Page 46 of Don't Bite the Boy Next Door
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“I swear I didn’t invite her,” I hiss as he grips my arm and shoves me towards the kitchen.
“Bullshit.”
“I promise you, Ryan,” I whine, pulling my arm from his painful grip, “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Then tell me how she just turns up at my door, just days after you ask about her letters?”
“I don’t know.”
He spins from me, angrier than I have ever seen him, muttering.
“What did you say?”
“I said,” he growls, “that this is why we can’t be friends.”
“But I didn’t do it!”
He shakes his head.
Gritting my teeth, I stalk from the room and march out the front door.
‘If he doesn’t even believe a simple truth, then I don’t want to be his friend – or anything else for that matter, the stupid idiot.’
I fume as I race from the front lawn into the forest and run to one of my favourite spots by the creek deep in the woods near my home. It’s the very first place I had ever seen him, which seems now like so long ago, but is really only about eighteen months, not so long at all.
‘Not long for a vampire,’I think mournfully as I sit by the stream, still running, despite the intense cold,‘unless you are suffering from unrequited love, then it seems like a very, very long time.’
I sit for perhaps an hour before footsteps approach, footsteps I know well.
“How did you know I was here?”
“You told me once this was your favourite place,” Ryan replies, sitting down beside me and nodding at the stream. “It was my favourite as a child.”
“Is that why you were here? The very first night we met?”
“Yeah,” he sighs, not looking up from the water. “I knew the old place had been sold, but I didn’t expect anyone would notice if I took a look around at night. Of course, I could hardly know my neighbour was a vampire.”
I snort at his rueful tone.
“No, I guess that isn’t the first thing a person might suspect of their neighbours,” I laugh, my mirth fading quickly as I recall the whole reason I am here now, in the cold.
“I’m sorry,” he says suddenly, turning to look at me as I stare down at my hands, fidgeting. “I don’t know what came over me, I never should have grabbed you like that. I, this is why I…, Jesus, can you forgive me?”
I feel my face flame, the tears close to the surface, as they seem to constantly be of late.
“Forget it, Ryan, it was nothing.”
“No,” he shakes his head as he places one large hand over mine, to still them.
I revel in their warmth.
“Mother told me she drove herself down here on a whim, she’d never made a road trip before, and she wanted to see me. She only got her driver’s license this year,” he shrugs. “She had no idea I was living with a woman, no idea what to expect. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, and I’m sorry I scared you.”
I say nothing, thinking through what he has said.
‘Why does he think he scared me?’
