“I meant another human! It can’t be me!”
He narrowed his eyes at me, but ruined it by grinning. “I thought you didn’t want to understand. Did you really not know that I love you? Jeongmal?”
“You can’t!” I said, alarmed. JinYeong being in love with a human woman was annoying but understandable. JinYeong in love with me wasn’t possible. Wasn’t doable. Definitely wouldn’t work. I didn’t want it to work. “You’re not allowed.”
“No,” said JinYeong, sitting forward and resting his arms on one knee. “You do not get to choose if I am in love with you. Perhaps you will look to me, perhaps you will look to someone else. But it is my choice to love you, and you can’t tell me not to do it. Neither can hyeong.”
“How?” I demanded. “And why? Why on earth would you fall in love with me?”
“I would like to know why, too,” he said, moodily. “You are uncomfortable and you make me think too much. And then sometimes you are nice and I can’t think and that is worse.”
“You want me to stop being nice to you?”
“Ani. Always be nice to me.”
“I’m not going to be nice to you!” I said, a bit more wildly than I meant to. JinYeong was prickly, and crazy, and annoying; he wasn’t supposed to be in love with me. He definitely wasn’t allowed to.
He wasn’t allowed to because that would make things uneasy when I had just started trusting him again. Just started feeling like we were on an even keel. Just started feeling like we’d be able to be good friends, even.
JinYeong sent a reproachful look in my direction, but I scowled at him.
“I’m not,” I warned him. “I’m not going to be nice to you.”
“You are already often not nice,” he told me. “Then be beside me and fight with me, and poke me in the ribs instead. I will wait for you to think about it.”
I nearly said straight away that I didn’t need time to think about it, and that he’d better get over it right now, but I’d underestimated how hard it was to say something like that to a solemn-faced vampire who was just looking at me.
“I’m not gunna promise you anything,” I told him instead. “We only just got to being friends again. You can’t expect me to look—to look at you like that.”
“I have no expectations,” he said, one shoulder shrugging. Instead of the devil-may-care look it usually gave him, today it made him seem oddly self-deprecating.
It left me with the definite impression that he really didn’t expect anything—except maybe a kick in the shins, if I was to judge by the wary light to his eyes. That wasn’t fair, either. If he was in love with me, and I wasn’t going to be in love with him—and I definitely wasn’t going to be in love with him; it was insane to think that I was—he needed to be protecting himself. Not laying everything out in the open like this, as vulnerable as a human with their neck bared.
“How is that gunna work with me kissing you for vampire spit?” I asked him sharply. If he wasn’t going to protect himself, someone had to. “Because I’m pretty sure that’s going to be the opposite of helpful for you, and—”
“Nan quenchana,” he said, with a slow, soft smile that made my cheeks grow warm, much to my shock. “For me, it is fun.”
“Hang on,” I said, unsteadily. “What do you mean, it’s fun for you?”
“I told you. Kisses are not a transaction.”
“Yes they are, you bloodthirsty little mosquito!”
“For me,” he said softly, eyes dark and liquid, “it is not a transaction. For me, it is—”
I yelped and clapped my hands over my ears, shocked to find myself recalling in detail the kisses that had just occurred. “I don’t want to know!”
He waited until I took my hands away from my ears before he said demurely, “You should remember that next time you kiss me.”
I glared at him. “I’m not going to kiss you again!”
I sure as heck wasn’t going to let him kiss me again, either. Good grief! That was the last thing I needed on my mind, taking up space that should be kept for other things.
“Pft,” he said. “You will need vampire spit again.”
“Then I’ll get you to bite me!”
JinYeong, just the tips of his teeth showing in the most satisfied smirk I’d ever had the displeasure of seeing on him, said silkily, “I enjoy that too. Very. Much.”
I stared at him with my mouth open for far too long before I choked out, “I really want to smack you in the face right now.”
“My face is beautiful and should not be damaged.”
“Everybody knows your face is beautiful! You don’t have to keep reminding us!”
That earned me another reproachful look. He said, “You never say so.”
“Only because you never stop telling me!” I thought about that for a moment and added, “Okay, I might not mention it even if you didn’t, but I definitely don’t want to when you’re always so certain about how good looking you are.”
“I have a mirror, and—”
“It would be better if the mirror thing was true,” I muttered.
“Amuten,” he said decidedly, as if to prevent me from diverging too far from the subject, “what will you do?”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the next time I needed vampire spit, the fact that he was apparently in love with me, or me occasionally telling him that he was beautiful.
“About what?” I asked gloomily. “Vampire spit? You being in love with me?”
He grinned at me unexpectedly, eyes bright and dancing. “You are so straightforward,” he said. “You can’t do anything about me being in love with you.”
“Vampire spit it is, then. It would be easier if I could bite you instead,” I said broodingly. JinYeong’s eyes lit up again, and his mouth opened, but I said hastily before he could reply, “If you say you’d like that as well, I really will hit you. I won’t make you any more kimchi, either.”
His mouth shut, very prim.
“If I need to have vampire spit, you can bite me.”
JinYeong grew very slightly primmer. “I will bite very gently,” he said.
“Don’t say it like that!”
“It is annoying, an gurae?” he said, his eyes alight with malicious laughter. “When someone says something normal in a way that makes it not normal.”
“Okay, fair enough,” I said grudgingly. It wasn’t like I hadn’t done the same to him, times past counting. “No more kisses. Just the odd bite or two, and not in any weird places.”
“Koll!” he said at once.
Deal. Great. That made things so much better.
“I’m not going to fall in love with you,” I said, more grumpily. My heart still hadn’t slowed down by much, and while that must have been the effects of the vampire spit, it made it annoyingly hard to speak without running out of breath. “So you might as well get used to that right now.”
“Kurae, so you said,” he answered, and although he didn’t sound happy, he certainly didn’t sound downbeat. He rose, swiftly and precisely, and turned to leave: said softly over his shoulder, “Try your best, my friend.”
I was left staring at him as he exited the room, and I’m pretty sure he knew it, too, because he fairly sauntered. I flopped back into the beanbag, found it far too reminiscent of an embrace and so far from subtly JinYeong-scented to be at all restful, and got up at once.
Flaming heck.
What was I supposed to do now?
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 28
