Because honestly? I couldn’t think of a better way he could’ve let me know about being sick either.
Then again, leaving those notes on my door wasn’t okay.
“You scared me,” I said quietly.
Eric hung his head.
“I know. And I wanted to leave it at that one note, I swear. But then you didn’t listen to it, and I didn’t know what to do, so I left another one. From there on out, things got out of hand.”
“Why didn’t you stop after we started talking?”
Eric shrugged, but his shoulders never went down.
“I don’t know. I… wanted to do nice things for you, but it felt like we weren’t there yet. Which probably means I should’ve let things go, but that thing inside me—no, that part of me, because it is a part of me—demanded more and more and more. And I didn’t know how to resist. This whole mate thing is new to me too. I’ve never felt like this, and I thought… I don’t know, by dividing things like this, I was the perfectly normal, well-adjusted human boyfriend. That more intense part was separate.”
He was fucking killing me.
I slowly crept closer until my foot hit his thigh.
Eric jumped at the contact but smiled as he looked at my foot.
“And you didn’t want me to see the more intense part?”
He let out a hollow laugh.
“No. I didn’t want you to know that I want to fucking possess you. That I’m so obsessed with you I go mad if I can’t see you for a day. I didn’t want you to know I crave you more than air.”
“You don’t breathe,” I said pointedly.
Eric rolled his eyes.
“I crave you more than blood.”
Oh.
“I want your blood too, but I crave more than that. I crave you, crave being surrounded by your scent. I crave your ass around my cock. I crave your laughs, I crave your tears, your joy, your opinions. I’m fucking addicted to you, and I know that doesn’thelp my case at all.” He looked up at the ceiling, taking a deep breath to calm himself down before his eyes met mine again. They were still blue, but not. The red was simmering beneath the surface, ready to break through at any moment. “Aries says it gets better. If we really mate. Right now, our connection is fragile, and my vampire side is reacting to that insecure state.”
“What does really mating entail? Mating sounds a lot like fucking.”
Eric coughed. “Uhm… that’s basically it. We fuck, I bite you, a bond snaps into existence, tying us together for eternity. Which, also, is how long you’ll live once we’re connected.”
I furrowed my brow. “We already did that. Twice.”
Had we accidentally mated?
“Yeah, but I bit you here.” Eric pointed at his neck. “A mating bite goes here.” He trailed his fingers over the spot where his neck and shoulder met, right in the dip of his clavicle.
My body shuddered, goosebumps rising on my skin.
A memory flashed through my brain.
Eric sucking on that exact spot.
Pleasure shooting through my body.
A tension building…
Holy fuck, I was getting hard.
