Page 112 of Night's Reckoning
You had sex with Tenzin.
It had been… He didn’t have words for it.
He wanted her to be there when he got out of the bath, and he knew she’d be gone.
She was good at leaving.
You asked her to leave.
Ben was so angry with her he didn’t know what to say.
I hate you.
I need you.
Don’t leave me.
I can’t stand the sight of you.
Among the tangle of thoughts in his mind, he kept coming back to three things: he’d had sex with Tenzin, he’d drunk her blood, and he didn’t have words to describe it.
He needed a few years and a few barrels of whiskey to even begin to explain what he was feeling. In that moment, all he felt when he thought about her was anger. He wanted to hit her. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to scream at her.
He wanted to do it again.
Fuck, he was a mess.
Ben sucked in a harsh breath and rubbed his eyes. He wanted to go home to LA. He wanted to hide in his room at Giovanni and Beatrice’s, eat a chicken burrito, and sleep for a week. He wanted to wake up from this nightmare.
He wanted his eyes to be brown again.
He didn’t want blood to taste good.
He wanted to talk to Beatrice. He wanted to know what to do.
How am I supposed to feel, B? Because right now I can’t think. Every time I think more than five minutes in advance, I feel so overwhelmed I want to cry.
Why did he want to cry? He was angry, not sad. He’d been stripped of his free will, his humanity taken from him, and handed over to a vampire not even Tenzin liked.
Okay, maybe he had a good reason to cry.
You can’t stay in the bath forever.
Ben stood and reached for a towel, keeping his eyes fixed on the floor. He kept catching his reflection in the mirror and wishing he hadn’t, wishing the old myth about vampire reflections was truth.
Sometimes it was worse knowing.
Kill me.
It was still an option. All Ben would have to do is park himself out in the sun and he’d burn up in the daylight. But there were two problems with that idea. He’d seen a vampire burning one time, trying to kill himself. It wasn’t quick and it was incredibly painful. Also it was one thing to be faced with death and accept it, it was another to actively go looking for it.
He reached for a soft cotton towel and wrapped it around his body. He tried to dry off his shoulders, but rubbing his skin hurt. Not as much as Tenzin’s fingernails had hurt, but—
He’d had sex with Tenzin.
Ben glanced at his shoulder, but all he could see where she’d marked him were faint red lines. The bloody marks had already healed.
You told her to leave.
