CHAPTER TWELVE || TOBIAS
W e ended up standing in line at Voodoo Donut for an obscenely long time. Belatedly, I realized that the donut shop was some sort of tourist trap.
Thankfully, even with it being the middle of summer, the sky overhead remained overcast, with steel-colored clouds overhead threatening buckets of rain that didn’t actually come. I still checked the weather forecast on my phone more than once while we were in line, for Bryan’s sake. He wouldn’t have burst into flames or anything silly like that, but he certainly wouldn’t do well if he stood in direct sunlight for any length of time. Bryan seemed oblivious to the danger. He had his phone out, researching all the things we could do in the city, keeping every single moment of potential silence filled.
The list of possible activities he told me about went on for a very long time.
I wasn’t fooled in the slightest.
Bryan was now very afraid. Not just for his safety, but for mine.
However, the bacon maple bar and the captain crunch donuts he instructed me to buy for him were totally worth every moment spent crammed into the line, because of the way his face lit up with unselfconscious delight when the frantic-looking cashier, clearly overwhelmed from the constant influx of people, handed them to us. I bought us each a cup of coffee from the local shop a block down, then we found a nearby park to sit and eat in.
“I still think you’re a towering weirdo,” I said, grinning at Bryan. I gestured to the half-eaten donut in his hand. “Bacon doesn’t belong on donuts. You cannot convince me otherwise. There’s no way.”
“It does so.”
“Does not.”
“Seriously, just try it first, before you tell me how weird I am. One bite.” Bryan held the donut out for me. “It’ll change your life, I promise.”
In truth, I was dying to try it.
But I liked this playful, innocent side of Bryan and I got the sense that what he wanted from me—or possibly even needed—was for me to be normal and playful right back. He needed a distraction from what waited for us back at Poplar Creek.
I understood that.
Bryan had left town, deciding that he would put himself back together as someone who protected innocent people from twisted and dark supernatural forces, much like his maker. And before he had hardly even really begun, that was being threatened by Danny and Michael. Now, he was faced with losing his best chance at happiness, at sanity, at solace. And part of the reason why he was so ready to give that chance up was clearly because he was worried about me.
My safety. My well-being.
How could he have ever doubted his own goodness?
There was no way in hell I was going to let him walk away. Not when his entire well-being was at stake. But a distraction… well, that I could do.
So, I heaved a theatrical sigh, taking the donut from him. And then I chomped a big bite from the end of it—so completely without hesitation that I was pretty sure he’d know I’d been dying to try it all along.
As I chewed, my eyes went round, and they met Bryan’s. I swallowed the bite. Then I laughed, feeling a mixture of surprise and delight.
It was delicious. Totally worth the wait. And not weird at all.
Bryan grinned back at me, his eyes dancing. “See?”
“I do.”
I was overcome, in that moment, by his simple beauty. With his broad smile, sparkling green eyes, wind-tousled sandy blond hair, and heart-shaped face, he seemed far more wide-open and innocent than I knew he was, like he could have been any one of the mundane guys nearby. I felt like I was seeing a glimpse of who he’d been before all of this had been done to him. Who he could maybe be again, if he were able to heal from all of this.
“Oh, here,” Bryan laughed. He reached forward and brushed a little glob of frosting off my lower lip.
Then he froze, staring at me. And, abruptly, the innocence was gone. Instead, pain flashed in his eyes. “Jeez,” he whispered, stricken, staring at me. “I’m sorry. I keep doing that—I keep inviting you in. Even though…”
He trailed off, but I got the gist of his thoughts well enough.
“Don’t make it weird,” I told him lightly, determined not to let him use me as a tool to hurt himself with. “I’ve already told you I’m not putting out until after you buy me dinner.”
He snorted at that, rolling his eyes. Just like that, the pain was gone from his face. Relief flooded through me.
“Fair enough,” he raised his eyebrows and nodded to the donut. “Are you planning on giving that back?”
I flashed him my most winning smile. “I might not. I might have found a brand-new love affair.”
He rolled his eyes, not taking the bait, and fished another bacon maple bar from the white paper sack the cashier had handed us. “Good thing I made you buy us two.”
*
“I had no idea you were a nerd,” I teased him an hour later, watching Bryan’s face light up in wonder as we stepped through the doors of Guardian Games. He took in the massive store, filled with shelves of cellophane-wrapped board games, figurines, books dedicated to role-playing adventures, and glass cases crammed with trading cards.
“Shush. This is my holy land.”
I smiled again—it was so easy to do in his presence—and followed him as he practically skipped to the nearest aisle and began browsing the shelves.
“I can see that.”
“This is the biggest independently owned game store in the whole city. And they have a huge area in the back, filled with tables to play at and shelves full of games you can try for free. This place is awesome. ”
“I thought you were into frat parties and doing things you can’t spell with gentlemen you can’t quite recall.”
“Oh, I’m into all that too,” he replied absently. “Though, not the hooking up part. Not anymore.”
“Definitely not,” I agreed.
His eyes scanned the shelf before him, crammed full of board games I’d never even heard of. He finally tore his gaze away long enough to shoot me a bemused glance. “Come on, you’re not into anything nerdy?”
I batted my eyes innocently at him.
I was actually a huge nerd. And inwardly, I was geeking out a little at finding that Bryan was too. But I enjoyed not making this about me. Bryan was here, so clearly in his element, and I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted to see this side of him until I had.
“I mean, I like Star Trek.”
He paused, cocking his head at me. “Huh. I would have pegged you more as a Star Wars guy. Because, ya know, ‘the force’ is basically just magic in outer space.”
“That’s a bit on the nose,” I told him, scoffing. “And I get enough magic in my day-to-day.” I paused, then added, “I like Star Trek because it’s just regular people trying to do the right thing in the face of impossible circumstances. The whole point is that they don’t have magic to fix things. They just have knowledge and will. And each other.”
“And advanced technology.” But he frowned thoughtfully at my words, considering me. I got the sense that I had just surprised him. “But seriously, you need to knock that off.”
I’m reasonably certain that my eyebrows must have slammed together at that.
“Knock what off?”
He rolled his eyes. “Being so goddamn perfect all the time, obviously. It’s unnerving.”
“I’m far from perfect,” I assured him. “Just ask Poppy. She’ll tell you anything you want to know. All the dirty details.”
He turned back to the titles he was browsing on the shelf in front of him, but I caught his grimace before his face turned away from me. “I get the sense that your sister doesn’t like me much.”
“Poppy likes you just fine. She helped out with the locator spell for Lee’s wife, no questions asked.” Actually, she’d had plenty of pointed questions and choice comments. But those had been about my sanity, not Bryan’s. Poppy liked him just fine.
Bryan shrugged, but at the mention of our mission—what we were actually in the city to accomplish—his expression darkened fractionally.
“Doesn’t mean she likes the idea of her twin brother dating a vampire,” Bryan muttered.
We both froze at the same time as his words registered.
Bryan whirled around to face me, his eyes going wide with alarm. “Oh, wow. No. I don’t know why I said that. I meant, in theory . Like, if we ever did go on a real non-platonic date.” He let out a shuddering breath, wincing. “Jeez, I’m such a jerk. Please just put me out of my misery.”
Somehow, rather than making me upset, his words reminded me that, while Bryan might have been a vampire, he was still just a regular guy, too. He hadn’t been trained from birth on the supernatural. And this was another glimpse of who he was, beneath all the pain and darkness. He was a bit of a nerd. And he had virtually no game with guys whatsoever.
It made my heart clench up to see it—to see him —maybe for the first time.
“I have a better idea,” I informed him. “Since we’re playing hooky from what we came here to do for the moment, I will gain vengeance for your foolish words by destroying you and burning your kingdom to the ground. You will bow before my dark power.”
He blinked at me, his jaw dropping. “Err, what?”
I winked at him, grinning. “I’m very competitive when it comes to board games. Ethan, Poppy, and I used to play. I didn’t quite flip the board, but it came close.” I paused, swallowing. The thought of those simpler times made me miss my sister and my best friend like a physical ache, but I pushed those feelings away. I would see them again soon enough, wouldn’t I? After a moment had passed, I added, “You said there’s a back room where we can play. Let’s go duke it out. Let’s be ordinary weirdos for a little while.”
“Oh my God,” Bryan said faintly, still staring at me. But after a long moment, his lips twitched and then his smile became a grin just as big as mine. “Tobias Hawthorne, you’re totally a nerd.”
I beamed back at him. “Yup. Sure am.”
*
Bryan had understated the size of the back room, which wasn’t just one room, but two. They were connected by a large rectangular archway. Both rooms were massive and filled with long tables. The room on the right had groups of people playing trading card games at the tables, complete with play mats and dice and fancy looking deck boxes. The room on the left was mostly empty except for a handful of people in the far back intently playing a complex-looking board game.
Beside me, Bryan let out a happy sigh and went straight for the shelves crammed full of used board games. I trailed behind, watching him.
Absent-mindedly, he chewed on his lower lip, his eyebrows sliding together, as he studied the titles before him. He paused for only a few moments before he started making some selections. He pulled three games off the shelf, one after the other, balancing them in one hand like a waiter in a fancy restaurant, then turned to me.
“Where do you want to sit?”
I immediately pointed to a spot that was a good four tables from the large group of people playing a board game in the back, but still well away from the opening that led into the store proper and also from the kitty-corner passageway into the other game room. I felt certain that nothing bad was going to happen to us in here, but just in case something or someone with harmful intentions toward us stepped into the room, we’d at least have a moment’s warning. I took a chair that faced both of the openings into the room.
Bryan slid into the seat on the opposite side of the table. He considered me for a long moment. “You’re always so methodical,” he said, but the warmth in his voice let me know it wasn’t meant to be an insult. “About everything. I bet it would have taken you at least twenty minutes to pick out a game.”
“At least,” I agreed. “I would have picked a game I wanted to try, but I would have read all the reviews first. And maybe even watched a YouTube gameplay video or something.”
“You’re that kind of nerd, then?”
“I totally am.”
“They make gameplay videos for board games?”
“They make videos for pretty much everything. Board games included.”
“I’m pretty much a vibes person,” he informed me, taking the top cover off the nearest game. He started dealing cards that had cute cartoonish cats drawn on them. “That goes for everything. Food, books, movies, games, whatever.” His voice went a bit softer. “Or, I guess, I used to be.”
Desperate to stop him from sliding back into a dark headspace, I gestured at the boxes of games on the table next to us. “You still are, clearly. You picked these in record time.” I read the title of the game he’d selected for us to start with, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “And it seems that your current vibe is ‘Exploding Kittens.’”
“I used to play this with my family. We’d do dinner and board games every Sunday night, even after my sister and I both started college.” Bryan paused, then flashed me another smile. It was dimmer than before, but it still reached his eyes. “It’s a lot of fun. And yeah, I guess I am still a vibes person about some things.”
“I’m a sucker for the classics, myself,” I told him. “Monopoly, Parcheesi, Sorry!, Clue…” I smiled and shook my head. “When we were growing up, Ethan was our best friend, but he couldn’t do any magic. So, Poppy and I did regular things with him. It was board games and pizza and cheesy monster movie marathons, whenever his mom or someone else in the coven made him feel bad. It became a regular thing for us.”
My chest tightened a bit. Ethan had started our monster movie marathon nights back up, after Bryan had left. I’d gone to a few of them, but I had made excuses after the first couple of tries.
Ethan and Nathaniel were deeply in love and so sweet to each other that it made my heart hurt to see it, even though I was happy for my friend. And even my waspish sister and her thousand-year-old girlfriend, Simone, were happy. They were constantly affectionate with each other, trading easy smiles and cuddling on the couch.
It wasn’t really the same as it used to be and I always wound up feeling even more like a fifth wheel. I knew they hadn’t meant to make me feel that way, but knowing that didn’t help.
Still, I already missed them.
But even if I hung out with them every single day, the writing was still on the wall: the people closest to me were moving in totally different directions. And it didn’t matter how good I was, or how many times I showed up for them, or how well I did anything and everything put in front of me, they’d still ultimately leave me behind, even if they didn’t go anywhere at all.
That was even good. That was right. Ethan should be happy with Nathaniel. And even my prickly no-nonsense potty-mouth sister had found someone who cherished all of that about her, even if she and Simone were taking things very slowly.
They didn’t need me anymore and that was good.
But just because it was good didn’t mean it wasn’t hard. Even though it probably made me extremely selfish, I could admit to myself that deep down, I still wanted them to need me a little.
Bryan seemed to catch my expression. Concern flashed in his eyes. “It sounds like those were some happy times. Pizza, board games, and monster movies… so, why the pain?”
“I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh,” he rolled his eyes at that. Then he added, “You miss them.”
“I do,” I allowed, relaxing a notch.
That was a safe thing to admit to him, wasn’t it? I had spent years around them, so of course I missed them a little. Anyone would have.
Bryan studied me, cocking his head to the side. “No.”
I blinked in surprise. “No?”
“No,” he agreed. “You miss them, sure. But there’s more going on there. I’m a literal master of conflicted emotions at this point and I know it when I see it. It’s nothing so simple as just missing them.”
“Can’t we just play the game?” I asked, reaching for the instructions.
Bryan used vampire speed to snatch the little paper booklet out of the way before I could get it. Thankfully, the only other group in the room was so engrossed in what they were doing they wouldn’t have noticed it if we’d set each other on fire.
“That’s cheating,” I muttered.
“You can open up to me,” Bryan said softly, his face filled with sudden concern. “Look, I don’t know exactly what we are to each other, but I do know that I care about you. You can talk to me. I promise I won’t bite.”
My gaze lingered on his lips, and I wondered for the very first time what it might be like if he did bite me. When a vampire feeds, they can choose to make it extremely enjoyable for their partner. Ethan had once informed me, blushing right down to his roots, that it is , in fact, quite a pleasurable experience.
“Tobias,” Bryan chided me, and I realized I was staring at his parted lips. “Seriously, talk to me.”
“You’re not worried it’s going to make things weird?”
Bryan laughed. “We trundled right the fuck into weird a long time ago.” But then he lost his smile and he grimaced, letting out a long breath. “Look, it—it sets my teeth on edge, to see you in any pain at all. I don’t like it. I can’t stand it.”
The naked admission stood between us. And we could both recognize that he’d just made himself very, very vulnerable to me. I could have seized his words and ran with them. I could have maybe even coaxed more confessions out of him, all of which would have benefited me and not him.
But with that one admission, he had just handed me all of the metaphorical cards in this conversation, and I couldn’t allow that.
“Look, I’m scared they don’t need me anymore. My sister and Ethan. They’re moving on without me. Doing their own thing.”
“And you don’t like being left behind,” Bryan said, understanding flooding into his face. “You’re not used to not being needed.”
It wasn’t even a question. His voice was all wrong. It was far too gentle.
“Who is?” I muttered, feeling naked and exposed before him.
Bryan watched me for a moment longer, something softening in his expression. I expected him to ask me about it, to pepper me with questions, or perhaps even for him to tell me how selfish it was not to be ridiculously grateful that the people closest to me were happy and loved. I was braced for any and all of it, my whole body going rigid with anxiety.
Instead, he said, “Thank you. If you want to talk about that more at some point, I’d listen.”
Wordlessly, I nodded, watching him.
And I suddenly did want to talk about it, more than I would have ever thought possible. But I pushed that notion away. I wasn’t here for me, after all. I was here for him. This whole encounter was only really happening because he was in danger. And once I had put a stop to it…
Well, what then?
It was better not to make this any messier and more confusing than it already was, right?
After a long moment, Bryan began dealing out the deck. “So, with this game, you’re going to want to focus on…”
And after that, Bryan began explaining the rules to me, breezing past the fact that my heart was basically leaking right out of my chest. And I knew it wasn’t because he wasn’t curious. He was holding space for me. Giving me permission to open up to him, on my own time.
Something relaxed deep inside me when I realized that he wasn’t going to force me to go further, even though a big part of me now wanted to. And I understood that he hadn’t shut the conversation down for him—I fully believed that if I wanted to talk to him, he’d listen.
Instead, he was just letting me be.
After a lifetime of being the golden boy for the coven, of feeling like I wasn’t worth all that much at all if I didn’t have all the answers for everyone around me, it was…
Well, it was a relief, is what it was.
I had seen Bryan coming years before we had ever met. I had known the face of the man I would fall in love with. But the spell I had cast—the Verum Amor—hadn’t been able to tell me why I might fall for him. I hadn’t even considered that part.
But another piece of the Bryan puzzle slotted into place, and it made me feel even more desperate to protect him. Perhaps because of his own pain, and perhaps simply because it was who he was, Bryan was a compassionate person. And when he looked at me, he didn’t see years of me trying to make myself useful so that I wouldn’t get left behind.
He just saw me , Tobias Hawthorne.
It was, I realized, the first time in a long time that anyone had.