“Oh, come on.” I sighed. “I was just having a really nice, relaxing moment here. I don’t need you or your emotional yo-yoing.”
Ben looked honestly hurt by that. “Emotional yo-yoing?”
“I like you. You’re awesome,” I said, mimicking him. “I think I hate you. Go away. But maybe not. Let’s make out! Nope, let’s pretend it never happened and just smile a lot!”
“Well, that sounds nothing like me.” Ben snorted.
I gave him dead-face.
He slid down to sit next to me on the platform.
“What are you even doing here?” I asked.
“Libby told Jane that she’d let you loose. I overheard because I may have dropped by your office to look for you. And then I followed your trail.”
“If you say ‘by smell,’ I swear I will hit you.”
I made a mental note to use either more deodorant or less scented body wash.
“No. It was weird. I could sense that this was where you were going. I could even see the water tower in my mind. Feel the cool metal ladder rungs in my hands.”
He could see inside my head? That was uncomfortable. Was this the first time? Or was it a full-time ability and this was the first time he’d mentioned it?
“Is that a normal vampire thing?” I asked. “Or some sort of special neovamp trick?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I want to ask anybody. Who knows what sort of experiments they’d do on us if they thought we were psychic, too?”
I sighed again, leaning my forearms against the railing. “We’d end up in one of those Men Who Stare at Goats scenarios.”
He looked at the drive-in screen. “Mrs. Winterbourne?” he asked. I lifted a brow, and he added, “I’ve seen it a few times. Edgar Beane, the guy who owns the drive-in? He never quite moved past 1998 in terms of his cinematic interests. And Brendan Fraser is a particular favorite of his.”
“So you’re just going to brazen your way through this? Pretend the awkward away?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I can’t expect you to just sit by while I figure out what’s going on in my own head. It’s not fair. And I’ve been a dick to you while I’ve tried to work through it.”
He looked to me, as if he expected me to argue, Oh, no, you haven’t been that bad! And my face remained impassive, because he had been that bad. I made a little hand-waving motion, as if to say Go on.
“I have feelings for you, very strong feelings,” he said.
At this, I pulled my head back and leaned away from him, making him raise his hands and say, “I’m not saying I’m crazy in love with you or making a doll out of the hair you leave in the drain or anything. But strong ‘liking you’ feelings, like thinking about you all the time. Like, when we’re at work, instead of concentrating on my coding, I’m sitting there at my desk wondering how you’re doing. If you’re having a good night, or if some wackaloon is yelling at you over the phone and what sort of placating yet still pretty insulting thing you’re going to say to him. When we’re at home, I have to concentrate on finding things to do to keep me from seeking you out, to keep from knocking on your door to talk to you, because I know you need to retreat into your safe corner. And I realize everything I’m saying is making me sound like a freaky stalker, and I’m sorry. I haven’t really felt like this about someone for a while, and at first, I wasn’t sure if it was because you’re my sire. I mean, Jane married her sire. Iris married hers. Miranda is going to marry hers. I didn’t want to be with you just because my vampire hindbrain told me I had to. So after I finally figured out that I didn’t have a reason to be pissed off at you for this whole vampire thing, I still kept my distance.”
I stared out into the night, focusing on Brendan Fraser’s goofy-handsome mug.
God, I hoped he was kidding about the hair-in-the-drain thing. Gross.
“And I am supposed to react to this how?”
“With a forgiving heart and a forgetful brain? I will settle for a permanent blackout of all memories connected to me interrupting what was a very enjoyable make-out session by freaking out and running away like a little girl.”
“Why did you run away like a little girl?” I asked. “Which made me feel just awesome, by the way. Super-attractive and desirable.”
“No, no,” he said, shifting his body toward mine, bending his knee so his shin brushed against my ass. “I want you. I want you on a level that would definitely not help my stalker status. But we started kissing, and I realized that I am not comfortable doing any of that in that house, with a mind-reader sleeping down the hall and people who have known me for years. So between that and the general ‘sire feelings’ freak-out, I ran.”
“Is this sudden avalanche of confessional feelings a result of the epic love story that is Gigi and her chiseled Russian boyfriend, and you realizing they’re never going to break up?” I asked.
Ben scoffed. “No. If anything, being around Gigi reminded me why we weren’t all that great together. We’re too damn similar.”
“You proposed to her,” I noted.
“Because I was afraid I would lose her otherwise. I could feel her pulling away from me, trying to find a way out without hurting my feelings. I panicked. She was my first love, and we made sense, and I didn’t think I would ever find someone else who . . . Well, anyway, when I asked her, she broke up with me, and rightly so, because fear is a terrible reason to ask someone to spend the rest of her life with you.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I told him.
“I want to find a way for us to get back to the people we were sitting out in front of the dorm . . . before you were crushed by a flying free weight. Because I liked those people. They were good together.”
“Our meet-cute is not like other people’s meet-cute.” I sighed. “I like you, too. But I’m torn between those feelings of like and knowing that there’s a very good chance you could freak and run out on me. Or just decide to be a dick again and make me feel so uncomfortable in my own temporary home that I think I can’t move without weirding someone out. I don’t like either option.”
“And if I promised I wouldn’t do that again?” he asked. “That I wouldn’t run away or shut down?”
“That’s really easy to promise and twice as easy to forget,” I countered. “I need to feel anchored somewhere, Ben. I need to feel like I can’t be kicked out of my home, even if it’s only home for a little while. I don’t want to risk what I have at Jane’s. No matter how cute you are.”
“What if I said that if it ever got awkward again, I would ask Jane to send me to some other vampire for fostering?”
I shook my head. “Jane wouldn’t do that.”
“She would if I asked her.”
He was offering to make sure I was safe, comfortable. It was more than I’d been offered by any of my previous potential romantic partners, who considered covering pizza to be a big gesture. I wasn’t sure Jane would honor his request, but it meant a lot that he was willing to give up his own comfort to guarantee mine.
Yes, he’d been a jerk, but he was apologizing. And his olive branch was more trunk-sized. While it didn’t make up for everything, it was something to consider.
“I can’t ask you to do that.” I sighed again. “You don’t have a lot of places you feel safe, either. Besides, we’re under such heavy restrictions that if you lived somewhere else, we’d never see each other.”
“Aw, your self-restraint is so sweet,” he said, bumping me with his shoulder. “I can’t promise you much, but I will do everything I can to make sure you don’t feel uncomfortable or unwelcome in Jane’s house, even if this doesn’t work out.”
“This is not a commitment,” I told him. “This is like a tryout, to see if we would be any good at dating if and when we’re ever released into the wild. If it goes well, great. Maybe once we’re back on campus, we can be a couple w
ho likes each other but doesn’t live together. If it goes badly, we’re just going to have to learn to coexist in the house in a way that doesn’t make me want to throw a van at you.”
“I think we can make this work. I just have to get past the whole hang-up about Jane’s house.”
“So I guess we have to establish a rule: nothing in the house,” I said cheerfully. “Nothing under Jane’s roof. Too many weird emotional strings attached there.”
He grimaced. “Which is a problem, since we spend most of our time under house arrest.”
“What are you going to do about it?” I asked, tilting my head.
“Find a way for us to date without being able to leave the house? Jane’s property is pretty big. We could sneak out to the cow pasture.”
“Anything that involves the word ‘pasture’ is not going to end in a good-night kiss for you.”
“It strikes me that there are plenty of beds on the R and D floors.”
“You know, when I thought about having sex with you, creepy lab facilities didn’t really play into it,” I told him.
“Yes, but you did think about it!” he quipped. “There has to be somewhere that two healthy adult types can find some time alone together.”
This was the same feeling I’d had when we’d spent most of the night talking outside my dorm. This was the Ben I remembered. And somehow, despite the fact that I’d seen him every day for the last several weeks, I’d missed him.
“You’re taunting a desperate man here, Meagan.”
I leaned closer, just enough that my lips almost brushed against his. “You’re going to have to try a little harder, Ben.”
And with that, I slid under the metal railing, turned in midair, and grabbed the ladder in free fall. Ben’s eyes went wide, but he relaxed the moment he saw me dangling from the rungs.
“I deserve that,” he said.
I pulled myself back up on the ladder until I was at eye level with him. I gave him a quick kiss. “Yes, you do.”
10
Your childe may surprise you with his or her interests. Remember that a vampire with hobbies is forty percent less likely to have a “rampage” incident.
—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire
Jane’s bookshop was a colorful, comfortable, quirky paradise. My inner book nerd rejoiced at the squashy purple chairs, the pretty knickknacks, the cozy smell of coffee and blood percolating behind the maple coffee bar. Crystals and silver figurines and geodes took up space along the upper shelves, displayed to catch the eye but high enough that they didn’t make the place look cluttered.
The book selection covered a little bit of everything: classic literature, graphic novels, straight-up occult studies, and a huge array of vampire self-help books. That made sense, given the number of vampires who circulated through the door.
I absolutely loved it.
It was safe for me to be there. While plenty of people would recognize Ben if he sat in the middle of Specialty Books working on his laptop, no one outside of Jane’s trust circle would recognize me. It reminded me of Pages, the little independent bookshop in my hometown where I spent a sad number of Friday nights in high school. While Ben was spending tonight working in the IT office, I’d gotten permission from Jane to take the night off so I could do a history assignment that had me stumped. Dr. Baker was a stickler for punctuality and punctuation, so my usual trick of turning in a first draft would not fly.
My IM pinged, and a little speech bubble popped up on my screen: Whatcha doin’?—complete with a Phineas and Ferb meme. I smiled. Jane had loosened the Internet policies ever so slightly after Ben and I had both come home from our “night walk” without incident. While the specter of Dr. Hudson and his science still made her nervous, Jane was giving us way more online freedom. We were allowed to talk to our friends as long as we understood that we still couldn’t reveal our location to anyone. Ben was even working up to an in-person visit with his family. All in all, everything was coming up pretty rosy for us.
Seriously, we just had a formatting meeting where we spent thirty minutes debating the “least historically offensive” fonts, Ben wrote. Please give me some news of the world outside. Is it beautiful there? Details, please, on the assignment you are working on. Use footnotes if you can. Citations are sexy.
And so I was having fun with Ben. Now that he’d made the monumental gesture of admitting that he (gasp) liked me, I’d put the burden completely on him to try to find some way for us to spend time together away from the house, a damn near impossible task. And until he did that, I was standing just a little closer to him as we both fished our breakfast out of the fridge in the evening. I was making a lot of direct eye contact. I was suggesting late-night study sessions. I was generally vexing him.
Hard at work, being very productive and studious, I have no time to talk nerdy to you, sir.
He sent me a little pouty emoji. You’re killing me, Smalls.
I sat back in my perfectly comfortable chair and rolled my shoulders. I scanned the bookshelves with my superior vision, taking in each spine. A few titles even I recognized—Fifty Ways to Introduce Variety to Your Undead Diet, Love Bites, The Office after Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace. My eyes lit on a bright green softcover volume titled The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire.
I scanned the back cover, which featured bullet points listing all the super-helpful tips unwilling undead parents could find inside. “Addressing the sire-childe power dynamic!” “Feeding difficulties and how to fix them!” “A how-to guide to interacting with your childe’s biological family!” This would be helpful if and when I ever met Ben’s family, which raised the question, did I want to meet Ben’s family?
Maybe the book could tell me.
“Andrea!” I called. “I’m taking this! Can you tell Jane I owe her eighteen ninety-five?”
“Jane opened an account for you. You’ll still have about eighty bucks before you hit your limit for the month.”
“Wow, that’s really nice of her. As soon as I’m done with the Skype chat I have scheduled with Morgan and Keagan, I’m going to go on an eighty-one-dollar shopping spree. And that is more exciting than it should be, which is an indication of my social life, really.”
“Honey, I once saw Jane weep while hugging a first edition of Sense and Sensibility. By that standard, you’re downright tame.”
“Good point,” I agreed, checking the time on my laptop screen. “My Skype thing is scheduled in about fifteen minutes. Would it be OK if I went into Jane’s office for it?”
“Sure, hon. Jane has lifted her online embargo, right? I don’t have to watch you to make sure you’re not contacting people you shouldn’t be talking to?”
“No, I understand the rules,” I said. “I know what I should and shouldn’t say, who to talk to and who to shout ‘I’m an Internet ghost!’ at and then shut off the webcam. I know the drill.”
“Behave, or I will wax your eyebrows while you sleep,” Andrea told me.
“That’s a very respectable threat,” I assured her.
Jane’s office was a little less organized than the shop. It was a small space dominated by a large, dark wooden desk and yet more framed photos. I’d gotten the impression that Jane needed these reminders of loved ones and good times around her in times of stress, considering that the highest concentrations of the photos were in locations where she either dealt with Council business or dealt with vendor issues and customer-service stupidity.
It would be nice, I thought, to have that kind of life, to have that support system Libby spoke of, to have all of those photos to put in my space to remind me that there were people out in the world wanting good things for me. But first, I had to graduate from school, get a job, and do the things I needed to do to establish that kind of life for myself.
After opening my lapt
op on Jane’s enormous desk, I worked on my paper for a while, keeping a Skype window open for my friends’ call. I was making pretty decent progress on my essay question when I heard the familiar Skype chime. Grinning, I hit the green accept button.
But instead of my friends, Tina’s face appeared in my screen. My mouth dropped open. I hadn’t even realized that Tina was on my list of accepted contacts. I’d never had problems with her as a dorm director. While she seemed to have good intentions, Tina seemed just a little too eager to be the “cool adult” in her charges’ lives, whether they were vampire or living. That sort of intensity could be off-putting.
No, wait. I remembered that in the first few weeks of school, Tina had added everybody in the dorm as a contact. I was pretty sure she didn’t have any friends on social media, and I felt too guilty not to accept the request.
Weird.
“Hi, Tina.” I cleared my throat. “I didn’t expect— This is a pleasant surprise!”
“Pleasant.” That was the word for it, right?
“Hey! Meagan!” she said, leaning just a little too close toward the camera. “How’s it going? Jane’s been sending me reports, but I wanted to talk to you face-to-face. I just figured out that your cell phone isn’t working. So how are you? Are you happy with your placement? Are your professors being responsive? I can contact them if you’re not getting enough help with your assignments.”
“Actually, yeah, the classes are going really well. And Jane’s great. Ben’s great. Everything is great.” Before being turned, I probably would have offered Tina much more information, details to prove that I was studying hard, meeting expectations, earning the extra attention the school was giving me. But somehow I held back. I had enough people here in the Hollow monitoring my progress. I didn’t need to add weekly Skype chats with Tina to my regimen of supervision.