Page 55 of Road Trip with a Vampire
I decided to play along and made a show of looking him up and down. “Looks good on you,” I quipped. It wasn’t a lie. The hat was hideous, but the man could wear a garbage bag as a dress and look amazing. Truly unfair. “Green matches your complexion.”
He placed a hand over his heart in mock offense. “My complexion? You wound me,” he said in a theatrical voice I didn’t think he had in him.
I was just about to tell him the chicken hat matched his complexioneven betterwhen—
Wait a minute.
Were we…flirting?
Was that what this was?
No.
That was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
Before I could answer my own question, my stomach chose that moment to do a comically loud rumble.
I sighed and looked down at myself. Saved by the appetite.
“Breakfast,” I said.
It seemed to take Peter a moment to adjust to the abrupt change of subject. “Right,” he eventually agreed. “Breakfast.”
“Go on and get yours,” I said. “I’ll meet you back here in an hour.” Now that I remembered I was ravenous, the twin aromas of pancakes and coffee wafting towards me from the diner were a siren song I could no longer resist. It had been a good twenty years since I’d eaten at a truck stop diner. Granted, the last time I’d done so I’d been so hungover, none of it had gone down all that smoothly, but my mouth still watered at the thought of all the junk food deliciousness I was about to consume.
I was so preoccupied by these thoughts that when I turned to walk towards the diner, I didn’t see the oversized stack of Coke boxes in my path until I tripped over it.
Ten years of yoga training was apparently no match for a one-on-one fight with gravity. I fell to the groundhard, scraping my knee against the sharp corner of a shelving unit on my way down.
“Shit!” My impact with the floor would leave bruises on my ass later, but my knee was a bright burst of pain that took priority over all other discomforts. A glance down showed that the scrape had torn my leggings and was deep enough to draw blood.
I clapped a hand over the bleeding wound reflexively—before remembering that the vampire I’d come here with had been wanting his breakfast, too.
Peter was crouching on the floor beside me inside half a heartbeat, his hands gently touching me everywhere. My face, my shoulders. My injured leg.
His dark brown eyes were round with panic.
“Are you all right?” His voice was low and urgent. His nostrils flared slightly, the only sign that he might be tempted by the drops of blood welling up beneath my palm. “You’re hurt.”
“It’s nothing,” I said honestly. Gods, this was embarrassing. A lifetime spent causing mayhem throughout the world, followed by the past decade dedicated to perfecting my flexibility and balance, and I had just been felled by a stack of soda boxes? Peter must have been right, earlier. My natural statewasclumsy.
If Lindsay or Becky were here, I’d never hear the end of it.
Peter scowled. “It’s not nothing.”
“It is,” I insisted. “A Band-Aid, a couple of ibuprofen, and I’ll be right as rain.” If I used my daily allotment of magic to heal myself later, I probably wouldn’t even bruise.
Peter wasn’t hearing it. He stood abruptly and accosted the pimply teenage boy sweeping the floor a few feet from where I’d landed.
“Who left those boxes in the middle of the aisle?” he demanded, jabbing an accusatory finger at his chest. Peter didn’t just look angry. He lookedmurderous.
The kid quailed and stumbled back a step, his eyes saucer-wide. “I don’t know,” he yelped, cringing into himself. “I just got here.”
Peter stepped closer to the kid, getting right up in his face. “If I find out you’re lying to me—”
Whoa.Whoa.
