Before I pulled out of town and got on the highway, I texted Daniel that I was on my way. I was hoping he’d be waiting for me when I got back. I could easily picture his chiseled body leaning gracefully against his car in the parking lot just waiting for me to pull in beside him, the sun reflecting in his sandy hair.
Pay attention to the road, Donnelly I had to say to myself as I started to glaze over, the vision of the sexiest man I’d ever seen dangerously clouding my mind.
Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I shouldn’t have left him. In my absence, he was sure to spot some other coed who’d catch his eye. After all, how could I possibly ever hope to hold someone like him? As I drove along, I had the nagging suspicion that he was only a temporary gift, a loaner that God would most likely pass on to someone else just when I least expected it.
I turned off the thruway just before dinner time and driving down Manheim Boulevard through town, I found myself wondering if my vision would be true. Rounding the last corner, I parked behind Capen Hall, but I was utterly disappointed when there was no sign of Daniel. After turning off the ignition, I opened the door, got out and began to stretch out my stiff shoulders and back.
Suddenly I was startled by the sound of the hatchback opening behind me. Surprised, I spun my head around to see the tops of Daniel’s broad shoulders pulling my duffle bag out of the trunk.
Oh, those sexy shoulders, I thought to myself. I wanted to feel them, to trace their contours with my hands and lips.
Slowly shaking my head back to reality, I found myself exhaling as if completely unaware I’d been holding my breath for the past twenty four hours.
Walking back to him, I reached up, put my arms around his neck and laid my head on his chest. After a pause, I heard my duffels hit the ground and felt his arms gently close around me as he buried his head in my hair. We stood there motionless for a minute just holding each other as if words were completely unnecessary.
For me, this was always my favorite part of the day, when I was in his arms with no other agenda other than enjoying the security that awaited me here. In my whole short life, I had never felt as safe as when I was here. The rest of the world and its problems didn’t exist for those brief moments. It was my paradise.
Still in his arms, I felt him lean down and kiss the top of my head.
“I hope this means you missed me,” he said softly.
“Well, maybe a little,” I told his shirt as I dropped my arms, curling them up against his chest so he encircled me completely.
A few precious moments later, he loosened his grip, allowing me to slip out of his grasp. Feeling completely relaxed, I needed to sit and took a seat on the rear bumper of my car while I looked out on the water across the road. Taking a seat beside me, he reached over and took my hand in his.
“Randall came back while you were gone.”
“The Professor?”
He nodded yes without a hint of a smile.
“Did he say where he’s been all this time?”
“Not specifically, no.” He paused for a long moment, then after taking a deep breath continued. “I should probably tell you that he doesn’t want me to see you … socially. He may cause problems.”
“Why?” I asked unable to keep the surprise out of my voice.
He hesitated before answering as if searching for the right words.
“I’m not exactly sure. – But I promise I will find out.” He reached over, and placing his arm around my shoulder pulled me close. “Don’t worry, Red, everything will be fine.”
Then he smiled reassuringly as he fondled a lock of my red hair in his fingers. He must have seen the lingering questions in my face, and leaning over he gently kissed my lips to erase them as best he could.
After a minute he leaned back and got to his feet as if to head inside, but I didn’t move. Looking down, he saw my concerned frown.
“What is it? I can read your expressions pretty well by now. Something’s on your mind.”
“It’s nothing really. I was just thinking about something my Dad said. Something about me starting to bring boys home to meet them.”
Daniel shifted his weight from one leg to the other and raised an eyebrow.
“He was joking, but it made me wonder … well, where all this is going.” I was looking at the ground, too afraid to see the expression he wore. “I know I’m only nineteen, and we haven’t known each other very long, but our relationship is so … I mean if you were … human, I guess I’d figure there was a possibility of us getting married someday, and spending our lives together but …”
“But – I’m not human,” he said calmly as if to continue my train of thought.
“So where does that leave us?” Unable to resist any longer, I looked up to meet his gaze. “I’ve never been so happy in my whole life as I am when I’m with you, and I want to feel this way for the rest of it. Tell me, what does a vampire want when his future is virtually limitless? Why would you want to be tied to a mere mortal who will only die on you someday?”
His shoulders slumped a bit as he sat back down next to me.
“I can’t picture a future without you, Sara. You are my future. Marriage? – I don’t know. To be honest, before you, I’d never even considered it.”
“Does that mean you’re considering it now?”
He’d left that door wide open and I’d walked right through it.
“We’ve only been together for a short time now, Sara. We have decades ahead of us. I suppose anything is possible.”
I wanted to say something like how evasive an answer I thought that was, but hesitated a long moment before I worked up the courage to do so.
“What if I were like you – a vampire?”
He closed his eyes at my words and clenched his teeth tightly as if they’d caused him physical pain. I could tell I’d upset him, but to me it had been the elephant in the room for some time now, and it was only a matter of time before one of us had the courage to speak its name.
“Would you want to be?” he asked quietly, his eyes still closed.
I thought about it for a moment, reflecting on the hours of thought I’d given the idea over the past week.
“I don’t know. If it meant that I could spend eternity or close to it with you, then maybe yes.”
“That’s not a good enough answer, Sara. You can’t realize what you’d be giving up. What if something happened to me? What if you had to spend an eternity without me here on this Earth? How would you feel then? Besides, if you were to become … well, who’s to say you’d be like me or Randall. It’s impossible to say what someone will turn into when their transformation is complete. You think you’d be like us, but you might be more animal than anything. I would still love you no matter what you were, but … how could I live with myself knowing what you did for me? No, it’s not an option.”
“Then what is?”
“I don’t know, honey, but we’ll figure it out together.” Then he leaned down and tenderly kissed me on the side of my head as if to say not to worry so much.
We spent the rest of the evening curled up in my room watching a couple of old movies on television. We talked, but it was surface chatter. We both knew the ungainly beast of an elephant was still sitting in the corner of the room. It had a name now that we both knew, and we also knew that it wasn’t going away anytime soon.
At eleven I walked him down to the lobby. When he finally let go of my hand, he paused at the door as if hesitant to leave. As he looked down into my eyes, I didn’t expect him to kiss me goodnight – but he did. Before I knew it, he was pulling me close and I was on the receiving end of a long, sensual, lingering kiss. His fingers running through my hair, they began to travel oh so slowly down the length of my spine. Would it always be like this? Is this how every girl feels when she’s been good and kissed? This tingling in low, exotic places.
Just before my knees gave way, he released me and I watched as he staggered away into the darkness, a little less steady on his fe
et than usual.
I sighed.
Every time I watched him walk away, I felt as if he was taking some vital part of me with him, and that I wouldn’t get it back until I saw him again. It left me to wonder, what if someday he didn’t come back.
As I walked back upstairs I wondered what I’d have said if he’d asked me to marry him. I wanted to say yes, desperately. I couldn’t imagine saying no, but the mental image of us on our fiftieth wedding anniversary still haunted me like a bad dream I couldn’t forget.
I didn’t want to be a vampire. If I were a better person, I would have admitted that to him, but I couldn’t. It was not a life, apart from him, that I would ever choose for myself. A frozen eternity held no appeal for me.
As I curled up in bed, I tried to put away these thoughts as best I could. I just wanted to focus on the here and now, the fact that I loved Daniel and he professed to love me. Closing my eyes, I concentrated on the feeling of his arms around me, the way I felt like we were the only two people in the world when I was there. Why did I have to worry about a future I had no control over? Tomorrow I would do my best to forget our conversation and just live each day as if it were my last, and eternity was never an option.
When morning came I was running late and had to double time it over to the lecture hall so I wouldn’t be late for class. Tabitha was standing at the top of the steps waving at me from across the quad.
“Running a bit late this morning, are we?”
“Guess so,” was all I said as we joined the tail end of the crowd heading up the stairs. We took our seats only moments before Professor Walker and Daniel came in the side door. The Professor walked up to the podium with his notes in hand while Daniel took Rodney’s normal spot at the table off to the side.
“Well, how do you like that?” Tabitha said under her breath.
I pretended not to hear her.
Without offering any explanation as to where he’d been, the Professor picked up right where Daniel had left off last Friday as if nothing had happened. When he came to one of his now familiar pauses where he’d normally have called on me for an answer, he scanned the room. It was his usual custom to make the rest of the class squirm ever so slightly before finally calling on me. But when his eyes finally did come to rest on me, his question remained unasked. I watched his expression as he stared deep into my eyes for a long uncomfortably silent moment. Under the weight of his gaze, I shifted my position in the chair, attempting to prepare myself for his usual ruthlessly hard question … but none came.
Unsure how to react, I nervously stole a glance at Daniel as if to ask his eyes for an explanation. As I did, the Professor’s jaw tensed while his eyes instantly shot to Daniel. I watched in confusion as the Professor’s usual carefully controlled façade slipped ever so slightly. If his look could have killed, Daniel would have been lying dead on the floor in a pool of pig’s blood.
A second later the Professor shook it off, and looking back over the class, asked his question to a girl in the row behind me. As she fumbled to come up with a response, I could see heads turning to neighbors commenting on this unusual change in classroom routine. Was I suddenly off the hook?
He asked several additional questions throughout the remainder of class, but his gray eyes never looked my way again. As his lecture wore on, I felt free to hazard a guess that he was purposefully avoiding my face. Was Daniel right? Did it have something to do with our relationship?
As class ended and everyone started filing out of the hall, I looked down at the podium as I zipped up my backpack. The Professor was gathering up his papers with something of a scowl on his face. No students had ventured down to ask questions today, probably too intimidated by the unusually dower mood he’d sported for the past hour. After his murderous look Daniel’s way, he’d never fully recovered his usual carefully controlled demeanor.
I watched as he stalked past Daniel without a word or a look, letting the door slam shut behind him as he left the room. Daniel slumped down in his chair as if his world had just come crashing down on top of him.
When I got to the end of the row, I mumbled goodbye to Tabitha and started down the stairs, anxious to see what was the matter.
As I stopped at the other side of the table, Daniel looked up. He slowly got to his feet and gathered his papers without a word.
“What’s wrong?” I finally asked when I realized he wasn’t going to tell me on his own.
“He knows everything now – about us.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t tell him much of anything. You told him. The minute he looked at you, he saw everything. He – he can read you much better than I ever could.”
“Read me?” His mysterious answers were making me overly anxious.
“Your mind. He can read your mind. I can only sense your emotions, but he can read every thought that passes through your head. He knew something was up when he looked at you, but when you looked over at me, all your memories of us surfaced and he saw it all.”
Suddenly feeling violated to my core, I did my best to shove my emotions down and stick to the facts at hand.
“Why should it matter if he knows? What can he do?”
“Randall is a very strong willed individual.” I watched him try to paste a reassuring smile on his lips for me. “But don’t worry, I’ll find out what’s going on. He can’t keep us apart. – No matter what he does.”
He leaned over, and after giving me a chaste kiss on the lips, quickly headed for the door, leaving me all alone in the cavernous lecture hall. I didn’t see Daniel again for the rest of the day. But his last words echoed in my head the way they had echoed in the empty lecture hall.
No matter what he does.
When I finished dinner that night, I pushed my tray back and again looked around the dining hall. Still no sign of Daniel.
“Where’s that guy – Daniel?” Ryan asked, snapping me out of my fog.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since this morning.”
Mike and Ryan went back to whatever they had been discussing, but I wasn’t really paying attention to the conversation. I think they were talking about a movie they’d seen over the weekend or one they wanted to go see next weekend.
“Is something wrong?” Tabitha asked, sounding concerned. I stopped scanning the room and turned to meet her gaze.
“I don’t know. Daniel’s been acting kind of funny since I got back. All I know is that it has something to do with the Professor returning from wherever he went.”
“Yeah, now that Professor Walker is back, I was surprised to see Daniel in class this morning. I wonder what all that was about.”
“Daniel was very cryptic about the whole thing. He said the Professor didn’t want us to have a relationship, but wouldn’t say why.”
“That’s strange. Why would the Professor care who he dated?”
“I don’t know, but I get the feeling there’s more going on than he’s telling me. Like he’s trying to protect me from something.”
“Oh, I’m sure it will all work out. Any fool can see he’s crazy about you. Guys are weird. They get spooked for the strangest reasons. Who can tell with them? I’d let it go for now, it will all work out in the end. Trust me.”
I decided to try to go with her advice. She knew more about men and dating than I did, and her hopeful words of wisdom I wished would be truth in the end.
I looked over at the clock next to my bed. It was almost 10:30 at night and Daniel still hadn’t called. Unable to stand it any longer, I was about to pick up the phone to call him when it rang.
Taking a deep breath, I answered, trying my best to sound casual.
“Sorry I didn’t call earlier, but the Professor decided to change the curriculum for the rest of the semester in some of his classes and he’s had me working on it all day. Going to be a big project for the next few days.”
“I figured it was something like that.” Again I tried to sound casual. It was forced though.
<
br /> “So how was your day?” His voice sounded strained, as if he were trying too hard to sound polite.
“Good. Just another day of classes and studying. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Well, I hope you can catch up enough to go out to dinner tomorrow evening. I’m going to plow through all this so I can finish and take my girl out.”
The tone of his voice softened. I could tell he was smiling on the other end of the line, making me think I might be catching a glimpse of what I suspected remained of the young man who’d died back in 1905.
“How about that Italian place in town that you’re always checking out through the window when we walk by?”
“That would be nice. Pick me up at 6:30?
“Alright. Until then. And, Sara?”
“Yes?”
“I love you.” He said it so quietly that I hardly made out the words.
“Good night, Daniel.”
Then I heard a click as he hung up.
I felt better that he’d called, knowing that even though he wasn’t here in my room with me, that he was up in his house on the mountain thinking about me. Lying back in bed, I thought about how I’d felt when I’d heard his voice on the phone. To be honest, it scared me, like I was an addict getting her first fix of the day. Some part of me was addicted to Daniel, I could see that clearly now. Was this a bad thing? Alright, I’ll rephrase that. How bad a thing was that?
Although I felt certain some part of him loved me, I doubted he felt about me the way I did about him. He was always so in control and sure of himself. While every time I was around him, I felt reduced to nothing more than a blubbering mess inside. We were in love with each other, but my love was consuming me and if its flow ever stopped, I wondered what would be left.
The Purity of Blood: Volume I Page 30
