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For a minute, it was almost normal. We lay there, wound around each other, my face resting on his chin. My head was empty, drained of all worries. I didn’t care what came next, as long as I was able to feel this way every once in a while. Then I wondered how much it would scare a man to tell him he ’d given you your first-ever orgasm achieved with the help of another person. Then I realized we were lying on the broken shards of what used to be my coffee table.
I was stunned by what I’d done. I was a big undead skank. My feelings for Gabriel were a dirty gray miasma of lust, resentment, and the psychotic devotion of a teenage crush. Add to that the fact that I was still angry with him about his ironic vigilante routine. I couldn’t stand what he’d done. He’d killed a man in cold blood. And I’d responded by having sex with him.
What sort of degenerate did that make me?
I lay there, the broken glass slicing into my skin, wondering what to do. Did we cuddle? Was I supposed to offer him breakfast? I wasn’t exactly well versed in the postcoital ritual of the living, much less that of the undead. I tried to reach out to his mind, pick up any emotion Gabriel might be feeling. Nothing. Stupid inconsistent powers. So I stared at the ceiling and prayed to the good Lord that Gabriel would say something, anything, to keep me from having to bridge the uncomfortable silence.
Maybe I could fake going to sleep? Sure, it was 2:34 A.M., the vampire equivalent of midday. But a sexual effort like that deserved a catnap, right? Plus, I’d lost a lot of blood earlier in the evening—
“If you don’t get up off the glass, your skin’s going to heal over it. It will itch for decades.”
That was…not what I expected.
He shifted to his feet, shaking debris out of his hair. His skin was ruddier, suffused with my blood. He looked almost tan.
That must have been what he looked like in life, minus the splinters of table sticking out of his back.
Gabriel made a hesitant grab for his pants and slid them on. “Are you all right?”
“Don’t go all prom date on me, Gabriel,” I said, my voice harder than I intended. I got up, leaving a wake of glass tinkling to the floor. I grabbed my robe and yanked it over my back. “My father isn’t going to show up on your doorstep with a shotgun and a preacher.”
He touched my arm and made me turn to face him. “In light of what’s happened, I think you should come stay with me for a while.”
“I don’t think moving in together is the answer to our problems.”
“We don’t have problems,” Gabriel insisted.
“You killed someone!”
“I killed someone for you!”
“Well, pardon me if I don’t think that’s going to make it into the next collection of Hallmark cards!” I cried. “And don’t think that this changes anything,” I growled, fangs creaking to full length. I closed my eyes, tamping my temper down. “We are not back to normal, whatever normal is for us. I’m still—I just don’t want to be around you right now. I think you’d better go.”
Well, if punching him in the face didn ’t hurt him, that certainly did. His lips parted, but he pressed them back together, reconsidering saying something that would probably piss me off even more.
“Jane, please, we can talk about this,” he said, stepping toward me. When he saw the anguish on my face, he stopped. “I’ll call you.”
“Please don’t.”
The door clicked shut behind him.
“Well, at least that wasn’t weird.” I scrubbed a hand over my face and surveyed the damage to my living room: chipped bric-a-brac, a shattered table, and a scrambled brain. And I didn’t know where my underwear was.
19
Remember, you’re much more flammable now than you were in life. So live every day as if you’re soaked in gasoline.
—From The Guide for the Newly Undead
Sometime between my sustaining multiple gunshot wounds and losing my panties, Dick had called my cell phone to leave me a cryptic voice-mail message.
“Hey, Jane, it’s Dick,” he said, his voice unusually quiet and subdued. “Do you think you could stop by my place sometime tonight? I need to talk to you.”
It was almost four by the time I heard the voice mail. And Dick wasn’t answering his phone, so I risked some early-morning exposure to drive to his trailer. Because if I was at home, I would be cleaning up broken glass and thinking about what I had decided to call “the incident.”
My phone rang as I jogged up the steps to Dick’s trailer. The caller ID said it was Gabriel. I debated picking it up but finally hit the ignore button. I knocked on the door and—
WHHHOOOOOMMMMMMPPFFF
