CHAPTER 16
Nina
Since Sampson has been given a week’s rest period after his injuries, he and his big pick-up truck are available to cart more than a few of my belongings to his condominium.
I’m not taking everything. Not yet. In the clear light of day, it’s not that I’m having second thoughts, not exactly, but I do have a few moments where I wonder if we’re moving too fast.
But then I see him resting his forehead against the immense Oak in my front yard while he thinks I’m inside, packing the last of my shower products.
In that uncensored moment, I see the weight of his discoveries about himself, and what they might mean.
Because he’s so sweet, he wants to bear his burden alone, so he doesn’t overwhelm me.
Except, he’s not alone, not anymore. My heart hurts with his.
The summer before my junior year, when he was a lifeguard at the town pool, and I was entering the worst period of my life, I looked at him and saw someone strong, tall, capable, and sweet.
I fell for everything he represented without ever exchanging a word with him.
At that moment, I thought he might return my affection, because yes, I remember him staring at me, like I was the only thing interesting at the pool, but then I went back home to the mess my parents had made.
I lost the ability to fight for anything as good as he was.
Not three months later, I took up with two football players, Sampson walked in on the stupidest moment of my life, and the rest was history.
But it’s a different history now, or will be, if I can just make myself trust in him like I did for those few, brief, innocent moments that summer.
Maybe he’s not human, but he has more humanity in his little finger than most people, myself included, have in their whole body.
So, yeah, I’m going to fight my own worst instincts and support him.
Fingers crossed. But I need him to fight his own worst instincts, too. Otherwise, we’ll never work.
Yesterday, he returned from the forest a lighter man.
He told me he’d met Xy in the woods. Sampson smiled and laughed about the Nephilim’s claim that he couldn’t satisfy me with his ten-inch dick, followed quickly by him snapping his teeth, and then chasing me through my short-ceilinged rooms. When he caught me, he growled, the sound low, passionate, and capable of twisting my entire core in ways I’d never dreamed possible.
And then his hands stroked passion into my very bones.
“Should I look into one of those ads that claim to be able to stretch dicks? Wouldn’t want to leave you hanging, Jelly Bean,” he joked, while we were still trying to catch our breaths afterward, our skins glistening with the best kind of sweat.
“Or maybe I could cut off an inch or two for you, so you don’t have to work so hard to make sure I’m wet before we fuck,” I joked back.
The next thing I knew, he decided to take my words as a personal challenge. He spent the next two hours bringing me to climax after climax. I was a flowing river by the time he slid right back into me and gave us both another orgasm, one that stretched, and stretched, before it shattered.
But today feels different. More serious again. Today, I think that he’s beginning to accept what seems so obviously true: he’s Nephilim, a true giant, not a pejorative term because he’s not completely human.
Maybe his non-humanness should matter to me, too, but I write dark vampire romance.
I’m used to the weird, the “other.” He doesn’t have the same ability to accept the paranormal.
His whole life has been about the regular normal.
Sampson might embody bravery in his day job, but when it comes to facing a world he never dreamed existed, he’s faltering.
It hurts to see him struggling with his identity. I don’t know how to help him, except by being with him, of course. I think maybe only time will soften the blows he’s faced these last few days.
“That’s the last of it,” I say in a loud voice, even though Mari and Nicholas are right next to me.
But Sampson needs a chance to collect himself before I “see” him.
He has his masculine pride. “Bye, Nicholas. Bye, Mari. See you in a few days?” I hug my neighbors.
Sampson’s already begun to organize a moving-in party for next Friday night.
When we went into town for a late breakfast this morning, he invited everyone he saw.
Turns out, he’s quite popular, which I knew, but the intensity of his fanbase is still a surprise.
I don’t understand how I managed to avoid him all these years, with the two of us living in the same town.
He’s omnipresent. I guess it was by sheer will.
Or fate… we weren’t meant to meet again until we were ready for each other.
“See you, Nina. Bye, Sampson.” Nicholas runs to give my giant a hug. He barely reaches above Sampson’s knee.
Tears spring to my eyes. Sampson Dean is turning my womb into marshmallows.
“You okay, Jelly Bean?” he asks, his huge hand enveloping my shoulder once I reach him. He looks down into my face, studying me, his brow furrowed.
“Yeah. Fine.” I start to tug away, but he twirls me back.
“We’re being honest, right?”
Apparently, we’re being honest with my emotions, not his. Even so, I can’t push him as he does me. His disquiet runs too deep, down to the very essence of who he is.
I’m just anxious that this will all go away. I’ll wake up next week and find I dreamed a relationship with my enemy, and he won’t really have turned out to be so damned sweet that I’m ready to be tested for diabetes.
“It’s just a lot, really fast, you know?” I hedge.
“It is.” He drags me up into his arms and presses me against his body, hugging me tight. My legs wrap around his waist. “Are you having second thoughts about living together?”
“Only the logical doubts that any sane person would have. I mean, we barely know each other.”
“I’ve known you forever.”
“You’ve known of me. I’ve known of you. But as a couple, we’re new.”
“So, what are you saying? Do I unpack the truck?”
Just the thought of it makes me want to cry. “No! I mean… I want to try this, Sampson. Try us. I’m just nervous.”
He lets out a huge breath, kisses my lips, and places me back on the ground. “Good. For a moment there, I thought I’d have to find a really tall mountain to jump off. Ugh. That’s a terrible joke. Sorry. Forget I said that.”
“Already forgotten.” I pause and look back to where Mari sits with Nicholas on their front stoop. He’s drawing something with chalk, and she’s pretending to find it fascinating. It’s probably a fire truck. When I look back at Sampson, he wears a melted expression. “What?”
He shrugs. “Just thinking that Mari is a good mother to Nicholas. He’s a great kid. Interesting. Smart. I can’t believe his father left him. I’d never do that.”
The fierceness in his tone unravels me. I lean into his leg and look up at him. “You’re going to make an awesome father one day.”
I expect him to smile back, or maybe kiss me again. Instead, he slowly draws himself taller. Straighter. And frowns. “That’s the second time you’ve given me the same compliment in the space of a couple of days. Is there something I should know about?”
“Like the secret child I have stashed under the stairway?”
“Maybe.”
I quirk my head to look at him, but I can’t figure out what he’s getting at. “I don’t have a child.”
He stares at his feet, the branches on the tree, then over my head, before he nods and meets my gaze again.
“Maybe I’m wrong, but I get the idea that you want to create a new family to replace the one you’ve lost…
maybe one that finally puts you at the center?
” His voice is very soft, but that doesn’t steal the sting from his suggestion.
“I loved my parents,” I object. “I was their center.”
“And they loved you, I’m sure. But?”
And there he goes, getting to the heart of what I don’t even know I’m thinking, but now that he’s said it, I feel it like a dark core in the middle of who I am.
“But… yeah, okay, maybe I wasn’t exactly the center.
I guess my family was a tad dysfunctional, what with my parents cheating on each other. ”
“I won’t cheat on you.” His voice is very calm, very centered, very controlled.
And it does exactly what he means it to do. It stabilizes me. “Okay.”
“And I won’t be cheated on.”
I nod. It seems like we’re making promises to each other, here on the street, that should better be saved for five months of dating, but I feel relief at clearing the matter up so quickly.
“And social drinking is okay, but I can’t stay with you if you get drunk.” The words pour out of me. I don’t even know I’m going to say them until they’re in the air.
“I get that. Because your mother drank herself to death after your father died?”
“Yeah. Because of that,” I say softly, pushing aside the memories. It still hurts. I didn’t even realize how much until he just said the words. “You’re perceptive.”
“I’ve had some practice. Comes from being set apart from the community even while I’m in it. I’m always looking in, studying people. I’ve figured out what makes individuals tick.”
“Oh, Sammy.” Just like that, my heart breaks for him. Again. He’s so handsome, strong, capable, wise, and sweet that it’s easy to overlook how he must have always felt different. “Because you’re so tall?”
“That, but I’ve always felt… unusual. I guess now we know why, what with the Nephilim thing.” He looks into the distance rather than at me. His body tenses. “I don’t want to say this next part, but I think I have to. Now. Before you move in with me.”
I grab his arm. “Sampson Dean, if you’re going to tell me you’ve changed your mind…”
“No.” He feathers my hair from my face with his gigantic fingers. “I want you to live with me. I want a relationship with you, but when you mentioned me being a father… I don’t think that’s going to work for me, now that we know what I am?”