Skye
I adjust the thick scarf worn around my neck and square my shoulders, careful of every movement I make while Abby picks at the plate of food on the tray in front of her. The cafeteria around us is quiet at this hour, full of students snacking in silent solitude over laptops and stacks of books, and professors and postdocs finding scraps worth of a meal after a long day of research and lectures.
My last lecture of the day wrapped up less than an hour ago without the drama or fanfare I expected. Most of my lectures are math-heavy, which seriously irks my more experimentally leaning students. I spent the entire lecture with my back turned to the podium, making sure my scarf and turtleneck stayed in place, ignoring the groans and murmuring behind me. Now, the bruise is hard to ignore. It pinches with every move I make, and the scarf is definitely overkill. I’m sweating under the weight of it.
“What’s up with you?” Abby asks, looking just as uncomfortable and as exhausted as I am.
I look up from my barely touched food. I’m bone tired. The kind of tired threatening to pull me under with every moment of silence and stillness that passes. I didn’t sleep after returning from Alex’s lab yesterday morning. I spent the entire day puttering around my condo, trying to rationalize what happened over the weekend and come to terms with what he is, and what we’d done, until my thoughts became so tangled I had no choice but to revert back to pouring what little energy I had left into my lab and the equations and formulas always plaguing my thoughts.
But it’s Monday. I haven’t heard from or seen Alex since yesterday morning. Not a glimpse. Not a whisper.
I shouldn’t be worried about it. The thought of him shouldn’t be hanging heavy on my mind when I have a billion other things I need to focus on.
“Skye?”
“Yeah?” I stab at a grape, but it rolls to the opposite side of my plate.
“What’s up with you? You’ve been weird lately.”
“I just have a lot on my mind–”
“Dr. Alex Scarlett, by chance?” She arches a brow and leans back with her arms crossed.
“Abby.” I rest my hands on the table.
“Look, I know you guys hung out this weekend.”
Hanging out is barely half of it. I suck in a breath and settle myself before saying, “Abby, I love you. You’re my best friend.” It’s the truth. When I went to check on her Saturday night, she’d been couch-bound, nursing what Toby told me was likely the worst hangover of her life. Toby knew I’d been with Alex but didn’t seem that perplexed about the fact that Alex took me home from the club, and based on our brief conversation, he was under the impression I’d finally let loose and gotten absolutely hammered–not spaced out on literal space dust.
“I know I am, Skye.” We hold each other’s gaze as tension bubbles between us. “That’s not the point.”
“Then, what is your issue with me and Alex?”
“Nothing. I don’t have an issue with it. You’ve just been weird since it started.” My lips part to argue nothing has started, even though I know that’s far from the truth, but she pushes forward. “I don’t want this to come off in the wrong way, but you don’t date. I’ve seen you talk to maybe three guys in the entire time I’ve known you, and even then, you’ve hardly done anything about it when they showed they were interested in you. You rarely even date.”
“Alex is not interested in me like that.”
“Are you kidding me?” She braces her hands on the table and hisses under her breath. “Skye, Toby and I have been talking about this for two weeks. Alex is… obsessed.”
“He is absolutely not obsessed,” I retort, but my voice cracks. I imagine his lips pressed against my neck and the way his hand felt firm against the flat of my stomach as he held me still while he drank me in. I shiver, resisting the urge to touch my neck where the bruise refuses to fade, a lingering reminder of what we did. What I wanted him to do. How desperately I wanted to do more.
How I haven’t heard from him since he quickly ushered me out of the lab.
“Have you hooked up?”
“Abby!”
“I’m talking about sex, Skye. Have you slept with Alex?”
I launch out of my chair and lean over the table. “There are other people here, Abby, please!”
“You have!”
“We haven’t. That’s not what this is. He’s a friend. A–a colleague. You know that.”
“He looks at you like he wants to consume you, Skye. He’s head over heels.”
I sink back into my seat. Goddess, if she only knew.
“He’s not.” My voice falls flat. Confusion rockets through my system. He’s not. He’s not into me like that. I’m probably the only person who knows his secret, and now he’s forced to trust me. Trust is a very specific level of intimacy. That’s all this is.
My skin prickles with a sudden sense of knowing, a truth so deep it hurts. I like Alex. Maybe more than I should. Far more than what’s appropriate. This is also the second time Abby’s brought this up, so she’s onto me. Toby is the only other person Alex has let get close.
How much can we trust them with this?
I adjust my scarf, eyeing Abby, and decide she might be the only person in the world I can say this to. “I enjoy his company. I think he’s brilliant. I think we have similarities that I am struggling to rationalize, and I would like to spend more time with him.”
“So you have a crush?” She chuckles a bit around a bite of spaghetti. “You can just say you like him. You don’t have to be so robotic about it.”
I bite my tongue several times before finding the right words to convey my feelings, which, likely, will still fall flat. “I’m in a complicated situation with him because I can’t tell if he feels the same way.” Because he’s a fucking vampire and I don’t know!
“You could just tell him you like him?”
I imagine his hands squeezing my hips while his fangs sank deep into the side of my neck.
“I don’t think he’d believe me.”
He told me straight that everything I’d felt in that moment wasn’t real. That in that situation, him feeding on me, everything I felt, everything I thought, was essentially an illusion. At least that’s how I interpreted it. I don’t know enough about his kind to even start making assumptions, but he was clear on one thing–a situation like this can create a bond.
I can’t trust the way I’m feeling now, can I?
Abby clears her throat and shoves her tray to the side, bracing her elbows on the table. “You know how I feel about Alex, but he has let up on me a bit ever since he set his sights on you. Being your best friend, and if I’m being honest, only friend, has its perks. So, I approve. What’s our plan here?”
“What are you talking about, Abby?”
“Our game plan? You getting in Alex’s pants?”
“I am twenty-eight years old,” I remind her, but she rolls her eyes to the ceiling and laughs sharply.
“You’re practically a virgin.”
“I am not! You were there… kind of.” My voice shudders as the memory of the first few weeks of our friendship comes barreling back to me in hazy, drunken memories I’ve long tried to forget, which are also, honestly, the reason I only have one drink when Abby wants to go out.
“I was there to pick up the pieces,” she retorts, her face stained pink like she’s holding back another laugh, “after you lost your virginity to Carl Cooper, and he found his mate at that same party two hours later!”
“That was an absolute disaster,” I murmur, my face dropping into my hand like I can shield myself from the conversation, but Abby has a point. I had one wild night. One true college experience, but it didn’t come until I was a graduate student, long after most people had found their mates and settled down with kids in tow. Things like that happened to me often. I’d crush on someone. We’d make it past that awkward getting to know you stage–maybe share a kiss, a touch–and then they’d find their person, their mate, like being with me was some kind of fucked up good luck charm.
Like I’m the Goddess’s Matchmaker.
Like She gave me this odd gift, if I can call it that, in exchange for never placing a mate in my lifeline, my tether in the tapestry a single, frayed thread.
Abby met Toby shortly after that night. I didn’t have a hand in it, but watching her storm into my room at our old apartment, announcing she found her mate, almost felt like a slap to the face. It had been Abby and me for three months at that point. She was mine. The only person who really understood me. The only person I trusted, even if I still continued to keep secrets from her about my family and my powers. But I like Toby. He’s a good man, and he’s good for Abby. They fit together like a puzzle piece, filling in the voids of their personalities to a T.
I’m jagged and uneven in comparison.
The next day, during my final lecture of the week, my students file into the observatory instead of the dedicated lecture halls in the physics department. I spend two hours in the dark showing them a map of the stars–my stars. The galaxies I created based on concrete evidence and mathematics, proven by the telescopes Lunaria U is most famous for. My greatest work.
Toward the end of the lecture, I notice I have an extra student tonight.
It’s been three entire days since I’ve spoken to or seen Alex, but now he’s sitting in the back row, cast in shadow, watching as I motion to the constellations dancing over our heads, and he watches carefully, his eyes never once leaving mine.
He doesn’t rise when the lecture ends, and my students file out. The observatory falls into silence and dims as the presentation fades, and the ceiling cover rolls back, revealing the real night sky, the twinkling stars and overwhelming aurora writhing in pillars of red and purple light.
I go to him like I’m drawn in, like he’s reeling me in like a fish. I wonder if this feeling of submission is my choice or something he’s doing to me, part of his vampiric profile, I suppose.
“You’re in my seat,” I whisper, and he stands, towering over me, maintaining a proximity that makes me slightly dizzy when I catch his scent. He’s in his dark thermals and smells like ice and the lab–like discoveries. Like science. Like everything I love.
He settles into the next chair, and I sit beside him, soaking in several minutes of companionable silence.
“I wasn’t avoiding you,” he says, like the distance of the last few days has also been weighing on his mind. “We had a few issues in the lab that needed to be sorted.”
“I didn’t think you were.” I did. I really did. Now, I feel like a forlorn teenage girl sitting next to the guy who’s totally out of my league.
He rolls his lower lip between his teeth, his fangs catching the light of the aurora for a split second. “I should have reached out. Let you know.”
“It’s fine. It’s not like this meant anything more than it did.”
“Can I see it?”
I meet his eyes, and his gaze drops to my neck, to the scarf. Something warm and greedy bubbles up inside of me before I can stop it, and I reach up, loosening the fabric until it falls over my chest.
His fingers are tepid but not icy when he touches my skin, his thumb swiping over the fading bruise. That same guilt I noticed in his eyes the morning he made the mark returns and cuts through me like a knife. I pull away.
I want to ask if he wants more.
But I already know the answer.
I hate that he’ll say no.
“Do you understand why we can’t do this again?” he says, his voice low, slightly scratchy.
“You’ve made it clear.”
“I don’t think I have.”
I look down at my hands, feeling overwhelmingly like I’m being scolded for something.
“I don’t want to use you. I respect you, Skye. You are more to me than just a feeder,” he says, and I look up at him, catching his gaze.
“I’m never going to understand this,” I admit. “This feeling. I don’t get it. I don’t get why I keep thinking about it.”
“It’s–”
“A bond, I know.” I rise, choking back a retort so sharp I wonder if it’ll cut my throat. “I’m sure there are other things we should be talking about, anyway. My blood sample, for one. I’d like to see the slides, to try to make sense of what you saw.”
“Skye.” He looks so defeated. So tired. His lips part, then close like he’s also struggling to just say what he wants to say.
“I have work to do,” I lie and leave before I start begging on my knees for him to touch me again because I think that’s what I want the most.
Lonely. Pathetic. Unwanted. Those feelings funnel into a storm that causes the charms on my bracelet to warm and ignite.
He reaches out to stop me, to grab my wrist, but I move out of his way and leave.