Forget Ever After Read Free

her hair.
    “I know. I saw the flyers. I wanted to call you
and tell you I was okay. I was afraid you’d drop out of school…You
didn’t, did you?”
    Liam seemed relieved when she shook her
head.
    “I’m glad you didn’t. It would have been a
terrible waste. I can’t follow that path anymore, but you’ll make a
fantastic doctor, I know it.”
    Practicing medicine had been Liam’s dream just
as much as it had been Lena’s, and she couldn’t understand how he
could be so cool, as he talked about letting that dream slip away.
Part of her was afraid to ask and finally know why Liam had
disappeared months, what he had done, where he had been, but her
need to understand was greater than her fear.
    “Why?” she asked, putting all her fears, all her
hopes, all her pain in that simple word.
    Liam nodded, as though he had been expecting the
question and pulled back from her. Lena wanted to protest the loss
of contact, but as she was about to, Liam tugged at the collar of
his shirt, exposing two jagged scars at the crook of his neck. Her
eyes widening, Lena leaned forward and brushed her fingers against
the healed skin. It was cool to her touch, cooler than it ought to
have been, and no pulse beat beneath her fingertips.
    Understanding came in a white blaze that made
Lena blink and lose her breath. She barely heard Liam’s quiet
explanation.
    “I was caught coming back from running. It
happened so fast, I didn’t even have time to realize what was going
on. It’s only when I woke up in the lair that I understood.”
    Her hand dropped to the seat between them, and
she used the support to hold herself upright. She stared at Liam
with a different gaze in regards to this new knowledge. This was
why he had disappeared without a word. This was why there had been
no trace of him. This was what had kept him away.
    Didn’t he know she wouldn’t have cared?
    “What’s it like?” she asked, her voice gentle
despite the weight pressing down on her chest that made it hard to
breathe.
    Liam’s smile was unlike any he had ever offered
her. “It was strange, the first few nights. It was as if I was
seeing the world for the first time. I never imagined there was so
much I couldn’t see, or hear, or smell…”
    His eyes seemed to lose focus for an instant,
and Lena ached a little more. How much had he experienced, in those
first nights, in the months since, that he’d never be able to share
with her?
    “And then,” he continued after a few seconds, “I
got used to it all. Now I can’t picture how I ever lived without
it. Without catching the scent of the jasmine before it even
blooms, or seeing stars so clearly, it feels I could almost pick
them out if I only reached toward the sky.”
    The quiet awe in his words forced a response out
of Lena.
    “So…you like being a vampire, then?”
    Liam blinked and frowned, as though the question
surprised him.
    “It’s what I am. I never wanted to be one, I
never imagined it would happen to me, but it did. And now…sometimes
it feels as though I was never anything else.”
    He hadn’t actually answered, but she took his
words as affirmative. The tone of his voice alone was clear enough.
She let seconds pass in silence as she watched him, finding him the
same as she remembered, though paler; his eyes seemed darker,
somehow, stronger.
    “I wish you had come to me,” she said at last,
trying not to allow herself to accuse or complain. “I worried all
these months, wondered if you were still alive and held against
your will. Or if you had died. I imagined so many terrible things
that could have happened to you. I even thought a vampire might
have gotten you, but I was sure you would have come back to me if
that had been the case.”
    His hand covered hers where it had curled into a
fist on her thigh. It felt cool, not cold as she would have
expected, and weighted nothing—and at the same time, it was heavier
than the entire world.
    “I couldn’t. My Sire…” He hesitated at