“But this cannot work.”
“What?”
I tried to play innocent, but there was already a welling despair inside me.
It seemed ridiculous since I had survived all this time just fine without him.
There had been a constant dull ache inside me, but it was nothing that I couldn’t live with. But when I was with him, the thought of not being with him felt like a fate worse than death.
“It’s not the same as it was before,” he explained quietly. “The way I feel about you, its not right. It’s purely … physical. My body insists that its you, but the rest of me…” He shook his head. “I don’t think I should be around you anymore.”
“Are you banning me from the house?” Being without him, being without everyone, that would be horrendous. I had just come to terms with what was happening, and he was going to take everything away from me.
“I just think that this is an impossible situation.” He looked over at me, his eyes betraying the hurt and want he had for me. “I can’t be with you, and Jack can’t be with you. He’s tried to hide his feelings about you from me, but there is some kind of cross contamination that I can’t get a grasp on. Neither of us can be with you, so having you around would be torture.”
“That isn’t fair!” I jumped to my feet, and already hot tears were slicing down my cheeks. There was a finality to his voice that devastated me. He had already made up mind, and there would be nothing that I could say or do to change his mind. “Do they all agree with you? They can’t! Ezra-”
“They support my decision,” Peter cut me off decisively. “All of them are very fond of you, but it can’t work. And since you are ‘mine,’ it’s up to me what we do with you.”
“‘What you do with me?’” I sobbed. “This is my life! Why do you get to decide what is done with me?”
“Your life is my life. That’s how this works.” Swallowing hard, he looked sad but resolute.
“Than isn’t your life mine?” I clenched my fists, trying desperately to find some ground to stand on.
“That’s not how this works,” Peter shook his head. “You are human. You have no standing over us.”
“So you’re all just …”
The room felt like it was spinning, and I rested my hand on the bed to keep from collapsing. He was going to take everything from me. The insistent way my body begged for him, the way my heart longed for Jack, the comfort I gained from Mae and Ezra, and the glorious future I had just mapped out for myself. With his simple, cold words, he was ripping everything away from me.
The ground felt like it was giving way from underneath me, and I had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting.
“Alice, we never meant to hurt you.” He sounded sad, but I could barely see him through my own tears.
Part of me wanted to run through house searching for Jack. I knew he would fight for me, make them change their minds, but I felt too weak. More than that, if Peter didn’t want me, it didn’t even seem worth fighting for.
“You’re killing me,” I murmured.
Then it dawned on me. It did feel like he was literally killing me. Every part of me, physical and otherwise, was writhing in pain. But I knew that inside him there was a hunger that really wanted to kill me. I saw how fierce it had been in Jack’s eyes, and I knew it had to be stronger for Peter.
“Peter, why don’t you just bite me?” I asked breathlessly.
“No,” Peter responded hoarsely. “That’s a horrible idea.”
“No, Peter! Listen!” I walked over to him, willing my heart to beat harder and faster, so the sound would overwhelm him. “I know you want to! You made me leave you once because of how badly you wanted to! You can just bite me, and this will all be over with. I’ll be out of your lives forever, and I won’t even care. I want you to. And what do I even matter to you? I’m just another stupid weak human, and you’ve killed them before.”
“I’m not going to kill you.” He tried to sound disgusted, but the hunger was at the back of his throat. When he looked away from me, I grabbed his arm, and forced him to look down at me.
“Please,” I pleaded.
He was still resisting the idea, so I remembered what had sent Jack over the edge. I bit my lip, hard, and before I could even tell it was bleeding, his eyes had widened. For him, my scent and taste were irresistible.
“You really want this?” Peter murmured huskily. His eyes looked conflicted, both sad and incredibly ravenous. “Do you even understand what you’re asking?”
“I know that I can’t live the rest of my life without you.”
If my mind hadn’t been turned into an absolute mess thanks to it’s intoxication over Peter, I might have been able to come up with a better way for handling things. Even if my body hadn’t been insisting that I was incapable of surviving without Peter, it would still have been devastating. I truly planned on spending forever with Jack, and it did seem unbearable to just forget it all. To go to school, to college, to go about my tedious little life and spend every day getting older, sicker, dying, and trying to forget them. I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t even want to try. It hurt far too much.
“Forgive me,” Peter whispered.
Before I could say anything more, I felt his lips pressed hotly on my neck, and then this sharp pain shot into me, like the prick of a needle. That was very quickly replaced by this wonderful, warm pleasure spreading through me. It felt so intensely marvelous that I couldn’t even imagine ever having felt pain. My body trembled and went limp in his arms, and I heard myself moaning. It was sheer ecstasy. Pleasure rippled through me, and I wanted this moment to last forever.
Faintly, I was becoming aware of how weak I felt. At first, it had just been because the pleasure had struck me so forcefully, but even though it still felt amazing, I could feel my life draining away. Some part of me was aware that I was dying, but there was nothing frightening or bad about it. I felt oddly at peace and blissful, and I let myself succumb to the drowsy, perfection that flooded over me.
My thoughts were dissolving. There were incoherent images of the sun shining over the tops of the building, and Peter’s green eyes, and Jack’s laughter. I thought of my brother, and I hoped he understood. Then there was nothing except the way I felt, buried underneath a warm blanket. My heart had slowed considerably, and my lungs felt empty.
Suddenly, there was a sharp pain of separation, and an intense chill. My mind felt strangely alert. Still incredibly weak, I didn’t even have the strength to open my eyelids, but I could hear the commotion going on around me. Peter wasn’t holding me anymore, but I couldn’t tell where I was. I just knew that his strong arms weren’t around me and his mouth wasn’t pressed to my neck. He had stopped too soon, and I was still alive.
There were banging noises and the sounds of rustling feet. Voices were shouting, and it took a minute for me to able to focus in on them clearly. Jack was shouting at Peter, calling him all sorts of hateful names, and Peter was saying very little in his own defense. Then Ezra’s voice boomed in, and the movement stopped. He had broken up the fight.
“He tried to kill her!” Jack wailed, and I could hear the terrified desperation in his voice.
“But she’s not dead,” Ezra told him soothingly. I felt strong hands touching my face, feeling my pulse and inspecting the damage. I wanted to yell at them, to tell them to leave me here to die, but I barely even had the strength to breathe, let alone speak. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”
“She wanted me to do it,” Peter muttered, and this was followed by a loud smacking sound.
“Jack! Peter!” Ezra roared. “If you want to save her life, then you have to listen to me!”