He was back at my side in a flash, tearing off the rest of my clothes while I giggled. “Honey, slow down. You’re going to hurt yourself… we’ve got all night.”

“…not enough time,” he panted, finally wrestling off my recalcitrant underpants and then donning his latex armor. His body covered mine, his hand slipping between my legs. I gasped, both at his touch and at the slick proof of my own unmistakable excitement. “Time later for more time,” he murmured, using his knees to prize my thighs apart while licking at my neck in what I had come to realize was the vampire version of fang foreplay. “Time for many more times tonight,” he concluded, as he bit, taking me roughly at the same time. The pleasure was almost unbearable.

And he wasn’t being coy. That night we had both world enough and time to roll around quite satisfactorily for many hours.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Tell me what happened to you,” Ryu said, his voice quiet in the dark. “I want to hear it in your own words.”

I stiffened in his arms. Now was the time for cuddles, not the dropping of bombs.

“What?” I asked, hoping he meant something else.

“Tell me about your friend dying. And what happened to you after.”

I groaned internally. That was the last thing I wanted to talk about. It was more than a little weird telling the person you’d just had sex with about your very first—and only—lover. But it would be hell telling Ryu about Jason’s death and what came after. Trying to put into words the depth of my grief was impossible. And I doubted if Ryu—who had compared humans to fireworks, after all—could ever understand what I was trying to get across to him.

I shifted, turning over to lie on my side away from him. But he wasn’t letting me get away that easy.

“Tell me,” he commanded gently, as he shifted with me into spooning formation.

I closed my eyes and thought, until Ryu gently nipped my shoulder. So I sighed and started at the beginning, secretly hoping that I could make the beginning into the whole story. I started with my parents, and how they met. I told him about Nick and Nan, our amazing proto-hippy neighbors who had been like family to me. They had a son and daughter. The son was Stuart’s dad and the daughter had fallen off the rails and gotten into drugs pretty heavily. She’d rather dramatically abandoned her little boy, Jason, in the train station in Chicago and his grandparents had taken him in. Obviously Jason was sad about his mother. But between my own parents and Nick and Nan, we were both as loved as two kids could be. And we’d come to love each other just as passionately. I don’t know when it started; it was like we’d always been connected. We were everything to each other, and our relationship evolved with us. But as children we were like twins—so close you’d think we’d shared the same womb. And then when we were six my mother disappeared, as well. At the time, Rockabill was a village where no one was divorced, or had a baby out of wedlock, or—gods forbid—abandoned their own flesh and blood. If Jason and I had been close before, now our attachment was almost preternatural.

“Jason and I understood each other, and we felt like it was us against the world,” I concluded, turning around so Ryu and I were nose to nose. He smiled at me encouragingly, but I took the opportunity to take his bottom lip between my teeth and give it a little nibble. Then I kissed him hard, opening my mouth to him as his tongue sought mine. Until he called my bluff and withdrew his lips with a determined shake of his head.

“I want the whole story,” he reminded me, his voice low and soft.

I shook an imaginary fist at him, gathering myself to begin.

“Jason and I shared everything,” I said, “except for one secret.” Reminding myself to breathe, I continued. “I never told him about my swimming. Because swimming is, in my family, as closely guarded a secret as incest, alcoholism, or infidelity are in others.” My voice broke, despite my attempt at levity.

The rest came out in a rush. “So, really early one morning, I went to the beach for a swim. I left my clothes in my cove and I just dove right in. But Jason must have gone to the cove, too, or followed me from my house, or something. Anyway, he couldn’t have known I would be okay. It was winter, the water was freezing, and there was a storm, so it was really rough. He must have thought I was drowning.” Fat tears rolled, scalding my cheeks. “He must have been trying to rescue me.” My voice broke, and I couldn’t continue. I shut my eyes. I felt Ryu’s fingers brushing away my tears but I was miles away, reliving my awful memories.

I saw myself coming out of the water after a refreshing swim to find another set of clothes next to mine on the beach. I remembered how it felt when I knelt down to investigate, and what it felt like the moment I realized that it was Jason’s Patriots sweatshirt with the distinctive maroon paint stains, Jason’s battered old North Face jacket, and Jason’s favorite pair of jeans. I’d never forget the emotion I felt at that moment, not that there was a name for it. I know that the German language makes new words by stringing together descriptive phrases until the required idea or emotion is properly expressed. If we did that in English, the word for what I felt while standing there clutching Jason’s battered hiking socks would be a word made up of some terrible combination of total devastation, unholy terror, and the overwhelming need to find out that he was okay, that this was just a trick or a mistake.

“You know the rest of that story,” I said, my voice rough. I kept my eyes shut. “I searched for hours for him, and then I finally found him in the Sow. After a while he came to me. I thought that meant he was still alive and had swum. But he was cold and his eyes were staring.” I shuddered and Ryu’s arms tightened around me protectively. “I got us to the beach somehow. I was exhausted. I just collapsed with him and blacked out. Then I woke up to emergency services bundling me into an ambulance and Jason into the coroner’s van. He was dead and I was nearly so.”

Ryu nodded, stroking a hand down my side. “You used a tremendous amount of energy to pull him out of the Sow. Nell said everyone felt it for miles, but they had no idea what could have happened or who it could have been. They never figured it was you, since you were not supposed to have anywhere near that kind of capability. Your panic just brought it all out. When we lose control like that, it’s very dangerous—releasing that much power can drain us to the point of death. You were lucky to have survived.”

My lips went tight and my gut clenched. “Lucky?” I asked, oh so rhetorically. “I don’t think I was lucky. What I lived through after Jason’s death nearly broke me.” Ryu frowned at me but I wouldn’t let him interrupt.

“The drowning and near-drowning of two local teenagers was big news. We’d grown up around the ocean; we knew we had no business being in it when it was like that. Jason was dead and I was comatose for a few days, so everybody just went ahead and made up what happened. People said Jason and I had a suicide pact, or that it was an attempted murder-suicide, or suicide attempt and botched attempted rescue. Because Jason had been so perfect, and I was who I was, it was the last idea that people latched onto. Jason was too alive to want to kill himself, and he was certainly too good to want to kill me and then off himself. So, he must have stumbled across me mid-suicide attempt and tried to save me. And, in that ultimate ironic twist that is the stuff of great news ratings and terrible made-for-TV movies, I lived and Jason drowned. The media loved it,” I concluded, bitterly.

“Who would say such things?” Ryu marveled. “Especially about children?”

I snorted derisively. “Confronted with cameras, most people will say just about anything to be that little talking head on the news. And nobody ever liked me anyway. So the kids at school were more than happy to flesh out the motive for my attempted ‘suicide.’ Jason was beautiful, a star athlete, and really popular despite our relationship. No one had ever understood our connection. So people, namely this girl named Linda Allen and Jason’s cousin, Stuart, told the media that Jason had outgrown me. That he was breaking whatever hold I had over him. That he only hung around with me now because he pitied me.” My voice had grown frosty with rage and Ryu’s eyes narrowed in sympathy.

“Linda even hinted that she and Jason had started going out and maybe that’s what pushed me over the edge. As for why they did it, Linda’s motivation was obvious. She’d always carried a torch for Jason and she is nearly as delusional as one of her romance-novel heroines. As for Stuart, he and Jason had never been close when Jason was alive. I think Stu used his cousin’s death as an opportunity to cause drama because he just likes being an asshole. Especially to girls who can’t beat him up for talking shit.

“Mercifully,” I said, trying to get my anger under control, “I didn’t actually have to see any of the news coverage at the time. I was lying in a hospital bed, with my arms and legs tied down so I couldn’t ‘self harm.’ Not that people weren’t keen to fill me in on what I had missed upon my eventual release back into polite society.”

Ryu shook his head, his face sad. “What then?”