Page 101 of Castings & Curses

“Oh.”

“You like that?”

I didn’t know which was hotter, his deep voice right in my ear, or the scrape of teeth.

“Yeah, I think I do. Do it again.”

He gently bit me, and worked his mouth over my shoulder before rolling me to my back. I could see the teeth in the dim light in his room. I cupped his cheek and pulled his lower lip down with my thumb.

He bit me, hard.

“Ow.”

Before I could pull it away and suck on it, he claimed my thumb into his mouth.

“I have teeth and nails. But not the ears. That was unexpected,” he admitted. “And no tail.”

“What are you?” I asked in a whisper.

He shook his head. “Big, scary. I don’t know. It’s not exactly something that was explained to me. And considering the way my parents gave me the birds and bees talk, it’s something I’m sure they would have been mortified to explain. I have no idea whose side of the family it comes from, and I don’t know how my mother will react when Sarina shows off her new trick.”

“My grandmother could do something similar to what I do. Terri-Ann’s skill is a little different. What we have is little, but from what I understand it's very Duchamp and Belvoir County.”

I sat up and gazed down at him. I could have stayed there and asked him questions all night. “I should get back.”

Eric reached up and dragged me back down for a kiss. Yeah, I needed to leave now, or I was going to stay.

“I’ll walk you to your car.”

CHAPTER13

“Hey Aunt Paisley,there's a guy at the door saying he’s here for Liv.”

I thought the pounding in the bedroom door was in my head before it registered that Kurt was knocking on the door.

“Gimme a second,” I said.

Liv squirmed. With a few shushing sounds and calming words, she settled back to sleep. Someone had put her in bed while I had been off at Eric’s the night before. For such a small person, she took up an awful lot of bed space.

I rubbed my face and opened the door.

“What?”

“Some asshole is demanding to be let in,” he started.

“Oh, Dylan.”

“You expecting him?”

“No, you called him an asshole. It has to be him.”

I followed Kurt downstairs. He kept going into the back of the house, I stopped at the front door and opened it.

“You look like shit,” Dylan smirked. He had one eyebrow cocked up, and his lips were pulled into a half grin. His skin was nut brown with tan, and his hair was blonder from all his time in the sun.

I felt a tug at my heart. When I had been in love with him, it had been very real, very genuine. When that love was broken, shards of it were still left in my body, like slivers of glass impossible to find, but very painful, and festering with infection. It had taken a lot of work on his part to make sure there was no love left for him within me.

The memories were still there. They weren’t all cringe yet. I didn’t harbor any hopes of rekindling anything with him. I didn’t even want to be friendly co-parents.

---