Chapter 7 Obsession
OBSESSION
OLIVER
I’m being an absolute idiot right now. I drop a note and a single, fragrant, blood-red rose from my garden on her side table.
I’m unable to leave her without a word, afraid she’ll be unhappy when she wakes up alone.
Her happiness is suddenly very important to me.
I stand beside her bed watching her sleep like some sort of stalker, obsessing over each fine feature.
Vale Granger is a beautiful girl. While she sleeps, her breathy sighs call to me as she dreams. I’ve never wanted someone so much in my life.
Somehow she’s destroyed my hard-fought control and it’s pissing me off like nothing else.
It scares me. This borderline obsessive need for her since the night we met, it’s taken a toll on me.
Just the knowledge that she’s nearby torments me.
It feels like I’m starving because I don’t get to feed from the one thing I want.
I’ve had to feed more often. I’ve had so many mortals lately.
In and out the door, servicing them because I starve for another.
I need to feed so things don’t get out of hand with the beast, he seems triggered by Vale.
He’s also been more active over the last few weeks, growling and purring at the sight of her.
I’ve hurt people before, so many. I don’t want to hurt her. I want to see her smile. She’s so beautiful when she smiles.
I’m not human. I’m a hybrid vampire-Lilu, something very rare, even in the supernatural community.
Vale knows it, at least her unconscious mind does if her dream is anything to go by.
She sees the monster inside me, the one clawing to escape, to get to her.
By some miracle though, she isn’t frightened.
She desires me anyway, and maybe that’s what confuses her the most. Vale wants what she knows is bad.
She’s perfection, even in her rumpled, sleep-swollen state.
Her long hair falls chaotically around her head, spreading out over the pillow, a crimson and gold halo.
My fingers ache in longing to touch that hair again, to wrap it around my fist the way I’d done during the night. The way she’d dreamed I had.
Her pale skin is flushed in sleep. Her lips kiss-swollen and berry-red from pressing against my own. She’s the loveliest sight I’ve ever seen.
I watch her like the pervert she claimed I was. I study every feature of her face, memorizing every inch. I don’t want to forget anything about her. I want to brand this vision into my mind, so I have it a hundred years from now, when she’s long gone.
She has the cutest nose, slightly turned up at the tip, with a dusting of golden freckles splashed across it, spreading across her high cheekbones like butterfly wings.
Her ears, usually hidden beneath her long hair are pointed slightly, like the fae who once visited our world.
Her delicate bone structure looks as if it’s been molded by the hands of the goddesses of old.
Her slender neck is bare of any freckles with only a slight dip where her clavicles join below it.
I want to lick that delicate skin, and the beast inside me wants to mar it with the imprint of my teeth.
My knee creeps onto the mattress. Oh, how that little dip draws me.
Vale is exquisite now at eighteen. God have mercy on the men she’d leave in her wake one day.
She has no idea the power she’ll yield against them.
I’ve glimpsed the woman she really is, the fire in her soul.
It shines through when she gets angry, when she smiles, when she laughs, and when she cries.
The way her mind works, the dream she shared with me, it’s lovely.
I have a feeling Vale would like my claws.
She’d enjoy my bite, and she would fight me for every needy inch.
I imagine what it’d be like pumping into her lithe body, her nails raking down my spine as she convulsed in pleasure, and it shakes me. I can see it all so clearly.
Mine! the beast roars inside my head, aching to get out, to get to her.
Her head tilts back while her legs spread. When she moans, a gasping, desperate declaration, I know exactly what she’s doing in that dream. I know she’s fucking me and it exhilarates me. God forgive me for how desperately I want her.
Vale cries out my name while her hand reaches to one breast, rubbing herself gently. When she moans again and the syrupy and sweet smell of her desire thickens in the air, I stop moving. I can’t breathe through it. The scent envelopes me, snaking around my body like a physical thing.
Her scent changes me, thickening my cock as I press closer to her.
Lost in her little moans and wrapped in her scent, I almost lose myself.
I have to get away. I need to escape because I wouldn’t be able to stop and poor, sweet Vale, she’d let me ruin her.
It would be so easy. She wants me just as much as I want her.
So I leave her there, running as if the angel of death is chasing me. I run back to my home, up the stairs to my room, slamming the door behind me, but her honeyed scent still clings to my skin, taunting me.
I rip my pants apart, not caring one bit as the button goes flying downward, hitting the floor with a loud thwack.
I drop to my knees, leaning against the door, and stroke myself like some lost youth.
I throw my head back and howl as her image fills me with powerful lust. I bang my head back against the door trying to get a grip, but the pain does nothing.
When I come, it’s with her name on my lips and a stuttered prayer of worshipful images of being buried deep inside her while she screams my name echoes in my head.
I want her so badly, it’s like a sick sort of need with zero innocence.
I’m shaken to say the least, and I want to know what it is about Vale that draws me.
Is she a witch, perhaps another type of Lilu.
My orgasm was so dramatic I continue to kneel on the floor against the door, gasping as I catch my breath. My eyes are wide, almost frightened by the intensity of it. What’s happening to me?
Want her, the beast purrs inside my head, prodding at my consciousness. Need her to survive. Need her light. Need her body.
His words make the shell of my body feel too tight. It’s how I know he’s trying to get out, but I can’t let him. So I ignore his words, even as his voice grows louder, his roars inside my head turning desperate.
She’s the one! Mate! he screams, and it feels like there’s power in the voice that hasn’t been there in a while.
He’s stronger when I’m hungry, triggered by the memory of starvation, a hunger so great it tears at your belly, at your mind, while your muscles decay and your lips bust and bleed.
The kind of hunger that makes monsters because we can’t die from it.
It’s a type of torture no one should live through, and most wouldn’t.
I grab my head, shaking it, begging him to stop. “Don’t do this! She’s innocent.”
She’s ours. His voice is a deep growl, but at the very least, the power of it recedes just a bit, as if he’s willingly going to take a nap and leave me with a few minutes of peace.
“Fuck,” I groan as I clean up the mess I’d made on my floor. I grab a towel and get into the shower. I’m too shaken to sleep today. I might as well get ready.
# Girl Problems
My phone’s ringing when I get out of the shower, a towel precariously wrapped around my hips as I rush to grab it.
I know exactly who it is. She always reaches out whenever something’s bothering me, like she has some sort of motherly superpower.
She claims our connection is different, not like what she has with her other children.
Some part of me doesn’t believe her and yet, in the old world, before phones and reliable post, she always seemed to know exactly where I was.
“Hello, Mother.” She was past due for a phone call anyway.
“How is my beautiful boy?”
It occurs to me she might be exactly who I need to speak with. She might know what’s happening to me. “I’m glad you called actually,” I say, and my words make her laugh.
“What a rare sentiment,” she says, her sarcasm biting through the line. She’s right though, it’s rare when I want to talk to her, even rarer when I answer the phone.
“I have a problem.” I hear her shifting and feel her worry through our bond. It isn’t always so clear.
“I think something’s wrong with me. I met a girl who I’m having trouble with.
” I try my best to come up with the words to explain Vale Granger.
“I’m having some difficulty controlling myself with her.
The beast inside needles at me relentlessly because he wants her.
I’ve had to feed every day.” It’s not entirely true, he’s not the only one who wants her.
“You haven’t had her yet?” she asks, confused. She thinks I’m talking about a normal woman.
“I can’t. She’s only eighteen. She’s innocent.”
“What does her age have to do with anything? It’s not like we meet any mortals near our own age.”
I take a deep breath. “If it was only age, that would be different. I don’t want to kill her.
I care about her well-being.” My cheeks flush as I say it, as if I’m embarrassed about caring for another.
Am I so far removed from caring about anyone other than my family that it embarrasses me to speak it?
“I don’t want to hurt her. I want to see the woman she becomes, with or without me, and it’s driving me crazy.
” I take a breath before continuing. “There’s something different about her, Mother.
She feeds me without sex. She controls her essence somehow.
I’ve never met the like or equal of her. I want her more than my next breath.”
Mortals might think I’m crazy to talk to my mother about these things, but we’ve lived for centuries, and we feed on sexual energy. We’re beyond being prudes with one another.