Author's Note: The chapter name is from a book title by Melissa Marr. It seemed like the correct contradiction. This chapter hurt to write, but it felt very true. I promise a happy ending…
Chapter 2: Wicked Lovely
ELENA POV
My anger only lasted about an hour. My unequivocal belief that I was right and that morality was absolute lasted until midnight.
I made it to one in the morning on sheer stubbornness, and then I was lost.
By two, I was pulling up in front of the boarding house.
I didn't bring a flashlight, and I don't want to turn on any lights, so I feel my way inside in the dark. The door is unlocked, as always. Damon told me once that when he locked it, all the people who came because they wanted to kill him broke windows instead and he got tired of replacing them. I was never sure how serious he was about that.
The boarding house reminds me of Stefan. I spoke to him yesterday on the phone. I've been doing my best to bulldoze through his guilt and anger to be his friend, but it is still awkward. It makes me sad.
I want to find a way we can still be something to each other, and maybe if I was a vampire and had a century or two, we could, but Stefan feels everything just as strongly as Damon does. I worry that he doesn't have it in him to accept things and move on from me having chosen Damon. I wouldn't blame him, but it hurts anyway.
Even while I'm missing one brother, my feet are carrying me inevitably toward the other. I can barely see anything, but I know the way. If it weren't for Jeremy, I would have probably moved in here already. My house holds too many bad memories, and I am irrationally fond of Damon's room here; its clean lines and sparse, indulgent furnishings. I knew he likes the boarding house better, too. The big rooms and opulent décor are exactly to his taste, though he never talks about things like that.
The only exception is my bed. It is smaller than his, but he loves it so much that one time, I asked him why. Most guys aren't that fond of floral sheets.
He had propped himself up on one elbow and smiled at me, a strange light in his eyes. "It's all frilly and feminine. Every time you let me sleep in here, it's like getting into your panties all over again."
I pause outside his door. I hate sleeping without Damon. When we had first gotten together, we were having sex pretty much all the time. It made me feel cheap when he left afterwards, and he didn't put up much of a fight. Any fight, really. And then he was just staying over every night. Sometimes at his house, sometimes at mine, but we were always together. I'd gotten used to the comfort of his presence. I'd almost begun to take it for granted that he would always be there.
I resist the urge to rest my forehead against his door and give into cowardice. Instead, I make myself go inside. It is dark and I don't hear anything, but I can feel that he is here. That alone is enough to make me shudder with relief. A dark corner of my soul had considered the possibility that he had been angry enough to go and find another girl. To drink from, to fuck, to kill? I had no idea. Maybe all three. To prove to me that he was who he was and no one had the right to ask him to change.
I pulled my shirt off over my head, intending to crawl in next to him. Since he is here, we can probably work this out. He is never, never mad at me in bed.
My hand stalls on the button of my jeans. He could be, this time. He'd been furious. What if he pushes me away? What if he doesn't want to bother with me if I am going to be such a pain in the ass, questioning his choices, getting in the way of his lifestyle?
We've been together for almost a year. Enough for the newness to wear off. Way longer than I figure it usually takes him to get his fill of someone, sexually or otherwise.
"That zipper broken?" His lazy voice comes out of the darkness and wraps around me like warm velvet. "I can help you with that."
I nearly break it now in my haste. I pull back the covers and crawl in with him. He pulls me on top of his chest and holds me hard against him, his hands giving lie to the calm of his tone. I shudder, running my hands all over him, memorizing the lines of him as if he's been gone for weeks instead of hours.
He finds my lips in the dark and his kiss pulls at things deep in my stomach, makes my chest open and ache, soothes and feeds the fear that is like a cancer inside of me.
"Damon, God you scared me."
"Why?"
"I thought you were leaving, really leaving."
"You're not that lucky."
I hold onto him so tightly that it should hurt. "Don't even joke about that. Not right now, ok?" I kiss him again.
Heat flares low in my belly. I want to be as close to him as I can get, let the fireworks of our connection drive away my doubts, drive away the poisonous idea of what it would feel like if he left.
When we got together, I'd told him that I wouldn't ask him to change, but that I couldn't promise I would be able to forgive the things he did. I told him, honestly, that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to not forgive him, no matter what the crime. I doubt that he'd understood what I meant.
I kiss his neck and my hand travels lower.
He stops my hand before it gets below his waist and it feels like he's injected liquid nitrogen into my veins.
Damon has never stopped me. Not once refused sex, ever, even right in the middle of a bad fight. I mean, he has every right, of course he does, but he never has.
"You're still angry with me," I say through uncooperative vocal cords.
"No, I'm not. Well, I am, but not for the reason you think. I just can't do that right now, Elena."
I need to see him.
I roll away and turn on the lamp. His expression makes the fear run rampant in me. It settles at the base of my throat, like a bar pressed just above my collarbone that is slowly choking me.
I don't care if it hurts. I need to see him. Just in case he can't forgive me, I want every second I can to memorize that face, those lips, those shoulders. The exact way his neck transforms into sculpted jawline. The way his eyes change when he looks at me.
"Are you leaving?" I ask him. I'm braver than I thought.
"No," he says shortly, his hands clasped behind his head.
He must hear that I'm not breathing, because he relents and pulls one arm free to take my hand. I grip it with both of mine, as if I can hold us together with just the inadequate human strength of my hands. This is big. I've opened something really big between us.
That secret, dark part of me wants to know if I would sacrifice Bree now, if I would accept her death without question if it meant I wouldn't have driven this wedge into our relationship. It asks me if she was worth maybe losing him.
Of course she is, she was a person, I tell myself fiercely. I push the thought away where I can't examine it too closely. I don't want to know my answer. In this secret corner of my mind, I am a far, far worse person than Damon will ever know. This part of me would have sacrificed Stefan and Elijah to save him when Klaus was torturing him. Would have sacrificed Bonnie and Caroline. I don't let that corner own me. I don't let it be my whole mind.
"What's wrong, Damon? You're scaring me."
"It won't make it better, Elena. Talking about things doesn't always make them better. Lots of times it makes it worse." He won't look at me. "Come on, Bree's been dead for almost two years and look where talking about her got us. Probably some kind of witchy ghost revenge. I fucking hate witches."
"You don't want me to touch you, Damon. There's something really wrong. If we can't just make it disappear, we have to talk about it."
"What's wrong with you?" he asks instead. "When I left, you were all righteous. What happened to you?"
I don't want him to know about me. I don't want to let that possibility into the room, let it free like a virus. But it's sure not going to disappear on its own and this, this is the elephant in the room in our relationship. We can't really have a relationship with this between us. I've always known that.
Part of me thought I might get killed before my secret came out and I was perfectly happy to fill all the remaining days of my life with Damon, devouring him like a last meal over and over again.
Instead, he killed Klaus and Stefan left, touring monasteries and meditation retreats all over the world in search of peace. Control. A way to forgive himself. I didn't fool myself into thinking he'd find a way to forgive Damon and me.
My grip tightens on his hand until I would have hurt him if he wasn't a vampire. I close my eyes because I can't look at him when I say this.
"I'm afraid of the things you do," I tell him. "I'm afraid that you will murder and compel and take from people, and it is all wrong and I can't live with that. I'm afraid there isn't a way to make my peace with what you do, with…" I falter, each word harder to spit out than the last, as if the words, in self-preservation, are trying to cram themselves back down my throat before I can ruin my own life with them.
"I'm afraid that there isn't a way to make peace with that part of who you are."
His hand goes slack in mine and I won't open my eyes because I can't bear to see his hurt.
"I'm afraid-" my voice chokes down so small that without supernatural hearing, he would miss what I say next.
"I'm afraid that I'll forgive you. That instead of leaving you, I'll stay and condone everything you might want to do. I'm afraid I'll sacrifice my principles instead of losing you. I'm afraid that I'll lose myself instead." Tears streak out from beneath my eyelashes.
Stefan would understand. I don't know if Damon gets this part of me, even now. If he grasps that like his brother, my principles are what lives at the core of me. What am I if Damon is more important than that? Who am I if the core of me is another person?
Nothing.
But still, how can I let him go? How can I fool myself into thinking that he could do anything that could release the hold his love has on me?
I told Bonnie once that I was afraid to choose Damon because what I felt for him was stronger than love. Too strong to manage, to live with on a daily basis. I don't think she believed me, but I was right.
I have weak, human hearing, so if it wasn't utterly silent in the boarding house, I would have missed Damon's response. It is so low, it is words spoken without breath.
"Me, too."
My eyes fly open because that is the dead last thing I expect him to say. He's not looking at me. He's still looking at the ceiling, one hand behind his head.
I touch his chest, tentatively. "Damon?"
If we have the same fear, we have to be able to work this out.
He flinches at my touch. "Don't, Elena. You're right. We do need to talk about something."
Fresh tears overwhelm my eyes. "You may not want me to touch you, and we can talk about whatever you want, but I want you to know I love you," I tell him.
Some days it is easier to get Damon to believe this than others. He wants to. He wants to be loved more than anyone I've ever met, but it is so important to him that his impulse is always to pretend the opposite. As if he's hiding something valuable in plain sight so that no one will think to take it from him.
He is still holding my hand. I don't know why he can do this, while rejecting anything else from me.
"I love you so much," I tell him fiercely. "This doesn't change that. This is because of that."
"You may want to reserve judgment on that until after I tell you what I did tonight."
Fear should have nothing new to teach me. Not after the last two years. It does though, running through my nervous system like waves of electrical shock, erasing reality the way I know it, threatening to break everything down, take everything from me. What has he done? What if this is what breaks us apart for good? Damon could be gone. Just like that, our whole life together. He can just walk out anytime he wants.
"I don't want to reserve judgment," I tell him, wishing I could make my words forceful enough that they could batter their way inside his head. "I love you now, and I'm going to love you when you're done telling me." I expect it will hurt, though. I expect it will hurt a lot.
He doesn't react. He doesn't believe me at all. If he doesn't believe I care about him, it will be easier for him to walk away.
"I was really pissed off when I left your house and I went straight to a bar, two towns over. I picked out a girl, a blonde." His flat voice is a grenade inside my head, the pin out. Waiting to destroy all the happiness we've found in each other.
"It was a honky-tonk bar. She had a big belt buckle that she won from barrel racing. It had her horse's name on it. Lacey. I don't know her name. Her shirt covered that part."
I realize that under the tonelessness of his words, he is really upset.
I bite my lips, my tongue, and let him make his confession.
"I danced with her once and she was way into me. I didn't even have to compel her to get her to follow me around back. I knew she'd scream once I started feeding, though, so I compelled her not to be afraid, like I usually do. I told her that it was okay to let it feel good." His voice is broken glass grinding over gravel, and there's a hint of pleading in it. He's forcing himself not to look at me, now. I don't know how I can tell the difference, but I can.
"I always do that. Sometimes I like to scare them, let 'em run so I can chase them, catch them, but I don't like to hurt them. I usually compel them at the last minute to calm them back down so the bite doesn't hurt, the blood giving doesn't hurt." He pauses for a long moment.
"No, that's not true. Sometimes I have. Sometimes I've wanted to tear their blood out of them, feel how much they fear me, feel how much they should fear me. So that's not even right. I guess I have wanted to hurt them, sometimes." He swears, low and mean, like it's for his ears and not mine.
There are so many new kinds of pain now, for him, for me, for those poor girls that he's hurt with the same teeth that I've invited into my veins.
"It's been a while. I'd forgotten," he says, his voice going blank again. "Even then, though, I killed them quickly." His eyes flick to me, then away as if he doesn't dare linger.
"Not like Stefan," he says, sounding careless. "I didn't tear them apart or put them back together. I'd drain them dry or snap their necks, but I didn't torture them. I don't think that's probably worth much to you, but I think maybe it makes a difference."
His brow furrows and I can see him chewing the inside of his mouth. It makes his lower lip push out just slightly, sensually.
His mouth twitches and lines appear around his eyes that look almost cruel.
"I bit her. The girl with the horse named Lacey. I compelled her and I bit her and I tried to drink her blood. The more I drank, the more it choked me." His eyes flew to mine, accusing, the ice blue holding me there as he forces his words on me.
"I saw her in my mind, under me, naked, while I pounded into her. I saw her all limp but wide-eyed. Compelled. Unable to run." He rolls away from me, his knees coming toward his chest and he drops his legs off the bed, fists braced against his thighs. He makes a small choking sound and I realize he's gagging.
"I could barely make myself stay long enough to compel her to forget me," he said. "Ran like a fucking criminal all the way back here and showered until I was half-fish."
I reach for him. "Damon-"
He knocks my hand away, nostrils flaring as he turns to look at me. "You did this to me, Elena. You always wanted to make me more like Stefan, and you got your wish. Shit, I almost called him when I got back. Can you believe that?" he asks bitterly. "To ask how he lived with that feeling. You made me ashamed of what I am."
My hand drops to the bed. "Damon, please-"
He stands up and points a shaking finger at me. "I felt like I was raping her, Elena, to take her blood. How can you say you love me if you make me ashamed of who I am?"
I'm crying in earnest now, totally stricken by the damage I've done. I've never wanted to join the ranks of people who were incapable of accepting Damon, of loving him no matter what. I never thought it was possible that of all the ways I could hurt him, that this would be one of them.
And it isn't. I still love him. But he's right, I can't accept all of him. I can't love that he murders, that he hurts people deliberately. As much as I worry that I would forsake that part of myself for him, I'm not capable of it. I won't be able to make myself leave him for it, but I also can't excise the part of me that hates it, hates that he wants to do that.
He goes to his closet and pulls on jeans over his nakedness. I can't take my eyes off him. The hands that touch me so softly are the ones that break necks, rend flesh from bone. The teeth that pierce my throat so sweetly can tear and butcher and ruin. How can all this contradiction exist within me? Within him?
He reaches up and grips the top edge of the doorframe into his closet, the muscles in his back rippling as he squeezes. I hear the wood groan and begin to crack under his fingers.
I'm curled into a ball on his bed in my underwear.
"Stop crying!" he finally growls, the words ripping up out of his chest with an animal sound. I catch my breath and try to swallow my sobs.
"I love you, Damon. I heard what you said, but I love you anyway."
He comes back to the bed slowly, those pants riding low on his hips, the cut of his abs stark above dark fabric.
He sits down next to me, his eyes sad and distant. "Do you?" He tucks a long strand of my hair behind my ear, like he always does. I'm blinking away tears so I can see him better.
"Then why are you crying?" he asks with brutal gentleness.
I don't have an answer.
His fingers brush my cheek. "I think you should go," he says, very softly.
Author's Note: I hate to leave you on such a sad note, but I don't think there will be anybody around to read during Thanksgiving, so I'm going to wait to post until after the holiday. Hit the button to follow author so you don't miss the next chapters. The making up is so much more fun than the fighting…
