Every waking moment was spent thinking about him.
I fucking ached for him. For him, his scent, his blood.
I closed my eyes, but it only made me see him, his warm brown eyes a mix of honey and chocolate, the way they’d turned unfocused when the drugs hit.
“I can’t,” I said as I sat down next to Bennie and let out a huge sigh. “I can’t stop watching over him.”
It wasnotstalking.
Bennie might not think it was an okay thing to do, but regardless, it was not stalking. I was no stalker. I was a protector. Finn’s protector.
“Why?” Bennie asked, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Why can’t you stop?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t know,” I admitted. Rationally, I knew there was no reason for my behavior. We hadn’t ever been a thing, but even after my life had ended, I hadn’t been able to let go of him. Quite the contrary. The whole “watching over him” part had been accelerated tenfold by the revelation that vampires—and other creatures—existed.
“When did this start?”
Now Bennie was asking the right question. Painful for me to answer, but probably something he should know.
“The watching over him part? After you turned me,” I mumbled.
I could feel the judgment; worse, I could feel his disappointment. I’d kept it a secret from him when fledglings weren’t supposed to have secrets. I’d snuck away to watch over Finn for three years.
“How have I never noticed?” Bennie said, wonder in his voice.
I shrugged again, my eyes involuntarily darting to the drainpipe. Finn was probably making dinner right about now. Afterward, he usually got on his laptop, pulled out a ton of different textbooks, and started working. He overdid it, staying up late at night only to get up at dawn for a shift at the coffee shop where he worked.
“I didn’t want you to,” I said, cringing as I felt Bennie flinch next to me. “I don’t mean it like that. It’s just… I wanted to keep him safe. I fuckingneedto keep him safe, and that means far away from vampires, werewolves, and whatever the hell else is out there. I can’t explain it, but I physically can’t stay away. Ican’t. The longest I’ve managed since my existence began was two weeks.”
Bennie nodded slowly, and when I looked at him, he stared at me thoughtfully, like I was a riddle he needed to solve. “I guessthe two weeks you’re referring to are the first two weeks of your existence?”
I nodded.
Bennie hadn’t let me out of his sight at all for those two weeks, the risk of me losing it and going feral had been too great.
“Yeah.” Blowing out a breath, I contemplated how much I should tell him. “By the end of those two weeks, I was miserable. I don’t even know why, but as soon as I was able to go out by myself for even an hour, I found myself sitting there.” I pointed at the building across the street. “It was about eleven at night, and I just… watched Finn lying in bed, scrolling on his phone, and itcalmedsomething in me. It was the weirdest thing. But seeing him snort at something he was seeing made the vampire part of me—the rage, the bloodlust, everything—so much easier to control. I began craving it, the peace he brought me, so… I came back. Occasionally at first, but as time went on, the need to see him got so much worse.”
“Eric…” Bennie sounded strained again.
“I wasn’t stalking him,” I reiterated. “It’s not like I followed him all the time.” I couldn’t, even though I’d definitely wanted to. “I haven’t placed a tracker on him or anything like that.” Though if he wanted to return to CRAVE, the club he’d been to last week, I couldn’t promise I wouldn’t resort to that. “I just… watch over him for an hour or two, until he goes to bed, and then I leave him be. I’ve never talked to him before last weekend.”
But now I wanted to do it again.
Bennie sighed.
“You sound like a lunatic.”
Maybe I was. Then again, I was a vampire, and most of our kind were kind of… eccentric. Maybe it had something to do with our DNA and the way our bodies worked. It’d be interesting to find out, but while I wanted to become a doctor, I was no biologist, and I definitely wasn’t the one to take on that task.
For now.
Who knew? Maybe I’d change my mind in a century.
But right this instance, my brain was fucking itching because I couldn’t see Finn. The minute in the hallway hadn’t been nearly enough for me to get my fix for the day. Besides, I needed to make sure he was eating. He hadn’t been eating over the past few days, only nibbling on toast, pulling a face whenever he did.
Because his stomach was fucking hurting.
