Chapter 32 #2
“Uhm… do you want me to start at the beginning, or do you have questions you want me to answer first?” he finally asked, voice tight.
It was a good question.
I just didn’t have an answer.
“Just tell me everything.”
Eric nodded. “Okay. But please listen until I’m done, okay? Because parts of it will probably sound bad.”
Perfect. Just perfect.
“It all started five years ago.”
“Wait, what?”
Eric gave me a flat look. “That’s what I meant.”
I closed my mouth, but my mind was already racing.
Five years ago?
“I got a glimpse of you during your freshman orientation,” Eric continued, then quickly added.
“I didn’t stalk you back then or anything.
I just… that’s when I noticed you for the first time.
You piqued my interest, but when I realized you were barely eighteen, I uh, obviously didn’t ask you out.
You were too young. But I saw you here and there.
At a pub with your friends, on campus. Nothing out of the ordinary.
I didn’t even know your name. But after more than two years of running into you and thinking, ‘Wow, he’s cute,’ I was ready to actually talk to you.
You weren’t eighteen anymore, and it felt less predatory to me. ”
I huffed out a laugh.
Good to know that a five-year age gap had felt too big for him when I’d been eighteen but stalking me when I was twenty-three was perfectly fine.
“I know how that sounds.” He scratched the back of his neck and gave me a wry smile.
“Anyway. I knew you regularly visited that pub… uhm… the one that closed a year ago? A friend of mine, Winston, liked to go there, and I’d seen you a couple of times.
I planned on asking you out the next time I saw you, but then,”—he gestured at himself—“the whole vampire thing happened.”
Holy shit.
He’d wanted to ask me out… three years ago?
My mind kinda hurt trying to wrap around that fact. What did that mean?
“I need you to know that I never stalked you when I was human, okay? I didn’t even have the urge to. It was just… after.”
After… as in three years ago?
Not months?
Years?
Eric let out a hollow laugh and tugged at his hair.
“The first time Bennie let me out alone for a couple of hours, I… mysteriously found myself following you. I didn’t know why, I swear.
” He held up his hands, even though I hadn’t said anything.
Honestly, I didn’t even know what I was supposed to say.
“It was… I don’t know. Something drove me to check on you.
That’s how it started. In the beginning, it wasn’t an everyday thing.
I occasionally needed to check in and make sure you were safe.
I knew I couldn’t ask you out with me being a vampire.
I never wanted you to get involved in this world, but a part of me couldn’t let go.
” He shrugged. “I couldn’t really explain it.
Why I couldn’t keep away from you. Why the need to check on you only got bigger over time.
The need to make sure you were okay. I reasoned that you were my last connection to my human side.
My friends moved on. I don’t have parents anymore, and the last one of my grandparents died last year.
So there’s no one connecting me to my old life. No one but you.”
“But that’s not it?”
I bit my lip.
Why the fuck did everything he said sound weirdly logical?
Like… he should sound unhinged.
Three years.
He’d been following me for three years—and I’d never noticed a thing.
“No. You remember the part about Bennie and me both being very young, so we don’t know everything there is to know about vampires?”
“Yes?”
“What we didn’t know is that vampires have mates. The whole soulmate thing? Having one person out there who’s our perfect match?”
I blinked.
“And that’s me?”
Holy fuck.
Aries had called me Eric’s mate when we’d met.
“Yes. Bennie talked to Aries after that night in the club.” Eric let out a hollow laugh.
“After we interacted for the first time, I kinda spiraled. Bennie was concerned and realized something had to be going on. He followed me, following you, and yeah. He talked to Aries, and Aries explained the concept of mates to me.”
Oof.
I looked at Eric.
That was… a lot.
My head was full of thoughts and questions and worries, and… I didn’t know where to start sorting everything. My temples throbbed, and I closed my eyes.
I thought about the betrayal I’d felt when I’d realized he’d been the one scaring me. When I realized he’d been my stalker.
And then I thought about a newly turned Eric sitting on the roof across the street, utterly confused about why he couldn’t stay away from me. Thought about him out there—for years—without ever speaking to me. Without ever finding an explanation for why he couldn’t let go.
It had to have been frightening to him.
“I knew leaving you a note was a stupid idea,” Eric continued. “I tried a drop of your blood when you were drugged to make sure you weren’t overdosing, and… well, I tasted that you were sick.”
And he’d had no way of telling me. Because he couldn’t very well walk up to me and say, “Oh, I’m a vampire and drank your blood, that’s why I know you need to see a doctor.”
Ugh.
I didn’t want to feel for him, but I did.
Because honestly? I couldn’t think of a better way he could’ve let me know about being sick either.
Then again, leaving those notes on my door wasn’t okay.
“You scared me,” I said quietly.
Eric hung his head.
“I know. And I wanted to leave it at that one note, I swear. But then you didn’t listen to it, and I didn’t know what to do, so I left another one. From there on out, things got out of hand.”
“Why didn’t you stop after we started talking?”
Eric shrugged, but his shoulders never went down.
“I don’t know. I… wanted to do nice things for you, but it felt like we weren’t there yet.
Which probably means I should’ve let things go, but that thing inside me—no, that part of me, because it is a part of me—demanded more and more and more.
And I didn’t know how to resist. This whole mate thing is new to me too.
I’ve never felt like this, and I thought…
I don’t know, by dividing things like this, I was the perfectly normal, well-adjusted human boyfriend. That more intense part was separate.”
He was fucking killing me.
I slowly crept closer until my foot hit his thigh.
Eric jumped at the contact but smiled as he looked at my foot.
“And you didn’t want me to see the more intense part?”
He let out a hollow laugh.
“No. I didn’t want you to know that I want to fucking possess you. That I’m so obsessed with you I go mad if I can’t see you for a day. I didn’t want you to know I crave you more than air.”
“You don’t breathe,” I said pointedly.
Eric rolled his eyes.
“I crave you more than blood.”
Oh.
“I want your blood too, but I crave more than that. I crave you, crave being surrounded by your scent. I crave your ass around my cock. I crave your laughs, I crave your tears, your joy, your opinions. I’m fucking addicted to you, and I know that doesn’t help my case at all.
” He looked up at the ceiling, taking a deep breath to calm himself down before his eyes met mine again.
They were still blue, but not. The red was simmering beneath the surface, ready to break through at any moment.
“Aries says it gets better. If we really mate. Right now, our connection is fragile, and my vampire side is reacting to that insecure state.”
“What does really mating entail? Mating sounds a lot like fucking.”
Eric coughed. “Uhm… that’s basically it. We fuck, I bite you, a bond snaps into existence, tying us together for eternity. Which, also, is how long you’ll live once we’re connected.”
I furrowed my brow. “We already did that. Twice.”
Had we accidentally mated?
“Yeah, but I bit you here.” Eric pointed at his neck. “A mating bite goes here.” He trailed his fingers over the spot where his neck and shoulder met, right in the dip of his clavicle.
My body shuddered, goosebumps rising on my skin.
A memory flashed through my brain.
Eric sucking on that exact spot.
Pleasure shooting through my body.
A tension building…
Holy fuck, I was getting hard.
Nope.
I closed my eyes.
Eric coughed quietly, and I cocked my head at him. He couldn’t see my erection because my lower half was firmly hidden beneath the blanket, but…
“Wait… can you smell that I’m turned on?”
Could vampires blush? I wasn’t sure his cheeks were actually turning darker, but his expression certainly matched—a bit impish, a bit embarrassed and uncomfortable.
“Our sense of smell is really good. Like, really, really good.”
“Fuck my life.”
I let my head fall forward. Against Eric’s shoulder.
Because I couldn’t stay away any longer.
Eric wrapped his arm around my shoulder, the tension slowly draining out of him as we just sat there, staring into the void.
Everything had been said, all the secrets aired out, and all that was left was… us.
Just us.
Sitting in a pile of lies and broken hearts.
By all accounts, it should be an ending.
But instead, it felt like a beginning.