Chapter 6 Rowan #3
Her brows knitted together, then understanding dawned, and she let out another sharp bark of laughter.
I loved how easy-breezy she was with her mirth.
She didn’t try to stifle it, just fully letting herself experience the moment.
That was something I could get behind. “Ha! I’ll have you know, I happen to have two dogs in my rotation who only have three legs. ”
“Of course, how ableist of me to assume they’d all be four-legged.”
“Yeah, really. Guess I gotta cancel you now. Excuse me while I make a callout post.”
Another chuckle. My cheeks were already starting to hurt. Apparently, joy had a sore-face cost.
Worth it.
“Perhaps we could dance before you expose my truly wicked ways to the masses?”
She looked back at my offered hand, and I was sure she’d turn me down despite our camaraderie. But then she smiled ever so softly and placed her hand in mine. “I’d love to.”
How lovely.
We stood and walked to a more open area around the fountain. We weren’t the only ones on the aesthetic expanse of cobblestone either. A few older couples and two young pairs were also entwined together and moving to the rhapsody saturating the night air all around us.
Dancing to jazz wasn’t really like dancing to a waltz or even the blues.
Although the band was definitely playing a slower song, there was a heady urgency to it that demanded a certain intent and fervor to motions.
And yet, Naomi seemed to fall into it so effortlessly, her body winding as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, moving as if she were wearing actual dancing shoes and not stylish boots.
All that muscle of hers suddenly made a lot of sense—she had a great command of her body.
For a brief moment, all my limbs felt too long, and my feet were connected to an entirely different person, but I took a deep breath and centered myself back to the roaring twenties and the swing era.
Back then, vampires hadn’t really been known to cut a rug with the newfangled, Americana music, but we were so few and far between that it hadn’t been unusual for me to throwdown with Iko and whatever magical folks happened to be around in the hidden speakeasies we frequented.
Heh, hidden speakeasies beneath hidden speakeasies. It was like a Russian doll of subterfuge. What were those called again?
“Matryoshka!” I blurted without thinking.
“What was that?” Naomi asked as she twirled under my arm, then shimmied back to me as we jazz-squared. It wasn’t crisp, it wasn’t polished, but it didn’t have to be. We were locked into each other, the taste of sugar along my lips and her vitality filling the air between us.
My teeth started to ache the way they always did when I got hungry, except it was nowhere near my normal feeding schedule.
I’d trained myself to a flexible and easy rhythm of swinging over to my blood connection once a month if I didn’t get an injury that couldn’t be sorted with a day’s worth of snoozing in my coffin, so I still had nine more days before I was supposed to feed again.
It was her.
What else could it be? I was irrevocably drawn to her smile, her laugh, the way she squinted when she was being playfully suspicious of me, the way my own body seemed to warm when she shared her uninhibited enthusiasm with me.
As much as she made me feel so human, she was awakening the more bestial side of me as well.
Was that a good thing, though?
“I said, what was that?”
Oh right, she had been speaking to me. I was so caught up in everything going on that I’d forgotten entirely.
“Nothing!” I said quickly, and to my utter delight, she began to Charleston like she was an actual dancer in the heyday of everything. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“YouTube!” She laughed brightly when I joined in, throwing my arms to give myself a little extra momentum like I’d seen men do back in the day. “You?”
“Just picked it up along the way. You know, life.”
“Boy, do I!”
Our conversation halted a bit, not because we didn’t have anything to say, but because we were really getting into the dancing as the band ramped up in an allegro melody.
It was chaotic. It was fun. Most importantly, it was so free.
How could I have forgotten what it felt like to let loose and dance with vigor?
With intensity? With bounce and rhythm and everything else that the coven looked down on?
Too long. But as I moved with Naomi, laughed with her, breathed with her, just celebrated the moment with her, it was easy to forget all of them and whatever snide comments they had made.
“—ink?”
I blinked, realizing that Naomi had said something again as she spun toward me, but the feel of her body colliding with mine knocked any sort of comprehension right the fuck out of me.
“Pardon?” I asked. I hoped that she accepted my inability to follow a sentence as just not hearing her over the music and not me grappling with a lot of things I didn’t expect to be feeling on a date with a human.
“You want a drink?”
I shook my head, wondering if she had read my mind and blurted something without thinking. “No, it’s not time for me to feed.”
“Huh?”
Fuck! That’s not what she meant! Mayday, mayday! How was I so bad at this?
“I said sure. Let’s get off our feet.”
“My thoughts exactly!”
Part of my soul legitimately shuddered at the thought of stopping our dance—it was a revelation unexpected, yet it was like an elixir for my soul. I was repairing whole chunks of me in real time, and I never expected that.
But then Naomi’s blazing hand found mine, her shorter fingers intertwining with my longer ones, and she tugged me toward one of the adorable shopfronts at the edge of the square that I realized was a tavern. How quaint!
I couldn’t get drunk, and I didn’t need to ingest anything other than blood to survive, but that didn’t mean I didn’t occasionally enjoy the burn of a deliciously aged spirit.
Sort of like a ghost of a memory of how it once had been when I was a young man in the desert.
Reminiscence compliments of a barrel and a brewer with a dream. Or something like that.
”So, what are you having?” I asked as we waited for the bartender—er, tavernkeep—to approach us. He had a line as lengthy as his beard, so it was going to take us a couple of minutes.
“I’m actually thinking a Bloody Mary. Something a bit savory after all that sweetness of the ice cream.”
It truly took all my willpower to keep my face trained in a somewhat pleasant expression, because really, I wanted to howl with laughter.
What were the chances? But bursting into loud, ugly peals of mirth over a drink choice seemed like a pretty great way to tank a date, so I was glad I managed to contain my reaction.
“That makes sense to me.”
“What about you?” Naomi asked, still all smiles. I took that to mean that I was maintaining my cover well enough.
“Hmm, I’m not sure.” I wasn’t craving anything, but I knew I didn’t want wine.
I swear that was all the coven ever had, and they’d constantly mix blood into it so they could swirl it in their truly staggering collection of ornate glasses instead of actually contributing to conversation or developing a personality.
Huh. Apparently interacting with humans was making me a bit spicy. Fine enough by me. People sometimes mistook my kindness or amiable nature for weakness, but that certainly wasn’t the case.
“Something wrong?” Naomi asked, tilting her face so she was looking up at me through those enticingly thick lashes of hers. She reminded me a bit of the pinup girls from the forties and fifties, just a bit… shorter.
“No,” I answered honestly. “Just a bit in my head.” It was a habit that came from being alone so often. Even when Ibrahim changed me, he had often teased me about how much time I spent in my mind.
“Wanna share?”
Did I?
Yeah, why not?
“I just… Well, I had a… theater group that I was in. And I thought I was a part of it, but I recently found out that no, they were just pretending because of things they could get out of me.”
Naomi clicked her tongue, and I braced for her to tell me to man up, or that I was being too sensitive.
“I hate shit like that!” she said with a surprising amount of vehemence.
Apparently, I liked that a lot because my teeth started to itch.
I’d always had a thing for passionate women.
Some said it was something about the chase, but if I was honest with myself, it was probably something about the fight.
“Lemme guess, it’s a LARP group?”
If we’d been served already, I would have choked on my drink. But as it were, I just made only a slightly strangled sound. “How’d you know?”
“I went to theater camp when I was a kid,” she said, and I loved the way her cheeks flushed ever so slightly.
She was already beautiful, but that light dusting of color over her skin made her look like a painting.
“I was one of the ugly stepsisters in our Cinderella production, and let me tell you, watching all the leads was a lesson in all sorts of drama that wasn’t written by Rogers and Hammerstein. ”
Who was this witty, insightful woman before me, and how had I gone over a century without meeting anyone like her?
Ibrahim had been right; I needed to get out more.
I’d thought all I needed was him after the last of my adoptive human family had passed, but clearly, I’d been missing out by focusing so much of my attention solely on trying to find a vampire coven.
“I suppose those tropes exist for a reason. I have to admit, I prefer supporting performances rather than being in them.”
“God, I am right there with you. The last thing I want is to be center stage.”
Which was just about the opposite of most vampires. For all that we were beings of the night and photophobic, we certainly did like the spotlight.