Page 14 of Love Bleeds

If there had been, how could I have missed it?

Was I that self-absorbed? That bad a friend?

My mind flashed back to that night at our house, when I'd asked Damian over to show off my dice and the vampires had attacked. My throat constricted. I'd been a bad friendthatnight. If Damian hadn't felt the need to protect me...

"I'm sorry," Savannah said again. Something about the way she spoke told me that my thoughts must have been visible on my face.

I shook my head. "I'm fine."

After all, I wasn't the one who'd died.

Savannah laid an arm around my shoulder as if I was the one who needed to be comforted even though I wasn't the one who'd been crying. I didn't protest, even though it made me feel a little awkward. "Damian made me promise not to tell you," she repeated. "I guess he must have caught me watching him."

Again, I didn't know what to say. I wrapped my arms around my knees and drew them toward my chest. "I still don't know if I believe you," I admitted.

"I just... I don't know... I felt like you deserved to know."

"Because you don't think he's coming back?"

Surprise flickered across Savannah's features. Of course. All my friends walked on eggshells around me because they believed I was still under the illusion that Damian was somehow only gone temporarily. There was no way for me to tell them that he'd been killed by vampires, so I chose to say nothing at all about the matter.

Savannah thought for a moment, then she said, "He wouldn't have left you without a message."

"No, he wouldn't have." Even though I wasn't ready to believe that Damian had beenattractedto me, I could agree that he would never have done that to me. But he hadn't left. He'd thrown himself in front of a vampire to save me.

I exhaled and let my head hang low, the memory weighing heavily on my mind. For a second or two, it was all I could do just to breathe through the pain of that memory.

A week or two ago, it would have wrecked me. I would have fallen down a hole and remained there for the rest of the day, wallowing in my grief as if it was the only thing I'd ever known. Not now. I pulled myself up, mentally. I'd learned how to do that. Not to forget the pain or stop feeling it, but to roll with it. To remain functional.

Time was never going to heal this wound, but it had at least taught me how to convince the people around me otherwise.

"I'm sorry about Brian," I made myself say. Because this wasn't all about me, was it? Savannah had lost someone too--and far more recently than me.

Savannah tightened her grip around my shoulder. "It's not fair. None of this is."

"It's really not."

Honestly, I'd kind of let go of the idea of life being fair a long time ago. That illusion had shattered for me when I was a child and my mom never came home from work.

Savannah leaned into my side, and I awkwardly rested my arm around her shoulders in an effort to imitate the way she'd tried to comfort me too.

"Promise me you're going to live to at least a hundred," Savannah said.

"Promise," I said, if only because I never wanted to make someone else experience the same grief I was going through.