Chapter 31 #3
A woman sprawled across my sofa in an oversized shirt, drinking one of the rarest wines in my collection without the slightest appreciation for what’s in her glass while subjecting me to terrible music.
Her feet in my lap, her sketchbook on my kitchen counter.
Her preferred foods filling my refrigerator and her blood thrumming through my veins.
A speaker I purchased because the silence I once valued became unbearable once I realized how much she hated it.
This penthouse used to feel like a tomb.
Now, there’s evidence of life everywhere.
For most of my existence, I regarded Sapientia as a poorly balanced equation.
Extraordinary cognition at the expense of equally extraordinary hunger.
I could learn faster, retain more, understand more– and yet the same mutation responsible for those abilities amplified the most primitive part of me.
Hunger.
For more than a century, I believed isolation was simply the cost.
Then Beatrix walked into my life, and somehow, impossibly, the equation balanced.
Her blood quiets the hunger in a way nothing else ever has. I can be near her without every instinct narrowing toward the artery in her throat. I can touch her without calculating the pressure of my hands, feed from her without wondering whether my restraint will fail.
She’s a source who won’t wither beneath my appetite. A partner who can survive me. An equal. My bonded is the missing piece of Sapientia– the gift that makes the curse bearable.
Except even that assessment feels inadequate now, because if another human could provide the same biological compatibility, I wouldn’t want her.
I want Beatrix.
The woman herself is the anomaly.
She accepts things about me I spent decades trying to eradicate. She looks directly at the monster and, rather than recoiling, reaches for it. Challenges it. Occasionally insults it. Frequently attempts to seduce it.
A smile pulls at my mouth.
She reminds me of sensations I’d forgotten how to experience. Not physical ones– those have always remained– but human ones. Anticipation. Amusement. Irritation that somehow becomes affection before I can identify the transition.
Wonder.
Beatrix finds novelty in the most mundane things. She throws herself into experiences without considering the consequences, engaging with the world as though merely existing in it is something worth celebrating. Through her, I find myself noticing things I stopped seeing decades ago.
Even arguing with her is strangely enjoyable. Heated debates have become our own peculiar form of foreplay.
My gaze drifts toward her. She’s staring at her phone, entirely absorbed, one foot still resting in my hand. I reach over with the other and pluck the device from her fingers.
“Hey,” she objects, lunging for it.
I hold it out of reach.
“What are you doing?” she huffs.
“Playing something more cultured,” I murmur.
She frowns. “It better not be some boring classical shit.”
I give her a deadpan look, then proceed to search for Rachmaninoff. A moment later, the opening strains of the Second Symphony replace whatever assault on music she’d selected.
“Seriously?” she groans, letting her head fall back against the sofa.
“This is objectively superior.”
“Your opinion isn’t superior just because you’re a scientist.”
“It is when it’s correct.”
“Give me my phone.”
“I will, after the song ends.”
“Eli,” she whines.
I huff a laugh and set the phone aside, then move our wine glasses safely to the table before catching her around the waist.
She squeals as I pull her across my lap, lifting her to straddle me. Her knees settle on either side of my hips, her hands bracing against her shoulders as her green eyes focus on mine.
“You’re such a dick sometimes,” she grumbles.
“And yet you’ve chosen me as the muse for your art.”
Her jaw drops. “I thought we weren’t going to talk about that!”
The corner of my mouth twitches with amusement. “I said no such thing.”
“It was implied.”
She tries to look offended, but a smile breaks through, the symphony swelling around us.
Something expands beneath my ribs.
Not hunger. Not bloodlust. Nothing that needs to be analyzed, controlled, or cured.
Just… peace.
A quiet warmth spreads through my chest, unfamiliar only because I’ve gone so long without it.
I slide a hand around the back of her neck and pull her down to me. She meets me halfway, lips brushing mine, parting in invitation. I hold her there, my thumb brushing the warm skin beneath her ear as her fingers slip into my hair. Then I kiss her, hard.
The symphony swells again, and I feel the echo of her contentment through the bond, mingling so seamlessly with my own that I can no longer distinguish where one ends and the other begins.
Perhaps that’s the point.
For more than a century, I’ve dedicated myself to understanding the inexplicable.
Reducing mysteries to mechanisms, isolating variables, and finding answers for questions no one else thought to ask.
When it comes to Beatrix, however, I could spend an eternity studying her and never understand every part.
But for once, I find I don’t need to.