It's the longest chapter yet! Thanks so much to the people who have read and reviewed/followed/favorited this story; I really appreciate it, and I hope you like this chapter! I'm going to try to update at least once every weekend now, since I've started back to school and I'd like to finish the story sometime before I graduate, lmao.
xxiii.
Somehow, Bonnie hadn't expected finding a grimoire-just one grimoire-in New Orleans to be so difficult. It was supposed to be full of witches, right? It couldn't take that long. She'd either overestimated the number of witches or underestimated New Orleans, because after eight freaking hours of breaking into houses, she hadn't found so much as a trace of magic.
Damon trailed behind her, helping her go through everything and thankfully not teasing her. Oh, she could see his smirks and his eye rolls, but he wasn't pushing at her buttons. Yet. They weren't even keeping up their usual banter; Bonnie had at first, but then she became too focused, and then too irritated to bother.
"Can't you just, like, sniff out something magical?" she asked after a while when she was digging into a dresser drawer. "Or couldn't you remember some old witch you had a fling with fifty years ago or something and take me to her house?"
Damon snorted. "Trust me, Bon-Bon, if I had the power to end this farce quicker-I would."
She opened her mouth to retort, but what came out instead was a startled cry-more surprise than pain. She yanked her hand out of the dresser. Her palm was bleeding, a jagged line ripped across it where she'd caught it on a nail. Before she could do more than process the injury had happened, Damon bit into his own wrist-hurting himself more than she had, really-and offered it to her. Bonnie's eyes widened. "It's not that bad."
"You just think that because your pain threshold's been pushed too high. I don't think you want stitches." At her pause, he gave his arm an irritated jerk closer to her face. "C'mon, judgy, it's already closing up."
It really didn't seem that bad, but-what the hell. It wasn't like having Damon's blood in her system could hurt at this point. Bonnie grabbed his arm just past the wound and drank.
Drinking vampire blood wasn't something she'd done many times, but it had always been in life-threatening situations, when she had to get it over with and concentrate on something else. Now it felt almost surreal, like the situation was too ordinary for her to be doing something so odd. Damon's blood tasted like a copper penny and was just as cool; as soon as it touched her tongue, she felt the wound on her hand begin to close up. Before she'd had more than a sip, she pushed his arm away and wiped at her mouth.
Bonnie could feel his eyes on her with the odd, single-minded intensity Damon had sometimes; so she met his gaze and nodded sharply. "Thanks," she said.
He hadn't even hesitated. She'd hurt herself, and he'd overreacted, then tried to play it off like he was just being practical-what was she supposed to think about that?
That Damon actually cared about her, she figured. Maybe some other day she'd have teased him about it, but something about this felt too charged.
"Don't mention it," he said dryly, looking away from her and rolling down his sleeve; and just like that, the moment was gone.
xxiv.
Two hours later, Damon said, "You need a break."
Bonnie didn't even look up from the old journal she'd found. "No, I don't."
"Let me rephrase: I need a break."
She waved a dismissive hand. "Then go take one."
A pale hand covered up the page she was skimming and pushed the journal down. Bonnie looked up from it to glare at Damon, who had somehow migrated into her personal space without her noticing. "Let me rephrase again: Bon-Bon, we've got all the time in the world to look through this city." He kept eye contact with her as his hands covered hers and closed the journal. "C'mon. Have you ever had beignets?"
xxv.
"What if we made some?" Bonnie asked after Damon had broken into the small diner. It was a clean little place; it looked homey, like in the real world the staff would know all the customer's names. And although the sign advertised fresh beignets, there were none to be found in the kitchen. Now that Damon had planted the idea in her head, though, she was reluctant to leave without eating them. "Look, there's a recipe taped to the counter here."
Damon pointed finger guns at her. "I like the way you think, Bennett. What do we need?"
They found the ingredients in the counters and started mixing them together. And Bonnie found herself relaxing-it was easy to forget the awkward tension of the last few days when Damon was just being her friend. By the time the dough was mixed and chilling in the fridge, they were both messy and grinning.
Bonnie leaned back against the kitchen counter, Damon beside her; his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and every now and then he'd knock her with his forearm like he was making sure she was still there. She kept staring at his wrist where the bite mark had been earlier, tracing the bluish veins. "Think they'll come out okay?" Damon asked.
"Better than your pancakes, at least," she said, smiling up at him; then she giggled. "You've, ah, got something…" Flour and water were smeared from the corner of his mouth to the point of his chin, a relic of their earlier battle over the ingredients.
Damon frowned and swiped at his chin, but that just smeared it around more. Bonnie sighed. "Here, let me." She leaned over-way too close, his mouth too close to hers, one hand pressed against his chest to keep her balance-and dabbed at it with her fingers. "Stop that."
He grinned. Bonnie didn't look up at him. "Stop what, Bonnie Beignet?"
At his stupid nickname/pun, she had to fight back a grin. "You're doing the sexy eye thing at me. I can feel you burning a hole in the top of my head."
"What sexy eye thing?"
Bonnie glanced up and met his eyes. They were narrowed, focused on her, and one eyebrow was artfully raised; she poked at his nose, not caring that she transferred flour there in doing so. "That thing. Like the dramatic, intense eye thing you do, but with more seduction."
"Wait, wait, wait." His smile transformed, becoming more genuine; she liked that one better than the smirk. "You think I'm sexy. You think I'm seductive." He waggled his brows.
"I think you think you're sexy," Bonnie said, "not the same thing."
And then, because she wasn't having this conversation, she ran her fingers through the flour on the counter and flicked it right at his face.
xxvi.
"You know, I'm kinda going to miss this when we get back?" Bonnie said a couple hours later. They were in one of the booths, getting flour and powdered sugar (the weapon of choice for Kitchen War III) all over the seats as they ate their piping-hot, slightly burned beignets.
"Having me all to yourself?"
She rolled her eyes. "Doing normal things. When was the last time we had any kind of fun in Mystic Falls? At least here, the worst has already happened, so we don't have to worry about it all the time."
"Yeah, well." He stretched out his legs so that his boots rested on the seat next to her, and she bumped his calf with her knee. "If you ever get your witchy juju back, and if you actually manage to get us home-maybe we can take a break from the danger and do more normal shit. Make some pancakes, watch The Bodyguard."
She scraped up powdered sugar onto her finger and licked it off. Now that Damon had said something earlier, she could tell he was tracking the movement-it was weirdly gratifying, emphasis on the weird. Probably she shouldn't enjoy that he was still checking her out. Probably she should stop thinking about it. "When we get out of here, I'm never eating your pancakes again. You can give them to whatever jerk shows up next in Mystic Falls and they'll run right back out."
"And if that fails, you can just throw flour at them til they surrender," Damon said.
"They won't know what hit them," Bonnie agreed. "You know, that reminds me-it's been, like, a week since we watched The Bodyguard."
Damon threw his head back onto the seat and groaned dramatically. "Really, Bennett?"
"I saw a copy at one of the houses we broke into..."
"Of course you did. But I get to pick the next movie, alright?"
