CHAPTER 17. TEASING
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” Cali quoted, her voice soft and dreamy. “I love thee enough to hold both thy hands. Woo hoo!” she teased. “But not enough to take off his freaking gloves!”
“Stop it!” Leesa said, laughing hard. She was sitting on the wooden chair in front of Cali’s desk, her left elbow resting on the desktop, holding a plastic cup of wine. Green Day was squawking something about Jesus being in suburbia—Leesa had never been able to make complete sense of the song. She set her wine down on the desk to avoid spilling it while she laughed. This was her second glass, the first time she’d ever had more than one, and her head was buzzing. She’d already decided two glasses would be her permanent limit. She wasn’t all that fond of wine—had tried some only a couple of times before—but this one, a mellow chardonnay with a slightly fruity taste, was actually pretty good. Andy had brought a couple of bottles to Cali’s room the night before. He and Cali drank some—Leesa did not want to know what else they did—but there had been a bottle left over, and she and Cali were putting a nice dent into it tonight.
She hadn’t come down to Cali’s room to drink; she just wanted to share the details of her walk with Rave that morning. But Cali suggested they have some wine, as long as it was there, and Leesa figured why not? She had planned on sipping hers while Cali drank, but the wine tasted better than she expected, and she drank faster than she’d planned. The more she drank, the more romantically she described things.
Cali, perched on her bed as usual, was wearing a comfortable pair of baggy purple sweatpants and an oversized gray long-sleeve T-shirt with black and white slashes across the front. She, too, was beginning to feel the effects of the wine and couldn’t help teasing as Leesa became more and more sappy.
“You wouldn’t be making fun if you were there,” Leesa said when she managed to stop laughing. “It was so…” She paused, trying to find the right word in her wine-fogged brain. “So magical.”
“Oh, well, as long as it was magical, I’ll have to stop teasing you.” They both giggled.
Leesa took another sip. Her mind drifted back to that wonderful moment when Rave held both her hands and his dark eyes locked onto hers. “For a minute, I thought he was going to kiss me.”
“Ooooh, he almost kissed you!” Cali mimicked, grinning. “What is this, sixth grade?” They both started giggling again.
“Stop it, Cali,” Leesa pleaded, trying to control her laughter.
“Do you want to hear if Andy almost kissed me last night?”
“Ha! Please, no. I beg you.” Leesa knew Cali and Andy had gone out twice before last night and she had already heard about the passionate goodnight kissing that followed their second date. “I heard enough last time, thank you.”
They both broke out laughing again.
Caitlin poked her head in through the doorway, drawn by all the laughter. She was wearing a bright red T-shirt with i love boys printed across the front in giant gold letters. Leesa realized she’d never seen Caitlin wear any of her flirty shirts outside the dorm and thought perhaps her friend was not quite as wild as she tried to appear.
“Sounds like you two are having an awful lot of fun,” Caitlin said, smiling. “Can I join you?”
“C’mon in, Cat,” Cali invited. She lifted the nearly empty bottle of wine. “Want some wine? There’s a little left.”
“Sure, thanks.” Caitlin grabbed a cup from the stack on Cali’s desk and plopped down on the edge of the bed, holding the cup out to Cali, who emptied the bottle into the cup.
Caitlin took a big swallow and smacked her lips together with exaggerated delight. “Not bad,” she said. “So, what’s got you two so fired up?”
“Oh, not much,” Cali said. “Leesa’s been telling me about her walk with Rave this morning.” She paused, and then spoke with exaggerated excitement. “He finally held her hand!”
“Ooooh,” Caitlin said, grinning. “Was it good, Leesa?” she teased.
“Oh, great,” Leesa said, shaking her head. “Now I’ve got two of you on my case. I should keep my big mouth shut.”
“He kept his gloves on, though,” Cali added.
“Uh-oh,” Caitlin said in mock seriousness. “That’s worse than keeping his socks on during sex.”
“Maybe he’ll wear the gloves during sex, too,” Cali said. “Talk about using protection!”
Cali and Caitlin burst into laughter. “Rule number one: no gloves during sex,” Cali said through her laughter.
Leesa tried to control herself, but failed. She joined in the laughter, though not as loudly as her friends. It did seem kind of silly now, but that didn’t detract from how wonderful it felt at the time, Cali and Caitlin be damned.
“It gets better,” Cali said after a few moments. “He almost kissed her.”
Caitlin fluttered her hand dramatically against her chest. “Be still my beating heart,” she said. “Really?”
“And it was magical!” Cali continued.
The laughter started up anew, even louder than before. Leesa didn’t care. Her friends could tease her all they wanted. What were friends for, anyhow? Besides, it was magical.
When she stopped laughing, Caitlin turned to Cali. “Our little girl is growing up so fast. We’d better have the talk with her.”
“You two are too funny,” Leesa said, smiling. “Have you thought about taking your act onstage?”
“We’re only teasing cuz we love you,” Cali said. “You gotta admit, it’s pretty funny, at least for us.”
“I know,” Leesa admitted. “Just don’t lay it on too heavy, okay? I’m kinda new to this stuff—unlike a certain pair of wenches I know.”
“Ooooh, that hurts,” Cali said, clutching her chest.
“Guilty as charged,” Caitlin said, grinning and stretching her i love boys T-shirt out from her chest. “Cali warned you those Maston guys were strange, remember?”
“Seriously though,” Cali said. “Rave has a gig most guys would kill for. That no-phone thing is too perfect. The perfect excuse never to call. And since he can’t call ahead, he can just show up whenever he wants. If this gets out, guys’ll be ditching their cells by the hundreds.”
They all burst into laughter again. This time, Leesa laughed as hard as the others. She much preferred laughing with, than being laughed at.
Twenty miles to the east, across the river from where the three girls talked and teased and giggled, Rave stood in the dark outside the door of an old cabin, the same incident replaying in his mind. He had so badly wanted to kiss Leesa. For an instant, the pull had been so strong he’d almost forgotten himself, forgotten what he was, forgotten what could happen if his mouth met hers. He’d recovered in time, of course, but the memory still burned strong in his mind. He needed to know more, to know what his options were, to know if he could somehow kiss her without killing her.
The cabin was the oldest in their settlement, older than Rave, built of rough hewn logs cut from the surrounding forest more than two hundred years ago. Dried mud black with age chinked the spaces between the logs. The two front windows were tiny—glass had not been an option when the cabin was built, so deer hide had hung over the openings back then. Glass had been added later, and Rave could see flickering light inside, telling him that Balin—his friend, his mentor, the closest thing he had to a father—was inside.
The long-lived volkaanes didn’t breed the way humans did. A couple of times each century, all the women of childbearing age became fertile, and the Festival of Renewal took place. A day and a night were spent in song and dance and prayer, and the coupling that followed would produce ten to fifteen offspring, enough to insure the continuation of the tribe. When the infants were born, they were taken from their mothers to a large cabin in the center of the settlement and raised communally, never knowing their true mother or father. It took a full two score years for a volkaane to reach maturity and be deemed ready to take their place among the tribe—ample time to form an attachment to one or
more of their teachers, as Rave had with Balin.
Still, he hesitated outside Balin’s door. As close as he felt to the old volkaane, he was unsure how or even whether to broach the subject of what was happening between him and Leesa. In the more than a century and a half of his lifetime, no volkaane he knew had ever paired with a human. He’d heard such a thing had been done on rare occasions, but he didn’t know if the stories were true. There was only one way to find out. He sucked in a deep breath and knocked on the old wood door.
The volkaane who opened it was tall and thin, an inch or two taller than Rave’s six-foot height, with a lean body only slightly bent from more than five hundred years of living. He wore handmade buckskin clothes, the same as he had worn when he was younger—unlike many of his folk, he had never switched to more modern garb. His long hair was dark gray, the color of lead, with streaks of the characteristic Maston copper still visible in places.
Balin’s lined face broke into a broad smile when he saw Rave waiting on his doorstep. “Young Rave,” he said, “what a nice surprise.” He stepped back from the doorway. “Come in, come in.”
Rave shook his head as he followed the old volkaane inside. He had been “young Rave” a century and a half ago, and guessed he would remain “young Rave” until Balin finally passed away, probably in another couple hundred years. Rave was in no hurry for that to happen.
The inside of Balin’s cabin was Spartan, even by Maston standards. The entire place was one room, six paces wide and ten paces long, furnished with simple, handmade wooden furniture. A rectangular dining table with a split log bench on either side filled most of one end of the place, and a straw-filled sleeping mat covered the floor at the other end. A small fire crackled in a stone fireplace in the far wall, adding its flickering light to the illumination cast by four tallow candles high on the walls. Volkaane fireplaces were used for cooking and light, since they needed no fires for warmth. If necessary, their inner fire could even be used for cooking, but it was usually simpler and more efficient to put something over the fire. Four crude wooden chairs formed a half circle in front of the fireplace—volkaanes enjoyed watching any kind of fire flicker and burn.
“Sit down, young Rave. Can I get you something to drink? Water? Mead?”
Rave sat in front of the fireplace. What to drink was an easy choice. The way he was feeling, it was definitely a night for mead.
“Mead,” he said. Like all volkaanes, Rave enjoyed the homemade brew, and Balin’s was considered the best in the village.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Balin said, grinning as he uncorked a large bottle and filled two pewter mugs with amber liquid. “Gives me an excuse to have a wee bit myself.”
Balin handed Rave one of the heavy mugs and sat down beside him. They clinked mugs and each took a long pull. The sweet brew slid easily down Rave’s throat. He detected an extra taste to the honey-based liquid. Something fruity. Balin was always adding extra flavors to his brews.
“Apple?” Rave asked.
Balin nodded. “You’ve got a good palate, young Rave. Apple it is.”
Rave took another swallow, smaller this time, now that the edge had been taken off his thirst.
“So, what brings you to my humble abode this evening?” Balin asked.
Rave blew out a big breath. “I’m not sure where to start.”
“When in doubt, the beginning’s as good a place as any, I always say.”
So Rave began at the beginning, with his first sight of Leesa in the vampire class. He told Balin of the immediate pull he felt toward her, and how the feeling grew stronger each time he saw her. He spoke of their first walk, and of the night at the party—how protective he felt when, almost unbelievably, he found her talking to a vampire. He finished by recounting the details of their walk that morning, and how at the end, he had almost kissed her.
Balin listened closely, sipping his mead and never interrupting, his growing concern showing on his face as Rave spoke.
“Thank goodness you didn’t,” he said when Rave was finished.
“I know, I know,” Rave said. “But I wanted to so badly. Isn’t there some way I can do it safely?”
Balin drained the last of his mead and rose to his feet. “This is a two-mug problem, I think.” He took Rave’s mug and crossed to the table to refill both mugs.
“Such a thing is not unheard of, but it’s exceedingly rare,” he said after handing Rave his replenished mug. “When I was young, younger than you are now, one of my fellows took up with a human female. For a month or two, everything seemed fine, but one night, he lost control.” Balin stopped and took a long pull of mead.
Rave took a drink as well. He saw the sadness in Balin’s eyes and knew he wasn’t going to like the end of this story. “Go on,” he said, needing to hear the details.
“His passion grew too inflamed, and he breathed too deeply of her. He realized it instantly and stopped himself before she burned, but it was too late. The life breath was gone from her.” He looked into Rave’s eyes. “He was never the same afterward, young Rave, never forgave himself for his loss of control. He died before reaching his second century mark.”
“That’s horrible,” Rave said. He closed his eyes and sipped his mead, replaying in his mind everything Balin had said. “But it can be done?” he asked at last. “You said it’s not unheard of, just rare.”
“Yes, it can be done. With caution and with practice.” Balin rested his mug on the chair beside him and took Rave’s free hand in both of his. “But I’m not sure it can be done by you. Your power is very strong, young Rave. Perhaps strong enough to make you chieftain one day.”
Rave had long known his power was greater than most, and this was not the first time Balin had talked about Rave someday becoming chieftain. But it was the first time the thought brought sadness and regret with it. He didn’t know how he could give up Leesa.
“I shall delve into the scrolls and see what I can find,” Balin said. “But you really should let her go before this goes any further.” He stood up and paced a few steps, then turned back, his heart heavy. “I’m sorry, but if you love her, the best thing you can do for her is to leave her alone.”
Rave buried his head in his hands. He knew Balin was right, that everything he’d said was true. The closer Rave let himself get to Leesa, the more danger she would be in. The smart thing, the safe thing, would be to let her go. But he didn’t know how. He lifted his head and looked solemnly at Balin.
“I don’t know if I can do that,” he said. “We have to think of something, Balin. We have to.”