"You're sorry."
He put the book down on a vanity table. "It's not so bad."
"Really? What's good about it?"
"Well, for one, I'm here," he said, coming over to sit next to her on the bed. He picked up a tennis ball that had rolled out of her trunk. She'd brought it to practice her vampire lessons. Lawrence wanted her to concentrate on the ability to move objects in the air, something she had yet to master. Jack threw it in the air, catching it deftly. Then he put it down. "Unless, you know, you want me to go."
He was sitting so close to her. She remembered how she'd run to him the first night she was attacked, how passionate he'd been about discovering the truth about Croatan, and then how deeply he'd disappointed her when he'd brushed her aside. And then she remembered something else. Something she couldn't stop thinking about ever since she'd drawn Mimi's blood and absorbed her memories.
"You were the one - that night of the masquerade ball - it was you who..." Schuyler whispered, and in answer to her question, he kissed her. The kiss was the third one they'd exchanged (she kept count), and as he breathed into her and cupped her face in his broad hands, everything in her life up until then seemed secondary and ordinary.
There was nothing to live for but this pure, heavenly sensation. The first time they'd kissed, she had glimpsed Jack's memories of a girl who looked like her but was not her. The second time, she'd had no idea he was the one behind the mask, but this time it was just the two of them. Jack wasn't kissing someone he thought he'd known before, and Schuyler wasn't kissing someone she didn't know. They were simply kissing each other.
"Jaaaack! Jaaaaack!"
"Mimi," Jack said. He disappeared so fast out of the room it was as if he had turned invisible.
When Mimi poked her head into Schuyler's room, she was sitting by herself kicking the trunk again. "Oh. You. Have you seen Jack?"
Schuyler shook her head.
"By the way, don't get too comfortable around here. I have no idea why Father wants a little creep like you around, but here's some advice: keep out of my way."
Later that night, Schuyler had received two different welcome presents: someone had short-sheeted her bed, and there was a book slipped under her door. A copy of The Plague by Albert Camus. Inside the book was an envelope, and inside the envelope, there was a key.
From then on, Jack never acknowledged her presence at the house or at school. But he had more than made up for it later.
"Where'd you get this?" Jack asked, tracing a cut on her forehead with a light finger. They were lying on the thick shag carpet, gazing at the remnants of the fire.
"Oh. It's nothing. Banged my head," Schuyler said. She didn't want to tell him about Dylan just yet. "Were you followed?"
"Yes. But I made sure she left before I got here," he said. His voice was sleepy, and she nestled in the crook of his arm. The streetlights were the only light in the room, but she could see him clearly in the dark. His perfect profile, as if sculpted in marble, glowed like a candle. "You?"
"No."
In reality she had not checked. She had been too busy talking Oliver into leaving. Too busy and too excited. Because she had known, hadn't she? She had known Jack would be there, waiting for her, as she had waited for him earlier.
But yes, next time she would be more careful. They would both have to be.
;
"I thought you'd forgotten."
Schuyler smiled as she removed her raincoat and hung it on the hook. She had just entered the apartment with her key. A key she kept on a silk ribbon around her neck. She never took it off, for fear that it would be stolen. She'd entered the building in the normal fashion. Had a polite word with the guard. Headed up in the elevator, exchanging pleasantries with the neighbors. Cooed at their baby bundled inside a fleece-lined thousand-dollar stroller. Pretended she was just like them. No more vampire tricks for one evening.
"Have you been waiting long?" she asked.
"I just got here."
He was standing against a column, his arms crossed in front of him. He was still wearing the same white shirt from that morning, a little crumpled at the end of the day, and he had loosened his tie, letting it fall to the side. But he was still golden and gorgeous. His sea green eyes danced with amusement and desire. Jack Force. The boy she had been waiting to see all evening. The boy she had been waiting for all her life.
She wanted to run to him - to skip, giggling into his arms - but she savored the way he was looking at her. She could drown in the intensity of his gaze. And she had learned a little about seduction in the last few weeks they had been together.
Had learned that it was sweeter when she made him wait.