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“Ugh, yes, unfortunately. I think I’m going to be buzzing for the next three days straight.”

I laughed. “Same.”

Elliot finally joined me in the front, clambering between the seats to drop down with a grunt beside me. “Shit, I’m so thirsty now. Do we have any water?”

“’Fraid not.” I nodded at the giant slushie cup in the center console. “Just the liquid sugar. Want it?”

He made a face. “I can’t. Like you said, I’ll probably just drop dead. Is my tongue still purple?” He stuck it out to show me.

I laughed and nodded. “Uh-huh.”

He leaned in closer with a wicked smile. “Show me yours.”

I did, my belly fluttering and my lips curving up when he darted in to lick my tongue again.

“Mmm.” He sat back and licked his lips with an uncharacteristically coy smile. “So sweet, muffin.”

Chapter Fifteen

Elliot

You’d think, after the perfection of last night, that I’d be in a stellar mood. That I’d be walking on air, floating around in a romantic, dreamy haze, unable to think of anything but my perfect sugar muffin Ricky.

That last part was true, at least. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, just like I hadn’t stopped thinking about him since the moment I met him. But it was worse now. More all-consuming. More desperate, more piercing. It made my whole body ache when I thought too deeply about how I felt for him.

But I was a bad person. So, so bad. So I didn’t deserve to feel good. I didn’t deserve to bask in the aftermath of the most perfect night of my life.

I’d told myself not to let Ricky touch me. I’d made myself promise. To, well, myself. It shouldn’t have been particularly hard, for fuck’s sake. But no, I just had to have his finger in my ass.

Who knew a single finger in the ass could unleash such a monstrous tidal wave of guilt and doubt and self-loathing? Me. I did now. Wasn’t I a lucky fucking duck?

I’d done so well until then. I’d worked so hard to keep us from crossing the, admittedly arbitrary, imaginary line I’d created without him knowing. I’d even found the strength to steer us down a different and safer path when he’d been undoing my jeans while his tongue was in my mouth. He’d wanted to touch me. Maybe even suck me off. And I’d still, somehow, managed to resist. And then I’d failed spectacularly at the very last hurdle, because when it came down to it, I couldn’t resist him. I just couldn’t.

It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair—I hadn’t asked to be a ghoul, I hadn’t asked to be biologically wired to need to eat people—but it especially wasn’t fair to him. He didn’t know I wasn’t human. It was wrong. So wrong. I was a terrible person, because I was lying to the sweetest and best person in the fucking universe.

And now, enough had happened between us that he might never forgive me if he found out the truth. There was a chance, a very good chance, that he’d feel too betrayed. And the thought of that completely fucking devastated me. Devastated me. If I ended up being the cause of Ricky’s distress, of his sadness, I would lock myself in my apartment and never leave again. I’d let myself rot into my couch until the neighbors were all too scared to come up to the top floor of the building, and they spread rumors about the weird creepy hermit living upstairs.

It would be what I deserved.

Of course, there was an even better chance that it wouldn’t be hurt or sadness that Ricky felt if he found out I was a ghoul—it would be disgust. Shudderingly strong, nauseating disgust. Complete and utter revulsion. Horror. Fear. All those things. All the bad things. All the things that would mean he didn’t want me anymore.

I didn’t think I’d be able to handle Ricky hating me. I was pretty sure it would make me crumble. Collapse in on myself. Stop caring about anything at all. Because what would be the point if the person I cared about the most hated me?

I’d been agonizing over this all day. All fucking day. Flip-flopping back and forth on what to do.

Except I already knew, deep down, what I should do. What the right thing to do was. It just scared the absolute shit out of me, so all day I’d been trying desperately to find workarounds. Figure out other ways I could keep Ricky and not have him hate me or be disgusted by me, but not actually have to tell him I was a ghoul. That he’d let a creature who ate humans kiss him and touch him and make him come.

Because that was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? For fucking fuck’s sake. I had to tell him.

Except that brought its own set of goddamn problems, because of course it did.

We didn’t tell humans we existed. Period. None of us beings of the non-human variety did. It was just… a thing. Did humans find out in other ways? Yeah, sometimes. Did they start legends and folktales about us? I mean, yeah, and some of them were actually pretty entertaining. But they didn’t really know. A lot of them wouldn’t be able to handle knowing we actually existed. Especially not us heinous, people-eating ghouls.

Would Ricky be able to handle it? He was a sweet, sensitive guy. He’d been super understanding and compassionate about my “medical condition.” Would he really react that differently if I told him it wasn’t actually a medical condition, but more like a… whole-other-species condition?

I was kidding myself, of course. A supposed acute allergy condition was, in no way, shape or form, anything remotely like being a goddamn monster who ate people. He was obviously going to react differently. He was obviously going to be horrified.

But the guilt had become too much. It felt like it was eating away at my insides, so I had to do it. I had to tell him. That, or put an end to anything between us right now with no explanation.