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“It is.”

“But you don’t drink blood?” Zia asks as she scoots a little closer.

“I can’t.”

She frowns. “I saw your fangs, though. I can see them right now.” She points at them, almost so close she’s touching them.

God help us both if she touches them.

Barely fighting the urge to roll my lips over my teeth, I sigh. “I can physically feed. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I don’t understand,” Zia says as she scoots even closer. “How do you survive if you can’t drink blood? Why can’t you drink blood?”

“I drink coconut water by the gallon. It has qualities that are similar and it’s enough to keep me going. I—”

“You didn’t like what I brought you, did you?”

I blink at her as I discreetly put space between us again. “That’s not what I said.”

Zia shakes her head. “You didn’t like her, and now you’re telling me this just so I don’t chain you to the bed again.”

“That’s not it at all, Zia. I appreciate what you did for me, it was very thoughtful but—”

Before I can finish, she hops up off the bed and rushes toward the dresser. Zia grabs a mug from the top then spins toward me, quickly putting herself directly next to me on the bed again, our thighs touching and everything.

“Here.” She shoves the pea green-colored ceramic toward my chest. “If you don’t have a problem with what I brought you, drink this. It’s from her.”

I pull my stare away from her brown eyes and look down at the thick, dark liquid-like substance she’s offering me.

And immediately wretch at the coagulated and gnarly blood.

“I knew it!” Zia exclaims as she yanks the mug away and launches it across the room. It crashes against the wall in a mess of goopy blood and ceramic shards, creating the most morbid Rorschach test there ever was. I bet human psychiatrists would have a field day with that. “You don’t like what I brought you and—”

“Zia, stop,” I demand.

To my surprise, she does.

Zia stops dead in her tracks, stops moving completely, save for the rapid pumping of her chest, and she almost looks as though she’s waiting for me to give her a command.

So, I do.

“Come sit down.” She does as I say, albeit slowly, and sinks onto the mattress next to me. I lower my voice as I turn to face her, Zia’s pulse erratic enough for me to hear. “I appreciate what you did for me.”

She meets my eyes but doesn’t speak.

“I appreciate that you wanted to make sure I had something to eat while I was here, but I don’t feed like other vampires because I can't.” Not that I’m going to tell her why yet. Don’t need to reveal everything to my captor right away just because I’m ridiculously attracted to her. “I can’t feed from humans directly and even if I did feed from them, I couldn’t do it from a mug like that because the blood would make me sick. It has to come from a direct source.”

Zia nods slowly. “You weren’t rejecting what I brought you.”

“Right.”

“You just don’t drink blood.”

“Correct,” I say as I watch her try to make sense of my vague and bullshit explanation. I have to tread lightly with her, I can tell, but I’m compelled to give her something in the way of a reason. Because I’m more fucked up than I thought.

“And you definitely can’t have the blood from that dead lady because it’ll make you sick?”

“Right. I can’t have the dead lady’s bloo… did you say dead lady?”