Page 56 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

“All right. I trust your judgment,” she says, and my heart lifts. I’ve even got a little bounce in my step as I head back to the apartment. Until she adds, a moment later, in my ear, in an amused sort of voice: “I mean, it’s not as if you’re ever going to do more sex stuff with him.”

And as soon as she does I realize:

That is all I want to fucking do.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I don’t know why I slink in like someone returning to the scene of the crime.

This is my apartment. I belong in here. The person I accidentally orgasmed on is the one who doesn’t—though it’s hard to tell myself that when I tiptoe through the living room, past the kitchen, and into my bedroom, and go inside and close the door real quietly, only to find him curled up on my bed like he’s been here my whole life.

The only thing that tells me he hasn’t is how long he is.

I would definitely have tried to magic something bigger if he were my best friend. Or sex buddy. Or boyfriend. I can’t believe you just thought that last one, the dismembered memory of Madison drives home for me, but I can’t really be more reasonable right now. I’m too busy realizing what he’s doing.

He isn’t sleeping, like I thought.

He’s got his face pressed into my pillow. And he seems to be taking long, deep breaths, of a kind I understand. But sort of don’t want to. It’s the reason I turn my back and cough, very loudly. Then I hear my mattress making some kind of boing sound, and him suddenly crashing around, and even a faint oof as he clearly ends up on the floor. When I sneak a look I can see some sprawled part of him.

But he does his best to smooth all this over.

He snaps to his feet before I can fully turn, and by the time I have he’s even set right whatever he knocked over. The only thing out of place is his hair, which looks a little shaggy and unkempt. Though he makes a good show of smoothing it back into place. “I swear on the very beard of Odin that I was not still so intoxicated by the taste of you that I found myself irresistibly drawn to your scent against my will, and then instead of placing my boots back inside the clothing hut over yonder, I tried to kiss your bed,” he says, all in so big a rush I wouldn’t believe it even if the words were normal. Which they obviously aren’t.

“That just sounds like you kind of were.”

“Yes, I can understand now that it sounds like a confession. But it was not.”

“So you just fell face-first into my bed, with your mouth open.”

“My mouth was not open. And even if it was, it was not because I wanted to eat your pillow. It just happened to be in that position when I lay down, for no reason at all. And you need not fear that I shall lie down again, because I found I did not care for it. I am definitely not obsessed with it.”

“Well, good. Because I really don’t want you to be.”

Oh god, why do I now sound like I’m lying my ass off, I think.

Not that it matters. He takes it at face value anyway.

“Of course not. I have intruded on your private space.”

“I was thinking more because I want you to have free will. Which is why I have this book—to check if you do. To make sure, and then you can decide if you actually want to do things like that,” I say, then consider about a second too late how that sounds. “Oh, but not that I want you to do them. I mean, I don’t mind if you do, but I just want you to choose. To do things I have no desire for. Or just maybe realize that you want to ride off into the sunset.”

Christ, he looks baffled on the end of that one.

It’s okay, though.

I am, too.

My whole body feels like it’s blushing; suddenly my head is full of everything that happened in the library. And I swear my stomach drops when he haltingly speaks a second later. “So you wish for me to leave you forever, then,” he says, and my only consolation is that he sounds achingly sad about that.

I can’t even tell him no. “Well, I mean, if you want to.”

“The question is, do you want me to? Because if so, you must know that if you bid me do this, I will do it anyway. You need not search for some spell inside me that I know you shall not find. In truth, I fear that you already understand that you will not. That you simply find it unsettling to your modern cynicism that someone might be so utterly undone from the very first moment they laid eyes on you. That they might feel they already know you, in their soul. And that every second they spend with you only proves this to be true.”

I want to roll my eyes after that.

But instead I find myself going over and over that part about the soul, and proving it true. Love at first sight isn’t so silly if it’s not love at first sight at all, I find myself thinking. Probably because of the influence of Mathilde’s memories on my mind, considering what a sentimental sap she was. Though even as I’m thinking something so unkind essentially about myself, I can feel the undercurrent of accuracy. I mean, if I really were some person I don’t remember, some woman called Freya from his time who he can almost feel—would it be so strange?

He could have seen me. He could have known me. There could be fragments of me still stuck in his mind, left behind by his evil twin—but so much sweeter to someone like him. He might be able to see me from a completely different perspective somehow.