I halt his words with a warning hand. “Don’t be one of the weirdos obsessed with taking a woman’s virginity! I’m not some freaking continent you didn’t get to plant your flag on!”
“I know!” He whips his head toward me, eyes burning. “I’m sorry, okay? It’s your body. Your choice. I just…imagined everything playing out differently in my mind.” He stares ahead again, his fingers clenched on the steering wheel.
“You’ve done it too, right?”
“A few times, with a couple of Cody’s friends. I always hated myself afterward. I felt like I was cheating on you.”
“But you weren’t. You were being a normal man with physical needs.” I lay my hand on his shoulder. “It doesn’t bother me at all.”
“So your thing with Tom shouldn’t bother me either. Is that what you’re saying? Emotions don’t work like that, Daisy. I feel what I feel. But I don’t blame you, of course. He deceived you, manipulated you into thinking you wanted him.”
“Stop trying to blame it all on Tom!” I snatch my hand from his shoulder. “I knew exactly what I was doing. Tom was the hottest guy in school—handsome, sexy—and he wanted me, and I made a choice, Jay. A conscious choice. Sure, he messed with my head later on—screwed with my confidence—but he didn’t force me to be his girlfriend.”
“And you…loved him.”
“In a way. But it wasn’t the same.”
He nods, quick and sharp. “I understand. I can deal.”
But it seems as if he really can’t, because he doesn’t say anything else, not even when we’ve parked at his place and we’re heading up the walk to his front door. Without all the people swirling in and out of the entrance, the massive doors look even more imposing—gleaming dark wood inset with crystal panes, furnished with ornate bronze handles. There’s a scrap of blue-gray shade across the sunbaked front step, thanks to the second-floor balcony.
“Do you want me to leave?” I nod to my car—which has been neatly reparked, probably by the fastidious Henry.
“No.” Jay stares at the door handle without touching it. “But I’ll be working, so if you’ll be bored—”
“There’s plenty to do at your house. And you said Jordan’s coming over, right?”
“Right.” He purses his lips.
“Jay, do you want me here?”
He looks at me, incredulous. “Of course I do.”
“Okay.”
“It’s just hard.” He focuses on the door again. “Knowing it wasn’t the same for you as it was for me.”
Knowing that I wasn’t entirely devoted to him during those eight years, as he obviously was to me. He knows it’s an irrational expectation, but he can’t talk himself out of his emotions because he’s an incurable romantic, as Cody said. He hoped that I would be just as incurably romantic.
The most I can be is incurably honest.
“I thought about you often,” I tell him. The words are so pathetic, such a pale shadow of how I felt. I don’t know how to tell him that I was lost, that I ached inside, that his absence was a cavernous ravine in my life, that the longing was part of what drove me to Tom. But all of that gets swirled up on the way to my mouth and comes out as, “I missed you a lot.”
Jay opens the door and moves aside, holding it for me.
I can’t say what I feel, but I can’t let him suffer either. I have to distract him, to shake him out of this mood.
“I thought of something earlier.” I step inside, and he lets the door fall shut. “I’d like to try using my voice to help your glutton.”
“Like brainwashing him out of his gluttony?” Jay cocks an eyebrow.
“More like soothing him so you can reason with him.”
He shrugs. “Worth a shot. Text Jordan about the song, and we can try your voice thing on Slagle before I start working. And we should test a few other things about your ability—how long it lasts, and how far you can physically move from your subject before your influence fails. Whether or not other sounds can break them out of your sway—that kind of thing.”
“You’re talking like a scientist.”
“Yeah, so?”
“It’s cute.” I smile tentatively at him. “I remember how excited you got every time Dad came up with an experiment for you to do together.”
A half smile curves his mouth. “I miss your dad.”
“You should come for dinner soon. What about this weekend? Tomorrow is Friday, right? What about tomorrow night?”
“I’m having another party tomorrow.”
My mouth falls open. “Jay. Seriously? So soon after George?”
“These parties aren’t impulsive, Daisy. Each one has been in the works for weeks, and people expect them now. Even if I announce that I’m not hosting a party this weekend, most of the guests either won’t get the memo or won’t pay attention, and they’ll show up anyway. Plus, you know these events give my people a chance to get the fresh blood they need without hurting anyone.”
“Something I still don’t quite agree with, I’ll have you know.”
“It’s not a perfect system. Would you rather they start biting people in the back alleys of Asheville? We don’t have handy little mind erasure or compulsion powers, you know.” His lip curls. “That’s the stuff of TV shows.”
“That would be so convenient though, right?” I sigh.
“Real life is much more dangerous and interesting,” he says softly. “Because it gave you, a girl fresh out of college, the power to control vampires like me.”
