“Matryoshka!” I blurted without thinking.
“What was that?” Naomi asked as she twirled under my arm, then shimmied back to me as we jazz-squared. It wasn’t crisp, it wasn’t polished, but it didn’t have to be. We were locked into each other, the taste of sugar along my lips and her vitality filling the air between us.
My teeth started to ache the way they always did when I got hungry, except it was nowhere near my normal feeding schedule. I’d trained myself to a flexible and easy rhythm of swinging over to my blood connection once a month if I didn’t get an injury that couldn’t be sorted with a day’s worth of snoozing in mycoffin, so I still had nine more days before I was supposed to feed again.
It washer.
What else could it be? I was irrevocably drawn to her smile, her laugh, the way she squinted when she was being playfully suspicious of me, the way my own body seemed to warm when she shared her uninhibited enthusiasm with me. As much as she made me feel sohuman,she was awakening the more bestial side of me as well.
Was that a good thing, though?
“I said, what was that?”
Oh right, she had been speaking to me. I was so caught up in everything going on that I’d forgotten entirely.
“Nothing!” I said quickly, and to my utter delight, she began to Charleston like she was an actual dancer in the heyday of everything. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“YouTube!” She laughed brightly when I joined in, throwing my arms to give myself a little extra momentum like I’d seen men do back in the day. “You?”
“Just picked it up along the way. You know, life.”
“Boy, do I!”
Our conversation halted a bit, not because we didn’t have anything to say, but because we were really getting into the dancing as the band ramped up in an allegro melody.
It was chaotic. It was fun. Most importantly, it was sofree.How could I have forgotten what it felt like to let loose and dance with vigor? With intensity? With bounce and rhythm and everything else that the coven looked down on? Too long. But as I moved with Naomi, laughed with her,breathedwith her, just celebrated the moment with her, it was easy to forget all of them and whatever snide comments they had made.
“—ink?”
I blinked, realizing that Naomi had said something again as she spun toward me, but the feel of her body colliding with mine knocked any sort of comprehension right the fuck out of me.
“Pardon?” I asked. I hoped that she accepted my inability to follow a sentence as just not hearing her over the music and not me grappling with a lot of things I didn’t expect to be feeling on a date with a human.
“You want a drink?”
I shook my head, wondering if she had read my mind and blurted something without thinking. “No, it’s not time for me to feed.”
“Huh?”
Fuck!That’s not what she meant!Mayday, mayday! How was I so bad at this?
“I said sure. Let’s get off our feet.”
“My thoughts exactly!”
Part of my soul legitimately shuddered at the thought of stopping our dance—it was a revelation unexpected, yet it was like an elixir for my soul. I was repairing whole chunks of me in real time, and I never expected that.
But then Naomi’s blazing hand found mine, her shorter fingers intertwining with my longer ones, and she tugged me toward one of the adorable shopfronts at the edge of the square that I realized was a tavern. How quaint!
I couldn’t get drunk, and I didn’tneedto ingest anything other than blood to survive, but that didn’t mean I didn’t occasionally enjoy the burn of a deliciously aged spirit. Sort of like a ghost of a memory of how it once had been when I was a young man in the desert. Reminiscence compliments of a barrel and a brewer with a dream. Or something like that.
”So, what are you having?” I asked as we waited for the bartender—er,tavernkeep—to approach us. He had a line aslengthy as his beard, so it was going to take us a couple of minutes.
“I’m actually thinking a Bloody Mary. Something a bit savory after all that sweetness of the ice cream.”
It truly took all my willpower to keep my face trained in a somewhat pleasant expression, because really, I wanted to howl with laughter. What were the chances? But bursting into loud, ugly peals of mirth over a drink choice seemed like a pretty great way to tank a date, so I was glad I managed to contain my reaction.
“That makes sense to me.”
