breath to compose myself before heading out to face her.
When I found her, she was leaning up against the coat closet just inside the front door, working hard at undoing the strap around her ankle that held her shoe in place. I watched as she struggled to remain upright, wrestling with it while she balanced on one high heel-shod foot. I doubted she could do that stone cold sober, much less this deep in her cups.
Finally, with a frustrated growl, she slid down to the floor and brought her foot up closer so that she could work at the buckle.