"Oh." I tucked a tangle of my hair behind my ear and hoped my voice stayed even. "Do... do you want to?"
"I"m not going to!" Milo insisted, hurt. But he dropped his eyes guiltily to the floor. "I want to. It"s impossible not to." Then he looked back up at him, his russet eyes full of warning. "Don"t kid yourself, Alice.
37.
They"re all thinking about it." The idea seemed to be fresh to him, and he straightened up and looked warily at the door, as if he expected one of them to come running into the room at just that second to kill me. "It"s really not safe for you here."
"I think I"m pretty safe here," I rea.s.sured him.
"You have no idea." His eyes widened a little bit, then narrowed. "Do you let them bite you?"
"No." I floundered uncomfortably under his judgmental gaze. "Well... it"s complicated."
"Not Jack." Milo"s voice had gotten small and plaintive and... jealous. Definitely jealous. His crush on Jack was even more intense than it had been before. Milo had gone from defensive to protective, but it was hard to deny how much more powerful he was. Before when he tired to protect me, it was something of a joke, but just standing there talking to me, there was something menacing about him. He would do real damage to someone if he wanted to.
"Not Jack," I answered quickly, and I knew that I could never explain how Jack had tasted my blood once. There was a certain possessiveness to him, and I doubted that Milo wanted to share either of us with anyone, let alone each other. "It was once with Peter, but it was... a very difficult situation."
"What"s going on?" He stood up straighter, and he appeared to almost be sniffing the air.
"Something just happened."
"What are you talking about?" I looked around the room, trying to figure out what he was freaking out about.
"You. Something happened to you. You"re..." His eyes changed, and I recognized that burning hunger behind them. "Everything about you... It"s like... You want me to bite you?"
"No!" I shouted, alarmed.
Admittedly, since he was so new to this, there was a good chance that he could accidentally kill me if he bit me, but that"s not what had me so concerned. I remembered the way I had felt when Peter bit me, and while it was incredible, I definitely did not want my brother to make me feel that way. There was something tremendously incestuous about the idea.
"I don"t understand." His face betrayed the internal struggle going on within him, and when he took a step closer to me, it finally dawned on me that I could actually be in danger. "What did you do?"
"I didn"t do-" But then I realized exactly what I"d done. I"d thought of Peter, and for some reason, my body turned itself into the most delectable thing a vampire could imagine every time I thought of him. It usually effected Jack the hardest, but since Milo was so new, he had no defense for it.
"Milo!" Jack shouted, appearing in the doorway to his room.
With a great effort, Milo pulled his eyes away from me, and he exchanged a look with Jack that I couldn"t read. They both looked rather intensely at each other, and there seemed to be some kind of conversation going on between them that I wasn"t privy to. Milo swallowed hard and his breathing had grown more labored, but he managed to keep his focus on Jack.
"Go back to your room," Jack told him calmly.
He stepped off to the side so Milo could get by, and Milo complied reluctantly. When he went to pa.s.s him, Milo looked up at Jack, almost pleading with him for something, but Jack kept his gaze 38 hard. Eventually, Milo shivered, and walked past him. Jack stayed frozen in the doorway until I heard the bedroom door shut as Milo went back into his room.
"What the h.e.l.l were you doing?" Jack turned back me, his voice suddenly full of venom.
"I didn"t do anything!" I protested. "He came into my room while I was sleeping!"
"You should"ve yelled for me or Mae!" Jack crossed his arms over his chest, but he wasn"t really angry with me. He was jus worried that Milo had been about to finish the job that Peter had started. "And you"ve got to stop thinking about Peter! Do you want get yourself killed?"
"It"s so impossible!" I groaned and flopped back onto the bed. "You know, in the real world, it"s okay to just think about people! There"s not little mind police checking to make sure that your pulse hasn"t quickened or whatever stupid thing it is that I do!"
"I know," Jack sighed apologetically. "We"re just a little more sensitive then everyone else."
"What was that, by the way?" I looked back over at him.
"What?"
"That look you had with Milo. You were like... I don"t know. Really intense and... connected."
There was a weird pang of envy stabbing at me that I tried to ignore. "You guys aren"t like...
lovers or something?"
"No, no, of course not!" Jack laughed, and the clear sound of it made everything about me lighten and relax. "But we are more "connected," I guess. Because I turned him. It makes us a little closer."
"Oh." I wasn"t sure exactly how I felt about that, but I knew that I"d better hurry up and get used to it because there"d be nothing I could do about. The one thing I knew for sure about vampirism is that it was permanent.
"Are you okay?" Jack asked earnestly and walked closer to the bed to check on me.
"If I said no, would you stay here with me longer?" I looked up at him hopefully.
Seeing Milo, and then having him want to kill me, had shaken me, but I was mostly okay. But knowing that Milo was okay had taken this giant weight off my shoulders, and it made aware of how little time I"d really spent with Jack lately. Suddenly, I missed him terribly.
"I shouldn"t..." Jack trailed off, but I already knew that I"d won.
Lifting up the covers, Jack crawled into bed with me. Regrettably, he was wearing a tee shirt and pajama pants, but at least he was here with me, so I decided not to look a gift in horse in the mouth. I snuggled up next to him and relished the feel of his strong arms around me. Despite Milo"s earlier proclamation, I knew there was no where in the world I was safer than in Jack"s arms.
"Everything"s gonna be okay," Jack a.s.sured me, but that was his mantra anymore. He stroked my hair gently, and I rested my head on his chest, letting his heart thud slowly in my ear. "Milo"s going to be just fine.
"He just has to adjust to everything."
39.
"I don"t want to talk about adjusting or how everything is going be fine or okay or great in the future," I grumbled tiredly. "I just want to lay here with you. And that be it."
"That"s a really good idea."
Jack finally settled into bed and I felt him relax with me. I fell asleep around him constantly. He made me feel safe and calm and I think I tired more easily than he did. But Jack and I very rarely got to fall asleep together, let alone curled up together in bed. The moments were few and far between, and I wanted to hang onto this one as long as I could.
Unfortunately, it didn"t last as long as I would"ve liked. I fell asleep in the middle of enjoying it, and we were woken up much too soon. I had been in the middle of a dream, and then I heard someone clearing their throat loudly in the hallway. As I started coming to, I felt Jack"s arms start to pull away from me, and I clung onto them to tightly. He laughed quietly into my hair, but that only annoyed the interloper in the hall.
"Ahem!" Mae coughed loudly.
"What?" Jack groaned.
"It"s time to get up," Mae announced firmly.
"But I"m still sleeping," Jack yawned.
"Too bad." To enunciate her point, she clapped her hands loudly. "Get up!"
"I"m up!" Jack insisted, and finally managed to free himself from me so he could sit up.
"What do you think your doing?" Mae asked wearily.
When Jack sat up, he cleared my view so I could see her standing in the hallway. She was wearing a rather fancy housecoat and she had her hands on her hips. She was tired and irritated, and just the way she looked at Jack made me feel guilty.
"Getting up, like you asked." Jack leaned back and stretched, and I watched the wonderful muscles of his back ripple underneath his tee shirt.
"I meant, what do you do you think you"re doing in that bed, with her?" Mae nodded at me, but she never took her eyes of him. "Did you think that since you left the bedside lamp on it would make it okay?"
"Kinda." He smiled wickedly at her, but she was in no mood for it.
"Get up. We all need to talk to downstairs." Mae took a step away, but Jack stopped her.
"Hey, hey. Did Milo tell you about his little exertion last night?" Jack asked, then his voice took a more accusing tone. "When he was on your watch?"
"We"ll talk about that all when you get downstairs." Mae turned sharply, her housecoat billowing behind her, and disappeared down the hall.
"It"s way too early for a lecture," I muttered into the pillow.
"You"re telling me."
40.
Jack looked back at me, and his expression softened with fondness. His smile deepened, growing more genuine, and gently, he reached over and brushed a hair back from my eyes. I"m sure my eyes were sleep clogged and red, but he looked into them like they were magical. His hand rested on my cheek for a moment, and it started growing warmer, but he let it linger.
"You"re really beautiful when you sleep," he murmured softly.
"I am not." My cheeks reddened deeply and I buried my face deeper in the pillow. He laughed brightly, and reluctantly, dropped his hand from my ever warming face.
"Dibs on the shower." The bed moved as he got up from it up, and I turned my head so I could get a better view of him as he went over to the closet.
"There"s like twenty-seven showers in the house. Are you calling dibs on all of them?"
"Maybe," Jack laughed and went into his closet.
I didn"t really mind him showering first. It gave me more time to lie in bed, burying myself deep in the covers. Besides, more time in bed meant less time being yelled at for getting too close to Jack, and that was always a good thing. I knew that many a love story had been written full of longing glances from across the room and that could sustain a smoldering romance, but I couldn"t see how. I had spent the night curled up in Jack"s arms, and that wasn"t enough anymore.
Chapter 7.
It wasn"t a lecture. Ezra sat on the couch, and Mae sat on the floor next to him, resting her head on his knee. I had barely seen her in days, and that had probably gone the same for Ezra. Her long honey waves of hair cascaded around her, and he absently ran his fingers through it. Jack was sitting on the other side of living room, stretched out on the chaise lounge with Matilda by sprawled out over his feet. Milo stood off to the side, fiddling with the floor length curtains next to him.
Under the bright lights of the living room, Milo was even more brilliant than when he had waken me in the middle of the afternoon. His dark brown hair even looked glossier. He was still clearly my brother, but like what he would"ve looked like in a few years if he worked out more and had a stylist. It was hard not to stare at him when I walked in the room, but something felt unsettling and distracted me.
They were all poised around me like it was an intervention. Milo didn"t really seem nervous, but he wasn"t exactly comfortable either. Jack sat up straighter when I walked in, and I surmised that they had been talking about me while I had been showering. Maybe I shouldn"t have let him go first. I sighed and made my way over to a chair to sit and wait for whatever they were going to dump on me that would probably ruin my life a little bit.
"So," I said when it appeared n.o.body else would speak. "What"s going on?"
"I heard you had a visitor last night," Ezra began, his accent lilting with a hint of dissatisfaction.
His eyes flitted over to Milo just briefly, and Milo cringed visibly.
Milo touched at his hair nervously, but that seemed to do little to settle his unease. His cheeks colored lightly, and I was rather surprised to find that vampires could blush. Absently, he pulled at the curtain and almost yanked it down. He reddened even deeper and sheepishly spouted apologizes that Mae just brushed away. There was something clumsily graceful in his movements. The way his slender fingers picked at everything was oddly elegant, but there was also the sense that he didn"t understand how to control it or have any mastery of his strength.
41.
"Sorry," Milo muttered again. When he took a step away from the curtains, it was too wide, and he almost stumbled into the chair but caught himself with any amazing ease. Everything was suddenly much easier for him, and learning how to handle that made things harder.
"The good news is that this is all perfectly normal." Ezra watched Milo with a bemused smile. He finally just gave up on movement of any kind and collapsed into a nearby chair.
"You"re just getting your bearings, love," Mae purred rea.s.suringly. "We"ve all been through it."
"Not all of us," I whispered under my breath, and Jack shot a disappointed look my way. That solidified my belief that whatever news they were breaking here was bound to be bad.
"This is just so weird!" Milo lamented.
He meant to just lean back in the chair, and he nearly tipped it over. He scoffed at himself, and underneath his perfect new features, I saw the frustrated little boy had always been. Whenever he uncovered a problem he couldn"t solve, he furrowed his brow intensely and his eyes got sad and faraway. There was something incredibly rea.s.suring about seem him look that way again. I didn"t want him to be frustrated, but it meant that he was still under there.