Page 7 of Tell Me Why
“I’ll call Kirsten,” he said. “Had a job come in.”
“When?” she asked.
“About an hour ago,” he said.
“You go into the office?” she asked, checking the movie they were watching. It was more than an hour in, by her best guess.
“Nope,” Hunter said, faux-ominous.
It meant something, a job that could go directly to Tell’s cell phone. He didn’t give out the number freely, and any time it got passed around to someone who was too free with it, he got a newnumber. The human work - like Ellen - came through the office and his no-answering-machine landline ancient phone.
He wasn’t just nudging her to take better care of herself.
He was warning her.
“What do you know?” she asked Hunter, and he shook his head.
“Many things, but nothing about this.”
“How long are you staying?” she asked.
“Just through today,” he said, kissing her jaw and then settling back to watch the movie again.
“Leaving the country again?” she asked, and he shrugged.
“Work.”
It wasn’t cagey. Itfeltcagey, but it wasn’t.
This was a sort of self-preservation technique he had to keep from burning through the time he spent with her too quickly by spending most of his time apart. It was, she gathered, intended to make it possible to betogetherover centuries rather than decades, but mostly itfeltelusive and distant, sometimes even impersonal, as focused as he was on her while they were together.
It was still a bit disorienting, and she was working on how to deal with it.
When he was here, he was here.
When he wasn’t, he was very muchnothere andonlywherever he actually was.
She didn’t even think he missed her.
Tell didn’t seem to have any of the same hesitation to just beingaroundher all the time. Tina would have said from the ones she’d met that vampires were solitary creatures, by nature, and Tell wasn’t exactly forthcoming about the details of his - extraordinarily long - past, but he also didn’t feel like he intentionallyhidthem from her. They ate together, they worked together, they often went out together, and it didn’t feel like astrain at all. With Hunter, everything felt like it was an event, and then when the event was over, he was gone.
It was… she hadn’t figured out what it was, yet, but she was working on it. And trying to roll with it, because shelikedhim. She liked being around him. Liked his smell. Liked the way hewaswith her. She loved him, too, and where she hoped that things weren’t always going to be like they were right now, she was willing to walk quite a long way with him, just like this, and she didn’t think she’d be unhappy about it at all.
No.
Shewantedto go do the invoices and get those finished up and out of the way, but instead, she was going to lay here with Hunter’s arm around her chest and her fingers wrapped around his forearm, and she wouldn’t get up again until she had to go to bed at dawn.
She heard Tell call Kirsten and she sighed.
She was hungry.
She wasn’thungryhungry, but it was the normal gnawing of awareness that her fangs would drop in nearly unbidden if she were around someone whose actual purpose was to feed her, the way she would have salivated as a server put a dish on the table in front of her, as a human.
Thesmellof it.
She remembered the way the smell of a hot dish of food had made her feel and it was indistinguishable from the way she felt as a fountain got off the elevator and she could smell them coming into the penthouse.
But they didn’t get cold.
