Chapter 33
It was hard to focus on what Hank was saying, and she kicked herself internally. She knew she wasn’t supposed to have favorite clients, but Hank was her favorite nonetheless. He was kind, and while his voice was as deep as an ocean trench, he was soft-spoken. Deferent. Thoughtful.
Distantly, she realized that he had stopped talking to her. She looked up and saw Hank staring at her, his brow furrowed.
“Nadja, are you okay?”
“Mm-hmm!” she said, so high and thin that it sounded like air being let out of a balloon. She took a fortifying breath and looked him in the eye. “I’m fine, Hank.”
But she wasn’t fine. Her ears were ringing and black spots danced in front of her vision, the spots growing bigger and denser with every passing minute.
“I don’t really know what the etiquette here is, but I don’t believe you. I think you need to go to the hospital.”
“They can’t help me,” she said, gripping the armrests of her chair, as if that would steady her. It only made the spinning feeling worse.
Her throat burned with tears. This conversation was so similar to the one she’d had with Robbie. The difference was that while Hank was concerned, Robbie had been nearly frantic. Robbie had wanted to throw her over his shoulder and run to the hospital.
“Is there someone you can call to take you?” Hank asked, crossing the space and crouching down in front of her chair. “I would really like to check your heart rate, Nadja. Can I do that?”
She must have nodded because she felt the dry heat of Hank’s fingers against the inside of her wrist, his thumb pressing gently opposite. He looked at the clock on the wall.
“This is unnecessary, Hank.” But she didn’t push him away and he didn’t leave. He kept holding her wrist and staring at the clock.
But there was no way to tell Hank what she needed, what she was.
It wasn’t that she thought the information would scare him.
His partner’s best friend was a selkie who was married to a vampire.
Hank knew all of this and accepted it with the casual ease of a person who also knew someone who went to same high school as a new acquaintance.
But he didn’t know that she knew all of that.
He didn’t know what she knew or what she was and she wasn’t about to open that Pandora’s box.
Not to mention that to tell him about how she fed or, rather, how she wasn’t feeding, would be crossing almost every single professional boundary she had.
She couldn’t tell him that her last feed, her last real feed had been the morning she’d left the pack.
She’d tried to log onto Voyours when she’d returned to World’s End, to knit topless for Geoff while telling him all the ways he had disappointed her so that he could get off.
She’d tried so hard but had ended up shutting the lid of her laptop before he really got going and subsequently refunding both his booking fee and tip.
Geoff’s aroused energy had reminded her of the time that Magda tried a new flavor of sparkling water and spat it all over Dick Van Dyke, her ancient Bassett hound.
“Limoncello, my ass,” she’d grumbled. “It’s like they asked a person who’s never had limoncello to describe limoncello and then made that. What garbage.”
Geoff’s desire had tasted like an approximation of food.
Like cereal served with water instead of milk.
She could vividly remember the explosion of sugar and sweetness and all of the deep-fried richness that had been Robbie.
Nadja had thought it might just be Geoff, so she opened her bookings to new clients.
Everyone was the same, like she was watching The Wizard of Oz in reverse, beginning with Technicolor and sliding backwards into a black and white haze.
She hadn’t logged on since. That had been six weeks ago.
Nadja was in more trouble than she’d ever been in, and she knew, she knew, that eventually, she’d have to do something.
She’d have to suffer through the limoncello sparkling water, through the watery marshmallow fortune cereal to save her own skin.
It would have to be tonight. The thought made her want to weep.
“Hey, hey now,” Hank’s deep bass cut through her musings. “It’s gonna be okay, Nadja. If you don’t have someone to call, I can call 9-1-1. Or I can drive you myself.”
“No,” she protested, not realizing that she actually begun to cry until she felt the tears slide off her chin. “Please don’t call 9-1-1. It’s not that sort of thing.”
“Nadja, I can’t not call someone,” Hank said gently.
Nadja cursed his damned hero complex. Why couldn’t her session tonight have been with the client who walked into her office in the middle of a thought and then talked without stopping until Nadja broke through to tell him that time was up?
Why did it have to be Hank? Gentle, sweet Hank who had a nearly pathological need to make sure that everyone he cared about was safe?
He was still checking her pulse and she gripped his wrist with her other hand.
“It’s not something they can treat at the hospital, Hank. I’m…” She closed her eyes. She would have to tell him. It was the only way to keep him from calling an ambulance. And then she’d have to release him from her service. “I’m a—”
The door to her office flew open with so much force that it bounced off the wall and swung on its hinges. In the doorway, wreathed in the light from the exterior lamps, stood Robbie.
This is it. I’ve reached such dire straits that I’m hallucinating, she thought.
But this Robbie was not a version she knew.
Her brain would never have conjured this Robbie.
He was bigger, the muscles of his arms and shoulders testing the tensile strength of his T-shirt.
His hair was longer, past his chin, and he had a beard, full and thick and in that moment, she wanted nothing more than to bury her fingers in it, delving deep to find the sharp line of his jaw.
But if she had doubted her eyes, the smell of funnel cake wafting into the room with the force of a storm would have been proof enough that he was real. He was here.
“Who the hell are you?” Hank said, rising to his feet. “Wait… Robbie?”
“Hank,” Robbie said, but his eyes never left hers.
“This is a private session,” Nadja protested weakly, gripping the arms of the chair to keep her from either throwing herself into his arms or passing out. She wasn’t sure.
“Fuck your private session,” Robbie said.
“Robbie,” Hank said, putting his body between Nadja’s and the nearly feral man in her doorway. “She’s not well.”
“I know she’s not well,” Robbie said from between clenched teeth.
“She needs a doctor. She needs an ambulance. She needs—”
“Me,” Robbie interrupted. “She needs me.”
Hank took a step toward Robbie, his hands held out placatingly. “Robbie, let’s step outside. I’ll call an ambulance, and they can take her to the hospital. You and I can follow in the truck.”
“I’m not leaving her, and nobody is taking my mate anywhere.” For the first time, Nadja heard a proper growl behind his words, as if the sound was coming from a deep within his chest.
“Your…” Hank turned to look at Nadja. “Nadja?”
“I’m not his mate,” she whispered, flinching when Robbie snarled.
“Do you want me to get him out of here?” Hank asked, and Nadja could have wept anew.
The whole situation was so fucked. Hank, her client, was such a good person that he was willing to put himself in danger to remove Robbie if that’s what she wanted.
She should want that. Her control was slipping, her fingers trembling against the linen of the chair from clinging to the armrests so desperately.
She was seconds away from hurling herself into Robbie’s arms. But she couldn’t.
She wasn’t his mate, no matter what he thought.
“Robbie and I should talk,” she whispered. “I obviously won’t bill you for this session. Maybe call in the morning to reschedule or”—she gasped for a breath—“or I’ll just see you next week.”
That gasp had Robbie ducking around Hank, leaping over the coffee table, and landing on his knees in front of her. He wrapped his hands around the back of her calves and squeezed. She choked on another sob, another gasp.
“Nadja, I don’t feel right about leaving you alone with him,” Hank said, his eyes wide with bewilderment.
Poor man. He’d be talking about this night in therapy for weeks.
But it would have to be with someone else.
She’d gotten too close. She could see that now.
She had come to think of Hank as a friend.
From that same, deep, growling space in his chest as before, Robbie said, “I would carve out my own heart before I let anything hurt her, Hank.”
Hank was staring at Robbie now. But he must have seen some truth in Robbie’s face because after a long moment, he nodded and reached for his coat, hanging on the rack in the corner by the door.
“If you need me—”
“I know,” she said. “Thank you, Hank.”
He closed the door quietly behind him, and Nadja felt it the instant the room was sealed again.
Robbie had always had a presence, but he was radiating energy like never before.
She could taste the funnel cake richness of his desire on the air and didn’t know whether to be grateful or bereft that he still wanted her.
But there was more. Anger and surprise and worry and a dozen other things she couldn’t identify swirled around him like an aura.
His hands were still wrapped around her calves, but he dropped his head and leaned forward on his knees until his head pressed against her lap.
He was still as a statue except for his back, which rose and fell with the huge gusts of his breath.
He didn’t speak. He did nothing but hold her legs and rest his head.
Her hand was so close to the long brown strands, shot through with red that glowed in the lamplight.
She resisted for a scant second before resting her hand on the back of his head.
She threaded her fingers through his hair, tracing the shape of his skull beneath.
He groaned.
Her hand froze, but he released one calf to reach behind him and hold her hand against his head, to keep her close.
“Robbie, I—”
“You left,” he said, his voice crackly.
“I left.”
“You’re not taking care of yourself.”
She couldn’t refute that. “I know.”
He shot upright, still on his knees but looking up at her now.
“You know? You know? You leave me to believe that you’ve been dragged back to hell or whatever the fuck it’s called.
You. My mate. And then I come to find out that you’ve been here all along.
You’re here, and according to Callum, you look like you’ve got one of those Victorian wasting illnesses where people just fucking died in their sleep. My mate.”
“I’m not your mate,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“You disappeared and I thought I could never get to you, never see you again. I wanted to die, Nadja. I wanted to die. Do you know how it feels when your fated mate abandons you?”
“I’m not your fated mate!” she screamed, sucking in a breath as the spots in her vision grew ever darker.
“The fuck you aren’t,” Robbie growled. “My body knew you were my mate before my brain even knew what they were.”
“I’m not… I wasn’t… You’re not…” she stammered.
“I am. You were. You are,” Robbie said, leaning closer.
“And the fact that my mate is suffering is something I can’t handle.
We’re going to have a long talk after this.
For hours. We might still be talking in the morning when your first client shows up and I have to kick them to the curb because I’m not done with you yet.
But before we do any of that, Doc, I have to ask you a question. ”
The ease with which his nickname for her dropped from his mouth brought fresh tears to her eyes. She squeezed her eyes shut against them.
“Doc?” Robbie asked.
“What?”
She opened her eyes and saw that his face was mere inches from hers. His whiskey-colored eyes were bright in the golden glow of the table lamp next to her. But she could see the dark circles underneath them, deep and purple, a mark of a man who hadn’t slept well in a very, very long time.
She felt his hand shake slightly when he cradled her jaw with it, the other shaking in kind when it carded through her hair to reach her neck.
“What?” she asked, a breath of air between them.
“Can I feed you?”
She needed to say no. It would only hurt worse in the end when he left again. But she was so desperately hungry and he was the only thing she wanted. He had always been the only thing she’d wanted.
Before she could come to her senses and protect herself, she nodded.
“Tell me. Say it,” he said, closer, his lips feathering against her cheek with every word.
Apparently she was more of a masochist than any of her Voyours clients, than anyone in the history of humanity or succubi or sentient beings everywhere in the universe.
Because even though she knew how badly it would hurt when he left, when she convinced him to leave, she was powerless to refuse him, to refuse herself.
Just once last time, she thought. She was doomed to misery anyway. Why not grab at this chance with both hands? This last chance. She closed her eyes and ran her hands up his chest, over the larger muscles atop his shoulders, to wrap around his neck.
“Please feed me, Robbie,” she said, speaking the last syllable of his name into his own mouth as it collided with hers.