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“You’re sure?” He seemed unable to believe, that after years of wooing Elena and her friends; after courting them and terrorizing them in turn, he had actually won the game.
“Yes,” Bonnie said. “Just be quick. Please.” What Bonnie was afraid of now was that Stefan and Meredith would finish too soon. Damon had hauled them into a little private clearing, so maybe there might be come excuse to make—but the whole thing would look bad. Boys made things so complicated.
“All right. I’ll make it quick,” Damon said in a dazed way. Then: “This will sting at first.”
“I know, I know.” Bonnie felt Damon’s breath on the back of her neck. He was holding up her hair, exposing her neck to the darkness. She shuddered, not because it was cold. Then she felt the touch of his lips there on her spinal cord, cooler than she would have imagined. He kissed her lightly and a wave of feeling went through her.
Damon, you let that girl go right now!
It was a voice from above like all the cliché’s for heavenly voices. It was otherworldly, like faraway bells, like silver. But its command was unnecessary. Damon had already dropped Bonnie and caught her, still falling, this time facing him.
Elena didn’t want them to.
Bonnie . . . over to . . . house . . . Damon . . . be ashamed!
Elena was fading but her meaning was clear. Damon however, did not look in the slightest ashamed.
“You’re still a baby, baby,” he told Bonnie lightly, and flicked her nose with his finger in a most insulting way. “Actually,” he went on, “I had already decided not to before she even spoke.. You’re not ripe yet. Blood always tells, and I can tell you’re not ready from here. Still—” He leaned over and graceful as a cat, licked the tiny wound on Bonnie’s chin.
She felt his tongue as a strong silkiness, not at all raspy like a cat’s tongue, leaving a coolness behind it that turned to warmth.
Bonnie groped for some response. It had to be a good one, since she’d just been rejected. But while she was still fumbling for swear words bad enough, Damon winked and said, “Don’t burst a blood vessel trying to make me too mad. After all, some day you will be ripe. And I’ve got a good memory.” And then, while Bonnie was still groping for some response, he took a step back and was gone, blending in with the darkness.
Stefan
“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.
