Page 74 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

At which point I realize how little I want him to.

I want to do all of that again. I want to choose making love to him. Not sex, not fucking, not some mechanical thing designed to scratch some itch. Just softness and sentiment and his eyes going wide when I do the same back. I lick over his lips, and then kiss. And he tells me, “Oh yes, more.”

So I give it to him.

I pull him until his body covers mine, and get my legs around him. And he barely even hesitates this time. The shock of sex with me—of me wanting him—has worn off, it seems. And now there’s just this:

Him easing into me, slow, slow.

One hand on my face as he does.

No desire in me for him to not. I don’t care if this isn’t just sex, I don’t care if it’s full of affection. It feels good, it feels right—like something I didn’t even understand I wanted or needed or understood, just falling into place. So this is what it should be, I think as he moves against me.

Gentle at first.

Trying not to fill me with delirium.

But after a while I think he realizes: it doesn’t fucking matter. I’m delirious anyway. I get that way without so much as a drop of him inside me, and so much so that when he gasps over the incredible bliss that this is, when he looks into my eyes with his arms around me and his body over mine, and he tells me, “I love you, I love you, I have loved you for a thousand years and I will love you for a thousand more.”

My first instinct is to say it back.

I only stop myself by biting my lip.

But the awful part is—he doesn’t care. He says it again without even needing me to say it back, and this time in my ear. This time so soft and lovely I can’t even remember a word he ever said to me with hate.

And I think it’s this thought that makes me break.

I’m not even halfway to overwhelming pleasure, and there it is.

“I love you, too,” I say, with every bit of sense still in my head. No way to hide it, no chance at pretending this isn’t how I feel. I love him, I do. It’s wild and ridiculous and awful, but it’s true.

I can tell it is, because when I look away I see Phone.

And oh, the fucking fury in her eyes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I take her out of the building and down past Main Street to talk.

Mainly because I suspect she’s going to have some incredibly insulting things to say about Sten. And there’s no point in me pretending to myself anymore—I care for him enough that the idea stings. Hell, I can’t even say care anymore. I spoke the words, they’re out there now, there’s no going back.

I love him.

I’m in love with him.

Whoever he is now, he is the man I love. And to the point where it sort of makes me sick and dizzy to think that he was in there, somehow, all this time. All these years and decades and centuries of loneliness, waiting for my real life to begin. All this hope that someone would show up at some point and sweep me away from all this death—it was staring me in the face, it was him all along.

Now I just have to somehow explain that to her.

My best friend, really. My actual familiar.

My fucking phone.

“You know, I believed you when you said you would never let this go too far,” she says, as I find a seat on the wall that skirts the old community center. It’s starting to fall down now—the roof has caved in to the point where you can see a filing cabinet on the upper floor. And the yellowing grass all around it is so tall it’s covering some of the windows. Fairies buzz lazily between the dry blades.

I wave, for once, before I answer.

One of them actually waves back.