Page 37 of Thomas
“Never.”
“Good man.” Thomas stood, then gingerly stretched his arms up. “I am tired. I think I’ll nap in my rooms for a bit before dinner.”
“Please, take your time.”
They parted ways with Cameron feeling a mix of unease and amused incredulity. Thomas had beaten him like it was nothing. The entire time he’d worn that stony, unreadable expression, and Cameron had been confounded from the intensity of his heather-gray gaze.
Chess was not only a tactical game but a mentally emotional one. Thomas, clever man that he was, had baited his theoretical hook with some provoking distraction on the board, and Cameron had fallen for it every single time.
He wanted to talk more about the games during dinner, but he didn’t have the chance. Thomas kept to his rooms for the remainder of the evening with Mira reporting that he’d fallen into a heavy and deep sleep.
That night, Cameron had the opposite experience, tossing and turning in his bed. His mind was a tumultuous storm of thoughts, twisting and flipping this way and that.
The shock of Devon’s secret attraction and subsequent rude behavior. Thomas’s looking increasingly frail and his absence from dinner. The conversation Cameron previously had with Mira replayed in a loop as well—how the blood bags had been “required” of Thomas, whatever that meant, and that they might be contributing to his distress.
Cameron thought about Thomas’s being in love with a vampire named Dawn and the tenderness and wistfulness with which he’d spoken of her. And then, how her whereabouts were presently unknown to Thomas. How that must quietly eat away at him as someone that he cared for, deeply.
It was no wonder Thomas hadn’t remembered Cameron at all. He’d been a ridiculous fool to assume otherwise. That this arrangement had been inherently mutual—that Thomas hadactively said yes to Cameron’s proposal because of a fleeting moment between them several years ago.
Rachelle had told Cameron that there was a process to these things. He’d ignored that process because of his social apprehensions, and look at where it had gotten him.
Cameron stared up at the ceiling in the darkness, his chest rising and falling from concentrated breaths. If Mira was right about Thomas’s aversion to blood bags, should Cameron find someone for Thomas to feed from? Should… he offer himself? Would Thomas even want that?
He had no experience in this and had never once been inclined to give someone consent. Casually, maybe on one or two occasions, he’d wondered about it, though. What it might be like to be bitten by another vampire.
Cameron wasn’t longing for it and he never felt as if he was missing out on something. It was more so curiosity. Like swimming in the ocean or taking a ride on an airplane. An act that one should justdoat some point for the sake of living and experiencing.
Flipping onto his side, Cameron twisted himself up in the bedsheets and groaned from frustration. Even if he deigned to offer himself to Thomas, there was no reason for the man to accept. He’d told Cameron that he preferred a certain level of emotional intimacy before being closer to another vampire.
Thomas hadlovedDawn. He didn’t even remember Cameron.
Enough—just stop it.Willing his mind to relent and give him peace, Cameron shut his eyes tightly. It didn’t work.
When all the complex nuances were stripped away, Cameron knew that he wanted to help Thomas. Cameron alone had made the decision to bring him here, and as such, it was his responsibility to ensure Thomas’s good health and contentment as best he could. That, Cameron decided, was the bottom line.
Eventually, he got up and paced around his rooms. He did so until the early light of morning, because only then did his brain finally run out of steam and allow him to collapse back into the bed and rest.
Chapter Thirteen
The contrasting sensations of hunger and nausea kept Thomas in his bed from early evening all the way through to afternoon the next day.
He was hungry, but the thought of drinking bagged blood from yet another crystal goblet made his stomach turn. His incisors were pulsing and aching. He had a headache, and he was beginning to feel ravaged in the same way he had just after he’d left the dungeons.
Why was his mind tormenting him? It was starting to feel as if he had never escaped—would never escape his prison. That his remaining life would always be some variation of that torture, whether he was sleeping on the cold, filthy ground or not. His body and brain would never let it go.
Thomas lay in bed with his eyes closed, feeling the warmth of the rare winter sunlight spilling over his duvet. The world was silent and completely peaceful aside from the throbbing pain within his body and mind.
Quietly… he thought that this might be a nice place to die. To give up fighting, moving around and carrying on. What good was it doing him, anyway? Or anyone else.
A soft knock at the door made Thomas’s eyes flutter open. The room was awash in golden light from the afternoon sun. Had he died? He didn’t believe in heaven, but the dust motes floating within the soft rays of light reminded him of its imagery. If it was heaven, it really sucked that he was still in pain, even in death.
He didn’t answer, but the door clicked open anyway. Mira poked her head inside. “Sir Thomas?” She saw him lying there, then stepped into the room. She was carrying a modest vase of white tulips. Not as large and glamorous as the first arrangement. Simpler and without the baby’s breath.
Despite everything, it warmed something small in Thomas’s heart as she set it on the bedside table.
“These are from Lord Ashford. He’s very worried about you… We all are.” She looked over at the bistro table and the untouched food and blood there from earlier that morning when she’d come to bring him breakfast. Which had only replaced another untouched tray from dinner the previous evening.
Mira bent to her knees at the side of the mattress so that she was at eye level with him. For a long moment, she simply watched him, unspeaking. Finally, she whispered, “What is happening to you?Whyare you still suffering?” Her eyes welled up with tears before she dropped her head as if she were praying at an altar.
