“What do you think your doing?” Mae asked wearily.
When Jack sat up, he cleared my view so I could see her standing in the hallway. She was wearing a rather fancy housecoat and she had her hands on her hips. She was tired and irritated, and just the way she looked at Jack made me feel guilty.
“Getting up, like you asked.” Jack leaned back and stretched, and I watched the wonderful muscles of his back ripple underneath his tee shirt.
“I meant, what do you do you think you’re doing in that bed, with her?” Mae nodded at me, but she never took her eyes of him. “Did you think that since you left the bedside lamp on it would make it okay?”
“Kinda.” He smiled wickedly at her, but she was in no mood for it.
“Get up. We all need to talk to downstairs.” Mae took a step away, but Jack stopped her.
“Hey, hey. Did Milo tell you about his little exertion last night?” Jack asked, then his voice took a more accusing tone. “When he was on your watch?”
“We’ll talk about that all when you get downstairs.” Mae turned sharply, her housecoat billowing behind her, and disappeared down the hall.
“It’s way too early for a lecture,” I muttered into the pillow.
“You’re telling me.”
Jack looked back at me, and his expression softened with fondness. His smile deepened, growing more genuine, and gently, he reached over and brushed a hair back from my eyes. I’m sure my eyes were sleep clogged and red, but he looked into them like they were magical. His hand rested on my cheek for a moment, and it started growing warmer, but he let it linger.
“You’re really beautiful when you sleep,” he murmured softly.
“I am not.” My cheeks reddened deeply and I buried my face deeper in the pillow. He laughed brightly, and reluctantly, dropped his hand from my ever warming face.
“Dibs on the shower.” The bed moved as he got up from it up, and I turned my head so I could get a better view of him as he went over to the closet.
“There’s like twenty-seven showers in the house. Are you calling dibs on all of them?”
“Maybe,” Jack laughed and went into his closet.
I didn’t really mind him showering first. It gave me more time to lie in bed, burying myself deep in the covers. Besides, more time in bed meant less time being yelled at for getting too close to Jack, and that was always a good thing. I knew that many a love story had been written full of longing glances from across the room and that could sustain a smoldering romance, but I couldn’t see how. I had spent the night curled up in Jack’s arms, and that wasn’t enough anymore.
It wasn’t a lecture. Ezra sat on the couch, and Mae sat on the floor next to him, resting her head on his knee. I had barely seen her in days, and that had probably gone the same for Ezra. Her long honey waves of hair cascaded around her, and he absently ran his fingers through it. Jack was sitting on the other side of living room, stretched out on the chaise lounge with Matilda by sprawled out over his feet. Milo stood off to the side, fiddling with the floor length curtains next to him.
Under the bright lights of the living room, Milo was even more brilliant than when he had waken me in the middle of the afternoon. His dark brown hair even looked glossier. He was still clearly my brother, but like what he would’ve looked like in a few years if he worked out more and had a stylist. It was hard not to stare at him when I walked in the room, but something felt unsettling and distracted me.
They were all poised around me like it was an intervention. Milo didn’t really seem nervous, but he wasn’t exactly comfortable either. Jack sat up straighter when I walked in, and I surmised that they had been talking about me while I had been showering. Maybe I shouldn’t have let him go first. I sighed and made my way over to a chair to sit and wait for whatever they were going to dump on me that would probably ruin my life a little bit.
“So,” I said when it appeared nobody else would speak. “What’s going on?”
“I heard you had a visitor last night,” Ezra began, his accent lilting with a hint of dissatisfaction.
His eyes flitted over to Milo just briefly, and Milo cringed visibly.
Milo touched at his hair nervously, but that seemed to do little to settle his unease. His cheeks colored lightly, and I was rather surprised to find that vampires could blush. Absently, he pulled at the curtain and almost yanked it down. He reddened even deeper and sheepishly spouted apologizes that Mae just brushed away. There was something clumsily graceful in his movements. The way his slender fingers picked at everything was oddly elegant, but there was also the sense that he didn’t understand how to control it or have any mastery of his strength.
“Sorry,” Milo muttered again. When he took a step away from the curtains, it was too wide, and he almost stumbled into the chair but caught himself with any amazing ease. Everything was suddenly much easier for him, and learning how to handle that made things harder.
“The good news is that this is all perfectly normal.” Ezra watched Milo with a bemused smile. He finally just gave up on movement of any kind and collapsed into a nearby chair.
“You’re just getting your bearings, love,” Mae purred reassuringly. “We’ve all been through it.”
“Not all of us,” I whispered under my breath, and Jack shot a disappointed look my way. That solidified my belief that whatever news they were breaking here was bound to be bad.
“This is just so weird!” Milo lamented.
He meant to just lean back in the chair, and he nearly tipped it over. He scoffed at himself, and underneath his perfect new features, I saw the frustrated little boy had always been. Whenever he uncovered a problem he couldn’t solve, he furrowed his brow intensely and his eyes got sad and faraway. There was something incredibly reassuring about seem him look that way again. I didn’t want him to be frustrated, but it meant that he was still under there.
“As you can see, he turned quite smoothly,” Ezra turned his attention back to me. “Better than expected, actually. He’s had very little problems, and he seems to have a rather large amount of self-control.”
“This is the least amount of control I’ve ever had in my life!” Milo retorted incredulous.
“You’ll get it all back, plus so much more,” Mae told him, her voice soft and gentle. “You should’ve seen Jack after he first turned. He was a horrible mess.”
“Thanks,” Jack added dryly.
“Everyone is a little out of control in the beginning,” Ezra continued gravely. “Which is exactly why you never should’ve gone into Alice’s room last night.”
“I’m sorry!” The way Milo said it, I knew he’d already apologized for it a hundred times. “I’ll never do it again!”
“Everything turned out fine.” I waved off Ezra’s concern. “It really wasn’t that big of a deal.”
“Yeah, it kinda was,” Jack said seriously, looking over at me. “If I hadn’t woken up…”
“If he hadn’t eaten before he saw you, there wouldn’t have been enough time for anyone to intercede,” Ezra agreed. “Before you came downstairs just now, Milo ate, and we’re all here too. Being around him like that is far too risky.”
“Great.” I felt oddly exasperated and I had to fight the urge to through my hands up in the air.
Milo looked guilty in the chair across the room from me, and I hated the idea that he could kill me.
They could all kill me, and according to Milo, they all wanted to. So it didn’t seem fair that he was the only one that felt guilty about it and required a chaperone. Or three of them, as it were, and they still acted like it wasn’t enough.
“Well, it’ll never happen again, and I’m still alive,” I shrugged.
“You have like no sense of self preservation,” Jack looked at me skeptically.
“Obviously not,” I returned his gaze evenly. If I cared anything for my life, I probably wouldn’t spend all my free time with a pack of vampires.
“That leads us to now,” Ezra interjected, but I didn’t follow so I looked at him quizzically. “Milo can’t go home, for many reasons. He’s got to stay on with us.”
“Sure,” I nodded.
While I hadn’t really thought of it until then, it did make perfect sense that we lived here now. Milo couldn’t go back to his normal life at school, and with everything going well for him, I would just turn, and there wouldn’t be anything tying us back to our old lives. In fact, we’d be a threat to everyone we knew until we got things under control.
“You, on the other hand, will not.” Ezra spoke slowly, letting the weight of his words sink in, and looked at me apologetically.