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And as if I needed more testosterone-based drama in my life, Paul started calling again. Those calls were the few I was comfortable sending straight to voicemail, but some sick part of me couldn’t help but listen to them. He just wanted to make sure I was OK, he said. He missed me. He missed us. He wanted to go out to dinner so we could talk. His voice grew more strained with each message.
So I took on a new mission: evasion. If I could avoid Paul and Cal for the next few days, I could collect a handsome fee, put some distance between my family and financial disaster, and perhaps regain a little self-respect. OK, maybe just collect the handsome fee.
My luck ran out on Friday night. According to her Facebook page, Gigi was planning to leave for some vaguely described “party” after she got home from school. To avert disaster, I came home early, while she was still getting ready. I found that the element of surprise was an essential part of parenting.
I walked into the bathroom, following the roaring of Gigi’s high-powered blow-dryer. My sister executed a perfect little hair flip, popping up from her awkward bend with shiny, smoothed locks. She grinned at me, shutting the dryer off long enough to spray herself with a coat of hair shellac.
“What’s the plan for tonight?” I asked.
She watched me in the mirror as she coated her lips with shiny raspberry gloss. “I’m just going to hang out with Kristen. ”
This caught my attention. Kristen Duffy was a nice enough girl, a teammate from the volleyball squad, but her parents worked a lot and left her to her own devices. Sometimes those devices included the contents of the family liquor cabinet and poorly thought-out photos posted on Facebook. I’d encouraged Gigi to spend time with her other friends, without outright forbidding her to see Kristen. Teenage friendships were dramatic enough without adding a Romeo and Juliet element to them. I made a circulating gesture. “And?”
“We’re meeting Kristen’s brother and some of his friends at the state park for a sort of bonfire. ”
“Kristen’s brother who’s in college?” I asked, arching my brow. “Which would mean said friends are also in college?”
She nodded.
“And I take it Kristen’s parents won’t be chaperoning?” I cocked my head to the left, asking dryly. “I’m sorry, did I unwittingly ingest the enormous portion of controlled substances it would take for me to agree to this scheme?”
Gigi huffed. “No. ”
“Then you call Kristen and tell her you are declining her generous invitation, because there is no way this is happening while I’m still breathing. ”
“Iris, nothing’s going to happen!” Gigi cried. “I’m not stupid. ”
“I would never say you’re stupid,” I assured her. “But older boys plus a dark, unsupervised area plus the beer I know will be there—honey, you do the math. ”
Gigi sighed but didn’t respond.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I assured her.
“Thank you. ”
“I just don’t trust anyone else,” I added, pinching her cheek.
She grumbled. “OK, so I can’t go to Kristen’s. Can I go out with Ben?”
The sudden change in conversational lanes caught me off guard. That idea came up way too quickly. Gigi never just assumed that a boy would be available to go out. Sometimes she stressed all week about not having weekend plans and then got even more agitated if the expected invitations came from the wrong boys. I shot her a speculative look. “Did you already have plans with Ben?”
She twisted her hands at her waist. “He might have mentioned going to the movies tonight. Please can I go, Iris? He’s so cute, and even you would have to admit that he’s a nice guy. ”
I bit my lips to keep from snickering. “So you invented this beer-fueled forest orgy so a trip to the movies with Ben would seem reasonable and innocent. Well played, young Padawan. Very sneaky. ”
“Well, I haven’t figured out how you keep track of my chemistry average, so clearly, you’re no slouch, either. ”
“I will not reveal my secrets until I see midterm reports,” I told her. “Tell Ben he has to pick you up here. You know the rule. All dates must be prescreened and patted down. And willing to sign the release form for a background check. ”
“No!” she hollered. “Iris, no one else’s parents make them do that!”
“Well, three of your classmates are going to have to order maternity graduation gowns, so I think we’ll stick to my archaic, unreasonable policies. Look, Gigi, I won’t ask him for a blood sample. I just want to meet him. ”
“Ugh, why can’t you just be the cool parent figure who wants to be my friend?”
I shrugged apologetically as “Flight of the Bumblebee” rang from my phone. “I bring home vampires. How can you get cooler than that?”
Gigi turned on the blow-dryer, covering the crude response that I could barely make out in the bathroom mirror. I smiled sweetly and blew her a kiss as I answered my phone and took an order for three kinds of bath salts from three different boutiques for Ms. Wexler.
Then I trotted downstairs and ran smack into Cal as he walked out of the kitchen. I rammed headfirst into his chest, bouncing off him like a pinball and colliding with the countertop.
“Mother of fudge!” I yelped, cradling a hand over my aching hip. Cal grabbed my arms to stop my mad ricocheting about the kitchen. My hair flopped into my face like a dense, unmanageable veil.
“Are you all right?” he asked, pulling my hips parallel with his so he could check for bruising.
“Fine,” I ground out, pushing his hands away and shoving my hair out of my face. I turned away from him, rummaging through the spice drawer for the package of Laffy Taffy that I kept there.
Cal frowned at my bizarre choice of candy storage. “Why do you have candy there—” I lifted an eyebrow. He stepped back. “Never mind. ”
Ripping into the package, I stared at the artfully faded collar of his denim work shirt, the same shirt he’d worn the night of the “incident. ” Its presence wasn’t helping with my frame of mind. Somehow seeing it made me really angry for reasons that my rational mind couldn’t seem to pin down.
“Is there anything I can do to make the last day of your stay more comfortable?” I asked, my tone flinty. His sable eyebrows rose as I glared up at him. “Leave your bags by the door? Pack up your leftover blood in a doggie bag? Launch you off the front porch with a catapult timed for sunset?”
“Can we go outside for this discussion?” he asked, looking pointedly upstairs, where Gigi was singing some obnoxious bubble-gum pop song with the word “boy” in every other phrase. I nodded and followed him to the backyard. I stopped near the back door, but he continued out into the garden, between flanking beds of fragrant white and purple irises, their delicate, waxy petals fluttering slightly in the breeze.
I let him walk ahead. He would not touch me. I was out of his reach. At least, that’s what I told myself. “I understand why you’re so upset. Reading what I wrote, it … When I wrote those things about you, I hadn’t met you,” he said softly. “You were just another nameless, faceless human, so small and apparently harmless that I barely deemed it necessary to look into your background. ”
I snorted. “Oh, yes, it’s so much better to make hasty, hurtful judgments about someone you don’t know. ”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I didn’t think about you beyond what you could do for me or to me. I’m used to thinking of humans as a means to an end. It’s not an excuse, it’s just the way it is. And I didn’t know you would turn out to be …”
His heavy silence started to grate on my nerves, so I threw up my hands. “What?”
He scrubbed a hand through his dark hair, leaving it wild and tousled. His eyes were eerily black in the dim light, no pupils. “There aren’t words to do you justice. ”
“Find some. ”
“You shame me, Iris. ”
I fro
wned at him. “Find some different words. ”
“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to thank you for going out and risking yourself to protect me, to take care of me? Despite the blustering to the contrary, you are generous and gentle. You have devoted your life to taking care of other people, even when it means giving up what you want. Even when it could mean putting yourself at risk. You shame me. And I haven’t felt shame in a millennium.
“The hardest part is that a year ago, a month ago—hell, last week—I wouldn’t have cared. If some little human had volunteered to help me, leaving me free to finish an assignment faster, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. If she put herself in danger, well, that would be unfortunate, but I would make sure that she knew the risks involved and then let her go on her merry way. I’m objective, logical, focused. That’s how you manage to survive walking this earth for a few thousand years. ” He paced over the grass, brushing past flowers, leaving trails of silvery dew on his jeans. “But you, you just creep in and—a few days in your basement and a blissful encounter against your living-room wall, and I become emotionally involved. ” He spat the words as if they tasted foul. “You make me weak, Iris. You keep me from being able to do what’s best for me. ”
“I’m having a hard time understanding why you’re blaming me for something that isn’t a problem. ”
“This is a real problem!” he shouted. “I don’t make commitments. I don’t form attachments. I do not court locals. I do my job, collect my fee, and then move on to the next assignment, wherever it may be. That’s my life, and I love it. When this is done, I will be leaving. Nothing will change that. Not even this bizarre hold you seem to have on me. ”
“Well, who asked you for a commitment?” I shot back. “Have I asked you for a promise ring? I didn’t have a commitment to the last man I was with. I ‘courted’ his brains out for years. If you feel any sense of obligation to me because we happened to see each other naked, don’t bother. ” I turned on my heel to leave, only to swing back and jab my finger into his chest. “And by the way, I’m sure it’s awfully fulfilling, being able to pack your whole life into a cardboard box and move from one sterile condo to the next. So, once you’re done here, feel free to traipse around the globe doing whatever strikes your fancy, living in the moment like some spontaneous world-traveling sex pirate!”
Now it was his turn to put his finger in my face, which was probably a safer option, since I was not, in fact, an angry vampire. “Don’t even try to compare me with the Pygmy. What the two of you were doing was not ‘courting. ’ If it was, and he had a single firing brain cell in his head, he would be here right now, not me. You are not the kind of woman a man loves once and then walks away from. ” He stopped suddenly, staring at me, his eyes narrowed. “Did you just call me a ‘sex pirate’?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t notice. ” I sighed, rubbing my hands over my eyes. “I don’t even know what that meant. ”
A good, honest laugh burst from him. He straightened, gripped my upper arms, and dragged me toward him. He held me, pressing my face against his chest, where I inhaled the comforting scent of leather and sandalwood.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, pulling back from him. I stepped away, warding him off with raised hands to prevent further contact. “I’m sorry if I interfere with your ability to be a detached, rational vampire. I’m not going to change. If that makes you uncomfortable, maybe you should leave. ”
“You know I can’t,” he said.
“Oh, that’s right. You have no other options,” I grumbled.