Page 74 of Taste of Forever
It took an agonizingly long time to lift my head and my eyelids still weighed a million pounds each.
“Here, how about I do this?”
A large hand gently cradled the back of my skull, prompting my head to tilt forward. Moments later I felt a glass rim against my cracked lips, and then the cool, sweet kiss of water.
“Easy. Not too fast.”
I took a few eager sips. The angle of the glass made the water flow slowly and didn’t allow for me to take big gulps. Probably to keep me from choking, which was a sound idea.
“There we go. Good job.”
The glass pulled away, and the hand gently slid from the back of my head. I missed the contact of that hand before it was fully gone. I couldn’t be sure, but it felt like fingers trailed through my hair as it pulled away. An intimate, loving touch.
Everything about this was intimate, I realized. The soft way he spoke to me and the way he’d been waiting for me to wake up, water at the ready.
Those tiny sips of water were everything. I already felt stronger, despite still feeling like a piece of flattened hamburger meat.
“Gonna try sitting up again.” My voice sounded clearer, which spurred me on even more.
“Go for it. I’m right here. And so is the bed beneath you in case you fall, like, six inches.”
I braced my arms at my sides. “Hell of a drop that would be.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got this.”
It took a few false starts, but I managed to press myself up at the same time I finally opened my eyes. Laith sat on the bed next to me, his magenta eyes exhausted and full of concern. His blond hair was mussed and not in that sexy-on-purpose way. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
Our eyes met and he cocked his head with a smirk. “I knew you could do it, Science Barbie.”
I was only upright for a few seconds before everything came back to me in a rush. Fighting with Justin. The break up and leaving the apartment. Watching the sunrise in my car before deciding to come to Sanguine. The strange man in the square, and then…
“Fuck, fuck! Oh my God—” The room and comfy bed were gone and I was back in that filthy alley with the cold ground underneath me. Hot blood poured over my skin,myblood, from jagged wounds left by sawing fangs.
“Hey, Heather. Look at me. You’re okay. Shhh, it’s over. We got you out of there.”
I blinked and saw red eyes, not yellow ones. I felt the weight of two hands holding the sides of my face, the same hands that had brought my head up to drink water.
Thumbs stroked my cheekbones while I hyperventilated. My shaking hands flew up to my neck, where I now felt a large bandage over my ragged wounds. More bandages covered my hands and arms. I held my hands out in front of me and saw scraped palms and broken fingernails.
“What…happened?”
Laith made a groaning noise like he didn’t really want to tell me. “A draitrium junkie got you. They’re vampires addicted to a drug that lets them walk in the daylight. They get so obsessed with feeling the sun that they forget to feed. It was probably weeks since he’d last had blood.” His hand lowered, resting lightly on top of mine. “You never could have known, butSanguine isn’t safe during the day because of the likes of him. I didn’t get your voicemail until I woke up at dusk. But if I’d known you were coming right after you called, I would have told you to stay in your world until the sun went down.”
“How…” I swallowed and coughed, which prompted Laith to hand me my water glass. I took a few large gulps this time and tried again. “How long until you found me?”
He closed his eyes and gave a sad little shake of his head. “Too long. I just…I’m glad we weren’t too late.”
I tried to set the water glass aside and he took it from me, placing it on a nightstand next to a steaming bowl that smelled absolutely incredible.
“You hungry?” he asked.
My stomach was still knotted from the lingering terror of being in that alley, but food would probably go a long way towards regaining strength. So I nodded and sat up a little straighter. “What is it?”
“Chicken noodle soup.”
“Oh my God, that sounds amazing.”
“Really?” Laith laughed as he stirred the soup. “Tavia, Amy, and Rebecca from the blood bank all said the same thing, but I can’t wrap my head around it.”
