“I know.” She swallowed hard. “Plus, he’ll be with my mom when he goes, and I know he’s looking forward to that.” She wrinkled her nose. “Okay, that sounded morbid, but you know what I mean. It’s not like he’ll be alone.”
“Yeah.” Reaching out, I let my hand slide down her back. I couldn’t imagine knowing that I would live forever, Gods willing, but I’d only have another twenty years with my parents if I were lucky. Rosemary would live most of her life without her parents. The first forty years would eventually be just a blip.
Grief hit me suddenly. I’d had Zeke for over a hundred years, and that still hadn’t felt like enough. And I hadn’t had to watch him grow old, his body slowly failing, his memory not quite what it used to be.
I’d never really taken the time to think about the sacrifice that human mates made when they tied their lives to ours. The benefits were too large to fully explain, but the expense was almost inconceivable. They had to watch as all the people they knew in their previous life died one by one.
Moving to her back, I wrapped my arms around Rosemary’s waist and pressed my lips to the side of her neck.
“I’m good,” she said with assurance, patting my hand. “Really. I’m fine.”
“We can live here if you want,” I said, watching as she flipped the grilled cheese and stirred the soup. “Instead of my parents’ property.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, turning her head to brush her lips over mine. “But this house isn’t big enough. Once we start having kids, it would feel like a clown car.”
My stomach swooped at the thought of having children.
“Then we’ll add on. Or build another house,” I pressed. “There’s plenty of land.”
“Maybe,” she said, like she was actually imagining it. “We’d have to clear some trees.”
“I think we could manage that.”
“Dinner’s done,” she announced, pulling away from me. “It’s not fancy, but wait until you taste the soup. It’s my mom’s recipe.”
“Smells good.”
The couple of feet separating us felt like too much, especially after talking about the future that still wasn’t promised. Rosemary let out a woof of surprise when I reached under her chair and scooted it closer.
I needed to figure out who was responsible for the attacks of Vampires so my mate would be safe. Every moment I stayed with Rosemary, making dinner and chasing her around, was another moment when they were making plans, regrouping, and potentially tracking her down. It put me in a terrible position, because I knew where I wanted to be—with her—but Ineededto be with my brothers investigating the threat.
I couldn’t just ignore that it was out there. The knowledge that they could find Rosemary at any time was like a constant drum beating in the back of my head, impossible to ignore for long.
“This was always a comfort food when I was little,” Rosemary said, taking a bite of her sandwich. She closed her eyes as she chewed. “My mom made it on my first day of school, after doctor appointments, you know, that kind of thing.”
“For good reason,” I replied. I hadn’t paid close attention to how she’d made the soup beyond noticing a home-canned jar of tomatoes, but it was excellent.
“I know, right?” she said with a small laugh. “It hits the spot every time.”
“Did you spend most of your time with your mom?” I asked, watching as she dunked the corner of her sandwich into the steaming soup.
“Yeah, my dad didn’t retire until she was pretty sick,” she replied. “He was only home sporadically before that. Just long enough to get used to him again, really.”
“It must’ve been an adjustment when he was suddenly home all the time.”
“I loved it,” she said, grinning. “Having both of them home all the time was my dream. I hated going to school. I begged them to homeschool me.”
“They told you no, huh?”
She nodded. “Their excuse was that neither of them was qualified to teach me, but I think they just wanted the alone time.”
I laughed.
“I don’t blame them. They never really went on dates or anything,” she said with a smile. “If I wasn’t in school, it was always the three of us. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I had a babysitter, and that was usually just Aunt Halle.”
“It was the same with us,” I replied, remembering those times when my brothers and I were young. “But worse because we lived in a one-room house.”
“Nooo,” Rosemary moaned with a laugh.
