Page 76 of Love Bites
And I'd fallen in love with him,anyway.
What kind of idiot was I?
"I need... I need to go."
"I understand," Talon said, his voice just the tiniest bit unsteady as he handed me my sweater. I hated that I was hurting him, even while I was mad at him, at both of us, really. But I couldn't make myself calm down and talk about this rationally either. If I stayed, I would only make this worse. Unsure what else to do, I pulled my sweater on and forced myself to leave.
Talon didn’t try to stop me. I almost wished he would.
It was the very first time ever that I exited that hotel before morning and without begging him to stay just a little bit longer.
Had I made a huge mistake by getting involved with a vampire?
If so, why had it taken memonthsto see it?
Also, did I care?
I didn't know anymore.
Chapter Twenty-Three
"Okay, I get why Luke is depressed, but why are you sulking too now?" Elena poked me in the side, sitting next to me on the couch. She was watching one of her shows and I'd sort of joined her since I'd already been there when she came home. I wasn't really sure what it was about since I hadn't been paying attention, but the cops on screen were pulling a corpse out of a river.
I really had no idea why my sister liked police procedurals so much.
"Be nice to me, I'm pregnant." It had been three days since my last meeting with Talon, and I still hadn't made any headway in figuring out what I wanted to do with the information I'd learned.
"That doesn't give you a free pass to mope all day. What's wrong? Are you nervous about the baby or are you having trouble with your man?"
A little bit of both? It was hard to respond to that question. The more time passed and the more my belly grew, the more this pregnancy became real to me. The morethe babybecame real to me. I was going to be a dad. How was I going to raise a baby? I didn't know the first thing about babies. The only upside was that we weren't hurting for money. I'd lost my job at the cafe since I'd stopped showing up to my shift, but I'd never technically needed that job. Dad had left a lot of money to my siblings and me. I'd only ever worked at the coffee shop to feel normal. I scoffed at the thought, wondering if you could get any farther away from normal than I was now, pregnant with a half-vampire baby.
At least Talon had been a dad once before.
But what if something happened to him when he confronted his sire? Was he still planning to do that?
My heart ached at the thought. I couldn't consider it for too long. I needed to call Talon and make sure he didn't still want to go through with his stupid plans, but the idea of hearing his voice and getting mad all over again scared me.
What if I could never get over what I'd learned? So far, I'd been able to ignore the truth of what Talon was, living in willful, blissful ignorance. I could never go back to that, though. I could no longer pretend that what he did happened in some sort of alternate universe, to nameless shadow people who had no bearing on my reality.
Going back to Talon now meant accepting all his sins, and what if I couldn't?
"Collin?" My sister poked me again, this time in the shoulder.
"I don't know!" I slapped her hand away.
"Are you getting hormonal on me, little brother?"
"I'm not getting hormonal," I grumped. Pregnant people didn't need hormones to put them in a bad mood. Looking like a whale and having to pee all the time and swollen ankles and being banned from all sorts of foods and drinks could do that to a person. But sure, blame it all on hormones. "I don't know what to do," I admitted.
"Do about what?"
"Talon. I learned some upsetting things about him."
"What things?"
"He..." I licked my lips, struggling with the words. "He was there the night my parents died."
"Are you saying he was involved?"
