Page 43 of Rock Bottom
I couldn’t sleep. Julian had left for his daylight rest hours ago, but my mind kept circling back to everything I knew about his past. About thecenturieshe’d spent as property.
I sat on the edge of the bed in my room, turning over the concept in my head. Centuries. Not years —centuries. Multiple human lifetimes of having no say over his own body, his own choices, his own life.
How does someone recover from that?I thought about the way he moved, spoke, carried himself. There was confidence there, competence, but underneath it was someone who’d been conditioned to anticipate and fulfill another’s needs before considering his own.
How was he even functional after all that?
But he was more than functional. He was brilliant, capable, strong in ways that had nothing to do with his vampire abilities. He’d survived with not just his sanity intact, but with a capacity for love, for trust, for hope.
That made what we had even more precious. He was choosing to trust me with his vulnerability.
The weight of that trust — I could never be casual with what he offered me.
He’d spent centuries being owned by people who didn’t deserve him, but now he was mine by choice, not by force, and I determined to make sure he knew how special he is to me, how much I value him, how much I trust him.
Chapter 15
Silver
I woke the next morning and put on underwear, jeans, and a white t-shirt. I pulled my hair into a low ponytail and smudged the tiniest bit of black eyeliner around the outside corners. Not enough it was noticeable, but it fit my mood.
By the time I made it downstairs to scrounge for breakfast, Kirsten was already looking through the fridge.
“Good morning,” she said. “I can’t decide between a mushroom and cheese omelet, with maybe some onions and other veggies, or maybe blueberry waffles. Do you have a preference?”
“Add some sausage, and I’d say omelets, otherwise the waffles with a side of bacon.”
She laughed. “You sound like the shapeshifters. Okay, let’s do omelets, and you can crumble up some sausage for yours. Let’s pull everything out we want to put in them, and then we can split the prep work. How does Julian feel about onions?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer her. He told me he can’t eat food. After a few seconds of silence, I said, “I don’t think he can have them.”
“Oh, not for him. Some vampires have…” She trailed off. “You know what, none of my business. Forget I said anything.”
“Oh no, not going to happen. Explain.”
She rolled her eyes and started pulling things out of the refrigerator. “What you eat flavors your blood. Most vampires don’t like garlic. It doesn’t hurt them, they just don’t like it. Some do, but it’s rare. A lot of them don’t like asparagus. Some prefer pineapple, others absolutely detest it.”
“Oh. He didn’t say, but it’s supposed to be a while before I can feed him again.”
She nodded. “Right, so it doesn’t matter. We’re the only people on this floor right now, and all the vampires are still dead to the world, so no one will hear us talking. You never set up an appointment with Dr. Woods?”
She’d referred me to him when she closed up shop, but I’d never gone. “No. It would’ve taken a dozen or more sessions to go through my childhood and all of my medical history, and…” I shook my head. “I never want to have to talk my way through my childhood again. I’ve done it with three therapists, and that’s plenty. I’m fine now. I know who I am. I have my shit together. I’m good.”
“I believe you, but my point is that we’re going to have a different relationship from this point forward, and there are some ethical concerns around that. I’d like us to be friends, and that means I’ll talk to you about problems some, but it’ll be as a friend, not a therapist.”
“Yeah. I get that.”
“Cora says she’d rather be my friend than my patient, because I ask my patients questions until they figure out their own answers, and I just tell my friends what the fuck to do. I’d never thought about it that way, but she isn’t wrong. Do you want spinach? How about tomatoes? Do we want to do hot peppers and skip the chives?”
“Yes to spinach and tomatoes, no to hot peppers. Chives sound good though.”
“Okay, you get started cooking your sausage, and I’ll do the prep work on the veggies. Maybe you can do onions in one pan and sausage in another? I like the onions cooked slow, so they caramelize.”
“Yes, I can do that.”
While we worked, she told some stories about the necklace. It’d saved her ass a few times, and put her at risk some, too.
“Have you met Dawg, with the bikers?” she asked. “He’s the drop-dead gorgeous one.Waytoo pretty to be a biker. Anyway, he told me to be careful about depending on it, and it was good advice. Eventually, I figured out it has its own agenda, and if it needs you alive to carry its plans out, it’ll help keep you alive. If it needs to put you at risk to further its own schemes, it will.”
