Page 52 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Peter: I was worried I wouldn’t otherwise get your attention. I couldn’t think of any other excuse.

Peter: I’m not good at this.

I couldn’t help but laugh at that understatement.

Zelda: I can tell.

He didn’t reply right away, and I struggled with how to end this conversation. Could I let him know it was good to hear from him? It was the truth. But should I say it, given what had happened?

Zelda: You could have texted me anything at all and you would have had my full attention

Probably not the coyest thing I could have texted, but it wasn’t a lie. Hardly a day had gone by since we’d last seen each other when I hadn’t thought of him.

Regardless of what had happened between us in the past, I wanted him to know.

In the living room Lindsay and Becky were having a loud debate over whether they should barge into my room to find out what was going on.

Lindsay seemed to be firmly on Team Break Down the Door.

Fortunately for me and my poor door, hers seemed to be a team of one.

A cooler head—Becky’s—seemed to be prevailing.

For now, anyway.

Telling them my mom texted had been dumb. Maybe I could explain that I’d meant to say my college roommate texted. It had just been so long since we’d talked, so I’d gotten overexcited and had accidentally said mom.

All right, it wasn’t a good cover story. It wasn’t even a mediocre one. But I was out of time. Someone—Lindsay, probably—was knocking on my door.

When I opened it, she was glaring at me with her eyes narrowed and her arms folded tightly across her chest.

“Peter texted, and you hid from us because you wanted to text him back and knew we wouldn’t approve,” she said. “Right?”

I blinked in the face of her one-hundred-percent-true accusation. The lame excuse I’d just come up with in my bedroom evaporated from my head like mist at dawn.

Becky put her arm around me and gave my shoulders a squeeze. She was so obviously playing the role of good cop it was almost funny. “You don’t need to lie to us just because you think it’s something we won’t want to hear.”

“That’s right,” Lindsay agreed. “If you’re doing something you think we wouldn’t approve of you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Becky glared at her. “Lindsay,” she warned.

“It’s true,” Lindsay insisted. “At least in this case. The last thing she should be doing is texting the same man who just broke her heart.”

“He didn’t break my heart,” I said, before realizing I’d just confirmed I’d been texting Peter. Shit. “At least, he didn’t mean to. It was just…”

I trailed off, struggling to find the right way to end that sentence.

“It was just what?” Lindsay asked, one eyebrow raised.

“It was just…a confluence of unfortunate circumstances,” I finished.

Now that I stopped to think about it, this was the crux of it.

Which made me even sadder. We’d gotten along well, and our mutual attraction was undeniable.

Had we met under different circumstances, maybe we could have had some sort of future together.

Now, though, it was impossible.

“He’s not a bad person,” I went on. It was important that my friends understood this. “We just can’t be together.”

I could tell Lindsay wanted to ask more questions. Becky likely saw this, too, and put her hand on her cousin’s arm before she could.

“Our chief concern is that you’re all right,” Becky said. “Are you?”

I thought about that for a moment. Was I okay? Not really.

Would I be, though? Probably. In my four hundred years, I’d weathered more than my fair share of heartbreaks. I’d survived those; I would survive this.

Even if it would hurt like hell in the meantime.

“I will be,” I said, mustering a smile. “Promise.”

Once my friends had left, I collapsed onto the loveseat, exhausted from the long day at work and the evening spent socializing. I still had to do my nightly ritual, but first I needed to work up the energy to get off the couch and get started.

I’d changed things up after returning home, retiring the candle ritual in favor of moderately more advanced uses of magic twice per day.

The experiments I’d conducted on the road had helped me land on the perfect amount of magical energy I could expend daily without running the risk of anything going haywire.

Every night before bed I conjured a small ball of light, just like the one I’d made in that frigid Nevada field.

In the mornings, I created a warm, vigorous breeze that was better at drying my hair than any blow-dryer.

These two spells had been my daily combination since returning home—and to my relief, the panicky, clawing sensations that had plagued me in the months leading up to my trip across the country had all but vanished.

I went into my bedroom, drawing my new moss-green curtains closed so that no one who might be outside at this hour could see what I was about to do. My old curtains had been prettier, but these were intact rather than a pile of lacy ash. On balance, it was an improvement.

I absently picked up my phone from my dresser before I got started and saw that Peter had texted again after I’d set down my phone and gone back to watching television with my friends.

Zelda: You could have said literally anything at all and you would have had my full attention

Peter: You have my full attention, always.