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“Bonnie? Bonnie!”
She appeared almost immediately, on her own two feet, and looking entirely unharmed. Well, maybe not entirely. She’d been crying.
“Where is he?” Stefan caught her shoulders and almost shook them. “Damon!”
“He appeared, made some scary noises and then he left. Elena’s voice shooed him away.”
“I don’t believe you. You’ve been crying.”
“Oh, well—you know Damon. He always manages to say the exact thing that hurts most.”
Stefan gritted his teeth. “Why did I let him come over here? I could have stopped him on the other side of the Atlantic—”
“That’s all past,” came Meredith’s voice from behind Stefan, and when Bonnie heard it she got a shock. Meredith’s voice was . . . different. Meredith’s aura, when she stepped into Bonnie’s view, was different, too.
He didn’t—he couldn’t have made her a vampire in that short a time, Bonnie thought—could he? But that wasn’t it. Meredith’s aura wasn’t at all like Stefan’s, or Damon’s, either, it was still human. But it had changed in some fundamental way. Meredith was even cooler, more rational—more distant than she had ever been before.
She’d received a shock, Bonnie could tell that. And she was thinking about it.
Bonnie wanted to run to her and hug her and hug her until her warmth made its way through the thin layer of ice that seemed to coat Meredith’s body. Had Stefan done this to her? Stefan’s aura was certainly sorrowful, but Meredith wasn’t angry with Stefan. What had happened between them?
“Next shift,” she said, in the high light voice of someone trying to distract them all.
She took Stefan’s arm in hers and started toward the light of the door, almost dragging him along. She couldn’t help being playful and ditzy, but she allowed her personality full rein.
And her anatomy only helped: diminutive stature, that mop of strawberryblond hair; not to mention her heartshaped face with its delicate features and those huge cornflower colored eyes.
And she seemed younger than the rest—or she could seem young. If she wore lose sweaters to cover her blossoming young femininity, and chattered in a quick, high voice without ever censoring a thing that came into her head, people forgot how old she really was and were tempted to muss up her curls while saying that she really was charming or adorable—and entirely forgetting that she was over eighteen.
But there was another Bonnie beneath that one, and even another still beneath the Bonnie that liked fast cars and fast boys, and that was the one her friends would recognize the most easily. It was this deepest Bonnie who had envied Elena and Stefan, not for their fairytale relationship, but for the stability that she could sense in it. A Bonnie who was, at heart, a woman, and who had been one for a long time.
And Damon had just thrown a challenge to the womanly Bonnie. She could feel the hurt, hot rage burning inside her as she walked with Stefan up the staircase, his arm in hers. Elena? she called. She was furiously calculating if the plan that had just occurred to her might possibly hurt anyone.
Elena?
Silence.
Can you hear me?
Silence.
Elena there’s a Plan B I want to try with Stefan, but I don’t know if you’ll be mad.
I’ll forget about it right now if you’ll be mad.
Nothing. Bonnie tried to think other colors and forms in her mind, to “change channels.” Sometimes it worked.
Elena, if I don’t hear from you I’m going to try it. I can’t think of anyone else that it might hurt, and it might do Stefan some good.
Still no “presence” from Elena.
Bonnie’s heart sank suddenly. Are you leaving this entirely up to me? That would be just like you and Meredith. You would say it would help me grow up to know what I want.
Silence all around her. No one present except herself and Stefan—alone together, as they said.
All right, then. I’m taking you all on. This is my responsibility, and only mine.
Which was all part of being a woman.
