Chapter 23 #2
I pressed my lips into a thin line as I studied the extent of his injuries. Fortunately, the blisters had only formed where he’d come into direct contact with sunlight. But there were other parts that appeared red and irritated.
And his hands… I shuddered, looking at the blistered, angry mess in his lap.
“Can we get your coat off without hurting you?” I asked.
If he kept the thick coat on, he’d probably die of heatstroke.
Wait. He was a vampire. Vampires probably didn’t die from heatstroke.
I snorted out a laugh, but it quickly died off upon looking into Eric’s face.
His stoic mask was back, but the pain was oozing from his every pore.
“Just cut it off,” he said with a shrug.
I blinked.
I couldn’t very well…
“Don’t vampires have amazing healing abilities?” I asked.
Eric flinched but didn’t argue against my vampire comment. In fact, he stayed completely silent.
Perfect.
I huffed, then turned around and headed to the kitchen to get a pair of scissors. I couldn’t fucking deal with this.
So apparently my boyfriend was a vampire. And an idiot. A vampire idiot. An idiotic vampire.
I giggled, grabbed the scissors, and returned to the bathroom.
Eric hadn’t moved even an inch. He was just staring at me out of his red eyes as if he was waiting for me to attack him with the scissors.
Which… wouldn’t do anything, right?
Wait… how did you kill a vampire? And…
“Oh shit, do I need to get rid of my garlic?”
“What?” Eric cocked his head and winced, the motion pulling at his burned skin.
“Garlic. Do I need to get rid of it? Or can I use it as a weapon against you?”
Eric blinked again. “I mean… you can throw it at me. If you want?”
I barked out a laugh. “But it won’t hurt you?”
“Nooo?” He blinked again, still a bit dazed.
Okay. So, sunlight worked against vampires, but it didn’t turn them to dust, just badly burned them. Garlic was apparently useless. Good to know.
“By the way, your eyes are a bit creepy,” I said, which was honestly the understatement of the year. They were fucking unsettling—and following my every move.
“Sorry.” Eric closed his eyes for a long moment and took a deep breath. When he opened them again, they were back to the blue I’d gotten to know so well during the past couple of weeks.
Crazy.
“Is it better now?”
I nodded, then immediately felt like an ass.
The red was creepy, yes, but… wasn’t it a part of him too?
Shit. Was I discriminating against him?
This was such a fucking mess, and I had no idea how to untangle it all.
Okay, first things first. Getting his coat off him was probably a good idea, even though it almost physically hurt to cut the sleeves of what was obviously a very expensive coat.
However, Eric didn’t even bat an eye. He kept perfectly still, except for a moment when I pulled a little at the sleeve, and it rubbed over his wrist. He let out a low hiss that by all accounts should have sounded menacing as hell, but it didn’t scare me.
I’d heard that sound before.
I think.
It felt oddly familiar.
“Okay… done,” I said as I pulled the now ruined coat off him. “Now… what about those healing abilities? Are those a myth too? Because you could definitely use them right now.”
Eric let out a long sigh and closed his eyes.
“So you know?” he asked, his head falling back until he looked at the ceiling.
“That you’re a vampire?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. I know.”
I mean, I hadn’t known for sure until he’d turned up at my doorstep and didn’t argue against me calling him one, but yeah. The cat was totally out of the bag now.
“Okay.” He nodded, then looked at me again. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”
I snorted. “Yeah. Not gonna lie, I’m not sure I’d have believed you.”
I might’ve just run screaming. I mean, that was what I’d done anyway. Minus the screaming part.
Fuck.
This was so messy.
“Soo… what about those healing abilities? You’re being purposefully evasive.”
Eric’s face brightened for a moment, the hint of a smile ghosting over his lips. But the next moment, his face was all serious again. Back to business.
“I…” he started, but stopped again to give me a pointed look. “I don’t want to scare you.”
“I’m not scared.”
Oddly enough, I really wasn’t.
Eric gave me another pointed look, but I just shrugged.
“Look. I hate to tell you this, but right now you’re neither scary nor imposing, or whatever. You look like a fucking lobster. Or a British dude who spent way too much time on a Spanish beach. Soo…”
He sighed.
“My healing abilities are good. Like if someone stabbed me, that wouldn’t be a problem. Even a gunshot wound wouldn’t. But sunlight is different.”
“Why?”
“Okay, maybe it’s not different. It’s the prolonged exposure. If I held my hand in the sunlight for like a second, then pulled it back, it’d heal just fine. But I ran here. Through the sun. So…”
“Your healing abilities are drained because your body kept trying to repair the damage while you kept adding more?”
“Basically.”
This stupid fucking idiot.
“Okay. So we need to replenish your energy for you to be able to start healing again, right?”
Eric gave a short nod.
“And that means…”
Eric cringed. “Blood.”
I cringed too.
Okay. Hearing that out loud was a bit weird. I’d definitely need a bit of time to get used to that. But I needed to power through. I could freak out again once Eric was healed.
“How much blood?”
Eric raised his eyebrows. “I’m not drinking your blood.”
“Ouch.” I grabbed my chest as if he’d hurt me. And truth be told, the brazen rejection did hurt.
Wasn’t that a mindfuck?
At first, I was afraid my boyfriend was a vampire, and now that I knew for sure he was one, I was fucking disappointed that he didn’t immediately want to drink my blood?
“It’s not like I don’t want to… it’s just…
” Eric sighed, raising his hand to rub it over his face, but lowered it immediately after seeing it.
I got it. Looking at the mangled mess wasn’t pretty.
It actually made me feel a bit nauseous, but I couldn’t very well ask him to get up so I could puke into my toilet because his hands looked a bit like halfway fried chicken thighs.
“Yes?” I said.
“I don’t think this is the right moment for me to drink your blood.”
Ugh. Fine.
“So, is one bag enough?”
Look at that. My stealing a bag from his fridge turned out to be a good idea after all.
“What?”
“Is one bag of blood enough for you to get your healing abilities back?”
He blinked at me. Slowly.
I huffed.
Okay, no answer from him. Maybe the sun had fried his fucking brain too. Cool.
I turned around and left the bathroom to retrieve the blood from my fridge. It really was blood, wasn’t it?
Oh shit, I was casually getting my boyfriend blood for him to drink.
“Do you usually drink it out of the bag? Do you need a glass? A straw?”
No answer.
Great.
He was broken.
I rolled my eyes, grabbed the blood from next to the Greek yogurt, and returned to the bathroom, holding it up for Eric to see.
“Where did you get that from?” he asked, his eyes widening and turning that creepy, unsettling red again. And… holy shit, where did the fangs come from?
“That’s so freaky,” I mumbled, staring at the long, sharp-as-fuck-looking fangs in his mouth. Where did his canines go?
“Where did you get a bag of blood?”
Oh, right. He’d asked me a question.
“Uhm… I took it from your place?”
“Why?” Eric furrowed his brow, which looked kinda ridiculous with him being in full vampire mode and all.
“Because I was trying to convince myself it was some kind of relic from a Halloween party and just a very bloodlike-looking cocktail. But I couldn’t bring myself to actually open it to make sure because I was afraid it would be blood after all.”
I laughed, shaking my head. “I sound like a lunatic.”
For the first time since getting here, Eric cracked a real smile. One that lasted longer than a millisecond. A warm one. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You just figured out that I’m a vampire. I think freaking out is to be expected.”
I nodded. “Also, as it turns out, taking the blood was a good idea. You obviously need it right now. So… what do I need to do? Do I need to… heat it up for you? Wait… is the blood still okay? It was unrefrigerated for about half an hour.”
“It’s fine,” Eric said with a sigh. “And you can give it to me just like it is. Bagged blood is never good. The consistency and the temperature are all wrong, but for some reason heating it up just makes it worse.”
I handed him the blood and watched him like a hawk. Part of me wanted to look away because, quite frankly, this was fucking unsettling. Like a wild dream—but with it being all real.
Eric let out another hiss, the pain obvious as he raised the bag to his face and just… bit into the plastic.
Ugh.
A fresh wave of nausea hit me as I watched him greedily sucking the blood out of the clear plastic bag.
Yep, it sure was blood. Even I could smell the uncanny metallic scent.
My boyfriend was sitting on my toilet, drinking blood.
I had to bite back a laugh. I didn’t want to interrupt him. Mainly because he needed to drink so he would feel better, but also because it was… fascinating.
His throat worked relentlessly, swallowing down gulp after gulp, but his face was.
Huh. He looked almost disgusted. And pained, which was to be expected since he was holding the bag in his completely burned hands.
But the disgust was surprising. As was the way his skin was even paler now, his bones more pronounced, his posture more aggressive.
All in all, he looked more like a vampire than he did even seconds ago. Less human.
I waited for the fear to set in, but it never came. After spending half the day freaking the fuck out about the idea that my boyfriend could potentially be a vampire, I failed to be afraid now that I had confirmation—verbal and visual.
It only took Eric a couple of seconds to empty the bag. It fell to the floor with a clatter, a few last drops splashing across the off-white tiles.
Ugh. I’d need to clean that up later.
“Better?” I asked, raising my brows. His face was still red and partially blistered, and I really didn’t want to look at his hands any more than necessary.
Eric opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He shut it again and inhaled deeply before mumbling something under his breath that I couldn’t really understand much of. Something about lying?
“What was that?”
He looked up at me out of his blue eyes. Also, his fangs were gone, and his skin looked normal pale again, not extra freaking pale.
“It’s better,” he said, pursing his lips. “But not good.”
“How much do you typically need?”
As in, did he need to kill people?
My stomach churned, and my chest tightened.
Okay. Seemed like I found my breaking point.
Boyfriend being a vampire? Weird, but okay.
Boyfriend drinking blood? A bit nauseating, but okay.
Boyfriend potentially killing people by drinking their blood? Nope, that’s a step too far.
“Fresh from the source? Not that much. But bagged blood isn’t as efficient. I don’t know why; it’s just the way it is.”
Had no one ever tried to find out why? Were there no vampire scientists? Hell, Eric had been in med school. Shouldn’t he be interested in finding out why?
“So, you don’t completely drain people?”
Eric tilted his head. “I don’t kill people, no. Vampires usually don’t. It’s against the rules.”
“There are rules?” I asked.
Fascinating.
Were they written rules? Or more like common sense? Were there vampire laws? As in law books? And where did one get a copy? Was every new vampire handed a book of dos and don’ts?
“Yes,” Eric said with a nod, giving me a tired smile. Oh, hey, the redness on his cheeks was slowly fading, and the blisters were starting to look better too.
I risked a short look at his lap, and yep, his hands had started looking less gruesome. Awesomesauce.
“I gather you have a lot of questions?” he asked.
I nodded. “All the questions. But they can wait.”
Because Eric looked like he was ready to crash, he was literally swaying on the fucking toilet. Apparently, healing was draining. Or he was having an adrenaline crash.
Wait… did vampires have adrenaline crashes?
Eric certainly was having a crash of some sort. He looked like he might keel over any second now.
“Uhm…” I said, placing a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Do you want to lie down for a bit?”
He laughed, but it sounded pretty exhausted. More like a huff of breath. “I can’t leave the bathroom.”
Nope, he sure as shit couldn’t. Not for at least two more hours.
“I can get you a pillow and a blanket?”
Eric seemed to think about it for a while, but in the end, he gave me a quick nod. “And call Bennie, please. He’s probably freaking out with worry. My phone’s in my pocket.”
“Sure, no problem.”
I went out of the bathroom to grab stuff to get Eric more comfortable, including my tablet so he could watch a show or whatever, but when I came back, he was already sitting on the ground, slumped against the wall, his eyes closed. His chest was rising and falling evenly as if he were breathing.
But he didn’t need to, did he?
Weird.
Oh well, more things to ask about later.
For now, I’d get him more comfortable.
I placed the pillow on the bathroom floor next to him and carefully moved him until his head was resting on it. Then I covered him with the throw blanket I’d grabbed off the sofa and took his sleeping form in for a while.
He didn’t look like a vampire right now.
Just like… my Eric.
And in the end, that was what he was, right?
He was my Eric.
My boyfriend.
Yeah, he might not technically be human, at least not fully, but… was that the most important thing? He was kind. And funny. He listened to me ramble on about bad rom-coms. And he made me feel safe.
I shook my head, gathered up his ruined coat, and headed back to my couch.
My head was fucking spinning from everything that’d happened, but at least I didn’t feel as unsettled anymore. I had answers. Yes, answers that’d take me a while to work through, but that was infinitely better than thinking I was going insane.
I let out a yawn.
Holy shit.
Freaking out for hours was really draining. Who knew?
Maybe I should do the same as Eric and take a quick nap. After I messaged Bennie, that was. I didn’t need to have another sunburned vampire on my doorstep.
A—my bathroom wasn’t big enough, and B—I didn’t have more blood to hand out.
Wait. Was Bennie a vampire? Probably, right?
Oh, hey, another question to ask.
Later.
After a nice… long… nap.