My Blood Approves (34 page)

“
On the subject of which, I
should probably whip us up some supper.” He went over to the
fridge, talking amicably about the extravagant meal he had planned
for us tonight. Leaning against the kitchen counter, watching him
as he worked, I knew that I made the right choice to stay with
him.

When I went to school the next day, Jane
looked pleased to see me. I’d been standing at my locker, juggling
my books, when she walked past me, smiling in her overly seductive
way, and murmured, “Good to have you back, Alice.”

Admittedly, it’d only been three days since
I’d last been to school, but it had much longer than that since I
hung out with her, and I’d barely been active in my own life. At
school and at home, I’d been a zombie.

There was no separation in the two lives,
though. They were all part of me and what I was doing. I went to
high school, hung out my brother, gossiped with Jane, and in my
free time, I hung out with vampires.

Nothing about me had really changed, and
even as mind boggling as the events of the last month had been, I
was still just plain old Alice Bonham, and that’s the way it was
going to stay. For a few more years at least.

So when Jane walked past me, I got my books
together and bolted after her. She must’ve really missed me,
because she actually stopped to wait for me when I called her name.
After a few friendly jabs about being missing in action lately, I
filled her in as best I could about what had been happening my life
lately, conveniently leaving out the stuff about vampires.

At home, I let Milo help me with the
Calculus homework, which really seemed unnecessary. I would make it
my life’s mission to never, ever find a use for that particular
information. Milo made something delicious with salmon for supper
and enlightened me on his progress (or the lack thereof) with his
new crush, Troy.

All in all, my life felt like it had hit
some kind of stride, and maybe I really could get comfortable with
all of this.

Jack text messaged me, saying he’d be over
in twenty minutes to pick me up. I got ready, and Milo warned me
that I had to be up early for school, and I promised I’d be back
before one. That still seemed too late for him, and six hours of
sleep did not sound like enough to me, but I had to find a
balance.

While outside waiting for Jack to pick me
up, something startled me. I was waiting outside for Jack. No
matter how fast I rushed through getting ready, he was invariably
waiting for me. But I had been waiting for so long, that I’d
actually gotten a little chill and had to pull my sweater around
me.

I dug out my phone to text him just as a
silver Audi slid up in front of me, and my heart twirled
nervously.

Even through the dark glass of the car
window, I saw Peter’s green eyes burning at me. That incessant pull
that had slowly faded the last few days returned with a
vengeance.

My body started to shake, but not because I
was cold. My heart started beating in the way that drove Jack mad,
and I wondered if Peter felt the same way. I opened the car door
and got inside, preparing myself to find out.

- 22 -

Instead of saying anything to me, Peter
squealed away from the curb, keeping his eyes locked on the road in
front of us. His jaw tensed, and he gripped the wheel tightly.

The car was completely full of the
tantalizing scent of him, and my mouth actually started to
salivate. We had never been in such close quarters before, and it
felt like a bad idea.

Even as close as I was to him, my heart
tugged on me to move closer, to reach out and brush my hand against
his flawless skin, so I clasped my hands together.

“
I just got back,” Peter
said at length.

The silence felt thick and overwhelming, but
I couldn’t think of anything to fill it with. My head swam. I felt
the hunger for him, burning and frantic, like a rush of adrenaline,
only much more intoxicating. By the time we’d get to his house, I’d
be delirious with him.

“
We need to talk,” Peter
murmured huskily, allowing his haunting gaze to settle on me for a
moment.

“
I know.”

In my mind, I’d been imagining the
conversation with him over and over again. Although since I’d
kissed Jack, I’d been envisioning it with me rejecting him, instead
of persuading him to be with me.

Once I was with him, filled with his lust, I
couldn’t imagine not being with Peter. Every part of me screamed
that I really had been made for him, no matter what my heart said
when he wasn’t around.

Despite his proclamation that we needed to
talk, he said nothing for the remainder of the car ride.

I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and I
barely noticed his lack of attention towards me. The days away from
him had made me forget how absolutely breathtaking he was.

When we got to his house, the tiniest part
of me that wasn’t completely enamored with him felt trepidation at
seeing Jack. I had no idea how he would react, but fortunately, he
wasn’t around. I imagined that he was in the house somewhere, but
since Peter eclipsed everything for me, I couldn’t feel him
anxiously hiding nearby.

Mae and Ezra were in the living room, but I
barely noticed the tentative way they eyed us up as we walked up
the stairs to his room. Peter still hadn’t said anything to me, but
I followed one step behind him, as if he led me on a string.

“
I don’t know what they’ve
been telling you while I was gone,” Peter told me finally. I had
sat down on the edge of his bed, and he stood on the other side of
his room, his arms crossed firmly over his chest and refusing to
look at me. “But this cannot work.”

“
What?”

I tried to play innocent, but there was
already a welling despair inside me. It seemed ridiculous since I
had survived all this time without him. There had been a constant
dull ache, but it was nothing that I couldn’t live with.

But when I was with him, the thought of
being without him felt unbearable.

“
It’s not the same as it
was before,” he explained quietly. “The way I feel about you, it’s
not right. My body insists that it’s you, but the rest of me…” He
shook his head. “I don’t think I should be around you
anymore.”

“
Are you banning me from
the house?” I had just come to terms with what was happening, and
he was going to take everything away from me.

“
I think that this is an
impossible situation.” He looked over at me, his eyes betraying the
hurt and want he had for me. “I can’t be with you, and Jack can’t
be with you. He’s tried to hide his feelings about you from me, but
I know he feels something for you. Neither of us can be with you,
so having you around would be torture.”

“
That isn’t fair!” I jumped
to my fee, and already hot tears sliced down my cheeks. He had a
finality to his voice that devastated me. “Do they all agree with
you? They can’t! Ezra-”

“
They support my decision,”
Peter cut me off decisively. “All of them are very fond of you, but
it can’t work. And since you are ‘mine,’ it’s up to me what we do
with you.”

“‘
What you do with me?’” I
sobbed. “This is my life! Why do you get to decide what is done
with me?”

“
Your life is my life.
That’s how this works.”

“
Then isn’t your life
mine?” I clenched my fists, trying desperately to find some ground
to stand on.

“
That’s not how this
works,” Peter shook his head. “You are human. You have no standing
over us.”

“
So you’re all just
…”

The room was spinning, and I rested my hand
on the bed to keep from collapsing. He was going to take everything
from me. The insistent way my body begged for him, the way my heart
longed for Jack, the comfort I gained from Mae and Ezra, and the
glorious future I had just mapped out for myself.

With his simple, cold words, he was ripping
everything away. The ground felt like it was giving way from
underneath me, and I had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting.

“
Alice, we never meant to
hurt you.” He sounded sad, but I could barely see him through my
own tears.

Part of me wanted to run through house
searching for Jack. I knew he would fight for me, make them change
their minds, but I felt too weak. More than that, if Peter didn’t
want me, it didn’t even seem worth fighting for.

“
You’re killing me,” I
mumbled.

Then it dawned on me. It felt like he was
literally killing me. Every part of me, physical and otherwise, was
in pain. But I knew that inside him there was a primal hunger for
me. I saw how fierce it had been in Jack’s eyes, and it had to be
stronger in Peter.

“
Peter, why don’t you just
bite me?” I asked breathlessly.

“
No,” Peter responded
hoarsely. “That’s a horrible idea.”

“
No, Peter! Listen!” I
walked over to him, willing my heart to beat harder and faster, so
the sound would overwhelm him. “I know you want to! You can just
bite me, and this will all be over with. I’ll be out of your lives
forever, and I won’t even care. And what do I even matter to you?
I’m just another stupid weak human, and you’ve killed them
before.”

“
I’m not going to kill
you.” He tried to sound disgusted, but the hunger was at the back
of his throat. When he looked away from me, I grabbed his arm and
forced him to look down at me.

“
Please,” I
pleaded.

He still resisted the idea, so I remembered
what had sent Jack over the edge. I bit my lip, hard, and before I
could even tell it was bleeding, his eyes had widened. For him, my
scent and taste were irresistible.

“
You really want this?”
Peter murmured huskily. His eyes looked conflicted, both sad and
ravenous. “Do you even understand what you’re asking?”

“
I know that I can’t live
the rest of my life without you.”

If my mind wasn't an absolute mess from its
intoxication over Peter, I might have been able to handle things
better. Even if my body hadn’t been insisting that I was incapable
of surviving without Peter, it would still have been
devastating.

I truly planned to spend forever with Jack.
It’d be impossible to go to school, to college, to go about my
tedious little life and spend every day getting older, sicker,
dying, and trying to forget them. I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t
even want to try. It hurt far too much.

“
Forgive me,” Peter
whispered.

Before I could say anything more, I felt his
lips pressed hotly on my neck, and then this sharp pain shot into
me, like the prick of a needle. It was quickly replaced by this
wonderful, warm pleasure spreading through me. It felt so intensely
marvelous that I couldn’t even imagine ever having felt pain.

My body trembled and went limp in his arms,
and I heard myself moaning. Ecstasy rippled through me, and I
wanted this moment to last forever.

Faintly, I became aware of how weak I felt.
At first, it had just been because the pleasure had struck me so
forcefully, and even though it still felt amazing, I could feel my
life draining away.

Some part of me knew I was dying, but there
was nothing frightening or bad about it. I felt oddly at peace, and
I let myself succumb to the drowsy, perfection that flooded over
me.

My thoughts were dissolving. There were
incoherent images of the sun shining over the tops of the building,
and Peter’s green eyes, and Jack’s laughter. I thought of my
brother, and I hoped he understood.

Then there was nothing except the way I
felt, buried underneath a warm blanket. My heart had slowed
considerably, and my lungs felt empty.

The sharp pain of separation hit me
suddenly, and an intense chill. My mind felt strangely alert, but I
didn’t even have the strength to open my eyelids.

I could hear the commotion going on around
me. Peter wasn’t holding me anymore, but I couldn’t tell where I
was. I just knew that his arms weren’t around me and his mouth
wasn’t pressed to my neck. He had stopped too soon, and I was still
alive.

There were banging noises and the sounds of
rustling feet. Voices were shouting, and it took a minute for me to
able to focus in on them clearly.

Jack was shouting at Peter, calling him all
sorts of hateful names, and Peter was saying very little in his own
defense. Then Ezra’s voice boomed in, and the movement stopped. He
had broken up the fight.

“
He tried to kill her!”
Jack cried, and I could hear the terrified desperation in his
voice.

“
But she’s not dead,” Ezra
told him soothingly. I felt his strong hands touching my face,
feeling my pulse and inspecting the damage. I wanted to yell at
them, to tell them to leave me here to die, but I barely even had
the strength to breathe, let alone speak. “She’s lost a lot of
blood.”

“
She wanted me to do it,”
Peter muttered, and this was followed by a loud smacking
sound.

“
Jack! Peter!” Ezra roared.
“If you want to save her life, then you have to listen to
me!”

“
I don’t know if I want to
save her life,” Peter told them quietly.

Ezra let go of my face so he could rush over
to separate the fight. I could hear their bodies slamming against
each other, and Jack growling viciously.

“
Peter, step out,” Ezra
commanded. “And tell Mae that we need type AB positive. We should
have some in the cooler downstairs.”

“
She’s going to be
alright?” Jack whimpered.