“That I love you? I wasn’t sure you heard me.” He smirked, then took her mouth with a playful roughness that made the desire to place her bite almost a need.
They were young. They would have centuries. Or maybe, if something happened, if instant death came for one of them as it had for his mom, maybe they had only another decade or so. The idea ought to terrify her. But for a decade or a millennium, if she got to have Tai beside her, Claire would call it enough.
No. She would call it a gift.
Twenty-One
On the way back down the trail, hand in hand, their pace serene, Tai glanced down at her, then forward again. Claire waited for him to say whatever had just come into his head, but he didn’t.
“Thoughts?” she said.
“A question.” He hesitated again, then said, “I’m used to not having a family. I’m so used to it, I never thought to ask about yours. But you also never bring them up, unlike most people I know, so I’m thinking…wondering if your family’s hard too.”
“Hard? No. Absent, that’s all. Neutrally absent.”
Another glance at her, then away. A wrinkle formed between his eyes.
She gave his hand a tug. “Really, Tai, it’s nothing to worry about. I think about my family probably less often than you think about yours.”
“Okay, but how is absence neutral?”
“Long story short, my dad couldn’t decide if he wanted to be a father or not. When I was ten, he finally decided not. My mom’s a relic, and that’s a whole other level of flaky when it comesto parenting. She was fine while I was a kid, but her attention span is exactly two decades long. When I turned twenty, it was like a switch flipped in her brain: freedom! I haven’t seen her in about ten years. And neither of my parents kept in touch with their own families, so I don’t have the typical vampire network of great-great-grand-whoevers.”
Tai slowly shook his head. “Your mom should want to know you.”
“Well, she doesn’t. She’s past three hundred now, and honestly, she might not remember she has a child. I’m only half-kidding.”
“And you’re fine with it?”
Of course she was fine. No point in being anything else. “I’m admirably independent.”
He gave a low hiss.
“You don’t get to be mad for me when I’m not even mad.”
“Not sure it works that way.” They reached the base of the cliff and re-entered the marked trail before he spoke again. “Until you were ten, what was he like? How often did you see him?”
He probably thought she had deep feelings on the topic of her father, given he certainly did about his own, but she didn’t. Also…maybe it was truer than she realized when she first said she’d rather hear about him than talk about herself. But it was Tai. He wanted to know her, and he’d let her know him today in a way no one else did. And most important, Claire was safe with him.
Weird that her brain felt the need to remind her of that last one right now.
“You know how some people never grow up emotionally? Like, they function fine in society, have a job and an apartment. They have friends and romantic relationships. On paper, they look like an adult.”
“Sure,” Tai said. “But they’ve also got no idea how to deal with it when things don’t go their way.”
“Exactly. That’s my dad. He didn’t take no for an answer—not without a lot of pouting, cajoling, guilt-tripping, et cetera. If he was really invested in getting his way, he’d eventually just bulldoze over what you wanted and if it bothered you, it was your problem for being ‘too serious.’”
“Yikes,” Tai said.
“Uh-huh. So yeah, I loved him, the way every kid loves their parent. He was super spontaneous and a lot of fun. I missed him when he took off for wherever. But I also knew the score, you know? This is Dad. This is how things go when I’m with Dad.”
“How old were your parents when they met?”
“He was fifty-three, and she was two hundred sixty-one. I think he wined and dined her for a while before she said yes to a relationship. I’m also pretty sure she kept her age to herself the first year they were together.”
“Is Vanderlaan his name or hers?”
The perceptiveness of the question, asking more than its surface, plucked her heart as if it were a whole set of guitar strings, and Tai’s fingers had just found the perfect chord. She reached back toward him, and he laced his fingers with hers as they continued single-file down the side of the mountain. The foliage was overgrown here, the space for one person likely cleared over time by deer and other animals consistently plodding through.
