Chapter Nineteen Amelia

NINETEEN

Excerpt from the BoisterousBulleters Discord Server, #sticker-commissions channel

REGINALD_THE_V: Okay, I need some advice

REGINALD_THE_V: So, you know the girl I’ve been telling you about?

REGINALD_THE_V: Well…I kissed her

TACOCATTUESDAY: OMG

brAYDENSMOM: YES FIANLLY

REGINALD_THE_V: Except I think I fucked it up

REGINALD_THE_V: pushed too far too fast

TACOCATTUESDAY: uh oh what did you do

REGINALD_THE_V: and in the process told her something I keep v. v. v. close to the chest that I assumed she already knew but that she definitely did not know

REGINALD_THE_V: it freaked her out. and now I don’t know what to do

brAYDENSMOM: Well it’s good that you are COMMUNICATINt

brAYDENSMOM: thats a START

TACOCATTUESDAY: how far did you push things??? Like what base

TACOCATTUESDAY: like did you ask to eat her out or smthg? right after kissing her for the first time? Because if so no wonder she’s spooked

REGINALD_THE_V: I mean, I didn’t ask to eat her out

REGINALD_THE_V: at least not technically

REGINALD_THE_V: More like…I proposed blood play. Sort of?

brAYDENSMOM: OMG

TACOCATTUESDAY: DAMN SON

LYDIASGOALS: Listen I’m as invested in this as the rest of y’all but can we please move this convo to #off-topic?

REGINALD_THE_V: oooh yes sorry sorry, won’t happen again

Amelia

I spent another two hours going down a vampire research rabbit hole. Most of what I found ranged from unhelpful to downright bizarre, but after devoting much of my career to researching niche Internal Revenue Code provisions, I was used to leaving no stone unturned.

Just when I’d finalized the questions I wanted Reggie to answer when we talked, I heard a very soft knock on my door.

I froze.

“Amelia?” Reggie’s voice was more tentative than I’d ever heard it. “It’s me.”

What did I do? I told Sophie I’d talk to him, but now that he was here, I was freaking out again. But then, could I really just pretend he wasn’t here until the snowplows came?

Probably not.

“Yeah?” My heart was racing. Could he sense that? Could he smell it when my blood was pumping extra hard through my veins? I shuddered at the thought, even as the idea of it fascinated me.

“Can I come in?”

I thought of the vampire self-defense tricks I’d just read about online. I could probably break off one of the legs of my desk chair and use it as a wooden stake. I sucked at fighting, but if I really had to defend myself, I could probably do it.

I bit my lip and opened the door.

Reggie looked as though he’d spent the past two hours trying to pull his hair out by the roots. His expression turned hopeful when he saw my face, as though he hadn’t expected me to acknowledge his knock.

I thought back to Aunt Sue’s party, and his insistence that either she or Uncle Bill invite us in. And when we’d gotten to this house, it hadn’t been enough for me to open the front door for him. He’d needed my explicit permission before coming inside.

“You need an invitation before you can come in my bedroom,” I said. “Right?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I need express permission from an owner or primary occupant before entering someone’s home. Once I’m inside, though, I can go wherever I like. But I’d feel better about coming in if you give consent first.” He paused and looked at the floor. “I know you must be scared.”

My heart melted a little at his kind, patient tone, even as the idea that he’d have had to stand outside this house all night if I hadn’t invited him in sent a strange, powerful thrill through me. That swimmy, shifting-sands-beneath-my-feet feeling that I’d come to associate with conversations with him washed over me again.

When I didn’t say anything, he cleared his throat and tried again. “May I come in, please?”

A smart person would have said no. The person I was two weeks ago certainly would have. Then again, what was one more questionable decision, considering the sheer number of them I’d been making lately?

“You can come in,” I said.

He entered right away and looked between my bed and the desk chair. The only two places to sit in the room. After only a moment’s hesitation, he went for the chair. He sat forward in it, elbows on his knees. I remained standing, watching him as he stared down at his hands.

“One of the very few times in my life I thought I was being completely honest with someone, and you thought I was playing a prank.” He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I suppose it’s only fitting, in a way. Given everything. Hades , I should have known you didn’t believe me when you took it so calmly. I just thought, well, she knows Frederick, she must already know that vampires are out there and not all of us are so bad .”

I stared at him. “I had no idea Frederick was a vampire.” More pieces of the puzzle were sliding into place. If Frederick was a vampire, that meant Sam’s best friend was dating one. That might explain why Sam had been so obsessed with my nighttime safety.

“Oh, shit,” Reggie said, burying his face in his hands. “I assumed you knew about Frederick.” I had never seen him look this anxious or caught so flat-footed. Not even having to put on a show at a dinner party full of my family members had made him lose his composure like this. I began to wonder whether the picture Reggie presented to the world might just be a carefully cultivated fa?ade. Right now, it seemed the mask was slipping. For the first time, I thought I was catching a glimpse of the real Reginald.

It made him seem more human, I realized with a start.

How ironic.

But because he was not actually human…“I have questions,” I said.

He nodded. “I expected as much. Ask whatever you want.”

I grabbed the list I’d just created from my Internet research and started at the top. “So. You drink blood.”

He looked at me. Nodded again.

I recoiled at the confirmation, even though I’d already known his answer would be yes.

I checked that question off the list and moved to the next. “And do you drink human blood? Or do you drink other kinds of blood?”

“Always human blood,” he said. “Only human blood. I literally can’t digest anything else.”

That would explain his avoidance of food at Aunt Sue’s party and his vague references to his diet when he wouldn’t drink wine with me at that bar. “Do you ever drink animal blood? I thought some vampires drank animal blood.”

He snorted. “ Twilight ?”

I blushed. “Um. Yeah.”

“Listen, as kickass as I’ve always found Edward Cullen, an entire family of celibate vampires living only on animal blood…well.” He smirked, his mask of cool indifference back in place. “None of those details apply to me.”

My face went hot at the innuendo. I hid my face behind my list, focusing on the next question. Which was probably the most important one. “Since you drink human blood, can you explain how you get it?”

His eyebrows lifted in confusion. “How I get it?”

“Yes,” I said. “ Where do you get your blood from, exactly? I assume you need to kill people, but do you have criteria for who you kill, or something?”

“Oh,” Reggie said, understanding. “I don’t eat that way anymore, for the most part. A few years ago, I started getting takeout from blood banks.” He shrugged. “I’m sure there are ethical issues involved in stealing from medical facilities, too, but it feels less cruel.”

It certainly made me less frightened at any rate. Curiosity got the better of me before I could stop myself from asking my next question. “Does it taste the same that way?”

Reggie hesitated. “No, it doesn’t. But it’s fine. Though I’ll admit that if I don’t warm my meals to the temperature of the human body first, there’s always something frustratingly missing from the experience. Drinking it cold is like having sex while wearing three condoms. Or watching Hulu with commercials.” He shook his head in disgust, apparently oblivious to the way I once again felt ready to burst into flames. “I have no idea how Frederick stands drinking it straight from the fridge. Then again, I have no idea how or why he does lots of things.”

“Oh,” I managed, lamely. “I see.”

“Can I ask you a question now?” Reggie asked.

My eyes widened. “Me?”

“I’m sure you have other questions for me, but before we get to them, I have to know. What did you think I meant when I told you I was a vampire?”

A reasonable thing for him to wonder. “It was the same night you’d told me you loved playing practical jokes.” I shrugged. “You called me in the middle of the night to tell me some dark secret you were embarrassed about. When I asked if you were a vampire, I only meant it as a sarcastic joke. When you latched on to it, I assumed you were joking, too.”

He stared at me. “Why would I joke about something like that?”

“Because there’s no such thing as vampires.” At the incredulous look on his face, I added, “At least, not in my world.”

That earned me a wry grin. “Fair enough. So, what did you think my real dark secret was?”

“When we emailed each other details about ourselves you told me you were between jobs. I assumed your dark secret was that you were unemployed,” I said, sheepishly. “In hindsight, it makes no sense. Especially since being unemployed is nothing to be embarrassed about. But at the time it made more sense than anything else.”

His mouth quirked up at the corner. “And I’d been so proud of myself for being honest with you right off the bat, too.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” I said. “But I do taxes for a living. I’m just not equipped to believe that vampires are real. So I didn’t. Not until…”

I trailed off, looking away. He remembered what had happened between us in the kitchen as well as I did.

“And my always needing to ask permission before entering someone’s home? And the way I repeatedly refused to eat or drink anything when you offered?” he pressed. Though his voice was gentle, not accusatory. “None of that made you wonder if maybe I was telling the truth about what I was?”

I winced. “It should have,” I admitted. “But I thought you were just being polite about entering. And that when it came to food, you just had a lot of dietary restrictions. Like me, I guess.”

“I do have a lot of dietary restrictions,” he quipped, smirking. “But it’s because I literally can’t eat anything except for…”

He had the decency not to finish that sentence. He knew I knew what he meant.

“Yeah,” I said, quietly.

“I can leave,” he added. “This house, I mean. If you don’t want me to stay, I can go.”

I looked out my bedroom window. The blizzard still raged. In the hours I’d spent researching vampires the sun had set completely. It would be impossible to see anything, even if the winds died down.

“It has to be really dangerous to drive in a storm like this,” I said. “Even if you had a car, how would you get it out of the driveway?”

“I don’t need to drive,” he said. “I would just fly back to Chicago, the same way I flew to the grocery stores.”

My heart thudded hard against my rib cage. When he’d told me he’d flown to the store, he’d meant that literally, too. I tried to recover quickly. “Chicago is a lot farther away than Pete’s Groceries.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. His bright blue eyes were so earnest, the mask he liked to hide behind slipping again. “The last thing I want to do is make you uncomfortable.”

“But there’s a blizzard out there.”

“Yes. But if you’re frightened—”

“I’m not.” All at once, I realized it was the truth. “A bit weirded out? Absolutely. Frightened?” I hesitated. “Maybe a little. But rationally, I know I shouldn’t be. I mean, how many different opportunities have you had to drink my blood without my consent since we’ve met?”

I’d meant it as a rhetorical question, but he answered immediately. “Thirty-seven. No, wait—thirty-eight.”

Wow. “Uh…okay, you having a ready answer to that cuts against the point I was trying to make. Which is that if you were going to hurt me, you’d have done it already.”

“Even before I got most of my meals from blood donation facilities and still fed directly from the source, I was particular in choosing my victims.” His eyes shone with sincerity. “Even at my most depraved, I never would’ve hurt someone like you.”

I knew I shouldn’t let myself be taken in by this show of vulnerability. I might not want him to fly in a blizzard, but if I’d wanted to keep a barrier between us before I knew what he actually was, I wanted to keep a ten-foot wall between us now.

But I wasn’t made of stone. “I’m not kicking you out into a blizzard.”

The tension he’d been carrying left him all at once. His shoulders relaxed, and relief flooded his features. “Okay.”

“But,” I continued, holding up a finger, “I’m not kissing you again. Ever. Or doing other stuff with you, either. It’s one thing to be snowed in with a vampire. It’s another to—”

“I got it,” he cut in. Was that disappointment I saw in his eyes? “To be perfectly honest, kissing you was probably a mistake on my end, too.”

That shouldn’t have hurt. After all, I’d just told him the same thing. And yet a small part of me folded in on itself, anyway. Against my better judgment, I asked, “Why was it a mistake for you?”

He paused, jaw working. “It just was.”

An awkward silence filled the room after that. The ticking of the bedside clock, the howling of the wind outside, served to underscore just how very alone we were.

“You’ll sleep in the kids’ room,” I said, as if we hadn’t already established where he’d be sleeping. Somehow, it felt important to reiterate that we would be staying in opposite ends of the cabin. The place wasn’t huge, but we had to as stay far apart as possible until we could finally go home. “And I’ll—”

“Sleep here,” he finished for me. “Got it.” He stood up and took a small step towards me. I wasn’t a short person, but when he stood next to me like this, he practically towered over me. Everything about this man was just so large . “Sleep well, Amelia. I’ll see you in the morning.”