She even spoke, in that strange mind-speech that wasn’t, somehow, like telepathy, but which allowed her to get in two levels of communication at once.
“Da — mon.”
Tell about the malach. Please.
Damon just raised an eyebrow at her. Tell a bunch of humans about himself? Was she being deliberately ridiculous?
Besides, the malach hadn’t really done anything. They had distracted him for a few minutes, that was all. No point in blaming malach when all they had done was enhance his own views briefly. He wondered if Elena had any notion of the content of his little nighttime daydream.
“Da — mon.”
I can see it. Everything. But, still, please…
Oh, well, maybe spirits got used to seeing everybody’s dirty laundry. Elena made no response to that thought, so he was left in the dark.
In the dark. Which was what he was used to, where he had come from. They would all go their separate ways, the humans to their warm dry houses and he to a tree in the woods. Elena would stay with Stefan, of course.
Of course.
“Under the circumstances, I won’t say au revoir,” Damon said, flashing his dazzling smile at Elena, who looked gravely back at him. “We’ll just say ‘good-bye’ and leave it at that.”
There was no answer from the humans.
“Da — mon.” Elena was crying now.
Please.Please.
Damon started out into the dark.
Please…
Rubbing at his neck, he kept going.
Much later that night, Elena couldn’t sleep. She didn’t want to be hemmed in inside the Tall Room, she said. Secretly, Stefan worried that she wanted to go outside and track the malach that had attacked the car. But he didn’t think she was able to lie, now, and she kept bumping against the shut window, chiming to him that she just wanted air. Outside air.
“We should put some clothes on you.”
But Elena was bewildered — and stubborn.It’s Night…. This is my Night Gown, she said.You didn’t like my Day Gown. Then she bumped the window again. Her “Day Gown” had been his blue shirt, which, belted, made a sort of very short chemise on her, coming to the middle of her thighs.
Right now what she wanted fit in with his own desires so completely that he felt…a bit guilty over the prospect. But he allowed himself to be persuaded.
They drifted, hand in hand, Elena like a ghost or angel in her white nightgown, Stefan all in black, feeling himself almost disappear where the trees obscured the moonlight. Somehow they ended up in the Old Wood, where skeletons of trees mixed with the living branches. Stefan stretched his newly improved senses to the widest but could only find the normal inhabitants of the forest, slowly and hesitantly returning after being frightened off by Damon’s lash of Power. Hedgehogs. Deer. Dog-foxes, and one poor vixen with twin kits, who hadn’t been able to run because of her children. Birds. All the animals that helped to make the forest the wondrous place it was.
Nothing that felt like malach or seemed as if it could do any harm.
He began to wonder if Damon had simply invented the creature that influenced him. Damon was a tremendously convincing liar.
He was telling the truth, Elena chimed.But either it’s invisible or it’s gone now. Because of you. Your Power.
He looked at her and found her looking at him with a mixture of pride and another emotion that was easily identified — but startling to see out of doors.
She tilted her face up, its classic lines pure and pale in the moonlight.
Her cheeks were rose pink with blushing, and her lips were slightly pursed.
Oh…hell, Stefan thought wildly.
“After all you’ve been through,” he began, and made his first mistake. He took hold of her arms. There, some sort of synergy between his Power and hers started to bring them, in a very slow spiral, upward.
And he could feel the warmth of her. The sweet softness of her body. She still was waiting, eyes closed, for her kiss.
We can start all over again,she suggested hopefully.
And that was true enough. He wanted to give back to her the feelings she had given to him in his room. He wanted to hold her hard; he wanted to kiss her until she trembled. He wanted to make her melt and swoon with it.
He could do it, too. Not just because you learned a thing or two about women when you were a vampire, but because he knew Elena. They were really one at heart, one soul.
Please? Elena chimed.
But she was so young now, so vulnerable in her pure white nightgown, with her creamy skin flushing pink in anticipation. It couldn’t be right to take advantage of someone like that.
Elena opened her violet-blue eyes, silvered by the moonlight, and looked right at him.
Do you want…She said it with sobriety in the mouth but mischief in her eyes….to see how many times you can make me say please?
God, no. But that sounded so grown-up that Stefan helplessly took her into his arms. He kissed the top of her silky head. He kissed downward from there, only avoiding the little rosebud mouth that was still puckered in lonely supplication.I love you. I love you. He found that he was almost crushing her ribs and tried to let go, but Elena held on as tightly as she could, holding his arms to her.
Do you want — the chime was the same, innocent and ingenuous — to see how many times I can make you say please?
Stefan stared at her for a moment. Then, with a sort of wildness in his heart, he fell on the little rosebud mouth and kissed it breathless, kissed it until he himself was so dizzy that he had to let her go, just an inch or two.
Then he looked into her eyes again. A person could lose themselves in eyes like that, could fall forever into their starry violet depths. He wanted to. But more than that, he wanted something else.
“I want to kiss you,” he whispered, right at the portal of her right ear, nipping it.
Yes.She was definite about that.
“Until you faint in my arms.”
He felt the shiver go through her body. He saw the violet eyes go misty, half closing. But to his surprise he got back an immediate, if slightly breathless, “Yes,” from Elena out loud.
And so he did.
Just short of swooning, with little shivers going through her, and little cries that he tried to stop with his own mouth, he kissed her. And then, because it was Time, and because the shivers were starting to have a painful edge to them, and Elena’s breath was coming so quick and hard when he let her breathe that he really was afraid that she might pass out, he solemnly used his own fingernail to open a vein in his neck for her.
And Elena, who once had been only human, and would have been horrified by the idea of drinking another person’s blood, clasped herself to him with a small choked sound of joy. And then he could feel her mouth warm, warm against the flesh of his neck, and he felt her shudder hard, and he felt the heady sensation of having his blood drawn out by the one he loved. He wanted to pour his entire being out in front of Elena, to give her everything that he was, or ever would be. And he knew that this was the way she had felt, letting him drink her blood. That was the sacred bond they shared.