My gaze dips to her collarbone, where blood trickles from the puncture marks in her skin, dripping down her chest toward her breast.
Quickly, I lean forward, lapping my tongue across them, closing the wound and encouraging its quick healing. Maeve winces, then shifts so she can sit more comfortably in my lap, her head against my shoulder.
“Are you okay?” I ask, pushing her hair back from her face and tucking it behind her ear.
“Mm-hmm.” She looks up at me, and when her gaze meets mine, warmth rushes into my chest. The tug I’ve felt since first feeding on her flares back to life, so strong and demanding that it almost takes my breath away.
Maeve must feel it too, because her brow furrows, and she reaches up to touch her chest. “What was that? Did you feel it?” Now she touches me, right over my sternum. The brush of her fingers sends goose bumps down the length of my spine.
I capture her fingers with mine, pressing them into my bare skin. And I tell her the truth. “Yes. And I don’t know.”
“It’s stronger than last time,” she says.
She’s right. I focus on the tug, the heat. It’s like an internal compass guiding me to her.
Then I recall that morning after I first fed from her, my awareness of Maeve as she woke up, far away from me in the castle, separated by corridors of wood and stone. But I felt it. Just like I do now. Like part of her lives inside me, and part of me lives inside her.
Arella’s voice returns to me.It smells like you’re carrying her magic in your veins.
What do I smell like now, I wonder. And what does it mean that I’m carrying her essence with me long after it should’ve dissipated?
Maeve shifts in my lap, drawing me back to the present moment. She’s still covered in my cum, and her skin remains glisteny with a sheen of sweat.
“Let’s get cleaned up,” I tell her. Then I wrap my arms around her and lift her smoothly from the armchair. Shelaughs as I carry her across my apartment, but she doesn’t complain. In the kitchen, I set her down, then wet a cloth in the basin and use it to clean Maeve’s skin, being careful to avoid the marks I left on her collarbone, just above her heart.
“You care for me,” Maeve whispers as I wring the cloth out, then do a second pass over her skin, until I’m sure she’s clean.
I glance up at her from where I’m wiping her thighs. “Did you just realize this?”
She smirks, then takes the cloth from me, using it now to wipe my skin clean.
“No. But... I feel it now. How much you care.” Without meeting my eyes, she says, “Do you feel it too? How much I care?”
Her fingers guide the cloth over my skin, each swipe tender and slow. And I don’t have to consider her question for more than a moment. “Yes.”
Now her lips form a gentle smile. “Good.” She drops the damp cloth into the basin, then tips her head back to look up at me. “Because I think I’m falling in love with you.”
Her admission, so sudden and startling, makes my heart leap in my chest, and she takes a breath at the same time, like she felt it too.
She’s . . . falling in love with me?
Two emotions war for victory inside me: fear at what this means, at having allowed myself to become entangled in this way; and so much joy that I feel I could die now, after 333 years, and feel like finally,finallyI did it right.
“You don’t have to say it back,” Maeve says, leaning back against my kitchen counter, still naked, her pale skin catching the firelight. She glances away, averting her eyes. “But I wanted you to know.”
“I’m in love with you, Maeve.”
I say it without hesitation, because it’s the truest thing I can say.
Even before this moment, before she opened that door, I knew I was on the other side, knocking. I’ve been falling in love with her since she challenged me that first day in class, since I smelled the storm on her skin and saw the way her eyes look in the starlight.
“I love you so much it...” I curl my fingers into fists at my sides. “So much that it scares me.”
Maeve is looking at me again, and she presses away from the counter to wrap her arms around my middle, her head coming to rest against my chest, where my heart is pounding out a frantic rhythm. “Maybe that’s not so bad,” she whispers.
I stroke a hand over the top of her head, then glance into my sitting room, where the fire she lit still crackles in the hearth. “How do you mean?”
Her arms tighten around me. “Fear means it’s real.”
