A/N: Thanks again for all the lovely reviews! Just to let you know: This chapter gets frisky. Nothing we don't see on the show, but I thought I'd drop a warning (or a teaser) anyway. Enjoy!

Chapter 3

"Be careful of the curse that falls on young lovers,
Starts so soft and sweet and turns them to hunters."

Tyler taps his foot nervously on the pavement, then reminds himself of a dog and stops. He looks around again, searching for the sheriff car that usually perches in the driveway, motionless and menacing like a shark in open water. It's not there, but that doesn't stop him from reaching up fingers to pluck at his shirt collar. He's faced vampires and werewolves and a whole host of supernatural problems, but Sherriff Forbes still feels like the monster in his closet. That woman is scary.

He confirms that the cruiser isn't there—not even tucked away in the garage—so he walks to the door. His nerves shift and take a different shape, but they still make him sweat as he considers the door handle. Caroline is just as scary as her mother.

He's about to knock when the door jerks open and she's standing there, light pouring out behind her and chasing away the shadows on her front porch.

"What?" she asks. It's short and doesn't give any invitations.

"Where's your mom?" Tyler asks, and then he wants to kick himself. Though it's not a completely worthless question, it's out of nowhere and definitely not what he wanted to say.

"Away for the weekend—why?" Caroline answers, eyeing him with suspicion. He looks at her, his eyes roaming over the hard set of her jaw and the light glinting in her blue eyes like fire under ice.

"I wanted to say I was sorry," he blurts out, which is better but still not really the reason he came over. He wants to prove to her and himself that he can be the one to get her through this. And maybe there's a part of him that really just wants to kiss Caroline the way he did before and see what happens when they don't have an audience to stop them.

Distraction is good, right? It's helpful.

Fine, the truth is, he's been angry and hungry ever since he saw her at The Grill, and maybe it makes him a selfish bastard but he's not leaving until he knows she wants him just as much as he wants her.

"God, do you know what it's like listening to you?" She asks, leaning up against the doorframe and coming just a little bit closer to him. Good thing his tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth, because otherwise he might have swallowed it. "That's all you ever say to me anymore."

"Because you won't accept them," he says, pushing toward her, and she backs into the house. He takes it as an invitation—even though he kind of knows it wasn't—and follows her in. "Look, I know it was stupid to kiss you there in front of everyone—"

"Then why did you?"

He shrugs, not bothering to open his mouth and answer. He can't explain the impulse to her, the way he had to make some kind of move in that moment, when Caroline was telling him it wouldn't happen and Matt was watching and it felt like she might slip away if he didn't do something to yank her back.

"Is this some stupid wolf thing?" she demands, and he should have known she's way too clever for him.

"Maybe," he says finally. This time his shrug is sheepish. "Or it could just be a me thing."

She huffs an angry sigh. Then she goes completely quiet, not even breathing, and it jolts him when he realizes again that she doesn't have to. She could lie down and be still for a hundred years, and her body could repair itself and get up again.

"You shouldn't have done it," she says finally.

"I know," he says, his voice low and raw in a way that reveals how he aches. "Can I do it again?"

"What?" she asks, her mouth dropped open in shock, which makes it so, so easy for him to step forward and kiss her. She makes a sound of surprise in the back of her throat, but he doesn't let her go, just reaches up and holds her mouth to his.

He feels the moment she comes back to life, and the next second he's fetching up against the opposite wall, landing so hard his body makes a thump that rattles the picture frames on either side of his head. Her hands are at his shoulders, pinning him down, and her eyes are black. Some instinct inside him roars to life, making him angry and a little afraid, but mostly it opens up a kind of bottomless hunger inside of him. He wants her.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" she demands, pulling him forward just to shove him back again. He doesn't answer, just stares at her. She's close, an inch or so from him, and all he can see is her pitch black eyes.

"Fuck," she says, which catches him by surprise; he can't remember ever hearing Caroline utter that word before. Then she's kissing him—she makes the choice to kiss him, finally—and every thought gets dragged out of his head like oxygen in a vacuum.

She's demanding, rough like he is, her fingers digging into the skin of his shoulders. She sucks his lips into her mouth like she wants to devour him, and his eyes nearly roll back into his head. His limbs feel weak and useless, but he digs his way up from the sensations and gains leverage on her. He flips them, tossing her into the wall and using his body to hold her there. She stays stiff, fights it for a second and then goes pliant, and a roar of victory rolls around in the back of his throat.

He lifts her and she obliges him, her thighs settling at the base of his hips and her ankles locking together behind him. She reaches for his shirt, pulling it up over his head so quickly it almost makes him dizzy. He does the same with her blouse but takes his time, his mouth roving over each inch of skin as he bears it.

Her back is still hard against the wall, and he unwinds her hands from around his neck and flattens them on either side of her head. They pull back and stare at each other, their frantic breaths tangling in the space between them.

"Mine," Tyler says, leaning harder into her as he says it, instinct writhing around inside of him like a living beast. His eyes trace over the dark veins traveling across her cheeks, the way her mouth trembles as she fights her fangs, and he leans down to kiss her again.

Then the world tilts and falls, and he's on his back in the center of the room. Caroline straddles him, her deceptively slender arms taking their turn in restraining him.

"No," she says, and he's never heard her voice sound like that before, low and husky in a way that makes him want to jump out of his skin. "Mine."

She leans down again, her mouth hot and open. His hands tangle in her hair, fisting and pulling down, but she makes a noise that's somewhere between a moan and a cry and he lets her go.

"Did I hurt you?" he asks, guilt already clawing through him as he runs his fingers over her downturned face. He knows she's strong, but he still shouldn't have been so out of control—what was he thinking?

"No," she says, and now he sees what stopped her; razor-sharp fangs glint wetly at him from the corners of her mouth. She won't meet his eyes until he forces her chin up, and he thinks she looks ashamed. Her breath is jagged and cut open, like she's fighting a hard battle and losing it. "I don't want to hurt you," she confesses in a hoarse whisper.

"You won't. I mean, don't suck out all my blood or anything but—Caroline," he presses, because he's not entirely sure she's listening to him. He waits until she looks up again. "You're perfect."

She looks calmer now, her face shifting back to normal, and he's glad for the reprieve. He wants her so much it makes him shake, but he doesn't want to take her up against the wall in her living room.

He sits up, gripping her around the waist to pull her with him. Once they're on their feet, he reaches for her hand. "Come on," he says, and starts tugging her up the stairs.

She resists, halting on the first step, and he looks back down at her. He knows she's thinking about it now that they're not so overwhelmed by instinct and desire; she's conscious of what it will mean. He doesn't know what he'll do if she changes her mind and sends him away—macho man or not, he'd probably cry.

Then she catches up to him and leans on her tiptoes to kiss him. He pushes her back into the railing, his fingers ghosting over her until they reach for her hips and pick her up again. She goes with him, and he carries her the rest of the way up the staircase to her room.

Caroline moves from sleeping to waking in seconds, instantaneous the way a flicked switch fills a room with light. She hates it, this jarring super-awareness the very moment she wakes up. If there's a way to ease into consciousness slowly, Caroline hasn't found it yet.

Her keen senses bombard her with sensory information, so she has no trouble realizing she's not alone. Tyler's deep breaths echo in her ears, and his smell clings to his body and hers—the scent is slick and sweaty, masculine with a touch of the body spray and soap he uses. She breathes deep for a moment, her eyes sliding shut. She wonders how it's possible that he can seduce her in his sleep with just the scent of his skin.

Her eyes edge open and she looks down at him again, staring at his body twisted up in her sheets. One of his legs has escaped and hangs half off the bed, bare. The other is curled at the knee, and he's pointed towards her, his right arm reaching out to tangle around her waist. She realizes she's never seen Tyler asleep before, except when she drove him home after his first transformation and he passed out in an exhausted heap in the backseat.

This is… different. She would even say peaceful. There's a lulling quality to his breathing that almost drowns out the frantic sensations battering into her sleep-logged system. For just a moment, the world doesn't seem so bright and sharp anymore.

She reaches for him, but stops before her hand can meet his shoulder. She's in love with him. As impossible and irresponsible as it sounds, she's sure of it now. And his careless words to Matt still rattle around in her head, proof that he loves her too. But she's still feeling bruised and lost over her encounter with the other werewolves, and the lingering pain cuts her in half. Tyler has the ability to become everything to her, but right now all she can think of is revenge.

She followed Tyler and Jules last night, so she knows where the female werewolf is staying. The place is close, an old bunker on the outskirts of town. Jules took Tyler there to explain how she deals with her transformations, or so Caroline overheard. Caroline interpreted it as a peace offering of sorts. A way to say, Sorry for torturing your friend/lover/ vampire girlfriend, Tyler, but look, swallowing Wolfsbane really does weaken the beast!

Caroline also knows that Jules is alone. She's partly disappointed by that—she would really love to get even with the whole pack—but the calculating part of her knows how good this is. Jules, who's wholly responsible for the plan to kidnap Caroline and use her as bait, is in town, alone and weeks away from being any threat to Caroline.

The fact that Tyler went with Jules, that he didn't say anything to Caroline (not that he ever got the chance…) and that he's accepting the bitch's help only shoves the wedge in further. Caroline wants to trust him and she does to a degree, but she can't trust him to take her side in this.

She reaches for him again, her fingers ghosting over his jaw and along the edge of his lips. She doesn't know how she never saw it before, how perfect he is. Did his transformation enhance him, or would she have realized it either way? If Caroline was never a vampire and Tyler was never a werewolf, would they have eventually stopped chasing after mutual friends and started looking towards each other?

He shifts, his hand reaching, searching for her. She pulls back and moves away, slipping silently from bed. She stays still and watches him for a moment as he kicks his feet restlessly. Then he settles and turns his face back into the pillow, and she grabs her clothes and slips out of the room.

Her chest feels heavy but she shoves it back. She keeps pushing until all the bottled emotion, all the fury and fear fade to the background, like white noise on a broken television set. She grinds her teeth together, and now she's just thinking of the other werewolves, the ones who chained her up and made her feel so helpless and small.

The last of her trepidation slips from her fingers like water, and when she gets to the front door she's all cool determination. She said what Jules and the others did to her would never happen again, and she means to keep that promise. It won't happen again.

Not to her, anyway.