Page 85 of By the Pint

Dima held my face between his hands. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I have the lock. And you have the key.”

A shiver ran up my spine. I understood what he was saying. Everything he was saying. He would open his mind to me now, let me in, like he promised all those weeks ago.

But … I wasn’t ready. I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever be ready.

“Here,” I said, avoiding any talk on that topic and reaching behind my head to unclasp my chain. “You keep it.”

He searched my eyes, and I redid the clasp behind his neck, so that my angular, basic, stainless-steel key laid against his beautiful, intricate, antique pendant.

“Maybe, someday in the future, when everything has … calmed down, when I’ve calmed down after my turning, you can find me and give it back.” I tried to make it sound light, offhand, but my heart thumped a mile a minute, and a cyclone ripped through my stomach.

“You want me to wait for you?” Dima said, holding both pendants together in one hand.

Yes.

I almost sobbed.

“No. I can’t ask that from you.”

It could be years, decades even, until I became anything resembling functional. And, okay, decades meant nothing to a vampire. But could I ask him to wait for me? With no guarantee I’d be the human he’d fallen for. Or anything like that human. Or that I wouldn’t reject him.

The only certainty was that I wouldn’t remember him, and we’d have to start from scratch.

Could we start from scratch?

It tore up my heart just thinking about it.

He smoothed the locker key against his bare skin and trained his eyes on me. The heat in his gaze had returned. “I will wait for you.”

My body responded without instruction from my brain. I pulled his face back down. His lips met mine again. My fingers gathered the bottom of his shirt and tugged it over his head. We broke the kiss only to remove it.

I can’t ask you to wait for me,I said, my tongue in his mouth.

You cannot stop me,he replied, pushing his into mine.

I forced a gap between us.Please, Dima. Don’t wait for me. I can’t—What if …

Casey.That was all he said, whined, before his mind went quiet. His eyes swept over me. From the top of my head, to where our laps met. He paused.Touch me.

Dima lifted my hands and placed them on his chest.

Sometimes, well, if truth be told, often, I thought about his ‘nude’ in the quilting book and what little justice it did for the real Dima. He was magnificent. Smaller than me, leaner, paler, colder, harder, but fucking perfect. I let my fingers travel over every inch of exposed skin. My breaths hitched with every peak and valley, as though the planes of Dima’s body had stolen the air from my lungs. Reminding me how different we were. The living and the undead, brought together.

Dima watched me watching him. His brow pulled down. His tongue traced his bottom lip. I tried not to think how I’d remember none of this. Tried not to let it read on my features. Tried not to cry. Tried to exist for this moment, as Dima was.

He slid off my lap, positioning himself between my knees in the expansive footwell, and supported my foot with one hand while he peeled the shoelaces open. He let my brogue fall to the carpeted floor and did the same to my other. Then, he walked his fingers up the inseam of my trousers. Out the corner of my eye, I noticed my shoes tucking themselves in the gap under the driver’s seat, and my jacket hanging itself on a hanger. Like, where did he even get a hanger from? And why was that tiny gesture so overwhelmingly touching, when his jumper and shirt and boots lay in haphazard little hills wherever they’d fallen?

The L word popped into my head unbidden. I willed it back into the locker. Not to think it, and definitely not say it. Dima didn’t need to know.

Even if I knew he felt the same.

And I knew, with one hundred percent certainty, if I said those three words, he wouldn’t return them.

He’d be right to not return them. It’d be selfish and pointless for me to say them. But there they were, floating around in my head.

Let this night serve as one final, amazing goodbye.

If any of these thoughts escaped, Dima showed no signs he heard them. His hands whipped open my belt and dragged down my fly.

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