Double Take by A.J. Cole (literature books to read TXT) 📕

“Oh, come on, Leander. Are you really that sensitive?”

He raised his head and gave her a deep stare. “What you did wasn’t fair. I mean, it’s difficult enough for a guy to deal with sudden… nakedness, even if he’s normal. For a werepire, it’s devastating. I was almost unable to keep myself from, uh, from, from - ”

“Jumping me and doing the nasty right there on the floor? I know. Sorry.”

“You know?!”

“Hey, payback, pal. You insist on breaking into my apartment whenever the hell you please, so I had to show you there’d be consequences.” She shrugged and brought her dish and cup to the sink.

“C-consequences!” he spluttered. “Consequences for who?”

“Whom.”

“Whatever. Riss, you’re the one who almost got brutally raped, and believe me, when I say ‘brutal,’ that’s exactly what I mean. The male werepire has pretty much no control whatsoever once he passes that point of no return.”

Something in his tone made her turn to face him, puzzled. She paled, seeing he was dead serious. “So, even if it’s mutual, you’d be, you know, brutal?”

“’Fraid so. I think it’s built in to discourage us from having sex. As you may have surmised, any pregnancy that might result would have devastating ramifications down the line.”

“Wow.” She looked at the floor. “I am sorry, then. On several levels.” Without looking at him again, she left the kitchen, grabbed her purse and books from the hall table and opened the door.

He followed her out, waiting as she locked up, and they went downstairs, silent, Arissa suspecting his thoughts were running along the same line as hers.

The silence continued as they drove to school, but about a block from the entrance to the University, Arissa’s mental wheels stopped their mad spinning. “Okay, don’t take this to mean anything, but I have a question.” She kept her eyes on the road, as much to avoid having an accident as to avoid seeing his reaction. “What if say, two werepires decide they really, um like each other. A lot. Okay, let’s say they fall in love or something silly like that.” She uttered manic giggle. “So! And here’s my question. Wouldn’t that love make it possible for them to be, you know, intimate without one hurting the other?”

He was silent for so long, she almost did look, but then he sighed. “Maybe. I don’t know. I just know that we – male werepires – can’t mess around for fun. A few have, in fact, gotten married, which is how we found out about what happens when their kids try to mate with humans. And as far as I know, the husbands in those relationships didn’t harm their wives in any way. So, maybe.”

“Well, how do you deal with your natural urges?” She’d pulled into the parking lot by this time and was searching for a space that wasn’t on another planet.

“Celibacy.” His voice was wandering about in the Despondent Zone, and she had to clamp down on an impulse to say, “Oh, you poor thing!”

“Really?” There. That didn’t sound like pity. “How long have you been, er, like that? I mean, when was the last time - ?”

“Can we not talk about this?”

Parked at last, she switched off the engine and allowed herself to face him. To her surprise, his jaw was clenched, brows nearly meeting over the bridge of his nose. Great, she thought. Now I want to kiss him. Crap. “Sure, Leander. I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to upset you or anything.”

He took a deep breath through his nose, returning her stare. “I know you didn’t. So okay. Can we just say what we’re really thinking here? I don’t know about how you feel, Riss, but I really like you. For that reason, I never approached you before, even though I’ve wanted to for a long time. And yes, I said I didn’t know we had a class together, but I lied. Had to. I didn’t want you thinking I was some kind of stalker. Anyway, when I found out you had become like me, I – please forgive me – I was delighted. It meant I could finally talk to you without committing myself to a relationship that went beyond the friend stage. But now I’m not sure I can handle that, and the last thing I want is to hurt you, physically or in any other way.”

She was astounded. This was the most she’d ever heard him say, for one thing. For another, he’d lied to her? What a horrible thing to do, even if she did accept his reasoning! For yet another, he was confessing that he like her. Uh-oh on steroids. “Wow. Well, since you’re being so honest, I’ll reciprocate. It’ll make me late for class, but whatever.” She sat straighter and took a deep breath. “I like you, too. I’m totally attracted to you, and from what little I’ve come to know of who you are, I find you to be very nice, a really good guy, and if it weren’t for this new development about the whole death-by-sex thing, I’d be all over you right now. There. I said it, and now I’m getting out of the car because that look in your eyes is scaring the snot out of me.”

She grabbed her purse and books, snatched the keys from the ignition, and shoved open the door, all in one smooth, totally un-Arissa-like motion. She was almost in the building by the time he caught up with her.

“Arissa, wait!”

She turned around. “Are you going to - ”

“No, Riss. We’re in front of a school building with students and teachers all over the place.”

“Not to mention the campus police.”

“Them, too. I just wanted to say that I appreciate that you like me. I actually feel a little better about myself. And who knows? Maybe we can make this work somehow. I think we should go talk to Kyria.”

She thought about that. “Hmm. Sounds like a smart idea. Okay.” A smile lit her features and she took off for class, aware that she was now several minutes late and her classroom was on the top floor on the other side of the building. She decided to make a run for it, maybe get to her seat before the teacher noticed how tardy she was.

Werepire Lesson #1: Never run in public. She gave herself this severe advice when, three seconds later, she found herself at the door of her classroom, not winded, not worn out, in fact exhilarated. She’d been unaware of anyone in the halls as she’d zoomed through, but couldn’t be one hundred percent sure. If anyone had seen her, there would be some kind of fallout, no doubt. However, she was here now, and her worries about being scolded by the teacher melted away. This must have been an ability that had developed more fully since her encounter with Vlad on that back road, because the last time she’d hurried outside from class, the speed factor had still been normal. Huh. Still… with a silent “ta-da!” she turned the knob and entered the classroom.

“So you see, you don’t necessarily have to kill them.”

“Will I be able to control myself enough, though?”

Vlad gave her a serious look and took a bite of his burger. They were seated in a back corner of The Graduate, a diner located right outside the campus. Already Arissa had learned a number of startling facts, information that rocked the foundations of all she thought she knew about vampirish things.

After her last class, she’d left the building the way she’d come in (slowly, this time), planning to go to her car to wait for Vlad. It had occurred to her that he probably wasn’t sitting on one of the benches, sunbathing. But before she got off the sidewalk, a gorgeous silver Jaguar with dark windows swooshed up to the curb in front of her, the passenger door clicking open in invitation.

Concluding that she wasn’t about to be abducted by a local drug lord, she got in right away and shut the door, sure that Vlad wouldn’t appreciate it if she stood there with the door wide open, peering in to make sure it was him and letting in all that uncomfortable sunshine.

“How are you, Arissa?” he’d asked as the car eased away like a ghost. “Are you hungry?”

In fact, she’d been ravenous, not having bothered with lunch. They’d gone to the diner, and there the surprises had begun. First, after parking he’d told her to go ahead in. She figured he had to cover up or something before leaving the car, but by the time she got to the entrance, he was already there, inside, opening the door for her.

“Not gonna ask,” she’d murmured, shivering from the assault of an over-enthusiastic air-conditioning system.

“I’ll explain anyway,” he’d said through a grin.

The hostess had given Vlad a dreamy smile, making Arissa wonder how well he knew her, and seated them at a table against the back wall and away from the windows. Before he could say anything, the waitress had appeared at the table, pencil poised over her order pad. Having eaten here often enough to know what was on their simple, fifties-style menu, Arissa had ordered a ham-on-rye club sandwich, fries and a diet soda. When the waitress turned to Vlad, she fully expected him to say, “Oh, nothing for me, thanks – a glass of water with lemon, perhaps.”

Nope. He had favored the girl with a high-wattage smile and ordered a burger, rare, with pickles, onion, tomato, mustard and mayo, large cheese fries, a coke, and asked if they had any of those wonderful chocolate chip brownies left, which he wanted with a cup of coffee after the meal.

The look on Arissa’s face pretty much must have said it all, and Vlad had burst out laughing. That was three shocks in a row, so far: that he could run so fast that she never felt him pass her outside, that he could eat regular food, and that he could not only laugh, but become absolutely beautiful when he did. She also noticed that while the tips of his fangs were visible, they didn’t look all that strange.

“Okay,” she’d said. “I can see I know absolutely nothing about anything. Start explaining, please.”

So he had. He told her that while a vampire’s speed was impressive, it was also the only way they could get around during the daytime without looking like lobsters by bedtime. He also told her that as fast as he was, when she “turned” under the power of the full moon, her speed of movement would be twice that of his. Since she’d experienced how swiftly she could go already, she believed him.

Next, he said that all the tales of vampires only able to consume blood because they were too dead to eat (“How can one be ‘too’ dead, eh?”) was only partly true. Their bodies didn’t require constant nourishment from normal sources, but were still capable of processing food in almost the same way as they did before they died. The blood, however, functioned much the way oxygen worked in a living body, providing the animus that kept them undead instead of dead-dead. So blood wasn’t consumed for its nutritional value at all, but rather to keep their