Page 27 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

I hated myself a little that I was pushing him away. I could practically feel the longing radiating off of him. Not to mention the hurt and confusion that I was fighting this so hard.

I couldn’t stand it.

“Thank you,” I said, meeting his eyes. I put words into the silence between us, desperately wanting to fill it up. “I, um, have nightmares now. It’s a thing.”

“How often is it like that?” Tobias demanded. Then he paused, as my words seemed to register for him. His eyes went wide with dawning horror. “Wait. You said nightmares. In the plural. As in—”

“It’s every night.”

The agonized look he gave me was so raw and genuine that it broke my heart all over again. “Bryan. I can make you a potion you can take before you sleep. It’ll stop all the nightmares. You’ll sleep peacefully, you won’t have to—”

“No.”

He stared at me, stricken.

And even though I really didn’t want to, in that moment I couldn’t help but understand exactly how he felt. Because if the roles were reversed, if he had gone through what I had, I would have done anything I could have to protect him from the horror of it. And he had that capability.

He could protect me from the agony and grief and guilt I felt. Hell, he could probably do it without half-trying. And here I was, refusing to give him permission to make me feel better about being a monster.

Knowing any of that didn’t make it better or easier.

It just made me feel worse.

But he didn’t understand, did he?

I needed the guilt. I needed the agony. I needed the nightmares. Because the feeling of horror and revulsion I always felt upon waking was the only lifeline I still had to my own humanity. The way I felt now was a visceral reminder that I was still me.

“Bryan, you don’t deserve any of this,” Tobias said at last, sounding so forlorn it almost broke my heart all over again. “No one in the coven blames you. The witch queen herself pardoned you. She even offered to take these memories so you wouldn’t have to live with them. It wasn’t your fault. Everyone knows that.”

“Please don’t,” I begged, wishing that he could understand how agonized I felt, how ugly and awful. “Look, I don’t need you—or anyone else—to fix this. And I don’t need you to talk me out of it, either. I just…” I trailed off, shaking my head, trying to find solid ground again. But when I grabbed for what I actually craved in that moment, it was all just coming up Tobias. And that was less than helpful, wasn’t it? “Look, the worst part here is that I don’t even know what I do need.”

A lie, of course. I needed him.

“I’d give it to you. Whatever it is. Whatever you need, whenever you need it. Once you figure it out, just say the words.”

He said it so earnestly and unselfconsciously, without so much as a moment’s pause, that he had to have meant it completely. It wasn’t the words, so much as the inner certainty that he had put everything he was behind them, that made them matter.

Something inside of me melted. And some of the icy-cold resistance I had been harboring gave way. If I was a frozen winter, then Tobias Hawthorne was the dawn of a warm spring.

Basically, he was my kryptonite. He always had been. There was a reason I had run from him, after all.

I knew that I ought to say something to push him away from me, to maintain the distance between us, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I chose selfishness and said what I really felt in that moment. I gave in to what I wanted, more than anything else.

“I think what I need right now is for you to hold me.”

Something lit up in his eyes at my admission, and it was awful. Because I knew that I was just setting us both up for heartbreak in the end. But I felt so scraped raw and fragile that the idea of banishing him back to the floor was suddenly impossible to entertain for even a moment.

The awful truth was, I needed him. I needed his solidity and his goodness and his warmth. I needed it like the monster I was.

Without another word, I laid down on the bed, rolling away from him, so I couldn’t see how terribly happy he was at my selfishness. And Tobias plopped himself down behind me, drawing his arms around my body protectively, cradling me to his chest.

And even though it was painful, knowing that nothing had really changed between us, I couldn’t help the deep feeling of rightness that stole through my body anyway. And something within my chest finally fully relaxed for the first time in months as he nestled close to me.

My eyes drifted shut as the exhaustion I had been shoving off for months finally pulled me under. And even though it was the most dangerous thing of all, for a split second, before I drifted off into sleep, I couldn’t deny to myself how happy it made me, to be here in his arms.

CHAPTER NINE || BRYAN

Hours later, I woke up in stages, enveloped in the warm Tobias scent of cinnamon and nutmeg. His strong arms were wrapped around me protectively and the heat from his body was so blissfully nice that I could have died right then and there, a happy vampire.

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