CHAPTER EIGHTEEN || BRYAN
T obias and I stayed in bed together for the entire night. We slept in each other’s arms. We made love. We talked about trivial things—our favorite movies, our favorite foods. Places we’d visited. Places we still wanted to go. The books we loved and hated. It was surprisingly natural, comfortable, and easy.
“Seriously, Dune has got to be one of my favorite books.”
“More sci-fi,” I remarked, smiling. “I’m noticing a big nerdy theme here. It’s kind of a turn-on. I’ve always been into nerds.”
“Good,” he replied, grinning. “Because there’s more where that came from.”
“I’m not sure I agree with Dune though. As the epitome of sci-fi, I mean.”
He rolled his eyes, flashing me the grin I was coming to love more than anything. “Dune was one of the first books in the genre to really incorporate themes of planetary ecology into the narrative. It’s just so complex, and I get something new out of it every time I read it. It feels like I’m really stepping into this whole other world. It’s brand new, every time.”
“Are you sure you didn’t go to college?”
“Not a human one, that’s for sure.” He kissed the side of my neck. “While you were writing papers and going to frat parties, I was learning how to cast spells and banish demons. Though I’ve got a college boy in my arms, so I feel like I’m starting to understand the appeal of the whole university experience.” He paused, then his tone turned more serious. “Do you think you’ll go back?”
“To college?”
“Yeah. I mean, you were almost done with your degree, right? When everything happened.”
“I only had a couple months left, yeah.” I pushed myself closer to him, reveling in the warmth of his bare skin next to mine. With him so close to me, memories of what I had done couldn’t touch me. And with his arms around me and the blankets pulled up tight around us, with nowhere else to be, I finally felt safe enough to contemplate the life I had left behind.
Strangely, I found that I wanted to talk about it with Tobias.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It feels like I’m this totally different person now. I don’t even remember what seemed important to me… before.”
I abruptly felt like I was saying this totally wrong, because it was one of the biggest truths about me now, but one that I had barely even really processed. I hadn’t had time to figure out how to word it. But I wanted to share it with him. I wanted him to know me.
I tried again, adding, “Whoever I was before Giles found me, I feel like I’ve lost that guy. I’m someone different now. I have his memories and he’s still me, sort of, but I’m not him anymore.”
“That makes sense,” Tobias murmured. “And you are someone different now, even if you never wanted to be. You’ve been dealing with this all alone.”
“I wanted to be alone,” I reminded him.
“Right. Well, the wraith is gone now. You destroyed it.”
I shuddered at the memory. It had been an evil creature. It had ruined lives. It had killed whole families. Lisa and her daughter had been lucky to escape. If you could call it that. And the wraith had tried to kill me. It had tried to kill Tobias. And it would have killed the hunters. And probably anyone else who ever moved into the house too.
It had to die. And I didn’t feel bad that it was gone. But the fact that I had destroyed it with my own hands…
It was awful.
“I don’t think I can make a career out of hunting the supernatural, after all,” I admitted. “I—um—I didn’t like it. Killing the wraith, I mean.”
Tobias’s expression grew more tender as he considered me. “It probably doesn’t feel like it now, but you protected everyone who might have ever encountered it in the future. You stopped it from doing the same thing to someone else that it did to Lisa and her husband. You got justice for everyone it had ever hurt.”
I nodded. I knew he was right. But still… I had taken its life—or whatever you wanted to call its existence—away from it. And that felt… ugly. It felt wrong. I hadn’t had a choice in the matter, because otherwise it would have killed the hunters. And Tobias. And maybe even me. I couldn’t regret my actions.
But I still didn’t enjoy it.
And all of my pain and hurt was still right there, right where I had left it. Destroying the creature hadn’t offered me even a shred of solace. Which meant that this wasn’t the way forward for me that I had thought it would be.
“Anyway, the wraith is gone. And the hunters have probably already left town,” Tobias said, his tone deceptively neutral. But I wasn’t fooled. His heartbeat had begun to accelerate. He added, “There’s nothing left here for them to hunt.”
“I gave you my blood in front of them,” I reminded him. “And I used vamp speed. They’ve probably put two and two together and arrived at blood-sucking creature of the night. They might decide to start hunting me now.”
“They were unconscious at the time. They probably didn’t see much.”
I shrugged, not quite wanting to believe that. I wanted to examine why that was even less. “Yeah, probably not. I guess.”
“So, there’s nothing that’s keeping us here anymore,” Tobias prompted, saying the stuff aloud that I hadn’t wanted to be thinking. “You probably won’t be in any danger. Once you leave town, I mean.”
“I know.”
“I made you a promise,” Tobias said, his body going more tense against me. “And I don’t want to have to keep it. But I will never break a promise to you, Bryan. So, if you need to be alone—if you need me to leave—I’ll go. I don’t want to. But I will.”
“I know,” I repeated, my voice growing thicker.
Did I want that? Did I want him to go?
Though I had no idea what it meant for me yet, so much had changed. Believing that I had lost Tobias forever had put a lot of things into perspective for me. For starters, the awful, wonderful, and absolutely gut-wrenching realization that there was no way in hell I could live without him.
Not that I had to run off and go get married to him or anything crazy like that. But the idea of a world without Tobias in it, a reality in which I would never see Tobias again, where he wouldn’t be there to love me, was a bleak enough world that I couldn’t fathom living in it at all.
And then there was the equally powerful realization that Tobias loved me back.
Me , not the idea of me. Not the person I had left behind, not the person I had once been. But me now—the broken, damaged person that I was today. And it wasn’t due to the fact that his magic had shown him I was his one true love. If that’s all it had been, he wouldn’t have been able to love me so unselfishly.
And he did love me in a selfless way. He had proven that, over and over, hadn’t he?
When I had needed to leave, he had told me he would always be there, but then he had let me go. And he had come to protect me when he knew that I was in danger, but he had offered to leave the moment I asked him to. And when he had realized that the blood bond was forming, the very first thing he’d done, without any hesitation at all, was to tell me. He hadn’t tried using it to his advantage. And now, here he was, even after everything—even in the midst of the closeness and intimacy developing between us—giving me an out.
He had given up every last bit of his own power and leverage in our dynamic because somehow he knew I needed that from him.
And then, if any one of those things wasn’t enough on its own, he had even showed me how to guard my thoughts so he couldn’t know what I was thinking unless I wanted him to. He’d played it off as casual, but he was used to being in control, wasn’t he? And he had given up a big part of that control because he knew I needed him to. He had put what I needed first.
Just as he always seemed to.
I didn’t have any inside access to his mind, but I still knew it had cost him, big time. I had heard it in his voice, like he was speaking around ground glass that had gotten lodged in his throat even while he was showing me how to block him out. And yet, even so, even feeling whatever emotions had caused that pain for him, his very first instinct had been to make sure I had what I needed. That I was okay.
What was that, if not love? Real love?
It was dangerous. Because I understood just how that felt. And it seemed like it maybe had the potential to tear either one of us into tiny, jagged pieces if it all went wrong. But I didn’t want this to be just about me anymore. I wanted him to have what he needed, too.
“That’s a really, really long pause,” Tobias said lightly, even adding a little too-carefree laugh into the mix. He kissed the side of my neck again, causing tingles to spread through my body. “It’s okay if the answer is yes, Bryan. It’s okay if you still need time to process everything. If you still want me to go, now that this is all done, I will. And I swear that I’ll wait for you, as long as it takes for you to be ready.”
Somehow, that caused tears to burn in my eyes. What was wrong with me? Why was I always getting so damn emotional with him? Had I always been so emotional?
“I know that,” I whispered, the words coming up hard against the hot lump that was suddenly right there in my throat. “I absolutely do know that. But I don’t think I want to be alone anymore. Or, if I do, I think that maybe I want to be alone with you .”
The thing that was absolutely clear to me was that, yes, he had been right all along. He was my mate. And I was beginning to think that maybe I would do anything for him.
This whole mate-bond thing was starting to make a lot of sense to me. The connection between us wasn’t just chemical or magic or fate or whatever. It was mental and emotional, too. The totality of who he was always felt like an answer to a question I hadn’t even asked yet. He was exactly right for me. He was precisely what I needed, when I needed it. And I wanted—desperately—to be that too, for him.
But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Not by a long shot.
Because I also knew, just as fully as I knew anything else, that if Tobias ever rejected me, if he ever saw the monster within me, if he ever understood the awful truth that a tiny part of me—the darkest and most inhuman part—had liked the bloodshed and violence I had been forced to commit, I wouldn’t be able to stand it.
Tobias was the very first man I had ever given my heart to.
I was also pretty sure he would be the last man I would ever give my heart to.
And he was also the only person in the whole world—and that would probably be true forever—who had the power to shatter me completely. No matter what else happened between us, I could never, ever show him who I really was. Not all of me, at least.
I met his gaze and found that he was watching me, his lips parted slightly, looking like he was afraid to even breathe. He had never looked quite so vulnerable before. And maybe that was because I had the power to shatter him, too.
“So, the answer is no. I don’t want you to go,” I said, at last, feeling barren and vulnerable, exposed and completely raw. “I don’t ever want you to go anywhere.”