Fourteen
I was leaning against the stair rail in a pocket that the fog didn’t quite reach, trying to cool down despite the hot, cloying air, when Annalisa found me.
“For the record,” she said, “It was just a peck. Cella doesn’t seem into PDA.”
“Didn’t ask; don’t care.”
“Yeah, okay, man.” Behind us on the stairs, a pair gyrated and licked each other, moaning loudly. They were dressed, unfortunately, as Rick and Morty.
“I don’t feel good.” It was too much: the fog, the music, the smell of sweat.
Lara came looking for us soon, whining about being left third-wheeling. I told her I’d had enough of dancing but encouraged her as she dragged Annalisa back into the throng. I was starting to feel the pulse of the music inside my head.
I made my way through the fog, feeling like I was walking through steam.
The heavy bass rattled my brain. Outside, I readily sucked in the cold air.
There was more dancing and music on the lawn, but the patio was peaceful.
Four girls, all in different outfits worn by the daughter from Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, sat around the couches passing a blunt.
I collapsed onto the last available love seat and leaned my head back so the air would hit my cheeks.
My eyes were shut when someone dropped heavily into the space beside me, dipping the cushions.
I could tell it was Mason before I cracked one eye open to see him hunched forward, elbows on his knees and head drooping.
He looked exhausted, his features drawn tight.
His breath fogged in the cold. He had lost the stupid glasses.
I watched goose bumps rise along his arms and thighs before I cleared my throat. Mason looked surprised.
“I’ll go,” he said, but I beckoned him back down.
“It’s fine.” I closed my eyes again, biting down the urge to ask if he was all right.
Mason eventually stood again. “I’m going to get a drink. Want one?”
I shook my head. “Driving.”
Ridiculously, he winked. “Fast metabolism.”
Us too. I was barely tipsy anymore. But the world was beginning to rotate faster around me, and I thought another drink might make me dizzy.
I went inside to check on Annalisa and almost ran into Mason on his way out of the dancing crowd, holding a Solo cup with Cella’s initials Sharpied onto it.
I said, “Oh—”
“Sorry—”
The baby doll thudded into our shoulders and fell to the ground.
Near the edge of the crowd, Cella stood looking severely guilty.
“Intrusive thought!” she cried, plastered. Annalisa was gawking under her hand. “Sorry! You don’t have to—”
Wheezing with laughter, Lara shouted, “A blessing by Cupid, Roman god of love!”
She hiccupped, and Cella said, “Bless you.”
Mason looked from the doll to me, unsmiling and still unreadable. Like a switch flipped, he faced his audience with a toothy grin, scratching his neck, and waved dismissively.
“No way,” he said brightly amid the thunder of “KISS! KISS! KISS!” It was rowdier than usual, getting louder as people caught on to who had been blessed—it was well known that Carrington’s resident side-eye and shiny new star boy weren’t the friendliest.
Mason’s smile flagged. He raised his voice to be heard but faced me as he said, “Kieran would never.”
However he’d meant it, I heard it as a dare.
“Rules are rules,” I said. The crowd roared as I grabbed Mason by the back of the neck and dragged him to me.
The noise he made was unheard by the crowd, unheard even by me, but I felt it against the palm of my hand. Mason kissed back hard enough to force me a step backward, my hip bumping a side table. He clutched my waist to steady me.
The regret was immediate. It was one short, sloppy kiss, but I would never recover.
Mason must have just had something cold to drink, because his mouth was the coolest thing in the sweltering room. He was an oasis.
I clung for my life.
Somehow, I found it in me to duck my head.
Mason’s mouth followed mine for a moment.
He looked intensely at Lara, who was screaming her hat off.
Then he let me go. The cheering crowd quickly dispersed, onto the next.
Cella took an extra second. She looked like she’d just learned something about herself.
“Go,” I said quietly. My mouth felt too sensitive for one quick kiss. I pushed, and Mason stepped back, wobbly like he was standing on someone else’s legs. “Just. Go dance.”
I shooed Annalisa away, spurring her on as Lara pulled her and Cella back into the fog.
The lights were getting brighter, swelling to the beat of the music.
I leaned against the wall. Everything pulsed with the same rhythm; pulsing bass, pulsing lights, pulsing floors, pulsing walls, my pulsing head, and one hundred pulsing heartbeats.
I reached out for something to steady myself.
I realized that I was hungry.
So hungry my head hurt. Standing in the thick heat, breathing in fog, I started to see small, colorful spots.
I staggered along the wall, bracing one hand on it.
When I felt the stair rail, I grabbed it, intently watching my feet as the spots grew.
On the second floor, I tested the nearest door, heard grunting within, and stumbled to the next room. Empty.
I dropped onto my butt on the bed and held my head in my hands until it stopped spinning.
Someone opened the door. “Occupied,” I said.
“I brought water, but I’m realizing now that probably won’t help, will it?”
I raised my head and thought for a second that I had passed out. Mason stood in the doorway, haloed in the light from the hall, holding a Solo cup.
I grimaced. “I was kind of hoping no one saw that.”
Mason shut the door. The room became dark save for Blake’s Halloween decorations glowing green through the window. “Don’t worry. I don’t think anyone did.”
“Except you.”
Mason shrugged. “Well.”
He set the cup on the nightstand. “What happened?” he asked.
“It’s nothing. Just my head. You can go.”
“Dude. You stumbled up here like a zombie.” Mason knelt in front of me and raised his hand. I flinched, and he paused for a second before continuing, touching the backs of his fingers to my forehead. I rolled my eyes. “Hm. Still cold.”
I pushed his hand away. His eyes were on me again, just like I’d selfishly wanted, and I couldn’t even meet them.
“When was the last time you, uh, fed?”
That got me to look at him, surprised. He pointed to his lips.
“It’s your mouth. It’s got more color when you’ve fed recently, right? Right now you’re pretty pale.”
“Um,” I said, extra dumb. “No one’s ever picked up on that.”
He shrugged again. “When, Kieran?”
“Monday,” I admitted. It was Friday. “Don’t ask.”
“Okay . . .” said Mason. “So what do we do?”
I frowned. “We?”
“You still have to drive.”
“I’ll be fine. Or, whatever, Annalisa can drive.” She didn’t have her license, but I knew she snuck night drives in her parents’ cars while they slept.
“Annalisa’s sloshed.”
“She’s also a vampire.” She could be sober within the hour. “Fast metabolism.”
“Your dad said you feed on cattle, but would mice work? Or, like, raccoons?”
Maybe I was loopier than I thought if Mason was speaking in gibberish.
“I mean, I think I’ve seen deer around this neighborhood, if that’s better, but I don’t know how I’d sneak one up here . . .”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
He tilted his head. Like a dog. “I can hunt pretty fast.”
I gaped at him. Laughter spilled from my mouth. “You are not bringing me dead mice—”
“Or raccoons!” Mason started laughing too.
“Where would you even put them?”
He surveyed his minimal clothing. “Got six pockets, for starters.”
I shuddered.
“What about me, then?”
My smile fell. “What?”
Mason laid one arm on the bed beside my thigh and turned it over, baring the inside of his wrist. “It . . . wouldn’t mess me up, would it? If you just took enough to get home safe?”
I reared back—when had I leaned so far forward to begin with?
“You’re not seriously offering that. Why would you offer that?”
Mason looked confused. “Because you need it?”
“Why are you so cool right now? Why aren’t you grossed out?” I said. “All of your instincts have got to be telling you to hate every part of”—I gestured around my mouth—“this.”
“I already told you. I’m pretty used to defying my instincts when it comes to you.”
I put my face back in my hands, shying away from the too-much of it all.
“I’m really fine,” I said. “I just needed to get away from all the noise and smoke. And . . .”
“Blood?” he guessed. “Okay. At least lay down for a bit.”
“I’m not getting my shoes on the bed; I wasn’t raised in a barn. Uh, no offense.”
Mason chuckled. “Look how far we’ve come. Only took you passing out.”
“Nobody passed out.”
I felt his hands at my feet and yelped, uncovering my face to shove him away, but the calm intent in his eyes made me still. My hands dropped to the quilt, listless, as he unzipped and removed each boot.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Should’ve done something sooner. You seemed woozy on the patio.”
“But . . .” My head was spinning again. “You didn’t look at me out there. Not once.”
“Don’t you get it by now?” Mason sounded exasperated. “I’m always looking at you. I can’t stop.”
“That’s not true,” I argued. “You’re always looking anywhere else.”
“You asked me to,” he said, almost angrily. “So I’m trying. That doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
Something came apart inside my chest, ribs caving in. It was a landslide. I practically fell forward in my desperation to kiss him.
And Mason caught me, even as his mouth went slack with surprise. Caught me by the shoulders, holding me upright, then holding me against him. His mouth answered mine fiercely.
“All I wanted,” I gasped between kisses, “all night, was for you to look at me.”
“All I’ve thought about for weeks is not looking,” he mumbled. “If that isn’t at the front of my mind, you’re all I see.”
In response, I could only pull, hands working in a fever at his clothes, his skin, begging him closer until he rose to press me into the bed.
“Shoes,” I ordered before Mason climbed on. Crashes sounded behind him as he kicked them off. Then he was on top of me, swallowing the noise I made at the warm press of his weight. There was fire beneath his skin. It gave me chills. He was made of contradictions that way.
His hand tucked under my knee to bend my leg, and he touched from thigh to ankle, muttering some nonsense about legs that went on forever and interrupting himself to groan about it.
Leaning back, Mason curved his hands around my waist as if measuring the cinch of the vest. “This costume . . .” he said with despair.
“I didn’t think you’d noticed,” I said, absurdly pleased by the attention.
“Didn’t we just go over this?” He kissed me again, rolling against me like the tide. I wanted to leave so little space, the lines between us smeared. I wanted to blur into him. I wanted to bleed all over him. I wanted.
I jolted when my fingers brushed something fuzzy at his back.
Touching Mason had me loopier than I’d been all night—my first thought was that he already had a mouse in his pocket.
I realized it was the bunny tail and gasped out a laugh.
I managed to unclip the tail, tossing it somewhere for the room’s owner to find later.
Mason dropped his head into the crook of my neck and placed a smiling kiss there.
Close as we were, I felt when he went rigid. “You’re not actually drunk, are you?”
“I’m not.”
“And you’re not running away?”
“You’re as heavy as you look.”
He raised up on his hands, hovering over me. “I’m serious.”
I shook my head.
“What’s happening right now?” he mumbled, not really to me, but I answered anyway.
“I’m giving up. Kiss me,” I whispered, and he did.
There was no pulling myself out of his quicksand.
There hadn’t been since the first step. Mason lowered back onto his forearms, and I did my best to wrap myself around him.
I kissed him until I couldn’t tell my body from the sheets, his tongue from my teeth, vampire from werewolf.
Until we fell out of sync, as slow and messy and sweet as caramel.
“I like you,” said Mason. I had no choice but to believe him this time, after being kissed like that.
But then, had he ever kissed me any other way?
This was the part where I said it back, but I didn’t understand what it would mean to like Mason. I didn’t understand him at all.
I remembered what Annalisa had said about not knowing until you jump. I tried it out in my head. I like you too.
Out loud, I said, “Prove it to me.” I didn’t elaborate, but Mason nodded. His gaze didn’t waver.
My phone rang. His eyes flashed, but I touched his neck, holding on to say, I’m not running. It was Annalisa, ready to go home. I sat up, and Mason moved with me, kneeling between my legs.
“When are you free?” I asked.
“Whenever,” he said. “Tomorrow. Sunday. Right now.”
“I’ll call,” I said. “Actually, you call. I deleted your number.”
“That’s . . . fair.”
“I liked the sound of your voice too much.”
This seemed to appease him. He loosened his grip on my waist enough to let me leave. When I stood, I felt much steadier than I had before, if a little weak in the knees. Mason watched me go, looking like he only half trusted me to respond to his call. I would just have to prove myself too.