CHAPTER 18
POPPY
We stand in the garden alcove for a long time, holding each other, neither of us willing to break the moment.
My boyfriend is a vampire.
I keep turning that sentence over in my mind, waiting for it to feel real. Waiting for the horror to kick in, and my survival instincts to scream at me to run. But all I feel is peace.
Two hundred and fifty-seven years old. Born in 1769. Drinks blood.
And he loves me.
“We should head back,” I say finally, my voice muffled against his chest. “Before my family sends out a search party.”
“Your mother has been watching the garden entrance for the past fifteen minutes.”
I pull back. “How do you know that?”
“Enhanced senses.” He says it matter-of-factly, like he’s telling me about a useful app on his phone. “I can hear her discussing our absence with your Aunt Martha.”
“What are they saying?”
“Your aunt thinks we’re ‘getting to know each other better.’” A pause. “Your mother is just happy that you’re ‘finally showing some initiative.’”
I groan. “Classic Catherine.”
“They’re not wrong about one thing.” Julian’s hand finds mine. “I would very much like to get to know you better—in every sense.”
Heat floods my cheeks. “Is this the vampire charm I’ve heard so much about in movies? Do you guys have supernatural seduction power, or something?”
“No.” His eyes lock onto mine. “Just me being honest for the first time in weeks.”
I pull him in for a kiss that is so passionate that it feels like we’re both trying to make up for lost time.
“Do you want to go back to our room?” I whisper in his ear.
“Nothing would make me happier.”
We make our way back toward the resort, passing the party on the way. Most guests have retreated to their rooms, and only the diehards remain clustered around the bar. My family is nowhere in sight, which is either a blessing or means my mom is lying in wait somewhere.
Julian walks beside me, his hand on the small of my back.
The touch feels different now that I know what he is.
Not frightening—just weighted with new meaning.
Those cool fingers belong to someone who’s watched centuries pass.
Someone who chose me, out of all the people he’s met across two hundred and fifty-seven years.
The thought should be overwhelming. Instead, it makes me feel strangely grounded.
We’re halfway to the suite when something shifts in my stomach.
At first, I ignore it. Too much champagne, probably. Or the heat. Or the emotional whiplash of learning my boyfriend is an immortal blood-drinker and deciding I’m okay with it. I mean, that’s bound to cause some physical symptoms, right?
“I don’t feel so well,” I get out before I have to stop to keep my meal down.
“Almost there,” Julian murmurs, his voice low against my ear. “Thirty more seconds.”
I love that despite everything—despite the ancient secret he just revealed, despite the danger lurking somewhere in the shadows—he’s still focused on getting me home. Still attentive to every detail.
Twenty seconds.
The suite is just ahead.
Fifteen.
His hand moves from my back to my hip, fingers pressing through the thin fabric of my dress. Any other night, that touch would make it hard to focus on walking.
Ten—
I stop walking.
“Poppy?”
“I don’t—” I press a hand to my stomach. The churning is sudden and insistent and unwelcome. “I don’t feel great.”
His expression shifts from anticipation to concern in an instant. In the moonlight, I now can see the predator beneath the careful human mask. But his eyes are soft. Worried.
“What kind of not great?”
“The kind where I might need a bathroom. Soon. Possibly very soon.”
His features sharpen—not with frustration. With focus. The same look he had when he was scanning the party crowd for threats, memorizing exits and faces and danger. Except now the threat is inside me, and there’s nothing supernatural for him to fight.
“Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
“Okay.” His arm slides around my waist, taking more of my weight than I realized I needed him to. “Slowly. We’re close.”
We make it another twenty feet before I have to stop again. This time, the cramp doubles me over, and I grip Julian’s arm hard enough that it should hurt. It doesn’t, of course. He’s made of sterner stuff than regular human muscle and bone.
This is not happening, I tell myself. This is not happening.
I did not just learn that my boyfriend is an immortal creature of the night, choose to stay with him anyway, and then get struck down by questionable shrimp puffs.
The universe is not this cruel. I refuse to believe the universe is this cruel.
The universe doesn’t care what I believe.
“Poppy.” Julian’s voice is steady. Calm. The voice of someone who has handled crisis before—many crises, across many lifetimes. “I’m going to carry you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t have to.”
He lifts me like I weigh nothing—because to him, I probably do. Superhuman strength. I add it to the mental list of vampire abilities I’m now aware of.
He moves toward the suite with a speed that should feel jarring but somehow doesn’t. Faster than any normal person could carry someone without jostling them.
I would find this romantic if I weren’t trying not to throw up on his shirt.
The suite door opens. Closes. We barely make it into the bathroom before the first wave hits.
It feels like death itself... wait, I guess now that I have a dead boyfriend I might want to reconsider that.
Hunkered over the toilet bowl, I realize there are so many things I’d rather be doing right now, like, for instance, being struck by lightning.
Or having my mother critique my life choices for three consecutive hours.
Or reliving middle school, including the braces and the unfortunate haircut.
I’d even rather be watching Preston and Serenity’s couples content on repeat.
Literally anything other than kneeling on a bathroom floor while my vampire boyfriend holds my hair back.
“I’m sorry,” I manage, between waves of nausea. “I’m so sorry. This is not—this wasn’t how tonight was supposed to go.”
“You have nothing to apologize for.” Julian’s voice comes from somewhere behind me, steady and close. His fingers are cool against the back of my neck, gathering my hair away from my face with a gentleness that makes my eyes sting for reasons that have nothing to do with being sick.
“I had plans,” I say. “Good plans. Plans that involved less vomiting and more—” I wave a hand, unable to finish the sentence.
“There will be other nights.”
“Easy for you to say,” I smirk. “You have all of eternity.” The joke tumbles out before I can stop it, and my smirk vanishes. “Sorry. Too soon?”
His laugh is quiet but real. “Not too soon. I appreciate that you can joke about it.”
“Humor is my coping mechanism. You’ll learn that about me.”
“I look forward to learning everything about you.”
Another wave cuts off my response. When I can breathe again, Julian is there with a glass of water. Cold. Perfect. He must have moved while I was occupied, but I didn’t hear him. Vampire speed, I guess.
I rinse my mouth, spit, and lean back against the bathroom wall.
“This is mortifying,” I inform him.
“It’s called being human.”
“Same thing.”
I wonder how often he’s watched humans be sick, be weak, be fragile in all the ways he isn’t anymore. I wonder if it disgusts him, or if it just reminds him of what he lost.
“You’re thinking something,” I say.
“You make throwing up seem so...” He crouches beside me, his face level with mine. “Graceful.”
My throat tightens. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me while I had vomit breath.”
“I try.”
He disappears—literally disappears, moving too fast for my eyes to track—and returns with a cool, damp cloth, which he presses to my forehead. The relief is immediate.
“Show-off,” I mutter.
“Efficiency. There’s a difference.”
“You don’t have to stay,” I say, even as my hand reaches for his. “I’ve been handling my own ‘food poisoning’ incidents since college. You could—I don’t know. Do vampire things. Hunt. Brood mysteriously.”
“I don’t brood.”
“You absolutely brood.”
“I contemplate,” he says with dignity. “There’s a difference.”
I laugh, which is a mistake because laughing makes my stomach churn. But it’s worth it to see the corner of his mouth twitch upward.
“I’m not leaving you,” he says. “This is where I want to be.”
“On a bathroom floor with a woman who just threw up?”
“With you. The venue is irrelevant.” He adjusts the cloth on my forehead. “I’ve spent many years alone in beautiful places. I’d rather spend one night on a bathroom floor with someone who matters.”
My eyes sting again. Definitely not the nausea this time.
“You’re suspiciously good at this,” I say after a while. “Most guys would have fled by now. Most guys would be texting their friends about how I derailed their night.”
“I’m not most guys.”
“No.” I meet his eyes. “You’re really not.”
He considers it. “I’ve had practice. Being the one who stays.”
“Women—women you loved?”
He nods tightly. “Yes.”
“You stayed with them. When they were sick. When they needed you.”
“I tried.” His voice is rough at the edges. “Not always well. Not always successfully. But I tried.”
I reach up and touch his face. His skin is cool beneath my fingers, but the expression in his eyes is warm. Vulnerable. Human, despite everything.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him. “Just so you know. I’m not running. Not now, not ever—even knowing the truth.”
“You might feel differently later. When the shock wears off.”
“Maybe. But I doubt it.” I let my hand fall. “You want to know something crazy?”
“Tell me.”
“Learning you’re a vampire is actually less scary than some of the things I was imagining. I thought maybe you were in witness protection. Or a spy. Or—” I pause. “Okay, I thought you might be married. That one kept me up at night.”
“Married.” He sounds genuinely offended. “You thought I was married?”