Page 11

11

CAM

I didn’t get to see Penn the day after we talked. We’d both been busy, and the usual time that we spent together in the newspaper room had been consumed by research for my next article. I was grateful for a real story, but I wanted to spend time with Penn. I wanted to talk to him and find out where exactly things were after our conversation in his room.

Were we together?

It had felt like we were making things real when we kissed at his desk, and I was so happy about that. At least I knew that I’d see him the next day. We had a scheduled feeding, and Penn had never missed one yet. I reminded myself of this fact when I went to bed with very few texts from him. I reminded myself of the same thing when I didn’t get a text from him that morning and left mine on read.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see him in Newspaper that day either. I didn’t even go to the newspaper room. Instead, I went straight to Dean Yaga’s office and spent most of the class time waiting for an opportunity to talk to her secretary to schedule my appointment. By the time she was finally able to get me scheduled, there would’ve been less than ten minutes left of Newspaper. I shot Ever a text letting him know that I’d scheduled my interview and went back to my dorm to shower and get an early start on my homework.

I’d just finished the reading for one of my classes when I heard the tentative knock on my door. I closed the book and crossed my bedroom to answer it. I reached down to straighten my gray tee-shirt before I opened the door.

Penn stood behind it. He looked… wrong. I couldn’t place it, couldn’t figure out why he looked different, but something was off. I studied him for a moment before I let him in. As he crossed in front of me, I realized what it was. He looked like he’d been up all night. He looked nearly as tired as I’d felt the day we’d started this arrangement.

“Are you okay?” I asked him as he went to sit on my bed.

“Yeah.”

His voice was inflection less as he bent down to take off his shoes. He wasn’t looking at me. Something was wrong . I didn’t need to read his energy to tell that. I had gotten to know him fairly well over the past few weeks, enough to develop feelings for him, enough to consider him a friend, and he wasn’t acting like himself.

“Penn…”

I couldn’t feed off of him if he wasn’t okay. If he wasn’t in the right head space, it would feel wrong. I’d deal with fact that it screwed me up on my own time. We could reschedule for when he was feeling better. We were feeding twice a week, so he’d have enough time to recover before it became problematic.

“Cam, I’m okay,” he repeated.

He finally dragged his eyes up to meet mine. They looked so tired. My heart ached seeing him like this. I wanted to tuck him in with a bowl of chicken noodle soup or hot cocoa or something. I wanted to wrap him up in a thick blanket and then curl up in bed behind him and hold him close to me until he go some sleep and those bags under his eyes faded.

I sat down on the bed beside him. He’d only taken off one shoe, and he bent to work on the other one. “Talk to me,” I requested softly.

“I’m just… It’s nothing.”

It sure as hell didn’t look like nothing . I took a deep breath. Maybe he was just having a bad day or stayed up too late studying. There were a long list of maybes that it could be, and it didn’t feel right to feed off of him. I reached down and stopped him from taking off his shoe. He looked up at me, the shoe half-untied and abandoned for the moment as his hand stilled in mine.

“I don’t think I can feed tonight,” I told him.

He straightened and angled his body on the bed, facing me better. I mirrored him, curling my legs up underneath myself.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “Don’t you need to feed?”

I nodded and then changed my mind, shaking my head instead. “I mean optimally, two feedings a week, but we both know I can wait longer. What I can’t do is feed off of you if you’re not in the right state of mind to consent. It would be wrong.”

“I’m okay, Cam,” he told me again. His words were punctuated with a heavy sigh, and I could practically feel the annoyance radiating off of him.

Maybe I was being too sensitive, but I just had that niggling feeling in my gut that something was wrong. That he wasn’t being forthcoming and that feeding off of him would be a mistake, even if I’d been craving him since our last conversation. I could make do with the scraps of energy around campus. I could go to another club and take scraps there. Anything would be better than crossing a line with Penn.

It was the one thing I couldn’t bring myself to do.

“You’re acting weird. You look tired,” I pointed out. “When you came in, you barely looked at me.” Oh . I was pretty sure I understood now. “Is this about the other night?”

Was he freaked out by the fact that I had feelings for him? Maybe I’d misread the kiss, the conversation, all of it. There was a chance that, after he thought about it, he wasn’t okay with being romantically attached to someone who grew horns and fangs and talons, whose skin turned blue and had glowing eyes and fed off of sexual energy. Maybe he was freaked out by the whole thing. Could I really judge him for that?

He was human.

I wasn’t.

There was a heavy silence between us, and I hated it. I hated that I couldn’t fix whatever was wrong. Not if it was about the other night. I couldn’t change what I was or that I shifted into something inhuman. I couldn’t change the way I felt about him either.

“It’s not that.” His words cut through the thick silence. “I’m just in my head, but it’s… It’s not about the other night. I’ve just been thinking about some things, and I have some things I’m researching, and I stayed up too late last night looking for answers.”

“Is it anything I can help you with?”

He cocked his head in thought. I watched as his thumb rub invisible designs over my bedspread. I folded my hands to keep from reaching out to steady his hand, to pull him back to me. My knuckles were white with the force I was using to keep from interfering. He needed his space to figure out if there was anything I could help with.

“Not yet, but I’ll talk to you about it when I have more of it figured out,” he finally answered. “Though I wouldn’t mind if you got me out of my head for a little bit.” He scooted a little closer to me. “I promise you. I’m in a good enough head space for feeding, okay? And if you don’t believe that, don’t feed. Even though I know you want to.”

He wasn’t wrong. I could already feel those first tendrils of lust and want, an appetizer to the main course. I wanted to pull them into me, but I fought the urge.

“Please.”

One word. One word was all that it took. I practically dove at him, bringing my lips to his.

Everything else felt off, but kissing him didn’t. The way his body reacted to mine didn’t. His energy didn’t, when he started begging me to please feed off of him while I sucked his dick. I finally gave into my base instincts. Nothing about our hookup felt wrong as it was happening.

It wasn’t until it was over, when his high faded, and he left without a goodbye kiss that I started wondering if maybe I’d given in too easily.

Maybe I should have pushed to talk about it a little more.

Damn incubus instincts.

I felt restless and antsy for the rest of the night. My suite mates commented on it when I couldn’t sit still in the common room. I thought about asking them, but I wasn’t sure that they’d understand. They were monsters, sure, but they were different kinds of monsters. None of them had to feed off of people. I would have given anything to have another incubus as a roommate right then. Hell, I’d have taken a vampire at that point.

They might be able to understand.

Instead, I had a phoenix, a werewolf, and a djinn. They wouldn’t be helpful, because they wouldn’t understand. I wished I had more concubi friends, someone that I could talk to about this. Maybe if I did, they could tell me what I was doing wrong. They could tell me why I felt like shit for feeding off of my feeder.

Or maybe they’d judge me for only having one feeder the same way my family did.

I excused myself to my bedroom and screamed into my pillow.

It didn’t help.

I turned off my bedroom light and laid on the bed. I could smell Penn’s cologne. It had seeped into the pillow case after our feeding. Maybe it had been there before, from any number of other feedings. I sat up and took the pillow case off my pillow, but I could still smell him there. I could still remember him sitting on my bed with those sad, tired eyes and making the decision to take his words at face value.

But maybe I should have. Because I trusted him, right? I liked him. He was my friend. I trusted him, so maybe I should have taken his words at face value, and I was just being dramatic.

I wanted to scream and not just into my pillow.

I needed to talk to someone.

I pulled my phone out from my pocket and sent a quick text to Ryder, asking if he was awake. He might understand a little at least. We’d gone through all of the awkward stages of what was essentially my incubus puberty together. He knew as much about my species as I did, and he had the bonus of being a human who had been my feeder for years. Maybe he could provide from insight.

I was hopeful as I hit send, but the hope faded with every minute that passed and he didn’t text me back. Then I remembered that time zones were a thing, and it was really late for him. He was probably asleep.

“Fuck,” I grumbled into the dark. The one person who might understand, and I couldn’t reach him. Maybe I should call him and wake him up. I was having a crisis, and Ryder was my best friend.

It felt selfish, so I didn’t.

Instead I called the only other person I could think of: my sister.

She answered on the first ring. I could hear music playing in the background and her hissing demand that someone “turn that shit down” before she actually spoke into the phone. “Cam? Are you okay?”

Her voice was a weighted blanket of comfort settling over me. She might judge me for only having one feeder, but she might also understand. Surely she’d gotten feelings for a feeder, right? Or one of her feeders had acted weird, but she still fed off of them in the heat of the moment?

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m—Is it cliche to say I’m having boy problems?”

“A little bit. Give me two minutes to go somewhere private, okay?” I felt terrible for interrupting whatever she was doing, but not terrible enough to tell her that I’d handle it and call her later. I knew that wouldn’t have been the truth, and I wasn’t sure she’d believe me even if I tried to convince her that it was. It was less than two minutes before her voice was back on the line. “Okay, I’m ready. Hit me with your boy problems.”

“Penn’s acting weird.”

“That’s your feeder, right?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “He came over today for our regular feeding, and he seemed off. He said he was okay, just had a lot on his mind, and he still wanted to feed.”

“So you fed off of him.”

“Am I telling the story or are you?”

Christa laughed. “I’m sorry. Tell me your woes.”

I rolled my eyes. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see it; it was the thought that mattered. “Okay, so Penn and I are friends, but since we started hooking up, things have shifted.” I paused. I felt like such an idiot admitting this to my sister. “Have you ever gotten feelings for one of your feeders?”

“No,” Christa said bluntly. Of course not. That would’ve been too convenient. “But I don’t bond with my feeders the way you do. I have more than one. I rotate them. It’s never just one person that I’m building that exchange of energy with, Cam, and it’s rarely with someone I have any kind of relationship with outside of feeding. Honestly, I’m surprised it didn’t happen when you were feeding off of Ryder for all those years.”

I couldn’t imagine having the same feelings I had for Penn for Ryder. It felt wrong down to my toes. Ryder had always just been one of my best friends.

From the first moment I saw Penn, he’d been something more than that. I’d been intrigued by him. I’d wanted to get to know him in a way I’d never wanted to get to know anyone. Maybe I’d had a crush on him from the moment I laid eyes on him.

“Am I an idiot?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean, you asked.” Christa laugh rang through the phone again, somehow just as melodic despite the phone quality. Stupid magical perfection. “But I’ve thought you were an idiot since you tried to take the training wheels off your bike when you were five and ended up wrecking into the mailbox.”

“I didn’t take the training wheels off of my bike.”

“I said tried . Instead you loosened them enough that one fell off and you lost control. Mom lost her shit, and I thought you were going to die. It was a whole thing.”

That was not how I remembered it, but okay. I wasn’t going to argue with her about that… mainly because I remembered seeing my rusted old bike banged up in the garage with one beat up training wheel, so I suspected my memory of the incident might have been faulty.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked her. “I told him I have feelings for him, and now things are weird.”

“What did he say when you talked to him before you fed off of him? After he said he had a lot on his mind?”

“That he’d talk to me about it when he had some answers about whatever is going on in his head. He says it’s not about me telling him I have feelings for him bu—”

“Then maybe just wait for him to talk to you about whatever it is and stop catastrophizing. I’m sure the sky isn’t actually falling, Chicken Little.”

She could be such a pain in my ass. “I’m hanging up on you now.”

“Good. I want to get back to what I was doing. Which was spending time with my feeder. I put off dinner for you.”

“Gross,” I groaned. “Bye Christa.”

My sister’s laugh was cut off by her hanging up the phone. Maybe she was right, and I was making something out of nothing.