Ripe.
If I was another vampire, I’d have her throat torn out and be gorging myself on her. The scent of her blood lingers on my fingers. It was a battle not to sample her blood while I cleaned her wounds. I almost fucking licked the side of her face, the cut on her cheek tempting me more than it should have when she fucking licked me. I reined myself in. Just barely.
“It’s just up another floor,” Maris tells me. Her voice is soft, gentle, not at all like the woman that confessed her sins to me last night. I see the idiot I buried for her, brains smashed out. No one would think the soft spoken woman holding my hand and leading me to her bedroom would be capable of hurting a fly.The longer I’m with Maris, the softer she gets. Like warm honey sliding from a spoon, sticky and sweet.
Mouth-watering.
I follow Maris down the hallway and up the next staircase. It’s less grand than the one we took from the first floor. I look around as we walk. There’s a window halfway up the narrow staircase. No doubt an old servant’s staircase when the affluent didn’t want to be reminded of the hands that ran their households. Maris is quiet while we walk but she doesn’t let go of my hand. She stays just a step ahead, hand clasped tight to mine. She holds me with a desperation I recognize well from the patients I tended to that didn’t have visitors. Those souls that had no one wondering about their health or charts, the ones that only had nurses and doctors for company throughout the day.
There was an emptiness to those patients. A need that had taken root in them and shone out of them so bright you could see it in their eyes, feel it when you touched them. Maris holds me tight like she thinks I’m going to vanish. I give her hand a reassuring squeeze to remind her that I’m here.
That I’ll stay.
“You came back?”
That question. It hangs in the air, bears down on my shoulders and reminds me of the heavy fog that rolled in across the Seattle skyline in the mornings. Her soft words, the desperate hold she has on my hand, the way she didn’t believe I would choose to come back to her, it pulls me closer, begs me to crack her open and see her for what she really is because I know what Maris can be.
She can be brutal. A murderess with an inconvenient conscience she hates. A bitter, angry woman, but she’s also scared. Lonely. Desperate.
Mine.
The word claws into my throat and chokes me just as easily as the desperate woman holding my hand invites me in.
Maris’ room is at the top of the stairs on the third floor. It faces the street. Sunlight streams into the room from the open window, floor-length lace curtains sway in the wind as the shadows of ivy swaying in the midday sun paints the floor. The shadows bend and twist, reaching towards us like an eager lover’s touch. The room is not what I thought Maris might choose. It’s regal in a princess sort of way with detailed gold filigreed molding and dark floors. Wallpaper in the color of cornflower blue covers the walls and crystal light fixtures hang from them. The bed is monstrous, a pale pink piece in the Rococo style. Animals and vines are etched into the high arching headboard that reaches to the ceiling a good ten feet and the figures become aquatic the higher up I look, the headboard widening before it curves in and over the bed to form the pretty shape of a scallop shell.
Of course she sleeps in a fucking seashell.
I almost can’t believe how perfect the bed is for Maris, the perfect place for her to lay her head like some sort of murderous Venus, the unsuspecting siren waiting to drag a man to his watery grave. Sun glints off the gold scalloped edges of the ornate bed frame. Above it is a pink and white curtained canopy. A breeze blows in, the chilly air sweeping the curtains away and the canopy swishes from side to side. Maris left her bed unmade, the sheets and blankets and pillows lay rumpled and thrown. I can picture her laying there, body languid and hair rumpled from sleep.
My very own Aphrodite. Venus mine.
“It’s weird, I know,” Maris rasps and drops my hand. She crosses her arms, eyes downcast. I can feel her pulling away from me by the second so I step in close and take her hand again.
“I think it’s beautiful. Interesting choice for sure but I haven’t seen anything like this outside of a museum.”
I’m being honest. Maris’ bed isn’t something mass produced or available in a trendy boutique where bored socialites shop when they’re between galas. The bed is old, original, nothing made this century at all.
“It was Isla’s.”
I know that name. I read it on the plaque. Still, I play dumb, preferring to give Maris something to talk about while I get her into bed. It’ll help her fall asleep faster, like counting backwards from ten when you’re about to be put under for an operation.
“Tell me about her.”
“There’s not much to tell.” Maris walks with me to her bed. She stands beside me while I start to sort out the blankets and pillows enough to get her in. “She founded this place, built this home, I-I started sleeping in this room after the accident.”
“The break in,” I supply.
“Yeah, that,” she whispers and gets into bed when I motion her to. “I couldn’t sleep on the first floor anymore after that.”
“That was where your room was before?”
“Yes, I slept there growing up. It was great for sneaking out in high school.”
“I can see you doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Breaking the rules,” I say. Maris is laying on her back and looking up at me with wide eyes. She looks more innocent now that she’s in her damn seashell bed. She pulls the blankets tight when I sit on the bed beside her. “You’re going to start feeling the effects of the sleeping pills soon. Don’t fight it.”
