Chapter 13
Thirteen
“Well, first of all,” she said, “how many people in your life know about this?”
“Ryker and Leslie. And you, now.”
That was…all? Claire shook her head. Everything she knew about bloodfiends, she had learned from long chats at the blood bar with Peter.
She couldn’t claim expert status by any means, but one of things he stressed every time the topic came up was the necessity of a support system.
People surrounded Peter who accepted his condition as one facet of his whole person. Instead, Tai had been hiding.
Could a person be too good at hiding?
“Did you choose to tell Ryker, or did he find out the way I did?”
“We were sparring at the gym one day, and this human wandered in off the street thinking it was a medical office. He’d hurt his hand on a construction site, wrapped a cloth bandage around it, but it was still bleeding pretty bad.
One of the staff walked him back out and helped him get to the clinic a block over, so he was only inside for maybe three minutes, but I… ”
Tai was shrinking against the couch, looking smaller the longer he spoke. When Claire slid her hand between his back and the couch and rested it between his shoulder blades, he gave a start.
“What’re you doing?” he said.
“Keeping you from shrinking.”
“Oh.” He pressed his fingers to his eyes. “I guess I was.”
“You don’t need to, Tai. After all the time I wasted mad at a version of you that didn’t exist, let me get to know the real you. No shrinking, no hiding.”
“I…I want that.”
“You keep saying that. Are you trying to convince yourself? Because you can also say no.”
“No, no, it’s not that. I just…” Tai swiped a hand under his eyes. “You stayed.”
Claire took one of his hands and laced his fingers between hers. “I’m still here.”
“That’s what I have to keep convincing myself. Not that I want you to know me, but that you want to.”
“Well, in that case, I’ll keep reminding you. Meanwhile can we talk a little more about the day at the gym?”
He nodded, this time without hesitating.
“When this man came in and you smelled him, smelled the blood, you wanted to slake from him?”
He ducked his head, but after a moment he nodded.
“And hunt him. Make him your prey.”
Tai’s head snapped up, his eyes flashing with something like panic. “How do you know that?”
“Come on, dude, I’m a bartender. I hear a lot of stories from a lot of vampires. You think I’ve never met a bloodfiend before tonight?”
“Bloodfiends are statistically one in a thousand. You can’t know another bloodfiend.”
“Well, I do, and he’s a relic to boot.”
“But how? How can he be in here and not—? Claire, I’ve tried.
I drove thirty miles to a blood bar where no one would know me, and the second I walked in, I knew I couldn’t handle it.
Too many open drinks, and yeah, it helps that they’re all chilled, but chilled isn’t enough for me to…
That’s when I knew I had to withdraw from the business plans. ”
He hadn’t simply written her off. He’d tested himself. He’d tried to stay involved. “Maybe adjusting takes decades, Tai. Maybe by the time you’re a few centuries old, you’ll be comfortable in a setting like this too.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Did you react outwardly to the human in the gym? Is that what Ryker saw?”
“We’d been working out pretty hard, so I knew I’d need to slake before I left. And then this guy walked in, and…my fangs descended, and I wanted… The only thing I could think of to protect him was to freeze. I didn’t let myself move an inch until he was gone.”
He’d done the same in the car when the cop approached them. “I guess that looked pretty alarming to Ryker without context.”
“Yeah, he was ready to go find a staff member and ask for help. The minute the doors shut and the human was outside, I darted to the vending machines. No way Ryker would take a non-answer, and I realized I owed him the truth. So I told him.”
“And he said…?” This felt like one of the most vital pieces of the story.
If Ryker had needed time to accept Tai’s condition, it would’ve been one more brick in the wall of his belief that he was broken.
That his friend stuck beside him despite who Tai was at the core, rather than because of who Tai was.
“He said…” Tai scrubbed a hand down his face.
When he spoke again, he’d raised the pitch of his voice closer to Ryker’s low tenor, and even his inflection sounded rather like his best friend’s.
“‘Wow, man, that’s got to suck. I don’t think I’ve ever met a bloodfiend before, so if I ever miss something you need, just take me to task and I’ll know better next time. ’”
Dear, wonderful Ryker. Claire wanted to hug him.
Before she had to ask, as if a dam inside him had been razed and a whole river of words released, Tai said, “He was comfortable with Leslie so fast, I think maybe from the day he met her. He didn’t mean to tell her about me.
He said it was one of those ‘I have a friend who…’ and then a few conversations later, he said something else and Leslie, the sharp listener that she is, was like, ‘Wait—Tai‘s your friend who…?’”
Claire found herself smiling as she shook her head. “That is so unsurprisingly Ryker and Leslie.”
“Right?” Tai’s low chuckle sent a shiver down Claire’s back, and her body suddenly noticed her closeness to him, the toned muscles of his back where her hand still rested.
“I was mad when he first confessed. I knew how much she already meant to him, and I wanted to be…” He closed his eyes for a moment.
“I wanted friendship. With her. But if my best friend’s partner kicked me out of his life, then…
I had to go quietly. I was waiting for her to do it, and then Ryker told me she’d just asked a few questions, trying to understand something she had no experience with.
But no judgment, he said. Not from Leslie. ”
“She’s not the judgmental type.”
“Once I got to meet her, I told him it was okay. He could answer her questions.”
“Why didn’t you answer them?”
“We were still getting to know each other. She hadn’t asked about it in front of me, and I… Claire, talking about this is…saying this stuff out loud. It’s not easy.”
She hadn’t considered the toll her interrogation might take.
She’d been so focused on getting answers, correcting her internal concept of Tai Kristiansen—director of fundraising, charmer, speaker, socialite, musician.
Not a liar, not a fake, not an unaffected machine with metallic eyes, but instead…
a bloodfiend. She had focused on the need to reframe him, to see him clearly at last, but maybe she could have been gentler about it.
Okay, no maybe about it. Tai knew gentle wasn’t her style, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t try occasionally, when the topic was fraught.
“Did you ever talk to Leslie about it?”
“Once. She came to me right after they got engaged, and she said she didn’t expect me to go there if it was too hard for me, but that if I ever wanted to, she was here to listen.”
Shoot. Maybe Claire should have taken that approach.
“Hey,” he said with a nudge, shoulder to shoulder. “I don’t need you to be Leslie.”
“Get out of my head.” She nudged him back.
He gave her favorite version of his chuckle, the low, warm, slow one that reminded her of dripping honey. “You’re not so hard to read when your guard’s down.”
Well, that was terrifying. “Listen, if we need to end this for tonight, we can. I just grilled you pretty mercilessly, and… Does it leave you tired, after it hits you like that?”
“A little. I don’t think it’s so much from the…thirst…as it is from the effort to restrain myself.” He blinked. “I’ve never told anybody that before.”
“Then if it’s okay, there’s one last thing I want to ask you.”
He nodded, and his face was wholly open to her. He had stopped shrinking, stopped hiding.
Her final question could ruin all of it.
Claire wished she could call on her future-sight when she needed it, but it didn’t work that way.
She tried to be still and tune in to the source of what she sometimes “just knew,” her heart or her gut or something, but in this moment she had only the sharpness of her reasoning, which said after three years, Tai either wanted her or he didn’t.
Fear dripped down her spine, real fear that he didn’t.
Which meant she had to face it down.
“Earlier you said you chose not to tell me because you see this as the worst thing about you, and because… You said, ‘because you’re you.’”
The air itself seemed to go still between them. Tai’s lips parted. He gave a slow blink that emphasized the thick fringe of his lashes, and in a moment Claire was no longer asking and listening. Instead she was…feeling. Tai. The pull she used to feel toward him, used to be sure he felt toward her.
“Claire,” he said, turning her simple name into a song.
She had to be sure. Their truce was still young. She wanted his friendship so much, and if she was misreading signals…
Tai’s voice lowered to something like a purr. “If it isn’t there for you, I understand.”
“So I wasn’t imagining back then, that sometimes you seemed like you might be interested…not as friends or business partners, but…?”
He slid his hand through her hair. He held her eyes with his, and the gleam in them now was so bright she couldn’t look away.
His beauty was so unique, and his heart…
She could finally see his heart, see the shield he kept up so desperately around it because deep inside, Tai Kristiansen wasn’t impervious at all. His heart held splinters and struggle.
“You weren’t imagining it,” he said. “Was I?”
“If you were, would I be doing this?” She leaned into his touch, slid the hand she’d kept on his back up to his shoulder, then down to his chest. His heart gave an extra beat, and she kept her palm there, against this heart that was more vulnerable than she ever would have guessed.