Silence: Part Two of Echoes & Silence (28 page)

“I don’t want to be that way, though,” I said, hiding my face against the pillow. “In the moment it feels so right—like I could rip off your arms and it would only turn me on, but now—”

“As the heat dies down you
will
regret things, my love. It’s a part of the process.”

“What process?”

“Making room for the monster; deciding who you want to be as a vampire, and who you are as a human being.”

“But I’m a Lilithian vampire. We’re not supposed to be twisted and evil.”

“And this brings into argument the nature versus nurture theory.”

“How so?”

“It’s not in your nature to hurt anyone—to make them fear you, or to enjoy that fear. But after all you’ve suffered, is it any wonder that all the torture and uncertainty, the abuse, the horror, the molestation, has twisted your pretty little mind?”

I swallowed down the sinking feeling.

“But you’re in a safe place with me, Ara. In my arms.” He wrapped them around me and squeezed tight. “I will love you no matter what. I will adore you as my sweet, caring wife, and I will treasure you as the monster. You will always have me to fall on when you’re not sure who you are anymore.”

I rolled over awkwardly and snuggled into him, tracing a line absently with my finger down his bare chest. “I feel really bad that I hurt you.”

“You didn’t, Ara.” He tilted my face up so our eyes met. “You weren’t even in there—” he tapped my head gently, “—I was with your monster, and I knew that.”

I took a deep, resolving breath, and let it out. “This is an unhealthy relationship.”

“How so?” He laughed.

“Couples aren’t supposed to hurt each other.”

He parted his knees slightly and looked down. “Do you see any damage now?”

“No,” I looked, but looked away quickly. “That’s not the point, though.”

“Well, I won’t tell if you don’t.” He kissed my forehead. “But you don’t feel any better about it, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Ara, this isn’t an abusive relationship. Neither of us is the victim here. We’re vampires. And vampires are twisted and sometimes cruel. But if we both like it that way, then I don’t really see a problem.”

“I guess you’re right,” I realised, psychoanalysing it all. “When people are into the messed-up stuff we’re into, the only problem is when the abuse is
unwanted
.”

“Exactly.” He tucked my hair behind my ear and pressed both hands firmly to my jaw. “As long as we both talk openly about our preferences, and respect each other’s boundaries, then this is not an abusive relationship.”

I smiled, feeling a bit better about it all. “So are you saying I can mutilate your testicles again?”

“Um, no.” He put his serious face on and rolled onto his back. “Like I said, I’ll teach you how to make a person afraid without actually causing them harm.”

“How would I do that?” I rolled up onto my elbow.

David tapped his head, winking at me. “Create a situation in their minds where they believe they’re being chased or hurt.”

My brows pushed up with the sudden extra width of my eyes. “I never thought of that.”

“And that, my love, is why I let you go—why I let you hurt me like that, because you needed it. You needed to experience the severity of your monster to know what it was capable of and what you wanted it to be capable of.”

I slyly raised a brow at him. “You
let
me do that to you, huh?”

“I could have stopped you if I wanted to badly enough.”

“I beg to differ.” I laid down on my back.

“Don’t underestimate me, Ara. I am a hell of a lot older than you, and I’ve had a lot more practice fighting off sadistic leeches.”

“Leeches!”

He laughed, scooping up my hand. “Is the baby okay? I was pretty rough.”

“She’s fine—she was just pushed all the way back into my deepest pelvic cavity.”

He laughed again. “We won’t be able to do that position much longer.”

I moved his hand and laid it over Bump. “She’s getting so big now.”

“I noticed.” He bent slightly and kissed my belly again. “But you look smaller when you lay on your back.”

“That’s normal.” I patted the belly. “I read up on it.”

“I suppose that’s to allow room for baby-mommy and baby-daddy to make love a little longer.”

“I’m not sure that’s what Nature had in mind at the time, but I’m willing to go with it.”

His breathy smile warmed the dawn, the green slowly returning to his eyes, then he looked over at the glass doors. “Sun’s up. I should go fix the pipes so we can shower.”

“You can fix pipes?”

“Of course I can.” He stood, baring all in front of me. “I may be a vampire, but I’m still a man.”

“Not all men can fix pipes.”

“Good thing I’m not all men,” he said, picking up his jeans, then, realising they were ripped, frowned at me. “I hope, since you’re a
woman
, you know how to sew.”

I looked at the jeans, then his face, to see if he was serious.

He laughed, hanging them over his shoulder. “I was joking, Ara.”

“You better have been.” I rolled over and snuggled into the blankets. “But I
can
sew, you know.”

“Good,” he said, walking his bare butt to the bathroom. “Then you better get to work,
wife
. You have beds to make and floors to mop as well.”

My jaw dropped with insult, and David just laughed again as he closed the bathroom door.

Chapter Six

Once last night’s vomit could finally be flushed down, and when the water flowed freely through the pipes, the chimney had been repaired and the new mattress brought home and laid in place, David and I took a plate of sandwiches out to the lake and spent the afternoon on the old picnic rug under the golden autumn sun. There was still plenty to do back at the house just to make it liveable, but neither of us made any effort to move. I knew David’s hesitation was because he felt safe here in this little bubble that had formed around us while we talked; he’d opened up about a lot of things and I don’t think he was finished. This strong, closed-off guy didn’t want to be alone in his circle of worries and fears anymore; he wanted to let me in—he always had. He just had to feel safe to do so. Which is why there was also no way
I
would get up and break the magic. If he was happy to keep talking, I would stay here until it snowed on me.

“I don’t really understand,” I said, propping my hands under me to sit up. I slid back a few inches to lean my back on the rock, my thighs right beside David’s face. “How can you not know how to be normal?”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve lived a normal human life, Ara,” he said, tucking one arm behind his head. “After all I’ve been through—starting from my days as a council leader to finding and then practically obsessing over you, then fighting for a way for us to be together, right up to becoming King and then losing you—I’ve lost a lot of myself; crossed paths with the vampire so many times I’m not sure now who rules supreme.”

I considered him for a moment—the golden streaks in his dark brown hair; the way the sun reached down from the sky as if to simply touch his beauty, magnifying it instead—and wondered how on earth he could be so sweet-looking yet so damn evil. “Are you saying you’re not sure if you’re good anymore?”

His mouth opened with a breathy laugh. “No. I’m saying that the vampire seems to be dying.” He rolled slightly and looked up at me. “If I no longer enjoy stalking and hunting and torturing, then… I don’t know who I am anymore, or what I’m even interested in.”

I very slowly drew my knee to my chest, trying to hide a smile behind it. I liked this version of him. But at the same time, I wanted to say just the right thing to make everything better. If a hundred-and-something year old vampire didn’t have any answers, though, what good could
I
do? “What were you interested in before you met me?”

“In what very little spare time I used to get as a council leader…?” I watched him as his mind ticked, his eyes clearly flashing over the past. “When we were younger, Jason and I loved baseball—playing it, not so much watching. And we’d occasionally, when we weren’t at odds, go out for a game now and then. Other than that, all I really ever did was read books… or listen to music,” he added, like music was an afterthought.

“Well, see?” I tapped him with the back of my wrist. “You have interests. I mean, music is one. Books…”

“I suppose,” he cut in gently. “But those things are just a part of my… makeup, you might say. They’re not hobbies.”

I reached down and took his hand off his belly to hold it. “It’s just going to take time. After that spell Morg put on you and after all the hell we’ve been through, you won’t feel whole again for a long time. And I don’t think you should try to. I just think maybe we should try to find at least one reason to smile every day and, eventually, it will become a habit and, eventually after that, we’ll just turn around one day when we’re doing something random and realise that we feel whole again.”

He squeezed my hand, and when I looked up from it to his green eyes, they were smiling.

“What?” I asked nervously.

“You just surprise me sometimes, that’s all.”

“How so?”

He laid his head back down on the underside of his arm and smiled up at the sky. “Because you couldn’t be more right. I can feel it in my bones that I just need distance from our past—just need to come to the point where it’s not so raw and fresh in my thoughts—and only time passing can do that.”

“Right, but you
can
distract yourself while you’re letting it pass. The sooner you stop thinking about everything, the quicker you can forget.”

“Okay, so we need a distraction.”

“Yes. But what?”

He pressed his lips together in thought. “Well, we can only have so much sex before we need a break—”

“Says you.”

He laughed. “We could read to each other,” he suggested, then his shoulders dropped in disappointment. “But we don’t share the same tastes in literature.”

“I’d be willing to hear any story read by you,” I offered. “Besides, a different genre might bring something new to my life. Who knows?”

“Perhaps.”

“And,” I said carefully, “maybe if I read to you from
my
preferred genre, you might find a new connection to something, too. It’s always good to try new things.”

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Okay, so that’s one thing. What else can we do?”

“Well, we don’t have electricity, so I can’t kick your ass on Halo—like we used to do.”

He laughed loudly then. “I forgot about that.”

“That’s because you lost, and then locked that memory away in the Vault of No Return.”

He laughed again. “I could get a generator.”

“I think you should do that,” I said, and my mind wandered back to the house, seeing it in the daylight that brightly illuminated all the things that were wrong with it. “What about renovations—aside from the necessary ones? We could get all domestic, you know—pick out curtains.”

I was kind of joking, but when David sat up and dropped his arms over his knees, studying my face like a new idea was forming, I suddenly got the feeling that we’d be taking another trip into town for some new paint.

“I don’t know the first thing about fixing up a house,” he said. “But perhaps that’s where we could start our reading journey together.”

“Home improvement books?” I screwed my nose up. “Not the genre I had in mind.”

“I know. But it’s boring and so normal it just might bring us back from the dark depths of the supernatural world.”

I nodded to myself. He was right. So right that I started thinking about rugs and matching pillowcases.

***

Calming elevator music played in the background, echoing around the tops of red metal shelves miles into the sky. We stood facing the tightly-packed paint-can stairway, glancing sideways at each other every now and then.

“Primer?” I said. “I think my dad used this first when he painted our house.”

“This is all very different to the days when the toughest choice was the colour.”

“And when was that?” I chuckled. “When the only two choices were white and white?”

His eyes sparkled as he smiled; they always seemed to sparkle in a different way when the laughter was as a result of something I’d said. If he laughed at a book or joke, it wasn’t as warm a smile as when he laughed at me. I liked that.

He reached up and drew a pamphlet from a plastic pocket on the front of the shelf, and flipped it over to read the back. “Well, I know we need to sand the old paint off first, then we need to—”

“Can I help you folks with something?” a man said.

David and I turned around to the open face of a very tanned man wearing a blue shirt with a badge on the pocket that said “Doug”.

He raised his brows expectantly at us when neither spoke, and then his eyes moved to my belly. “Painting the nursery, are we?”

“The entire house.” David put the pamphlet back and transformed into the friendly, human version of himself. It’d been so long since I’d seen this version that my heart skipped a beat and my cheeks went hot seeing that sweet smile.

“Right.” Doug clapped his hands once. “Then we have a big job to do, do we?”

“I would say that’s a fair assessment,” David said flatly.

“So what colour are we looking for?”

I signalled David with my eyes as Doug led us to the help desk. If that man said ‘we’ one more time, I would be forced to slap his overly-tanned chops, and it would take a vampire to hold me back.

“White,” David said, taking my hand and squeezing it authoritatively, as if to say ‘Don’t you dare slap him’.

“And for the inside?” The man typed something on his computer. “Are we painting the inside?”

David’s grip tightened on my hand. “Yes.”

“Do we know a colour?”

I squeezed David’s hand this time, when he thought,
Red. Blue. Yellow.
We
know many colours.

Instead he said, “Purple.”

That woke me up, and it reset the man, too.

“Ara?” David turned to me. “What colour would you like our house to be inside?”

“Uh…” My eyes drifted to the wall of colour swatches behind me. “Can I have some time to think about it?”

“Of course. You go take a look over there, and I’ll find out what else we need to buy.” David aimed me in the right direction and gave me a gentle nudge.

Before I walked away, I offered him ‘the look’.
Be nice,
I thought.

He just grinned malevolently, and the look of the bad-ass vampire behind those eyes made my mouth water.

As I perused the pale greens and ambers and yellows, I listened slightly to Doug’s very informative lecture, in case I needed to save the man. The conversation went well, right up to the word ‘primer’, but after that Doug started speaking in a foreign tongue.

I glanced back and, sure enough, David looked just as confused as me.

He did at least catch on though, after a minute, and when he tried to tell Doug he understood and just wanted to buy the products and get out of here, the man kept going—repeating things he’d already told him.

The Council Leader, the King, the hundred-year-old vampire, stood there and wore the condescension for a moment, but his jaw slowly set tighter and tighter, and his hands bunched into fists by his jeans pockets.

“And I suppose we’ll be purchasing a packet of condoms with the can of nursery paint, will we?” Doug slapped David on the back, and my jaw dropped.

As the shock of the insult lilted away it left behind fear—for Doug’s life. David was at least seventy years older than that clerk, but he was being treated like a nineteen-year-old boy that got his high school girlfriend pregnant. Accidentally.

I leaned back on the shelf and folded my arms, waiting to see his reaction.

He just laughed softly, though, wagging a finger at Doug. “That’s funny. Real funny.”

“Ah, it’s all in fun.” Doug slapped him again and moved behind the counter. “And, we are able to pay for all this stuff, aren’t we?”

David puffed his lips up in a very forced smile, and nodded a few times—to himself.

“Good, good.” Doug handed David a bit of paper with a friendly smile. “Did we need anything else before we ring this up?”

“Now that you mention it, I think we do, don’t we, Ara?” David turned at the shoulder and looked back at me.

I nodded, not really sure if we did or didn’t.

“Perhaps I can help then?” Doug offered.

“You know, you’ve been a great help, but—” David leaned a little closer; I strained my ears to hear what he was saying, but Jenny called for Janet over the PA then and even my vampire ears couldn’t make out what David said.

He walked away from Doug, slapping
his
back affectionately, and came to stand beside me, folding his arms and leaning on the shelf in the same way I was. “Found a colour yet?”

“Um. This one.” I held it up for him.

He clearly didn’t agree, but accepted it without saying so.

“Ready to go shop for pillows then?” He plucked the swatch from my fingers.

As we walked our shopping cart toward to the other counter to get the tint mixed, I looked back at our helpful clerk. “What did you say to Doug?”

“Oh.” He stopped walking, as though he’d forgotten about him, and held me in place by the arm. “Watch.”

I scrutinised his evil smile for a moment, then looked at Doug as he spotted a piece of gum on the floor. He walked around the counter, frowning at the gum, then put both hands on his knees, leaned right down and said, “Hello there. Do we need some help picking out some colours, do we?”

A burst of laughter folded me forward. “What is he doing?”

“Giving helpful advice, that’s all.”

“To a bit of gum?”

David shrugged. “Far as he’s concerned, it’s a very confused customer.”

I covered my mouth, laughing harder. “How long will he do that for?”

“Until he realises he’s not sure why he’s doing it.” He let go of my arm then and placed his hand on my back. “Come on. We’ll get some sanding paper and paint brushes while they mix the paint.”

***