Page 24 of Love Bitten

I locked myself in the bathroom, turning on the bathtub faucet while I collected my thoughts. I felt bad for leaving Xander so abruptly, but I couldn’t help it. I needed some time alone.

Even if Xander was harmless, sucking blood only consensually and only when he knew it was safe, dating a vampire took strength and commitment to stick with the relationship, as I had come to realize over our whirlwind couple of weeks together. I never asked The Librarian for a vampire; I asked them for a monster. The monster I was given was not my choice, and I honestly didn’t think I would have chosen a vampire given multiple options. I thought I would get a fae or some kind of shifter, or even something really wild like a ghost. I could handle a ghost, no problem.

Instead, they matched me with Xander, someone who had a lot of needs and a lot of strange, archaic ideas about how a vampire and a human were meant to coexist. It wasn’t fair to him to expect him to be anything but a vampire, to fit into the mold I wanted for my monster partner.

Still, the nagging little worry in the back of my mind refused to go away. Did he really care about me? Did he care about me as a person, or did he care about my blood and the fun we had together? He’d gone too far last night when he took too much blood. How often would that happen? How much worse could it have been? Was everything done out of self-interest? It couldn’t have been. Or could it?

I was giving myself a headache with all this overthinking. I stepped into the steaming bath, cupped my hands in the water, and lifted them over my head. Clear hot water cascaded down my face and neck, suffocating me for a second. I was letting things get out of hand, whatever the answers to all of my questions were. All I really needed right now was some time to process my relationship and what I wanted out of a partner. Making a rash decision in the heat of the moment would only hurt both of us, and the last thing I wanted to do was hurt Xander after everything he’d done to accommodate me – even if it did end up being for selfish reasons.

I sat on the ledge of the bathtub while I drained the water. The porcelain dug into my skin, hurting more the longer I sat there, but I wasn’t ready to move just yet. Standing up meant it was time to leave the safety of the bathroom and face Xander again. I had no idea what to say to him, but I would need to think of something quickly.

I still hadn’t thought of anything by the time I opened the door, a crisp white towel wrapped around my waist. I thought the awkwardness would swallow us whole, so after I stared long and hard at the shiny wood floor, I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“I have to go,” I blurted out.

“Of course,” Xander nodded. “Let me gather your things for you.”

“No, I can do it. Thanks for the nice evening and morning and…everything else.”

I gave him a quick peck on the cheek, immediately regretting my cold goodbye, but it was too late to walk it back. I scrambled to get my clothes on, leaving the house with wet hair and a shirt buttoned crookedly.

Xander offered to take me home within minutes, but I declined. I needed a nice, long walk in the fresh morning air to clear my head. The only problem was that the walk didn’t clear my head at all, it only gave me time to overthink the last few hours all over again. The only thing clear to me was the one thing I didn’t want to think about: I was going to have to make a big decision, and soon.

22

XANDER

Ishouldn’t have let Luke go so quickly, but forcing him to stay back and talk things through would have only exacerbated his doubts. Luke still had agency over himself and could do what he wished, although I still wasn’t certain what had upset him so much. He enjoyed our morning together, or at least, he told me as much. Nevertheless, his demeanor changed so quickly. Was it something I said, or perhaps something I did without realizing? Whatever set him off, I was now left all alone in my massive, empty house, and nothing about that was good for me.

I wanted to pen a letter to him immediately so he would get it in a day and have a chance to at least read what I had wished to say in person. I decided against that, however. Some of those thoughts were coming from a nasty and bitter place, one of past rejections and insecurities, and keeping them trapped in my head was a better outcome than letting them spill out through the ink on paper.

I walked over to the bedroom window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Luke walking down the driveway. Luke was long gone, so I stared through the filter of the curtains at the lawn, glittery and damp with dewdrops.

The morning light, even dulled by the thick fabric curtains, burned my retinas, forcing me to look away. I blinked a few times, the dryness stinging each time I closed my eyes. If only I could have been blessed with humanity, I would never have had to feel the burn of light or the overwhelming desire of bloodlust, or the sheer nothingness where my beating heart should have been.

No, I had to be cursed with vampiric parents, one turned long before my birth by someone he considered a friend, the other born into it through her own mother’s lineage. I never stood a chance. The moment I first opened my eyes as a newborn they were red, indicating hunger not for milk, but for blood.

I’d been raised on the taste of animal blood, something widely available even to humans, but nothing could replace the sweet, sharp taste of pure, unadulterated human blood. I craved it every waking hour, and whenever I finally got it, the satisfaction was short-lived.

Luke changed all that for me. I craved his taste more often than I cared to admit, but he gave it to me freely, with as little hesitation as I could hope for from a mere human. His willingness to make me happy gave me a different outlook on my desire. I thought I had found someone who understood me after centuries of searching.

As it turned out, all I had found was that I was still lacking in tact and the ability to love unconditionally. How could I not see that? And how could Luke not understand what I was going through? He took to everything else he learned about me so well.

I descended the stairs to the first floor, stopping for only a moment to look out the window for any sign of Luke. I’d waited long enough to give him time to get out of the front gate, but I still couldn’t help but check in case he changed his mind and turned around to come back to me. I hadn’t lost him yet, and I would allow myself to hold out hope for a little while longer.

I turned away from the window and descended the next flight of stairs, the one that led to the dungeons. In a select few vampires’ houses, these cages held prisoners kept there for blood harvesting. In others, they were used for the unlucky animals that replaced the need for human blood. My dungeon was used for the latter. It still wasn’t pretty, but at least I didn’t have to live with the knowledge that I held hoards of naked human beings captive for my own nourishment. I never understood how those vampires could exist with the knowledge of their crimes, and I hoped Luke would never reach that chapter in his vampire history book. It was an ugly one, to say the least. If I ever turned to that kind of sadistic life, I would carve the stake myself to drive straight through my heart.

I pushed open the heavy iron door, revealing that I didn’t have any livestock stowed away in here after all. I’d released the last of them after Luke came into my life, thinking I would no longer need inferior animal blood.

How wrong I had been.

With a sigh, I let the door thud shut behind me and I leaned against it, the weight of everything that had transpired this morning finally sinking onto my shoulders. If I had the ability to cry, I would have done so now. Never did I envy humans more than in this moment, when my lack of tears only served to prevent me from the breakdown I so desperately needed to have.

The dark, cold, musty dungeon surrounded me, its emptiness a painful reminder of everything I didn’t have. I knew what I needed to do, and I knew it would disgust Luke, but in times like this, I needed blood to give me strength.

I waited for nightfall and in the blink of an eye, I found myself at the local farmer’s house, asking him for a brood of his plumpest, finest meat rabbits. It didn’t please me to take them home, and it pleased me even less to condemn them to a life of deprivation in my dungeon. I could blame Luke for driving me back to this life all I wanted, but at the end of the day, I was responsible for my own actions. Luke was merely a spark in an endless series of dull, lifeless days.

23

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