Chapter 20
Twenty
Claire kept her hand on his thigh and curved her fingers around his. “You’ve been alone with it too long, Tai.”
His hand clenched around hers for a moment, then loosened again. “I want to tell it here, surrounded by all of this. To tell the trees and the mountains and the sky. And you.”
“Well, I’m listening,” she said. “I can’t speak for the trees or the mountains or the sky.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes. A mockingbird perched in a tree nearby and showed off a repertoire that included a tree frog, a seagull, and a crow among countless other bird songs. They laughed at the squawk of the crow, and the mockingbird flew away as if offended.
Tai said, “A year after my mom died, my vampire traits began emerging.”
Claire squeezed his hand and listened. She hoped her listening would be a gift to him. His story was certainly a gift to her, however hard it was about to get.
“Three months after I began needing to slake, I was at school, and… A few friends had to tackle me, pile on, to keep me from going after a classmate. I didn’t know what was happening to me.
I lost my ability to think, to choose. I fought back, trying to get at this human kid, nothing in my head but the prey drive.
The thirst was…” He cleared his throat as if feeling a phantom there even now.
“Teachers intervened, of course. In the nurse’s office, I was allowed to slake, and I could think again, remember what I’d just done.
I came out of the bloodfiend attack and plunged straight into a panic attack.
Begged Nurse Lori to tell me what was wrong with me. ”
“Did she know?” Claire whispered when he paused.
Tai nodded. “She was a vampire. I’ll always be grateful to her. She was so kind, Claire. She told me what she knew about hematorexia, which wasn’t a lot, but it was something to hold onto. She talked to—to my father when he—when he came to pick me up.”
His words stalled again. Claire held onto his hands and waited for him.
“He…um. He…took me home, and…”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Physically? No. I got the belt, of course, but that was just what I deserved.”
Claire wrapped her arm around his back and rested her head on his shoulder. “Tai, do you understand that counts as physically hurting you?”
“Oh. I guess. I just meant, nothing out of the ordinary.”
She couldn’t begin to tackle that one today. “Do you understand that you didn’t deserve punishment for having an attack?”
He pressed his face to her hair, breathed in her scent for a long moment. “You know, I really didn’t. Everything Peter said today… I haven’t thought about that day in years, but it feels different now. It feels like it wasn’t really my fault.”
It was a step. She tried to focus on that and not the fact he’d carried the punishment for years as something he did deserve.
“After he got me home and…and all that. He told me I had five years to get my crap together. On my eighteenth birthday, I wouldn’t be a bloodfiend anymore. Period.”
“What?” She drew back reflexively, stared up at him, sure she’d heard wrong. “It doesn’t work like that!”
“He would disagree.”
“Well, then he doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Icy rage coursed up and down her arms. What sort of father didn’t learn all he could about his son’s experience, instead pronounced an ultimatum the very day his own child experienced something so traumatic for the first time? Oh, Tai.
“He believes bloodfiends can beat the condition if they really want to by putting principles above selfish desires—and, you know, with sheer willpower.”
She had to work to process the gross absurdity of those words. She tried to keep her voice level. “There are multiple things wrong with that sentence.”
“I know.”
Nope, not going to stay level. “You didn’t choose this. We have science and data and studies and identified genes—” Her voice rose with every item on her list, ringing out over the cliff’s edge. Telling the trees, indeed.
“I didn’t know any of that as a kid,” Tai said. “All I knew was what he told me.”
“And how dare he call anyone who deals with this selfish, much less his own child!”
“Claire, I know.”
An urge overwhelmed her to spring to her feet and pace the width of the cliff to calm herself, but Tai needed her to stay close. She had to focus on him, not make this about herself. “Sorry. My ranting isn’t helpful.”
“It’s okay.” A faint smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “It’s kind of nice, seeing somebody else mad at him.”
“I am so mad I can hardly see straight.”
“Thank you.” Tai reached out and squeezed her hand. “Really.”
“So he told you all this crap, and you tried to conquer hematorexia with teenage willpower.”
“That’s exactly what I did.”
No wonder he still didn’t know how to take care of himself. No wonder he chose to shiver when he could simply wrap up in a few blankets.
“Have you seen him since you turned eighteen?” She already knew the answer.
“No. He told me I was no longer his son, changed the locks and blocked my number. Mom’s money saved my life, accessible as of my eighteenth birthday. It didn’t even matter that he cut me off financially; I was able to pay for college entirely on my own.”
“What a woman,” Claire said.
“In college,” Tai said without pausing, his words now flowing like a downhill river, “I tried for a science degree. I wanted to study genetics, figure myself out. At eighteen I had big dreams of curing myself, curing all of us. But I’m not Ryker Maddox.
” He grinned, a flash of good-natured self-deprecation as well as admiration for his friend.
“That head he has for equations, statistics, number strings a mile long… I’m great with consumer math; if I weren’t, I couldn’t do my job. But my head prefers art to science.”
“So what’s your degree?”
“I considered music next, but once I explained why I’d tried science in the first place, my advisor steered me toward a bachelor’s in public relations.
She said my people skills were unusually strong, and with a relevant degree I’d have a lot of vocational options to help people.
Then I got my Master’s in communication, also thanks to Mom’s money. ”
“So when you got the position with Josie Strong…”
“Yeah, I was still trying to find a way into genetics research. I’ve always wondered if my mom was a bloodfiend. I look just like her—black hair, same mouth and nose, same weird eye color. Then again, today I found out eye color has nothing to do with the condition. Peter’s eyes are green.”
He’d been trying to understand himself all his life. Claire felt the weight of that settle in her chest. “Doesn’t Josie Strong work only with human disorders?”
“For now, yeah. Once I got involved, I learned how vast the research field is. So many people need help and can’t get it on their own. So no, I don’t go to work to help cure hematorexia, but I do help treat or cure other things.”
She took hold of one of his hands and with her other began to rub his back. She didn’t know what else to do, how else to show him the depth of care inside her. The man she loved had been through too much, but he would never be alone with it again.
He hadn’t said everything. Not yet. She knew this, deep inside where her own stories lived, but she didn’t know what question he needed now to free the rest of his.
“I’m sorry, Tai. I’m sorry you lost your mom so young. I’m sorry your father refused to love you for exactly the person you are.”
“He didn’t stop there,” Tai said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“The entire family knows what I am, Claire. He told everyone, down to the most distant cousins. Made sure they knew not to take me in. Made sure they knew I was rebelling against vampire moral codes and had no interest in ‘bettering myself.’”
“And none of them told him off? Or at least reached out to you? Not a single one?”
He was quiet. He kept his eyes fixed on the distant mountains.
“Oh, Tai.”
“They’re old-school purists, Claire. No, they’re worse than that.
I found out…” He closed his eyes a long moment, then stared at the vista in front of them as if trying to find something out there, or someone.
“My father’s great-grandparents participated in multiple bloodfiend executions, and some of my relatives are still freaking proud of it, including my dad.
Murder isn’t a stain on the family legacy, but my existence is. ”
Claire could find no response. She could only be here to hold his words as they kept coming, finally, for the first time.
“I don’t miss them or need them anymore, and people like that aren’t really much of a loss anyway, but I still…”
He didn’t even glance down at her, kept gazing out at the beauty in front of them as if he needed to see it, needed to know the mountains heard him as well as Claire. But his grip tightened on her hand, and she gripped back.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I still miss her. I wish I could play a new composition for her. I wish she could know me now, know that yes, I’m a bloodfiend, but I fight it, and I’ve never hurt anyone. I don’t think she’d have kicked me out, Claire. I think I’d still have her.”
“I think so too,” Claire said. “And you get to miss her. You get to feel it all, Tai, everything you’ve lost.”
His face crinkled up, and his mouth pulled into a grimace as though he were suddenly fighting tears. Claire pressed her arm to his, close but giving him space to keep his eyes on the mountains.
Quietly he said, “Laurence calls me son.”
After every awful thing he’d told her, these were the four words that broke him. Tai covered his face with both hands, and his body bowed over as his shoulders silently heaved.
“Don’t fight it, Tai. Let it out. All of it, today, it’s time to let everything out.”
A loud sob broke from him, then another. Claire took him in her arms and held him while he wept. After a few moments, he wrapped his arms around her too, holding on tight, his tears dampening her shirt at one shoulder.
A faint tingling traveled down her spine.
This had happened before. No, she had seen it before it happened.
Her future-sight glimpse of Tai—she hadn’t been visible, but this was the day she’d seen.
He’d been wearing this red shirt, hiding his face in his hands in the moment before she held him. A turning point, a healing point.
In a few minutes, Tai’s sobbing began to quiet. By then Claire supported most of his weight as he clung to her. He sat up slowly, seeming to realize that he’d collapsed against her. He met her eyes, and she set a finger on his lips.
“Do not apologize,” she said.
“I was going to,” he whispered against her finger.
“I know you were, Tai Aksel. Now don’t.”
“Okay.”
“Your trust is an honor. Your story is a gift. You are a gift to so many people. And you are a gift to me.”
He took her face between his strong, beautiful, musical hands.
He pushed his fingers through her hair at her temples.
He took her mouth with his, and the kiss was salty and sweet, and Claire sank her fingers into the muscles of his back and deepened the kiss to leave no doubt in his mind that he was hers, even more so today than yesterday.
She hitched herself over to sit across his lap.
They kissed and kissed on the edge of the cliff, and when her lips traveled down his neck to the dip of his shoulder, Claire’s body surged and sang with something brand new. An urgent longing to bite.
“Claire,” he said, the word almost a gasp.
“I want to,” she said.
“I’m sorry you can’t.”
“I’m not going to be first. You’re first, when you’re ready. Only when you’re ready.”
He lowered his forehead to rest on her shoulder. “I love you. But I can’t.”
“It doesn’t have to be today.”
“Please don’t think this is going to change.”
“You’ll trust yourself one day, Tai. I have no doubt.”
“No. I need you to accept it.” He pushed his hand through her hair, and his eyes were shiny with…fear? “I need to know we’re enough today, just as we are.”
“Of course we are. We belong together, no matter what.” But also… “Did you just say…?”
“That I love you? I wasn’t sure you heard me.” He smirked, then took her mouth with a playful roughness that made the desire to place her bite almost a need.
They were young. They would have centuries.
Or maybe, if something happened, if instant death came for one of them as it had for his mom, maybe they had only another decade or so.
The idea ought to terrify her. But for a decade or a millennium, if she got to have Tai beside her, Claire would call it enough.
No. She would call it a gift.