I ran upstairs to Cal’s room and jumped on his back, shaking him awake. “Why are you napping?”
He rolled his head up and looked at me groggily, then buried his face in his pillows again. “I don’t wanna go to school.”
I laughed. “Come on, you don’t wanna spend your last few hours as a human in bed, do you?”
“Yeah. Kinda,” he said with a smile and a suggestive wink.
I slapped him on the arm. “Get up. We’ve only got an hour until the party.”
“Eric said I should sleep.” His voice was muffled in his pillows.
“Why?”
“Something about the changes I’ll go through over the next few days. He says it’ll be really taxing, and a rest beforehand can help.”
“But it’s only an hour until the party.” I shook him again, jumping up and down on him. “I’ve been calling and calling. I was getting worried.”
“Sorry.” He rolled right over then and cupped my hips to keep me on him, but when I felt his boner press against my vagina, I lifted my leg over him and sat on the edge of the bed.
“I need my costume,” I said. “Where’d you put it?”
He just pointed to the box of stuff by the stairs, slipping his hands under the blanket then.
“Where’s your costume?” I asked, grabbing mine off the top of the box.
“Hanging in the bathroom.”
Since he wasn’t looking, I snuck over and took a peek, laughing when I saw the high-collared cape. Fitting. “Did you plan that?” I called.
“Plan what?”
“To be dressed as a vampire the night you become one?”
He laughed. “No, but it should make for a good laugh, right?”
“Yeah.” I nodded, imagining Cal as a vampire. I could see him being the kind of guy that had a sense of humor about it—kind of like Eric—so it was also fitting that Eric would be the one turning him; be his master, of sorts. They were alike in a lot of ways, personality-wise.
“Has David said anything more about it?” he asked.
“About you being turned?” I confirmed. “No.”
“You think he’s hurt?”
No, I was sure of it. I only had to think of his face, when I told him, to see that. “Yeah. He wondered why I don’t want that with him.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Tell him what?” I sat down cross-legged on his floor.
“How you feel?”
“I can’t, Cal—”
“You can,” he demanded, rolling up a bit so he could look at me. “Because you can’t sit halfway between being with him and not being with him. You either want him or you don’t.”
“I do. But I’m worried.”
“About what?”
“What if things don’t work out? What if we get the kids’ hopes up and then we break up again—”
“They’ll deal—”
“No. They won’t. They’ve been through enough, Cal. And if David was a kind, loving guy all the time, I’d go for it. But he’s not.” I thought back to the day in the courtyard. What if he did that to me again? I could never ever tell Elora, but if he did that to me, I would have to leave him. And then she’d be left wondering why. “I just want to be sure first. I need to piss him off a few times to test it.”
He threw the covers back and jumped up. “I still think you should tell him how you feel. Maybe tell him you don’t want to let anyone know you’re together until you’re sure things are going to work out.”
“I don’t know why I’d do that when I can just not commit to him until I’m sure. Why hurt him more, Cal?”
“I think not telling him how you feel is worse.”
He had a point. And it made me feel heavy. “Maybe, but then there’s the… I mean, you’re going to be a vampire in a few days”—after a few days of suffering—“and if I… if David and I are together, as more than friends, he’ll never let me see you—”
“So tell him that’s not how things will be.”
“Have you ever spoken to David?” I asked rhetorically. “He has this way of, like, controlling me without me realizing he’s doing it.”
Cal laughed. “Then you need to get stronger.”
“Yes, I do,” I said decisively, “and until I am, I think a relationship with him could be a bit toxic. And besides, Elora’s wedding is in less than a week. If David and I get back together, that’s all anyone will talk about. I just want her day to be special, and then I’ll tell him.”
“Sounds like a bunch of excuses, if you ask me, but… it’s your life,” Cal said, walking past me with a huge boner making a tent of his shorts. I hid my eyes, moaning in disgust.
“What?” he said. “It’s your fault for putting your legs over me that way. I’m only human,” he added with a playful shrug.
“For another few hours at least,” I said. “Are you scared?”
“Not really.” His voice echoed as he walked into the bathroom and lifted the toilet seat, standing in front of it but not actually peeing. “I figure I can handle a little pain to have the rest of forever as an eighteen-year-old.”
“Have you thought any more about your family—how you’ll feel when they’re eventually gone?”
“I…” He started peeing then, but it was a broken stream, stopping and starting. “Yeah. And it’s sad, but I’m not going to think about that, you know? If I was staying human, it’s not something I’d reflect on for another thirty or so years.”
“Fair enough.” I nodded, hugging my knees. I frowned then, angling my ear toward him. “Why can’t you pee? Are you sick?”
“Boner,” he said simply. “Makes it hard to pee.”
“Why?”
He just laughed. “Ever turned on a dodgy bubbler?”
“Bubbler?”
“Water fountain—drinking fountain, not sure what you call them.”
“Oh, yeah. I have.” I thought about the broken one I used in the park once—how the water blasted up and hit me in the nose. And then I laughed, hard. “So you pee on the roof if you have a boner?”
“Not quite. But it makes it hard to get the pee out. And it can hurt. And it usually goes off in four directions, so you have to be careful.”
I rolled onto the floor, my stomach muscles so tight with the hilarity that I couldn’t breathe. By the time I composed myself, Cal was standing above me, his boner gone.
“You’re such a child,” he said sweetly, helping me up.
“Hey, I bet you laughed like that when you first found out you could pee in four directions.”
His white teeth showed with a short, breathy laugh. Which got me thinking about fangs. I wondered if David’s were sharp and pointy because he was once a vampire, or if he was just born like that. Which made me excited to meet Jason in just a few days and compare the differences between them—the evil soul and the pure one. I understood it now that David wasn’t evil because his soul was impure, and Jason wasn’t a saint because his was pure. But I wondered how they’d be different anyway, and I wondered how I’d feel around Queen Lilith, being that we were twin souls. Would I like her? Would she like me?
“What are you thinking about?” Cal asked, his hand on my shoulder.
“The wedding—meeting everyone. My dad will be there too.”
“The Vampire King?” he said, bending to get a shirt off the pile on the floor.
“Yeah,” I said, watching him sniff it and, with a shrug, decide that it was clean enough to wear. “I’ve only met him once.”
“Are you worried he won’t like you?”
“No. I guess…” Well, if I was honest… “Okay, maybe a little.”
“Why? He’s your dad, right? As long as he’s not a douche like my dad, he should love you no matter what.”
“Yeah, but I kind of wonder sometimes why he let Brett care for me if that’s the case. I mean…”
“You think it means he doesn’t care?”
I shrugged. “Brett said he just found it too painful to see me in ‘that state’ but I’m not sure what he meant by that—”
“Weren’t you still recovering from the burnt flesh for a while?”
“Yeah. When I reconstructed myself, it was in reverse of what happened to me in death and before it, they told me. So I did suffer a lot at first, but I don’t remember any of it.”
Cal cringed.
“Brett said I screamed a lot, and it was too much even for him.”
“But he stayed?”
“Yeah.”
“And your own father couldn’t?”
I pressed my lips together and turned them down, bringing one shoulder up. I did remember something about Morgana being his daughter too. Maybe he couldn’t come to terms with what she’d done to her own sister. Maybe he didn’t want to see me heal in reverse because knowing exactly what she did would make him want to hate her.
“Aw, don’t be sad, kiddo.” Cal put his arm around me. “Not everyone has the stomach for that.”
“So I guess that just makes Brett an amazing person—”
“No, he just loves you,” Cal stated. “It’d be different if he didn’t.”
“So are you saying my dad doesn’t love me?”
“No. I’m saying Brett loves you in a very different way to a father.”
I frowned, watching him as he sat at his easel and picked up his rag and brush. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” He glanced back at me, studied my face, and then shook his head. “Never mind. You better go, Ar. That costume will take a while to get on.”
I looked over at the costume. David once told me he was born in the late 1800s, so I thought Halloween was the perfect opportunity to honor that time period in a dress that was actually made then. It wasn’t so much a costume as it was an antique. But it was beautiful, and blue. I knew he loved me in blue. So much damage had been done to David in his past, and I needed to repair things delicately—one step at a time—starting by making him look at me like he used to. Like he loved me.