She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and when I slide back down next to her, her eyes are luminous. I go still, though I can’t quite read what she’s thinking.
Her lips look soft and her lip ring wiggles a little as if she’s toying nervously with it. I swallow and speak, because if I don’t I won’t be able to stop myself from kissing her and then she’s going to know exactly how much it’s killing me to wait, to try to seduce her into wanting me as much as I want her.
“What does it sound like?”
Her lashes sweep down and she smiles almost shyly. “I could hum it, I guess.”
A grin breaks out over my face. I don’t know how I managed to forget. “Be right back,” I tell her, and push to my feet.
Her hand flashes out and catches me by the front of my hoodie, and she stands up with me, her fist balling in the zipper. I suck my breath in as her knuckles graze my abs through two layers of fabric.
“Last time you said that, you didn’t come back for hours,” she says plainly, and it doesn’t look like she’s teasing. She tilts her head, the breeze sweeping strands of hair across her face. “Are you okay?” she says in a low voice, like she wants the words to stay just between the two of us.
I want to smile, but it puts a funny, fluttery feeling in my chest that she would think to ask me that, and I have no idea what expression I’m wearing right now.
I touch her hand, and her grip loosens under the brush of my fingers. “Don’t worry about me,” I say, and give her a lopsided smile. “Seriously, be right back. I have a surprise for you.”
“I have to admit I’m a big fan of your surprises,” she says, and lets me go. My eyebrows shoot up at her flirty tone, but she just grins.
I duck my head, fighting back a blush that makes no damn sense at all, and jog back to the Camaro.
I try to shield the guitar case with my body as I take it out, but Cali’s on to me and she shrieks with pure delight. There’s a scrape of shoes on gritty cement and then she hits my back full force and I have to throw out a hand to catch myself against the car to keep from crushing her new instrument.
She hugs me around the waist, squashing all the air out of my diaphragm so fast that for one horrible second, I think I might throw up.
“Oh my God, Jeremy freaking Gilbert, tell me that’s a guitar and you’re going to let me play it and I swear on my new snare drum I will be your slave for life.”
I manage to turn around, even though it costs me the end of that hug, because I want to see her beaming up at me.
“Would you still be my slave if I told you it was a lionfish?” I tease.
“Honey, I’ll call it anything you want if it has six strings,” she purrs, reaching past me to try to grab the case. I shift a little, using my longer arms to keep it out of her reach.
“What’s the magic word?” I taunt, trying to hold back my grin.
She catches my face between her small hands, her rings cool and nice against my jaw, and kisses me. She has to stretch up on her toes to reach and it sends her stumbling off balance against my chest. There’s a thump as the guitar hits the ground and I catch her around the waist, my forearm fitting perfectly into the curve at the small of her back, my other hand sliding up past the tattoo that I swear I can feel beneath her shirt.
She catches my lower lip between her teeth and I groan, dragging her tighter against me and as soon as my lips part she’s stroking my tongue with hers in something that feels like pure sex and the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted all at once. Her nails scrape against the back of my neck and a tiny growl escapes her as she arches her breasts into my chest.
“Karma,” Damon’s droll voice carries clearly across the parking lot, “is a bitch, little Gilbert.”
Cali pulls away, gasping, and it’s not until I feel her knees bump my thighs that I realize I’ve lifted her clear off the ground. I bend to set her down, smoothing my hand once over her hair as I look up to glare at Damon. He’s leaning his elbows on the railing of the second floor walkway, looking down on me with a cocky grin.
“Oh,” he says with a mocking look of concern. “Did I interrupt something?”
I roll my eyes, remembering the hotel in Denver and the look on his face when he stepped in front of my sister.
“We leave in half an hour,” he informs me with a wink. “Don’t forget to pack your teddy bear.”
I swear I’m going to have to live another hundred years before I learn to keep up with his mood swings. I turn to Cali, expecting to find her checking on the guitar I dropped when she kissed me, but the case sits undisturbed and she’s scraping a hand through her hair in a way I’m beginning to recognize.
“Wow, that was…inappropriate,” she says. “And jerkish, and misleading.” She winces miserably.
“And hot,” I say with a smirk.
She stops, her eyes jumping back to mine and laughter warring with guilt in her face. “I really didn’t mean to do that,” she confesses.
I catch her wrist, waggling my eyebrows. “You want to ‘not mean’ to do it again?”
She laughs, her cheeks pinkening a little, but she doesn’t move closer. I pick up the guitar with my free hand, still grinning. “Come on. You can pretend not to like me while you’re playing me your tattoo song. ‘Kay?”
She resists when I try to lead her back toward the stairs.
"Jeremy, I—”
I raise my eyebrow, interrupting her apology. “Unless you’d rather pack?”
She sags a little and then gives in, shaking her head. “Yeah right. Besides, all I have to do is zip my bag: it’s not like I took anything out.”
We grab a seat on the stairs as the porch lights of the hotel start to come on, and she flips the clasps on the case, pulling the guitar out and sighing as she settles it into her lap.
“I’m not even going to ask how you got this, or why, because it will only make me feel terrible and then I’ll have to think about making you take it back, and then my head will explode in sheer, selfish protest,” she tells me.
“Okay,” I agree.
She laughs. “You are really such a pain in the ass to get along with, you know that?”
“Hey, you’re the one who wanted to room together,” I remind her, and she just smiles, looking down at the new instrument.
She goes quiet then, listening as she tunes each string. It’s making my throat go dry to watch the way she touches the guitar, but I don’t ever want to look away.
“Ready?” she says, and when I nod, she plays four chords.
A hint of them is still lingering in the night air when she plays them again with a different emphasis. Her eyes drift closed as she plays them over and over and every time they sound different. They start bold, then go soft, and sometimes they sound spicy and impulsive, sometimes almost mournful. The last time they sound jaunty and teasing and I find myself grinning at her even though she can’t see.
She’s right. They sound like her.
“I like it,” I tell her. “I like it a lot.”
She smiles then, her fingers toying with the strings as she keeps her lashes swept downward.
“What’s mine?” I ask, curious.
“Not sure yet,” she says. “I mean, I get the impression right away, but it usually changes over time, as I get to know a person better. Yours has already changed twice.”
“Would you play it for me, how it is right now, I mean? Please,” I add when she hesitates.
“Okay, but don’t blame me if it’s wrong. I’ve only known you for a few days.”
I realize I’m holding my breath as she positions her fingers, watching the way she moves as if her hands are touching me instead of an inanimate object.
I am four chords.
The first is gentle, smooth, and the pause after it feels relaxed. The second is bigger, stronger. Unyielding but not cruel. The third lingers, and it sounds dark blue, weighted like the night sky when there’s no moon to make you see how big it really is. And the fourth teases playfully
at my ears, like a giggle that fades into the distance, leaving you with the hint of a smile on your face.
It takes her a moment to play it again, and every time she does, it sounds more familiar.
“Will you teach me?” I ask eagerly and she looks up quickly, almost surprised at the interruption.
“Sure.” She hands over the guitar and scoots closer to me. She moves one step higher, her right foot resting down by my knee and her left kicked up next to her so her thigh is soft against my back. It’s distracting as all hell, but there’s no way I’m complaining. “What do you want to learn first?”
“Yours,” I say immediately, and she looks thoughtful.
“What chords do you know?”
I tell her, trying not to be embarrassed at how short the list is.
“Okay, the transitions in mine aren’t the easiest, but I bet it won’t take you too long to pick them up. You ready?”
I nod, and she leans over my shoulder, her cheek brushing my ear as her fingers shape mine, showing me where to place them and how to move smoothly in between. My fingertips are nearly twice as wide as hers, and my hands feel clumsy at first, but everywhere our skin touches, it is perfect and the moment feels breathless, like an inhale before the first verse.
I haven’t strummed a single note, and already there’s never been a song I wanted to play more.
Chapter 9: Something to Celebrate
STEFAN
The warm scent of fabric softener and the soft thump of dryers are almost comforting, though I normally hate doing laundry. After so many nights in the stuffy air of Matt’s truck, anything different is good, even if I have to give up a few hours of sleep to do it.
“So what do you think?” Caroline says, peeking up through her eyelashes at me from across the folding table. “Are we going to have to get Matt sexual assault counseling when we get back?”
“The humans need sleep more than we do,” I protest. “It made sense for them to room together today so that we don’t have to wake them up when we get back. And it’s safer to do laundry during the day when the Augustine vampires can’t be out.”
Caroline raises a silent eyebrow at me.
“Okay,” I relent, keeping my eyes innocently on Ric’s plaid shirt as I fold the sleeves in. “And maybe I would have volunteered to do laundry for the entire state of Maryland if it got me away from Katherine for a few hours.”
“Hey, I’m not judging!” Caroline says, raising her hands. “If I was stuck rooming with Katherine I might have been desperate enough to volunteer to help Damon if it got me away for the day. Though come to think of it, I don’t even want to know where he and Ric went to get enough privacy to touch up the concrete job on Silas’s coffin. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for a garage, you know?”
“I’m sure it won’t slow Damon down any,” I say, frowning at a giant pile of mismatched socks in nine different sizes. “He’ll probably just compel a whole Home Depot and do it right in the middle of the concrete aisle.”
Caroline goes over to the dryer and hauls out another armload of clothes. “Once we fold this load, we’ll be good to head back.” She grins at me and bats her eyelashes. “What are we going to do for our little slumber party night? Stay up late and gossip about our crushes?”
“Well, we’ll get plenty of sleep that way.”
Caroline sighs. “For real. Our love lives are pitiful.”
“Barren,” I deadpan.
Caroline scoffs. “Save it for someone who might actually feel sorry for you, Salvatore. You’re going to be single for about another four minutes until some new googly-eyed girl comes and snatches you up.”
She smiles, though it looks a little forced. Her eyes stray to my lips, and I blink, not sure if I just misread that, but when I look back at her, she’s busily folding jeans.
“I could say the same to you,” I say, trying to make her feel better, but also mostly serious. Since I’ve known her, the amount of time Caroline’s relationship status has been set to “single” could be measured in weeks. Barely.
Caroline bumps me out of the way with her hip and starts matching up socks at about four times the speed I was doing it. I take over the warm pile of clothes she just retrieved from the dryer and she shoots me a look.
“Wanna hear something ironic?” she asks, her tone a little more subdued than usual.
“More ironic than me folding my ex-girlfriend’s underwear?” I ask with a grimace, setting aside a pair of the lacy boyshorts Elena has always favored.
“That’s not ironic so much as it is cruel,” Caroline declares, and takes me by the hips, swinging us around to swap places again. “Here, socks are safer. No, my irony is now that I’m the one on the run for my life, Tyler finally called me back.”
“What? How? I thought you ditched your phone when you left Whitmore?”
“I might have left him a voicemail with my new number.” Caroline shoots me a darting, sidelong look. “Or maybe two. Because I obviously have no sense of self-preservation.”
“Hmm,” I murmur noncommittally. She’s expecting me to yell at her, but she should know better by now. She’s always harder on herself than anybody else would be anyway.
“I know, I know,” she groans. “And it was the day after I gave you that whole speech about how it had been over between us for a long time and I just needed to accept it and everything. And then he calls just like, ‘Hey Caroline, how have you been?’” She shakes her head so hard that her hair swirls out and brushes past my shoulder. “Check your crammed voicemail box and you’d know exactly how I’ve been, jerk.”
“So maybe your love life isn’t so barren after all?” I ask, trying to sound neutral.
I’m trying to be a good friend and listen when she wants to talk, like she does for me, but honestly I’m bored as hell of hearing about Tyler. He was never good enough for her, not even during the scant few weeks where he finally stopped acting like an asshole to everyone. It’s terrible what happened to his mom and that he’s stuck being on the run from Klaus, but just because I feel sorry for him doesn’t mean he deserves a girl like Caroline.
“Oh, it’s barren alright. I told him I’m done.”
In my peripheral vision, I can see her peeking over at me, but I try to keep my face smooth, not sure what reaction she’s hoping to see from me.
“Apparently he’s been dodging my calls all this time because he’s on some suicide mission to kill Klaus.” She shakes her head again. “Even if we still had anything like a relationship left, I’m not going to be with someone who lives in the past.”
I give up on the socks for the moment and give her a level look. “You know, even if you don’t carry it around like a hopeless revenge plot, or a whole room full of mementos, everything you are in the present is because of the past, Caroline.”
“I guess…” she says, wrinkling her nose. “But I chose to let some parts go, and I’m a lot happier now. I don’t know why he can’t do the same.”
I look down at the table. “Maybe you’re just better at it than people like me and Tyler. I’ve been trying to do that since I got out of the safe Silas stuck me in, and it’s not working out so great.”
“You said you’re handling human blood better,” Caroline points out, always the positive thinker. “And you can live feed now without us having to stop you, which is way better than you’ve ever done before.”
“Yes, but the regret…” I release a soft, self-deprecating chuckle. “That one’s a little stickier to get rid of.”
“You keep saying that, but you’re doing better than you think,” she says, pushing aside a pile of shirts and starting to organize the rest of the clothes. “Is this Jeremy or Matt?” she asks, pointing to a tee shirt.
I shrug. “No idea. And how exactly am I doing better? I still feel terrible every time I have to compel someone to forget I fed from them.”
She puts the tee shirt aside and frowns at a black camisole. “Yeah, but you haven’t even bought a new journal
yet, and I haven’t caught you staring at Cali with the mopey eyes all week.” She pins me with a sidelong look that makes me want to squirm. “Give yourself some credit, Stefan. That’s what this is all about anyway, right? Allowing yourself to enjoy your life and go after what you want. I think you’ve been trying so hard that you haven’t even noticed that you’re already most of the way there.”
I pause, the laundromat somehow seeming quieter, smaller. I give Caroline a faint smile, my eyes searching the familiar, delicate lines of her face. “How did you get to know me so well?”
The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) Page 11
