Page 90 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Reggie picked up his mug from earlier and took a delicate sip, eyes never leaving my face. “You heard me.”

This asshole. “You think I’minlovewith him?” I began pacing the kitchen so vigorously the downstairs neighbors must have thought a herd of elephants had moved in. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Reg gave a one-shouldered shrug that was so clearly a pantomime of Peter’s mannerisms I nearly grabbed hisKiss the Cookmug and threw it at him.

“Great,” I muttered. “Now you’re copying his shrugging just to troll me.”

He had the audacity to burst out laughing. “That wasn’t what I was doing, I swear.” He put up his hands in a placating gesture. “Why did you assume that? Does Peter shrug a lot or something?”

I opened my mouth to tell him off, then snapped it closed again when I realized he entirely had my number. “Maybe,” I conceded.

“Listen,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “It’s beyond obvious that our Petey has feelings for you, and I cannot imagine why you’d go on this mad trip if they weren’t reciprocated.” He smirked, then added, “Besides, you twonappedtogether while Amelia and I were out. In the same bed! Here, in my good Christian home.”

Now he was definitely trolling me. I barely registered it.

It’s beyond obvious that our Petey has feelings for you.

Was it true? The idea of never seeing Peter again once he got his memories back filled me with a kind of hopeless dread that I had no name for. But did that mean I was in love with him?

I didn’t have the space to examine it. Not right there in Reggie’s kitchen the night before we were headed off for whatever was waiting for Peter in Indiana.

Later. Hopefully there would be time to sift through all these confusing feelings later.

“I didn’t go on this trip because I was in love with him,” I said truthfully, sidestepping the real question Reggie was asking like the land mine it was. “I went because I’d been repressing my magic for too long, and it was negatively impacting my life. I needed to get out of town for a while to see how much magic I could safely use again without endangering people I care about in the process.”

Reggie’s forehead creased in concern. “You’ve been hiding your magic?”

“Yeah.”

“Your entries in theVampyric Annalssaid you’d been living a new, secret life,” he said. That dumb vampire encyclopedia hadGrizeldaentries? That was news to me. “I didn’t realize you’re completely hiding everything that makes youyou.”

“I am,” I said. “Or rather—I was. I can’t anymore.”

“Because you came to your senses?” Reggie asked, acting so much like a mother hen with his lecturing tone that I couldn’t help but smile.

“Because I set my bedroom curtains on fire.”

His eyes widened. “Like that time in Paris when you and I set all those curtains on fire on a dare?”

That got a smile out of me. “Not like that,” I clarified. “That was a lot of fun—”

“It sure as hell was.”

“—but no. This time it was an accident. I was asleep, and I must have gone too long without doing any spells and…whoosh.” I threw my hands up in the air. “I woke up to an inferno.”

Reggie’s smile from remembering our wild year in Paris slid from his face. “I don’t understand any of this.” He walked back to the kitchen table and sat down heavily in his chair. “I’ve been so flipping glad to hear from you again, I haven’t wanted to pry into the reasons why you ran away. But now that you’re telling me you’ve not only run away and assumed a new identity but arealsosuppressing who you are and endangering yourself in the process…”

Reggie didn’t finish that thought, but he didn’t need to. His concern for me was written on his face plain as day.

It was time to tell him the truth.

“When I left,” I began, “something really bad had just happened, in part because of my magic. It was the wake-up call I needed to completely change my life.”

Reggie started talking again before I could get into all the restof it. “I understand what it’s like to wake up one day and realize,Shit, maybe I’ve been doing this immortality thing all wrong.” He gestured to the beautiful apartment he now shared with his girlfriend. “I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t had a similar wake-up call myself. But how is suppressing who you are and hiding yourself awayliving?”

I gave him a wry smile. “Peter said something along those lines to me, too, when I told him.”

Reggie raised an eyebrow. “Did he, now?”