Page 53 of Love Bleeds
"What's done is done," he said. A weak smile accompanied his words. "We can't turn back time. We can only move forward."
Turn back time. I cringed. Wasn't that exactly what I wanted? To go back to the way things had been? To pretend that the past year hadn't happened at all? "I wish I'd never learned about vampires."
Damian sat back down on the bed, a few inches away from me. "Me too," he said in a soft tone of voice. "But it is what I am now."
"I'm okay with that," I said quickly.
"Are you?"
My first instinct was to insist that yes, I was, but when he looked at me like that, with so much sincerity in his gaze, I couldn't lie to him. "I don't know."
He nodded.
"So..." I rubbed my wrist again, feeling awkward. I wasn't used to feeling awkward around Damian. This was all wrong. But maybe that was because there was a new part of Damian that I hadn't accepted yet. "What's your new name?"
The corner of his lips tucked up, so maybe I'd asked the right question after all. "I'm Crimson."
"Crimson..." I tried the name on my tongue. It didn't quite feel right, but maybe I could get used to it. "I'll try to remember that."
"It's okay if you forget." He paused. "I do want to know about... the person I used to be. Did I have siblings?"
"You have an older brother, Max, but you're not close. And your parents are kind of... stand-offish."
"Stand-offish?"
"Kind of distant, I mean. They're both lawyers and they spend a lot of time working, so you spent a lot of time at my place." A memory rose to the surface of my mind. "You always wanted to be an astronaut, you know? When we were younger, I mean. You used to say that all the time. I remember this one time you joked it was the best way to get as far away from your family as possible. They wouldn't visit you on Mars."
Damian mulled this over in his head for a moment. I couldn't help but wonder if any of this sounded even remotely familiar to him. I could tell him facts about his previous life all day long, but how much good was it really doing him if it didn't resonate? "Does my family think I'm dead?" he asked eventually.
"No. They think you ran away. Everybody thinks that. Someone updated your social media with a post saying you were leaving to look for adventure. I was thinking it must have been the vampire who turned you. They probably got your phone."
Damian... Crimson scowled. "Explains how Nicolai got that picture of you. He must have gotten it off my phone."
"What picture?"
"He showed me a picture of you to explain that you were our next target."
"And you didn't...." the rest of the question didn't make it out of my mouth. Of course he hadn't remembered me at that point.
"I didn't remember you, no, but I could tell you were important. Not to Nicolai, I mean. To me."
I felt myself blush, so I stared down at my shoes.
"Maybe we should watch that movie you mentioned earlier," Damian suggested.
“But we have so little time,” I protested. “Shouldn’t we be… I don’t know. Do something more important?”
“You’ve barely recovered from your run-in with my sire,” he reminded me. “Let’s just take tonight, okay?”
I sighed and agreed, even though I wasn't sure whether he wanted to watchStar Warsbecause he was genuinely interested, or because he just wanted to cheer me up. His words from earlier came back to me, about how my eyes lit up. I'd never known he noticed things like that about me. It made me feel oddly self-conscious. But also oddly happy.
Unsurprisingly, my emotions continued to be a mess.
