Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (17 page)

“You aren’t ashamed of me, are you?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m just not that into PDA.”

“Just a peck, then,” he said virtuously. “On the cheek.”

“All right,” I agreed, smiling despite myself.

He bent forward. I felt his breath on my cheek. I couldn’t help it. I turned into the kiss, catching his mouth full-on. His lips were hot against mine and tasted like mint toothpaste. My heart sped up, my belly growing pleasantly warm and my head light by the time we broke off.

It wasn’t like Dorian’s kiss. Nothing at all. It wasn’t deep enough to lose myself inside. But it was still sweet, sweet and true.

In Dorian’s world, I never knew what was true and what was delusion.

He smiled at me, and I smiled back ruefully.

“Cheek, huh?” he said.

“It’s close enough, isn’t it?” I said.

“Regrets?” he asked.

If he only knew....

I shook my head. “Not about this.”

“So,” he said, “about the whole ‘next semester’ thing. Mind if we get a bit of a jump on that?”

“I think we just did,” I said.

“Want to go out, I mean? We could go to the National Harbor for New Year’s Eve.”

I felt a pang of guilt. “Sorry. I already promised a friend I’d go to a party with him.”

“Him?” The pronoun did not go unnoticed. “Anyone I know?”

“No,” I said evasively. “Just somebody I know from the clinic.”

“How about tonight, then?” he asked lightly, utterly secure in his knowledge of my attraction to him. Secure in his trust of me. “Better get a jump on that
him
. Dinner and a movie?”

“Sounds good. Let’s see what there is.”

I freed my hand to use my cell phone, flipping through the movie listings.

“I don’t do chick flicks,” I warned him. “So if you want to see the newest Jennifer Lopez whatever, you’ll have to take Lisette.”

“What if they were showing
The Princess Bride?”
he challenged.

“The Princess Bride
is not a chick flick,” I said frostily. “It’s a classic. And if you don’t know that, then we definitely shouldn’t be going out at all.”

He chuckled and snagged the phone out of my hands. “Okay, what do you want to see? Explosions and chases? Or superheroes?”

“Don’t superheroes come with explosions and chases?” I countered. “If I have to pick...eh, let’s skip the comic book one. Sarah will probably want to drag us all to watch it later. She’s kind of crazy about those.”

“All right, then. Arundel Mills, eight p.m. showing, and I’ll pick you up at six-thirty?” he asked.

“Ooo, like a real date,” I said.

“It is a real date.” He made a face at me. “It’d better be, or I’m downgrading you to McDonald’s and a matinee.”

I laughed. “Yeah, it’s a real date.”

Lisette came into view with a garment bag over her arm. “One hundred fifty dollars down! One hundred to go,” she announced as she drew near. Her eyes burned with curiosity, but she pretended that she was thinking of nothing but her clothes.

“Saving a bit for the school year, are you?” I said.

“Well, everyone needs pizza money, right?” She grinned. “You two ready to go?”

“Sure,” I said.

Geoff stood up, and I grabbed my phone back and pushed to my feet.

“Nordstrom’s next.” Lisette gave me a broad wink and strode off, leaving us to follow as we would.

Geoff extended his hand again, and I took it, glad for its warmth.

“T
hat was good,” I said four hours later, zipping my jacket up to my chin as I shivered.

We stood outside The Cheesecake Factory, a short walk from the Arundel Mills theater. I’d expected some level of awkwardness at dinner—it was only our second attempt at something resembling a real date, after all. But everything had been easy and natural, the way it always was with Geoff.

The way it never was with Dorian.

I pushed that thought out of my head.

Geoff playfully tugged my hood up over my head. “We can wait inside the mall until it’s time to go inside the theater.”

“Nah. Let’s walk,” I said. “It’s quieter out here.”

I took his offered hand.

“Your hands are always so cold,” he observed.

“Maybe yours are just warm,” I countered.

He shoved our clasped hands into his coat pocket. “There,” he said. “Now they’ll both be warm.”

I put my free hand into my other pocket. Together, we ambled across the parking lot toward the theater entrance. There were a couple of small, dirty piles of snow where the snowplow had pushed them, melting slowly on the islands of grass, but the rest of the parking lot was bare and dry.

Reflexively, I scanned the windswept expanse. I didn’t know what I was looking for—another assassin, Cosimo, or maybe Dorian himself. But there was no one in sight except a mother pushing a stroller one-handed as she held tight to a toddler with her other hand.

Everything was perfectly, completely normal.

“So, your windsurfing story,” I said, picking up the thread of conversation that had been dropped when we’d wrestled with our coats outside the restaurant.

He grinned at me. “Okay, so Dale and I were out a few hundred yards from shore when we hit this patch of jellyfish. You’ve seen a jelly or two washed up on the shore before—but nothing like this. I mean, they were everywhere, and you could feel it when the finbox hit them. You have to remember that these boards were like twenty or thirty years old—something Dale’s dad had gotten as a teenager that lived in their garage. They were cheap to begin with, cheap and battered, way worse than any of the stuff you find at the rental places at the beach. But they were free.”

“Sounds like a start to a really great day,” I said. It felt so good, walking side-by-side with Geoff, our shoulders rubbing as we stepped. I clung onto the sensation, writing it into my brain with the fervency of someone who was afraid of losing it all.

“No kidding. So here we were, plowing through this raft of jellies, Dale wearing nothing but board shorts. Our boards shook a little every time we sliced through one. And all that shaking loosened Dale’s mast from its base, and as it flew off, so did he.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Oh, yes. I’d been wondering if those were stinging jellyfish. I found out about half a second after Dale hit the water. He started screaming and thrashing, struggling to get his board back together. I wasn’t as good at windsurfing as he was, so it took me a while to circle back to him, and by the time I got there, he had his mast back in its base and was back on the board after a waterstart, still cursing.”

“Crap,” I said.

“When I got close enough, I could hear what he was saying. ‘They stung me in the mouth! The freaking mouth!’”

I groaned.

“Anyhow, we went straight back to shore, and after a visit to the hospital, Dale spent the rest of the weekend watching TV and slathering on the medicated cream he got. And I never went out again without a long-sleeved rashguard.”

“I can imagine,” I said. “Wasn’t much of a Memorial Day weekend, was it?”

“Well, it was memorable,” Geoff said, waggling his eyebrows to let me know the pun was deliberate.

I jostled him deliberately with my shoulder, and we kept walking.

“So, this friend of yours, the guy from the clinic,” Geoff began. “What does he look like?”

My chest tightened, and I felt suddenly colder.

“Why?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light. “Jealous?”

“I was just asking because I wondered if he was the same guy I met while I was waiting for you to come downstairs tonight.”

I fought down a wave of panic. Clarissa could have told Dorian, and if he knew about Geoff, he’d never let me go. He couldn’t afford to, could he? He’d come and he’d get me and I wouldn’t come out of his mausoleum of a house again until I was truly and utterly his.

And how far away was that point now, really?

“Tallish,” I said around the strangling tightness in my throat. “Black hair. Blue eyes.”

“Oh,” he said. “I guess it’s not him, then.”

Not him. Not Dorian, come to stop me.

My hand had tightened around Geoff’s, and I forced it to relax. “Why do you think he had anything to do with me?”

“Because he came up to my car and knocked on my window. When I rolled it down, he said, ‘Waiting for Cora?’ That kind of gave me the hint.”

Not Dorian—but who, then?

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I said, ‘Maybe.’ Kind of a dumb answer, but I was so surprised, I didn’t really know what to say.”

“And what did he say?”

“‘You’ll be good for her.’ Just like that. Then, ‘See that you treat her right.’ And then he was gone.”

Not someone Geoff knew, so almost certainly from Dorian’s world—and only one other agnatic man had been lurking about, one who would be happy that I’d have a human date.

I asked, “Was he a little shorter than you? Light brown hair, sunglasses, brown leather blazer, a D&G t-shirt?”

“Yeah, that was him,” Geoff said. “Well, I don’t really know how tall he was because I was sitting in the car, but that seemed to be him.”

“That’s Cosimo,” I said.
“Not
my friend. But I met him at the clinic, too.”

“Is there something I should know about him?” Geoff looked grave. “Like, is he stalking you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He showed up today on campus, wanting to talk to me. He’s overly interested in my love life, but I think mainly it isn’t that he wants to date me but that he doesn’t want my—my friend to,” I finished a bit lamely. I had almost called Dorian my agnate. That would have required a bit of explanation that I wasn’t ready to give.

“But he isn’t,” Geoff said. “Dating you, I mean.”

I closed my eyes for a second, and all the sensations washed over me, Dorian holding me, kissing me, his mouth and hands all over me....

“No, not dating,” I said aloud. What we had could not be encompassed by that word.

“So you think this Cosimo guy will go away on his own? Or do you need to do something about him?”

I looked up at him. He held none of Dorian’s power, but also none of Dorian’s terror over me. He was handsome, kind, and so completely human. He was everything I’d wanted and the way back to my old life, the one I’d planned out so carefully. The one my Gramma knew.

“I think he’ll go,” I said.

We’d passed the theater entrance some time before. Geoff pulled his phone from his pocket and frowned at it. “Twenty minutes until the show, now,” he said. “Might as well head in.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

And we did.

We got drinks and popcorn and jammed our jackets under our seats in the half-empty theater. While the previews were still running, Geoff smiled at me and wrapped his arm around my shoulders, and I snuggled into him. He smelled of soap, deodorant, and body spray, a pleasant combination, and his chest was warm and firm.

The movie was the third installment in a blockbuster action series, which meant more camera shaking, more violence, and even less plot. It was mindless fun. I ran out of my popcorn first, and Geoff playfully popped a kernel of his into my mouth, his fingers brushing my lips.

I looked up at him.

“Still hungry, are you?” he asked, leaning close enough that none of the people around us could hear.

“I’m still catching up,” I said. “Putting some meat on these bones.”

“I like you the way you are now,” Geoff said. He grinned. “Of course, I liked you the way you were before you got sick, too.”

He leaned down, pulling me to him against the arm of the chair between us, his mouth finding mine. It was hot, so hot against mine, and it tasted of Coke and popcorn and him. I leaned into it, kissing him back, trying to push from my mind the memory of another mouth, other kisses that roused in me the kinds of sensations that I knew Geoff never could.

He broke off suddenly as his tray with his popcorn and drink started to slide off his lap, catching it right before it went over.

He laughed, and I did, too.

“Well, that never happens in the movies,” he said.

“No, no it doesn’t,” I agreed.

After the movie was over, we walked side-by-side to his car. His hand held mine firmly. He hit the unlock button on his key fob and walked me to the passenger side.

“Oh, chivalrous,” I joked. “Are you going to open it, too?”

“Sure,” he said. “But first, I was planning on this.”

He turned so we were face-to-face. Taking both my hands, he leaned down and kissed me. I leaned back against the cold metal door, opening to him, glad for his heat, his humanity. Eventually, I pulled back, catching my breath, and he kissed my cheek, my neck. My heart beat faster, my skin flushing even in the cold. And for a moment, just one moment, he was the only man in the world.

A mall security truck rolled by slowly, the guard glaring at us suspiciously from inside.

“We’d better go,” I said. “Or that guy’s going to kick us out.”

Geoff straightened. “Your apartment?”

I knew what he was asking—both things. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

He opened the car door for me, and I got in. He joined me, going to the driver’s side. He shoved the keys in the ignition, then grabbed my face in his hands and kissed me again for a very long time.

I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to let anything else in my brain except his touch, his mouth, his hands—I didn’t want to let the darkness back in.

Finally, he started the car. The headlights flicked on, and he backed out of the parking space.

“Well,” I said.

“Well,” he echoed.

I knotted my hands in my lap, watching his profile as he drove. Was this what I wanted? Was Geoff what I wanted?

He was everything that I had wanted, before. I knew that much. Until little more than a month ago, when I had walked into Dorian Thorne’s office, and he had pierced me with those eyes, touched me with his hands....

Geoff’s hand slid from the steering wheel to cover mine. I clasped it.

Geoff was real. He was human. He could never make me want to give him a part of myself that I did not choose to. He couldn’t fill my mind with heady madness, set my entire body to singing at his touch—