“Couldn’t stand knowing you see me for…what I am.” He dropped back to the couch and covered his face with both hands.
“It’s a condition, Tai. It doesn’t make you worse as a person.”
“How can you say that?” he whispered.
“Because it’s the truth. It’s what any decent vampire would say if they found out their friend struggles with…with…shoot, whatever it’s called officially. Bloodfiendism. Or whatever.”
He looked up from his hands. “Hematorexia.”
“What?”
“That’s the scientific name for it.”
“Humans consider it a disorder?”
“Well, they had to categorize it somewhere, put some Latin together. But peer-reviewed literature recognizes it isn’t a psychological disorder. It’s biological, genetic.”
“And correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t it translate to ‘blood eating’? As if all vampires don’t consume blood.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t say it was the most accurate Latin.”
“You’re not going to sidetrack me with terminology, by the way.”
His eyes pinched at the corners. Yep. Guilty.
“So let me repeat,” she said. “Any decent vampire would tell a friend struggling with hematorexia that this condition doesn’t make him a worse person.”
“You sound like Ryker.”
“Well, good. I’m glad someone besides me is talking sense to you, since you’ve robbed me of the opportunity for the last three…” Wait. “Ryker knows?”
Tai nodded.
“What about Leslie?”
Another nod.
“Well, gosh, just how far out of the loop am I? Did everybody at the banquet tonight know too?”
He seemed to be trying to regain his lack of expression, but he couldn’t get it back. Instead the lines of his face were wrought with a depth of hopeless shame that began to thaw Claire’sfury despite her best efforts. Tai wasn’t manipulating her. She had demanded honesty, and he was finally being honest. This struggle went all the way to his deepest, most hidden core.
Did she want to know that deep core? Did she want the truth more than she wanted to rake him over justified coals?
Yes. She did.
She sank onto the couch beside him, so close their thighs brushed. Tai shuddered and shrank from her, and instead of allowing her frustration to freeze over again at the ridiculous reaction, she tried to understand it. If she was in, she was all in. She wouldn’t let him hide from her, not ever again. She leaned into him, wrapped an arm around his back to keep him from pulling away.
“Okay,” she said. “You’re a bloodfiend. Now I know. What happens next, according to whatever your brain is telling you?”
“You kick me out.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I’m weak, Claire. I’m weak and defective and—and vile.”
Hearing him use such cruel words against himself left Claire without any words of her own. But she could hold him, so she did. Those words were why he needed to be held. Someone in his life had done the opposite. Thrown him away.Weak, defective, vile.Someone in his life had used those words against him before he did.
When he resisted her embrace, she tightened her arms around him. “Does this look like I’m kicking you out?”
