The Vampire's Release, A Paranormal Romance (Undead in Brown County #4) (7 page)

She inched away and covered her face with her hands, the grief beginning to seep from her in dark waves.  “We can’t be together.  You know that.” 
I wanted to go to her, but somehow knew it wasn’t the right time.  She was on the edge of some important revelation.

After wiping her eyes, she glanced quickly around, taking in the wine and the fire
and clean rugs. 
The fire in her rose. 
I immediately recalled Trevor, who had seduced her and then abandoned her.  Was this what he had done?  Before the accusations began to fly, I knew where her mind was.

She glared at me accusingly.  “What the fuck is all this anyway?”

I sighed.
“I’m not
using you, Sarah
.  I just wanted to make you happy
tonight
.”

The sound of the wine bottle shattering startled me.  It was a horrible sound that seemed to go on forever and accompanied by a searing sense of loss as I looked at the woman I loved.
  She looked at the broken neck of the green bottle in her shaking hand and then down at the mess she’d made on the pine floor.  The red wine had splashed against her jeans and pale yellow sweater.

“This won’t come out,” she murmured helplessly.  “
This
looks like blood.  Michael, it looks like blood.”
  She reminded me of a trapped bird, desperately trying to flee from confinement. 
Her face was elegant in its sadness.  But her eyes gave away everything.

“Let it go,” I said harshly.

When she didn’t respond, I rushed at her and pulled the dangerously serrated bottle neck from her hand.  I held it up in front of her face.

“Do you see this?  Do you know that this piece of glass represents the way you have tried to push people away from you?  You were vulnerable for about ten seconds, Sarah. 
Ten seconds
.  And then you let your bitter side out.  Is that all it takes?”  I was shouting at her by then.
  “If you are ever going to be happy, you have to stop this.  There’s more to life than you could possibly imagine.  If you don’t open yourself up and let people in without chasing them away, you will be miserable for the rest of your life.  Do you understand this?”

“No.  You don’t get it…”

“Shut up!”
  I hurled the rest of the bottle against the wooden door and a resounding crack and shatter spread around us.  I turned away from her.  The urge to strike her was strong, splitting me apart inside.  I wanted to get away, but I knew it would make the situation worse.

“Your mother left you. 
Trevor used you and gave you up. 
Your father is dead.  None of it was your fault, yet you constantly want to saddle yourself with this ridiculous notion of being unworthy.  It’s fucking destroying you.  Not just you.  Everyone who cares about you.  So just shut up.  I may not know the depth of your pain.  I may not have been with you through every single dramatic incident that has happened to you in your life, but
I love you
.  And I want you to be happy.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“It’s not supposed to be.”

What followed was a long silence during which Sarah gazed alternately between the fire, the spilled wine, the broken bottle and me.  I saw the connection she was making internally.  I felt the energy in the room shift from something dark and threatening to something gray and mournful.  It was a slow drain coming from her.  The hate was
shifting into something else
.  Slowly and painfully.

She began to cry in total silence.  No sobs, no sniffling. 

Reluctantly, I left her to retrieve a broom and dustpan from the pantry.  When I came back and handed it to her, she looked at me with tired eyes still full of tears.

“You can clean this up.  The whole thing.  When you’re ready, come upstairs.”

“You’re not going to help?”

“No. 
This is your mess.  And
when you finish and you throw away all those broken pieces, I want you to think very hard about the brittle pieces of yourself that you need to toss out.
  When you clean this up, you come back to me as a whole person.  I don’t want a shadow of what you could be.”
  I lifted her wet chin, still salty with tears and kissed her mouth very gently.  “If you can do that, I will do whatever I can to keep us together.  I want nothing more.”

Then
I turned and went up the stairs.

CHAPTER 9 – Sarah

I stood there for a very long time with the broom in my hand.  The fire crackled pleasingly in the background.  But I was rather lost.  Whatever I had been expecting from my reunion with Michael, it was a far cry from what had actually happened.

When had things started to go wrong?
  Probably the realization that no matter how happy I might be to see him again, we had no future together.  It made the crackling fire seem menacing.  It turned the chilled wine into a bitter truth serum that stole all the magic from the romantic scene in front of me.

For years I had shoved people away from me who might bring me some happiness.  Sure, there were one or two who offered nothing but pain.  Trevor, for instance.  But what about Kara?  My best friend.  And whether I wanted to really admit it or not, I had let distance grow between me and Katie.  When I had asked about how things were going with her, it was always about her classes or whether she’d gotten all the textbooks she needed.  How often had I asked about her personal life?

He was right.

With some hesitation, I placed the dust pan near the biggest pile of glass and began using the broom to push the shiny fragments up into the pan.
  They made musical little sounds when they touched the metal bottom of the pan. 

I saw something of myself in the broken glass and the spilled wine.  It was true.  There were parts of me that felt shattered and unusable.  There were memories and words that had escaped and left stains in the hearts of people I never wanted to hurt.

The broom began to move a little faster. 
Getting rid of this
, I thought. 
A good idea.  Take that shit to the trash, Sarah.
  There’s more to you than what’s broken.
  It didn’t sound like something I would say.  But it really was me.  None of the initial stuff was my fault.  My Mom left.  I didn’t leave her.  She left me.  Not my fault.  My Dad was dead.  He had cancer.  I didn’t create his cancer.  Not my fault.

But those jaded, stinging words used on the people around me?  Yeah, that was all me.  That was the broken glass.  But you can’t just pick it up.  You have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
  So it really
was my mess to clean up.  The big chunks of glass, the tiny little fragments, the wine that was making the floor sticky.

I didn’t just pick it all up and throw it in the trash.  I gathered up every piece of glass I could find by the sofa and near the door.  There were a few scattered
pieces in the kitchen and one o
n the rug in front of the hearth.  I went outside into the frigid cold of a February evening in Indiana and buried the broken pieces of myself in the dirt in the woods.

After mopping up the spilled wine, I went into the little half-bathroom next to the kitchen and looked at myself in the mirror.  My eyes were
a little bloodshot.  My nose was still
red from crying and some of the mascara I’d applied earlier was smudged.  I wasn’t perfect.  I would never be.

I wet down a corner of the fancy guest towel hanging near the sink and wiped away the makeup.  This was just me.  This was imperfect Sarah, who couldn’t ride a horse, couldn’t make her mother love her,
and couldn’t
make her father stay alive.  But I couldn’t stop the thought that maybe it wasn’t my job to do those things. 

Maybe I was supposed to be an innkeeper in Indiana who was in love with a vampire.
  And he had said that he loved me.  Michael.  Mysterious, glorious Michael.  An immortal
being
that
felt
things
deeply and contained his thirst in an effort to maintain some simple hold on his humanity.

And this wonderful creature was waiting for me.

S
omething familiar move
d
through me.  Desire.  Need.  Longing.  I pulled my sweater over my head.  My hair crackled with static.  I moved my fingers through it restlessly and unbuttoned my jeans.  One leg was sticky with wine that had seeped through the denim.
  When I examined the stains under the light, it no longer looked like blood.  It was no longer a threat. 

In the mirror, my mouth and chin looked like that of a little girl.  But there was a woman fully grown beaming out from my blue eyes. 
Someone who had moved through great trials and come out
of that yawning cave called loss with her heart intact but buried under a sea of bitterness.  It would be a hell of a struggle to turn it all over like dirt in the garden,
to bring
what
was
under the dying
leaves
back to the top.
  Like plowing a field in the spring.

I moved up the stairs like a ghost, feeling earthy and brazen.  Michael was standing by the window, his eyes trained on the doorway.  I
could barely look away from his face, but there was so much more to him than that strong sloping jaw and
those glittering
silver eyes.
    He wore a white
V-neck
t-shirt that exposed the gorgeous muscles in his biceps.  The curve
s of them beguiled me.  The lines of his collarbones spread out like the wings of an eagle, giving a solid base to
a
set of arms that had the power to crush a block of concrete.

The bed looked as if it had been slept in already.  When I moved to straighten the sheets and blanket, he shot f
orward and took my wrist
.
  His hand felt strangely hot against me.  It made me want to devour him.

“No.  The bed doesn’t matter.”

He stroked the point at my wrist where my pulse was easy to see.  The motion seemed to coincide with the rather
insistent
throbbing going on in other parts of my body.  My
throat was
alternately aching and tingling, and I wondered briefly
if I might be
a little
ill.   There was a speck of denial still left inside me, burned at the edges and sour with previous regrets.

The way his fingertips held my face was the
gentlest
touch
I’d ever recei
ved in my life.
  His thick eyebrows dipped in a gesture that seemed steeped in humility.  I knew then that he truly saw me as beautiful and worthy of whatever price he might have to pay to keep me.
 
It was a sobering
moment for me, but one that I c
ould cling to for the rest of my days.

Neither would I forget the ways in which we made
love
.  How many times?  I hardly knew afterwards.
  Perhaps six times?  Not including the times on the floor or in the bathro
om.  We ended up in the bathroom with me on the counter, my head thrown back and my knees gripping his naked hips. 

The golden
boards of the pine ceiling faded in and out of my vision.  I felt Michael’s body come to a slow halt.  I had already had several orgasms, which was unheard of for me.  He had just finished his third.  His palms slid up my back, through my hair and tilted my face towards him.

A lazy smile graced his mouth.  “You’re phenomenally beautiful.”

I returned his smile.  “And you wear me out.”  I was completely exhausted and he seemed to know it. 
Without another word, he brought the comforter from the bed, wrapped me up in it and carried me downstairs.  The smile never left his face.  It filled me with warmth to see him so happy.

He laid me carefully on the sofa in front of the dying fire and tucked the comforter closer around me.  I felt his lips move against my hair before sleep finally overcame me, and the words were like silk drifting around me, shimmering and bright
,
welcoming me into the world of dreams.

“I love you, Sarah Wood.”

CHAPTER 10 – Alex

“Get your fucking hands off me!”

The lack of fresh blood was beginning to get to Katie.  Despite her mother’s suggestion, I
didn’t like
the idea of taking her to the island.  I didn’t want to be that far away if things went bad for Sarah and she needed me.  Michael may have returned to the farm, but I still felt responsible somehow.

The raven-haired female in my grip slipped away for an instant i
n the woods, but catching
her again wasn’t hard.  She was a little slippery after falling into the mud
a few times since we left the house.