Chapter 26 #2
“Four thirty.”
“Okay, good. Do you know what brought on the cold? Did you injure yourself or something?”
“I lost her.”
“Lost who?”
“She’s so afraid of being left, but I never would have left her, Peter. I gave her my word so many times, but she can’t believe me, and I can’t be bloodbound, and I lost her….” His body heaved a sob that came from his gut.
“Claire.” Peter’s voice held endless care but also a sharp earnestness. “Okay, Tai, I need you to do a few things for me right now. You up to it?”
“I’ll try, but she just wants me to trust myself, to make us bloodbound, and I can’t. I can’t even try.”
“Tai, listen to me. I need you to get up, go to your kitchen, and open a blood bag. Then I need you to take two sips.”
“I told you I’m not thirsty.” Maybe Peter wasn’t hearing him either. Maybe Tai was the problem. Maybe he had a voice no one could hear.
“You’re in some kind of shock right now. A little blood will help.”
No, it wouldn’t. He shook his head and stayed on the floor.
“You called me for help, and I’m trying to help you. Now get up and go drink two sips.”
That was a fair point. Tai got up and followed Peter’s instructions while the melody he’d created for himself and Claire rang through his heart, too loud and all wrong, transposed to a minor key.
He broke the seal on a blood bag from his fridge and took a long sip. The confusion of grief cleared. He took a slow, testing breath, and his lungs filled, the iron band fallen from around his chest. Two sips, Peter had said. He took another, and he remembered other things he was supposed to do.
“Peter.”
A quiet sigh came over the connection. “Did you do what I said?”
“Yeah. I’m okay.” He returned to the den and scooped up three blankets from the backs of the couch and his favorite chair. He bundled up in the chair and drew his knees to his chest. He let himself shiver. “I’ve got three blankets around me. I remembered.”
“Good, good. You had me worried for a minute.”
“Sorry.”
“Now what’s this about Claire and being bloodbound?”
Tai told him everything, even the intimate moment he’d nearly placed his bite on Claire’s neck, even the times since that he’d wanted to but restrained himself so that she never guessed.
He left out only the detail of Claire’s vigilantism, of how they’d ended up arguing about becoming bloodbound tonight.
“If I could,” he finished, “I’d have done it by now, but I’ll never let myself do it. She said she understood, Peter. But all this time she’s been waiting for me to be ‘ready.’ She knows I can’t defeat this with willpower, but she still trusts me to bite without hurting her. It doesn’t make sense.”
“And when you said no again tonight…”
“She said it all over again—that I’d be ready someday. And this time, when I said no, she said she needs it, or she can’t be sure I won’t leave her.”
Tai shut his eyes against the truth, but he could still see her, the wound at her collarbone, smudged green eyeshadow, emptiness filling her eyes as he refused to let it go this time, her insistence that he give what he didn’t have.
He opened his eyes. There was no hiding from this. He’d said their relationship wasn’t fixable. He didn’t want it to be true, but he couldn’t see any other way right now.
“I can’t give her what she needs, and my word isn’t enough. I’m not enough.”
“I don’t believe that,” Peter said. “You’ll figure this out, the two of you. You belong together; it’s plain as day.”
“I can’t ask her to ignore her fear, Peter. And I can’t do the one thing she needs to feel safe.”
“You know there are bloodbound bloodfiends, right?”
Tai’s thoughts froze even as his body stood up from the bundle of blankets, let them fall, and stalked to the table where his phone lay. He stared down at it as if he could catch a glimpse of Peter across town, force eye contact, force him to take back what had to be a rumor, a legend.
“No.” Tai shivered. Still needed the blankets, couldn’t move, could only stare at his phone. “No, that isn’t possible.”
“It is. Bloodfiends don’t harm their eternal. They place the bite safely just as any other vampire does.”
“It isn’t possible.”
“Do you crave vampire blood?”
“Uh…I’ve never tasted our blood. I mean, besides mine, sucking on a paper cut.”
“And did you ever want to slake with the blood of a vampire? Cool straight out of the vein? Totally different taste?”
The very idea was gross. “Of course not.”
“Okay, and how about the prey drive? Have you ever, in your entire life, looked at one of our kind and wanted to hunt and take?”
He’d never put it together, but the answer was easy, obvious now that Peter asked the question, got Tai out of his own scared head. “You know I haven’t.”
“Yes, I do. I also personally know two couples just like you and Claire—one a bloodfiend, one not. Bloodbound for decades now. I wish this topic had come up sooner, so I could put your mind at ease, but I didn’t realize how you might be thinking of it. Should’ve brought it up myself, huh.”
Tai dropped to his knees as yet another wave of overwhelm crashed down on him. Too many to count tonight. “It would kill me, Peter. If I lost control and hurt her, it would kill me.”
“Of course it would, because she’s yours, and you’re hers. But you’re not going to lose control.”
“Oh.” He’d lost the rest of his words.
“You don’t need to be afraid, Tai. You can set that fear down and never pick it up again.”
“Oh.”
And just like that, he was crying. Tears came too easily lately, ever since he’d wept his soul inside out at the overlook.
The possibility that he could be bound to Claire, their souls beating together for as long as they lived…
The relief from the shame that they couldn’t be bound because of him…
But there was more too. There was a raw wound inside him, long scarred and calloused, tonight torn open and throbbing.
“Tai?”
He swiped the tears from his cheeks, got up and retrieved the blankets, bundled up again. “Sorry. It’s a lot.”
“She hurt you.”
“She has trust issues for a reason.”
“I don’t doubt it, but she still hurt you. Both things can be true, you know. Are you interested in a wise relic’s relationship advice?”
Tai laughed through the last of his tears. “I’d love some.”
“Talk through that hurt before you go forward. Don’t brush it off because you’ve got the solution. Also? Don’t place your bite before you’re ready. If you’re doing it only because of her fear, you’re not ready, and neither is Claire.”
“Well…shoot, Peter. You’re basically the wise old mentor from every epic movie.”
Peter gave a theatrical hiss that melted into laughter. “Take that back before the universe hears you.”
“What? Why?”
“Those guys always get killed off.”