It worked.
Bonnie stood in the middle of the street outside, her daring eyes illuminated in the moonlight. Why night? It was poor decision making, she knew it was. But the vulnerability of it made it all the more promising, to taunt the danger of the dark and the deceitful forest surrounding her Grams' house, both factors concealing Death knows what. She was holding her sliced palm out into a fist, squeezing her blood onto the asphalt like wringing water from a rag. As sure as the moon above her would rise each night, the scent of blood on the wind was irresistible to a predator.
She had waited for so long. The hum of his nearness dragged on for weeks without a glimpse of him. Patience, formerly a virtue, bored her. She sought him out with occasional, possibly imagined spikes in her sense of him like coming across footprints, remnants of magic. Little ghosts of elations that took her breath away, only to withdraw their gleeful claws and leave her laboring for unshared air once more. She searched his most likely dwelling place, the Salvatore mansion, (it was, after all, a boarding house), only to find it empty with no sign of anyone on her plane of existence living there. The only evidence that anyone used the space at all were the dirty yet dry, bourbon smelling glasses left around the house by whatever Salvatore had been drinking that long gone day in the real world. So she left there. She walked through the neighborhoods, watching the windows, sure to keep discreet her fingertips feeling out for telling tingling that wouldn't come. The irked urge to leave a path of destruction, a trail of bread crumbs in the form of smashed lawn toys, butchered mail boxes and bashed in windshields, a little something to let him know that she was upset, consumed her. But the urge was quelled. Her self-control was one thing she prided herself on. There was of course the option of drawing him out more gently, but she didn't dare call his name now; somehow the reality of him responding and knowing that she wanted him to respond scared her.
As time passed and pining pressed, she worried that the hum she felt was a hallucination, a kickstand invented by her brain to keep her from falling into despair while she idled. Chemically forged hope. This thought made her listless. It made attractive the prospect of finally just huddling in to the welcoming arms of a mental breakdown. By the time Kai returned, if he ever did, he would find her appearance disheveled, her magic in dangerously impulsive condition and her social skills limited to conversation with herself and any tree that would listen.
Luckily her calm descent into true insanity was interrupted by an out of the ordinary event. As this world was just a repeat copy of one day in which she lived alone, Bonnie had grown unaccustomed to the universe prodding at her as opposed to her prodding at it. One night, a stack of grimoires toppled with several impassioned thuds to the hardwood in her bedroom, startling her awake. It was unexpected. Things didn't fall here unless she carelessly ordered them, and she rarely was careless. She snapped on the light with a wave of her hand and spent a few minutes harnessing her heart beat, assessing the room wide eyed from her bed; had he finally come? She muttered a spell that might reveal him if he were standing there cloaked by magic. Only quiet and stillness followed.
Bonnie dropped her frustrated head back onto her pillow and waved the light back out with an indignant flick of wrist.
A whisper of an idea of him standing at the foot of her bed while she slept—and then of what she might do if she woke to that, both terrified and happy to see another person and that person being the first man she's seen in months— made her teeth grit. She felt enough shame in admitting to herself that she missed him.
While she pushed, or rather shoved with the disgust the thought of him out of her mind, she couldn't suppress the sudden burning in her lower body. She missed men. She missed their scent, their broad shoulders, husky voices and particularly the way she felt around them. She missed feeling attracted to someone, the deeper way her heart used to dip into its thudding.
Falling asleep was hopeless after the scare of the toppling grimoires. Bonnie couldn't lie still. She knew by heart each rush the wind would make against the house and every creak it would cause, yet this night felt different. It was probably lingering adrenaline, but she couldn't ignore any one sound for fear, (or hope, she wasn't sure) that she was not alone in the house. She turned from side to stomach to side to back, twisting her quilt into irritating lumps. Any attempt at calm led to an unnecessary amplification of each sound that hit her ears and she found her thoughts being dragged kicking and screaming back toward that image. Kai standing at the foot of her bed.
That would be awful, she knew it, it would be the worst. Just downright horrifying.
But intriguing.
No. Not intriguing. Not even remotely stimulating.
But what would he be doing there? Why at night? Why at the foot of bed, scowling down at her hungrily? Why had this been the first image to well up from the depths of her mind?
Get it together.
For shear mental safety, Bonnie held onto memories of Jeremy, someone to whom she'd given permission and felt safe with. She knew how to do away with her specific unease, but she refused to fantasize. Using her imagination scared her sometimes. And besides, her devices were simply not the same as that which they mimicked. They lacked, above all, the emotion that only a second person could both offer of himself and evoke from her. No, tonight she would not fool her mind or her body. Tonight she would only remember, and these fond memories would keep her wild thoughts from whirling around the only real accessible man, let alone person, in the world.
The next day was spent moping in the bathtub, sitting even after the shower ran cold. It was hard for Bonnie to feel anything but lonely, and extreme discomfort helped to ease her backed up emotions. Sometimes indulging in reminiscence led her to a painfully balancing depression. What goes up…
She considered, not for the first time in this new hell, killing herself. As she was already in the tub, a few little slices over the wrists would be convenient. The trouble with that was anything sharp enough was all the way down the hall, in the kitchen. If she went to get something, she would change her mind by the time she found it. She kept picturing the blood, almost romantically. She saw it dripping from her skin, clouding in the inch deep water and swirling down the drain. Maybe she would stopper the drain and just soak in it like you're supposed to.
Blood.
Blood.
Blood! Bonnie practically leapt from the bathtub.
She stormed dripping through the hall to her closet to find suitable clothes. She'd been sporting garments that were more comfortable than they were impressive, stretchy waistband things, leggings, jeggings, t-shirts, loose sundresses and the like, the last few months. It was now time, she believed, to look fit for a guest. She decided on a long-sleeved dress that flared out in tight enough waves to exhale sophistication but at a level just high enough on the thigh to yell for some long awaited leering. She loved the dress for how it blended casual with elegant, but its biggest selling point was that the blood red color of its weighty fabric honored her brilliant idea.
If Kai really was in town teasing her witchy senses, he would definitely drop the games for a healthy offering of blood. He was, after all, a vampire. A newer one, at that. Being stuck in a prison world, he probably hadn't been feeding like a good vampire should. Lucky for the both of them, Bonnie was feeling suicidal enough to test it. That was how she ended up standing outside, at night, dressed to kill and well aware that she could be killed with her bleeding hand outstretched, so hopeful she had to shoulder a tear away from one eye and glare boldly into the darkness around her.
She waited.
She waited so tensely that it seemed each breath took a minute to exit or enter her lungs. Maybe it was the slice numbing her palm, but she did notice a warming sensation sachet her hand from the fingertips inward. It reached her wrist just as she felt the same warmth begin at her other hand. It spread further into her body, elating her with its truth. It filled her, and she knew.
It happened so quickly there was no transition between the dark woods in front of her, and then a man blocking her view of them. He wasn't there, and then he darkly was, gripping her blood-dripping wrist tight as a steel cuff in his fist. He met her surprised look with a glare, and it was black-eyed.
It worked.
"Kai!" she gasped.