You can come in.
However hesitant the words sounded, Kai heard them. And they came from her mouth.
You can come in.
He stepped, ever so cautiously, through her doorway. Right foot first, delicate on the hardwood, hands low at his sides and fingers feeling out the doorframe as he crossed it, left foot now. They looked at one another for a moment and he took the time to relish: her fingers twitching at her sides, her nervous eyes with the brows arced at him in brace for what he might do to her, his own heart beating so hard it crept up into his throat and he couldn't say a word. He swallowed. If he was still human, he'd be sweating.
What indeed would he do to her now?
He could hear her human little heart rioting in the most adorable way. It aroused that familiar burning in his gums. Salivating, he tongued the sharp little tips of his fangs descending and clenched his back teeth. Go back in, go back in. For as starved as he still felt, it was only minutes ago that she last fed him.
The widening of her eyes pulled him out of thought and he realized his own eyes must be turning color in hunger. He took another step, further into her house, closer to her. Her mouth hung open in what he could only assume was residual lust from what he started in her bedroom and hadn't yet finished. He felt it too, curling wickedly inside him. He didn't know what possessed him to walk away in the middle of all the moves he was trying to put on her, only to give back her invitation barrier at the risk of being turned away and getting stuck with blue balls all night. No, he didn't know for sure what made him so stupid suddenly, but he guessed it was guilt. She told him she missed him too, and a subsequent flood of wrongdoings, including his unofficial presence in her house, invaded his mind and something abstract inside him screamed at him to do something morally upstanding. Like he had a conscience or something. Luke, breaking through, perhaps.
Thank hell she invited him in.
And now somehow his night swelled like a bruise with meaning. First, it was her admittance. To hear that he was missed while he was gone. That was new. Giving her barrier back was an unplanned spur of the moment decision and he had mere seconds to come to terms with self-disgust, mere seconds to hope she would react to his disgusting kindness in his favor. Littler time to realize that if she did, if Bonnie welcomed him into her safe space, he couldn't just ram her against the foyer wall and ravage her the way he wanted. He couldn't just walk into her home, a new man, and assume it was sexy time. Though it probably was. There was too much meaning. He couldn't handle it. It weirded him out.
The level of weird he was drowning in had him standing rather awkwardly, hardly a pace from the door, not knowing how much time had passed since he was invited in, how long he'd been staring at her or why his hands were shaking. But the ground was slowly coming back to his feet.
In two strides he closed the distance between them.
"Kai," she warned, raising her hands and taking steps back. Ignoring her retreat, he clasped both sides of her ribcage.
"Bonnie," he growled in response, tightening his grip and lowering his mouth to her neck.
"I just don't want to be alone again," her voice hummed on his lips as he pressed them against her throat, "That's all."
"Never," he rumbled into her pulsating carotid. Desire he felt for her that had been building monstrously during their time apart burned in his belly. She whimpered his name again in protest and he felt himself, below, already rising to the occasion. Other than her whimper, he couldn't help but notice she wasn't really reacting to him, which spurred him on to try even harder to stir some kind of movement on her end. He started a trail of kisses from her neck up the back of her jaw, landing on her ear. Moving his lips against her delicate ear bones, he whispered, "I won't leave you alone ever again, I promise. Not for the rest of eternity, Bonnie Bennett." And he grazed his more harmless teeth along the outer edge of her ear, smiling as an involuntary wisp of a moan played stowaway on one of her breaths.
One of her hands curled around his wrist in seeming encouragement, contradictory as it was. She didn't use her hand to urge his exploration of her, or pull it away. She just held him, slack to follow his movements, and it was enough. The soft, warm flesh of her palm and fingers on his cold skin comforted in a way she couldn't know, because he knew he'd never find the words to define it. He was so used to being pushed away he could hardly recognize this feeling. He couldn't interpret the sensation in his chest as anything other than uplifting. It was just good enough to arouse suspicion, and this slithered silently in between the positive things he allowed her gesture to make him feel. And from the darker depths of his mind, his old self mouthed his doubts. Choke her until she croaks how she really feels about you. And why was she being so lifeless? Go on, wring her.
"No," he argued out loud before he could stop himself. He felt his own voice reverberate against his lips from her ear and stilled. She might find this sudden parapraxis discomforting. He had to wonder just how dormant his old self was.
To his abrupt stillness, she seemed to liven, shifting her shoulder underneath his chin and regaining a normal pace of breath. "What?" she asked.
"Um," he stalled, pulling back from her in the hope that straightening his head on his shoulders literally would do the same figuratively. "No…" he teetered on his own outburst, waiting for the rest of any sentence to arrive, "way. No way. You're letting me in." Nice save, he thought, mentally high fiving himself. To reward himself, he leaned back into her. He curled his knuckles in a rough caress down her body, thinking again how truly heartening it felt to be invited. He wanted to tell her so without going too soft. Maybe he could tell her in the sideswiping medium of sweet nothings, a sweet little offhand remark made in the midst of seducing her so that she'd hear it and shortly afterward, because she was Bonnie, dismiss it as nothing.
"Bonnie, you have no idea what this means to—"
"I wanna leave town," she interrupted, balling up her shoulders, which succeeded in butting him out of her bubble. Acclimating to the slight rejection, he bit his lip and narrowed his eyes down at her as he let go of his sweet nothing and heard what she said in delay. "Tomorrow," she concluded, resolutely. Kai, not believing his ears, just stared.
"And where are we going?" he asked, very curious.
She glared. "We?"
He gave her a dull look that was meant to say You know you can't get rid of me, and she rolled her eyes.
"I don't know. Anywhere but here," she sighed, and added, "Not Portland," when he opened his mouth to make a suggestion. And he was fine with that. He had some desire to see how his childhood home looked now but it could wait for the next time they fought big and she pushed him away. Portland could be saved for a solo trip.
A wide grin slowly crept from ear to ear, "You really wanna leave good old Mystic Falls behind?"
Bonnie nodded. "It's time."
Kai considered this. Abandoning Mystic Falls in all its boring home-town glory had been a hope lurking in the back of his mind. Sure, he would miss it for the few things it meant to him. The place they met, the porches turned haunts, the bar where he first drank from her. The whole town served in his memory as the courting grounds on which their relationship was cultivated. Between 1994, the real world and their prison, the small expanse of Mystic Falls was where it all happened. All that first-sight charm that literally awakened Bonnie's magic, the terror of a time he put her through after Damon left, the few days he spent holed up in debilitating guilt when he heard that Bonnie made it out of his prison world, realizing the weight of emotion when it bowed off another person, realizing this Bennett witch out of nowhere struck a chord in him that had never been stricken and that it made a pretty sound, falling apart at the seams for someone for the first time in his life and feeling the pain, the real pain, and all the self-discovery and betrayal and prison-world designing and massacring that followed. What a place.
Then again, he wasn't one to get sentimental. To Hell with Mystic Falls and on with the new.
"We can't leave until tomorrow night," he finally said.
"I know."
"Unless you feel like being a doll and making me a daylight ring."
"Don't get your hopes up."
"You want to travel by night? Fine with me. I'm just looking out for you, being a human and a creature of the sun and all."
"I'll manage."
"I mean, the Eiffel tower probably looks amazeballs in the daytime, just saying."
He could see Bonnie struggling to maintain a serious face, and felt his heart flutter as she failed miserably and broke into a minor giggle. "Amazeballs? Really? Of all the twenty first century terms to pick up on, you let amazeballs enter your vocabulary?"
He shrugged, "That and selfie. And swole. And sexorcism. And procrasturbating. And food porn. And food horny. And foodrection. That one's my favorite."
"It would be."
He smirked.
"Anyway," Bonnie said, shifting the mood down, "We should go to bed."
He perked at the mention.
"Separately," she vehemently clarified. "As in I'm going to bed, and you can go to couch."
"Oh, havoc's in the house, Bon. You invited me in, there's no controlling me now."
"I mean it, Kai. I'm not over what you did to me. It's pretty fucked up. Really. You've officially done your worst, so congrats. I'll never trust you after this, I hope you know. I'll never fully not hate you, and I shouldn't have invited you in, I shouldn't have let you back into my life at all, but—"
"But you had to."
She frowned and nodded blankly. "Right."
"I get it," he said genuinely, because her having no better option than to let him back in her life was all part of the design.
"So…there's a stack of blankets in the hall closet. Just um…please…don't leave."
"Or what?"
Her eyes widened in what looked like an unexpected panic washing over her at the potential threat to leave her alone in the house again.
"Whoa," he held up his palms in surrender, "I won't go," he assured. "I'll stay."
She exhaled and he noticed for the first time how much more visible her clavicles seemed to be since the last time he saw her. She had lost weight in his absence, a sign to him that a hearty breakfast in bed was loudly called for.
"Goodnight kiss?" he offered. She pursed her lips and backed slowly out of the room without another word, making it clear she'd had enough of him for the night. He shrugged. Progress.
The rustling sounds of Bonnie tucking herself away in bed entered his vampiric hearing and he figured he might as well sleep too. He found the closet and the blankets she was referring to and made a bed on the couch, shrugging out of his blazer and kicking his shoes off before getting as comfortable as a guy could get in a shirt and jeans.
But he couldn't sleep.
He listened to her breathing far off become a calm pattern as he laid awake, and in little time noticed something was snaking into his nervous system, something that wouldn't allow for his fangs not to emerge or the hunger broiling inside him cool down. He inhaled deeply and noticed there was a latent scent of blood in the house. The sheets on her bed were his first thought. He tended to be a messy eater. Remembering this, he let himself relax into the couch with every intention of getting lost in thoughts of what could be happening if he never restored her invitation barrier or left her bedroom to begin with. Flashes of her thighs spread out before him and her oh-ing lips when he pushed into her…
Mutely he wondered if she changed them or if she was just casually sleeping on dramatically bloodstained sheets. That blood smell just wouldn't get out of his nose. He opened wide and cracked his jaw, stretching his lips back to let the incessant fangs breathe. As badass as he felt in the beginning, these fangs were more and more a source of irritation. He was raised as witches should be: not to bow down before vampires, let alone become one. With the promise of amplified magic via siphoning from the vampirism, he thought he could get past the petty details and the ingrained values of his upbringing. But it was beginning to agitate him just a little.
He realized grumpily he wouldn't be able to relax until he investigated the smell. Bonnie wouldn't be too pleased to be woken up by him tugging her sheets out from underneath her, but they had to wash. If she wasn't going to feed him in order to lessen the intense need sparked by the smell, they had to wash. Now.
He rose from the couch. Eyes on the prize, he made his way in the direction of her bedroom, oddly unable to be a real vampire and not cause a thousand loud creaks in the hardwood as he walked. He passed by the kitchen, noting mentally to raid it later, when something caught his eye. He took a step back and didn't have to lean too far into the room to see the horror.
Blood, darkly, spattered the greater surface of the kitchen counter and cabinets. None was smeared and all of it appeared to have flecked its place from one single blow. Some sat in a caked pool on the floor. It was undoubtedly the scene of murder. Only there wasn't a body. Because the body that had been murdered there was back to life, and sound asleep in her bed.
"Oh, fuck," he whispered.
