“You still keep Band-Aids in your back pocket?” Brennan asked.
Cole was bracing himself, pinching his forefinger with his other hand, a smudge of blood on his fingertips. And Brennan never thought he’d be into fingers, or blood, but there he was, wanting to lick them clean.
“Um, yep. Yeah, I do,” Cole said, eyeing Brennan like he still wasn’t convinced Brennan wasn’t going to eat him.
Fuck, Brennan wasn’t convinced himself. Heat rushed to his cheeks. He still wasn’t sure how vampire blood worked, so he wasn’t sure if he should be worried about blushing. He ducked his head and crossed behind Cole to dig in the back pocket of his backpack, where Cole seemingly had a small over-the-counter drugstore: painkillers, cold medicine, allergy medicine, lactose relief, menstrual relief, even a few multivitamins.
Brennan laughed at the extent of it, grabbing the variety pack of Band-Aids and zipping the pocket closed again. “Is this some sort of small business?”
“No, but I like to be prepared.”
“You’re not even lactose intolerant.”
Cole whirled around, still holding the paper-cut finger. “I don’t menstruate either, hon, and I don’t take women’s multivitamins.” He blinked, then amended, “Well, not all the time. They do wonders for your nails and hair.”
Brennan stepped closer to Cole, tugging his hand toward him.
“I guess I like being the person who can help when someone’s like, ‘Does anyone have an Advil?’ Or, a pen, or a charger, you know?” Cole trailed off as Brennan cradled Cole’s hand in his own and unwrapped the Band-Aid. He couldn’t have been bleeding that much, but blood was still smeared across the tips of his fingers. Cole’s hands were smaller than Brennan’s, delicate with long fingers, like a pianist’s.
Fuck. Brennan still wanted to lick them, and not even in a vampire way.
Brennan put the Band-Aid on, and when he finally tore his eyes away from Cole’s fingers, Cole was watching him intently, head tilted like Brennan was one of his calculus homework questions.
“What?” Brennan asked.
He was still holding Cole’s hand, standing too close to him. He dropped Cole’s newly bandaged hand and stepped back, face burning,then circled back behind Cole to return the pack of Band-Aids. Why hadn’t he passed Cole a Band-Aid to put on himself, like a normal person? God, he gotonebadly timed crush and completely forgot how to act like a person.
“Nothing, just…” Cole shrugged, the backpack shifting with the movement. “You blush blue.”
Brennan’s whirlwind of self-deprecating thoughts slammed to a stop. “What?”
“Well, I mean, I think…? It kinda makes you look sickly, to be honest, but I think that’s what it is?” He paused. Turned around to face Brennan again. “Am I making you blush?”
Brennan slapped a hand over his cheek, as if he might feel evidence of the traitorous color.
“Shit, how noticeable is it?” His brain shuffled through all the times he may have blushed in front of someone in the last few weeks and whether they may have noticed something weird about him. But then, he’d only blushed recently around Cole. “Would you see it and be like, ‘That guy’s a vampire’? Or would people just think I’m about to puke?”
Cole giggled.Giggled.“Not noticeable, unless you’re looking for it.”
They resumed walking, side by side, and Brennan felt like he could think again once Cole’s unwavering gaze was off him. They left the crowded quad behind them, the path narrowing. But then—
“So you’ve beenlookingfor it?” Brennan asked.
“I’ve gotta take the clues I can get.”
They turned down the street toward Brennan’s place down the block.
“You make it sound like I’m some sort of mystery.”
“I feel like,” Cole started, and that was another one of his things. He added these qualifiers to his statements, watering things down withI feels andI think, maybes. “I don’t know, you can be kind of hard to read, sometimes.”
Brennan had been told the same thing by his mom, two teachers, and three therapists. Dr. Morris traced it back to his mom and his childhood, as therapists often did, and said he was too used to being independent. It was a nice way of saying he started being depressed and lonely when he was ten years old and hadn’t stopped since.
“Well, that’s awkward,” Brennan said. “Because at this point you know more about me than my mom does.”
“I really doubt that. Because she doesn’t know about the vampire thing?”
“It’s a pretty big thing, wouldn’t you say?”
