A/N
I'd all but given up on writing more of this story because I just didn't know where to take it after the grandchild was born. And I've also been insanely busy. But I'd had an idea for a scene with Elena and Joey for a while, and somehow it all came together. Now I have a new vision for how this story could end, and if we're lucky, you'll get two or three more chapters before we leave the Salvatores and this sequel completed. But I can't promise anything, because I continue to be insanely busy.
[P.S. If you're a Supernatural fan, I've got a Dean-centered story, "Ben Remembers" currently in-progress, which I'm also hoping to start posting more regularly. Check it out if that's your thing:) ]
Stay safe everyone,
Norah
two months later
November 2041
Elena woke up with a start when the baby cried.
When Manny whimpered in the middle of the night, she'd gotten into the habit of rushing into Summer's room, so she could comfort her grandson, and let her daughter sleep. Which sometimes felt even more important, letting her oldest baby sleep. Letting twenty-three year-old Summer be the child Elena still wanted her to be.
But tonight, Elena was still in the hall, a few steps from Summer's door, when she realized she wasn't needed. Elena heard her daughter picking up her own tiny child, heard Summer singing Manny to sleep. An old lullaby Damon's mother had sung to him.
A remnant of another life. A speck of his nineteenth century childhood that he hadn't buried or burned.
A piece of old innocence Damon Salvatore had allowed himself to pass down to their twenty-first century children. It was a precious sound, this lullaby.
Elena stood at their eldest daughter's door for what felt like forever, but was probably less than a minute. Resting her forehead against the wooden door and listening to her Summer's thin, sweet, soprano voice. The baby was quiet now. Summer's singing became quieter, breathier, but she kept singing the lullaby, kept up the song even as each word grew softer. Like she wanted to make sure her baby stayed asleep.
Maybe Elena and Damon's oldest baby was going to be okay. Truly okay. There had been so many rough spots over the last few months, so many nights when Summer brought Manny to Elena, asking her to not wake up Damon. Afraid to let her dad know how hard this was, single motherhood. Wary of Damon's overprotectiveness, and the way he managed to feel guilty for things that weren't even a fraction his fault.
Over the last few months, Elena, Summer, and Manny had spent many nights together. They'd sit up on the living room couch, Summer leaning on Elena, too tired to cry or talk. Those nights, she needed her mother, just her mother. And it was gratifying, to be needed this way. Especially when Elena was married to such a larger-than-life man, the rare murderer turned dad who was really, really good at parenting. Who could teach a child to stake a vampire (using a dummy of course), and then help them with their math homework when the staking was complete. Still toned and powerful and only a little gray, he went from sexy badass with a stake, or a hatchet, to sexy dad in an overly expensive cardigan and those hot reading glasses. She found it especially hot that he could make fractions sound fun.
Sometimes Elena wished she could shine like Damon Salvatore, and so those late nights with Summer, she loved the fact that her child was choosing her. To be needed on that couch—it was everything.
Nevertheless, in the mornings Elena would inevitably steal away from the children to talk furtively with Damon over breakfast, telling him how worried she was. Damon was never worried enough. He had this rosy fantasy in his head of how the last few months had gone. As far as he was concerned, Summer was fine. Everybody was fine. The magic was fine. The world was fine. It was a bizarrely positive attitude. Especially for Damon freaking Salvatore. King of the doom-and-gloom, sarcastic one-liners.
He'd taken to distracting her in the morning with silly cartoons and videos on his phone, whipping out the sexy specs so he could read parody articles and celebrity gossip and memes, and anything that was unimportant. He seemed desperate to make her laugh. To make everyone laugh.
Elena had not been laughing enough for him, for her, for the world probably. Caroline had been on her as well, keeping up a nonstop monologue when they got together, optimistic to the point of being a lunatic.
Elena had been doing the worrying for all of them.
But tonight, she wasn't worried. Tonight was different. Even the air felt different.
Standing outside Summer's door, forehead still resting on the wooden door itself—Elena felt a sense of peace flowing through her. Even the door felt friendly.
As she walked back to her bedroom, passing Joey and Gil's room, and Lucia's room, and the twins' room, Elena noticed that the wooden floor beneath her felt ... different. Friendly, like the door. Which made no sense. Also the air felt ... friendly. No that wasn't the right word. She didn't know the right word.
She felt a tingle in the air she was breathing as she walked, a tingle in the darkness she was walking through—lit only by a lamp at the end of the hallway. The very darkness felt friendly. Welcoming. Kind.
She was tired. Half asleep. Clearly imagining weird sensations in air and dark, in wooden doors and wooden floors. Doors and floors made from trees chopped down and cut into nice rectangular pieces. But made from trees nonetheless. Trees that came from the earth. Trees bathed in the sun. Trees that cleansed the planet's air. Trees that were necessary for Elena's own survival.
Something about that was important. Something about the earth.
She was tired. Half asleep. This meant nothing. But the door was a type of balance, wasn't it? And wasn't there something about balance that she was supposed to care about? Something Stefan, dead but not erased Stefan, had told Damon, told his brother. When Damon and Joey both had had a sort of near-death experience, somehow finding themselves in a liminality between the living and the dead.
They'd received some sacred bit of knowledge from the land of the dead, and it was about balance. A duty to protect the balance of nature.
A gift, a cure, her life, her children's life—all of this, including the floor beneath Elena's feet, was a gift. She'd been a vampire. She'd died. She was supposed to stay either dead or undead. But she and Damon, out of all the vampires who'd ever lived(ish), they'd gotten a second chance.
And then they'd gotten Summer. And Joey. And Gil, and Lucia, and Zoe, and Phoebe, and baby Manny. All this life. All this beautiful life.
More than they deserved.
The witches who Stefan had been hanging out with in that really nice sounding afterlife—they hadn't wanted to steal away her life, or her children, or even her grandson. They hadn't even been angry at her, or Damon, though they certainly would have a right to be. No, it had been a friendly visit. But there'd been something about the balance. She and Damon and their children, they were supposed to be servants of nature. Or servants of the balance. Or both, because maybe balance and nature were the same thing.
Elena could feel magic in the floor. But she was probably imagining it. She was tired. Half asleep. Susceptible to crazy thoughts, because she was on the verge of dreaming. Yes, again, this was all silly. Nothing at all weird had happened since Summer had given birth, for fuck's sake.
Finally she reached her room, crossed the threshold into the room that made her feel safest, warmest. Normal. Elena climbed back into her bed, burrowing under the down comforter and snuggling close to Damon.
He was so deliciously warm, like a furnace when he slept. Still unconscious, he reached out for her, pulling Elena towards him. Elena let her husband wrap his arm around her, let herself sink into his scent, expensive cologne and that faint mix of stale liquor and grease from the bar. And spit up. The baby had clearly spit up on him today. But beneath all of that, Damon still smelled of the wind. Of movement. Of mystery. He smelled like a little bit of danger.
She loved his scent. She loved all of him. Elena Gilbert closed her eyes, sinking into her great love, letting his arm wrap a little tighter around her, until she was cocooned in the utter familiarity that was her husband of a quarter century.
###
Elena drifted into sleep, but it was a fitful sleep. Hazy dreams, confusing dreams. Like she was waiting for something to become clear.
She woke again to muffled voices. Downstairs. Furtive voices. The kind of voices that only meant trouble, because they clearly belonged to children of hers who were up to no good. Plotting voices. Idiotic voices.
Great.
She crept down the stairs and peeked into the kitchen, where Joey was bent down in front of the refrigerator, his face lit up by the light within the fridge. "You want a sandwich?" he said to someone. Gil? Lucia? Because obviously her children had decided that one of them had to be having a crisis tonight, or creating a diabolical plan. A plan that would inevitably lead to a Council member showing up at her office to complain. Since Summer was fine, it was clearly time for a different sort of crisis.
Now that Elena thought about it, Summer been fine for the last couple weeks. Maybe she was turning a corner. And so, of course, now it was time for Joey, or Lucia, or even Gil, who was supposed to be at college, to have a problem. "We have ham, turkey, and I think a salami's in here somewhere," Joey said, still not seeing her.
But as she got close enough to see through the oversized doorway and into the kitchen, she realized Joey wasn't talking to either of his siblings. Behind him, someone with red hair was slumped over the kitchen table in a dejected pose.
"I don't want anything," muttered Joey's boyfriend Glenn.
Elena couldn't stop herself from sighing as she walked into kitchen. This night had gone from spooky to frustrating, but now it was truly and emotionally complicated. Now that Glenn was here.
"What's going on, boys? And Glenn, if you were coming down, you could've arrived during daylight."
Glenn stayed slumped over the table, saying nothing in reply. Which was odd. And melodramatic. But mostly odd, because she'd never known him to be the quiet type. She had vastly preferred the boy Joey had dated before this one. Though this one did seem to be sticking around. It had been at least two years.
Damon had been nagging her for over a year to just get over her dislike of the boyfriend and accept that Joey seemed to be in this relationship for the long haul. For over a year, Elena had been maintaining that Damon was biased when it came to Joey. Joey was far too much like Damon, and Damon delighted in being their oldest son's friend.
Of all their children, Joey was the child who never seemed to need Elena.
The kitchen clock read three o'clock in the was still completely dark outside, and rather dim in the kitchen. Joey hadn't turned on the overhead lights, just the smaller lights around the counter. Her oldest son was busy ignoring her as he pulled deli meat, tomatoes, and mayonnaise out of the fridge. Glancing her way for just a moment, he gave Elena a pointed look that must mean something, but she didn't understand exactly what he was saying. Since adolescence, Joey had been, on any given day, at least half of a mystery to Elena.
"Sandwiches in the middle of the night?" Elena asked, trying for a casual tone. She gave her son a gentle squeeze on the shoulder. Joey shook her hand off, face expressionless.
"What's going on?" she said, worried now.
When Joey refused to look at her and started slicing a tomato with forced precision, she sat down next to his boyfriend. She lay a hand tentatively on Glenn's hand. He didn't flinch away from her. His shoulders did begin to shake, and she realized he was sobbing but holding the sound in. "Oh, sweetheart. What happened?"
He cried harder, but still silently. She felt her heart, maybe her whole body, softening towards the boy. Even though she could see his neck tattoo. Even though the tattoo always creeped her out, not least because it was a witchy symbol she'd never understood, but always felt must mean something incredibly inappropriate.
Maybe she'd been wrong to be so wary of this boy.
He seemed completely vulnerable now. And completely unthreatening.
When Glenn didn't respond, she looked up at her oldest son again. Joey had begun slicing the tomato into thinner and thinner slices. He seemed to be taking out his anxiety on the poor tomato. He also looked exhausted, like he hadn't slept at all.
Had he been waiting up for his boyfriend to arrive? And where had Glenn come from? The last she heard, he was staying with his parents in Philadelphia until he could find a job. They'd both graduated in May, but neither one seemed to have a clue what they were doing with the rest of their lives. "Joey, why don't you just put me out of my misery?" she asked after what felt like an eternity. "What happened to Glenn so that he's here in the middle of the night?"
Joey's sandy hair was rumpled and he was dressed in an old t-shirt and threadbare, plaid pajama bottoms. His shirt was inside out and had at least three holes in it. Elena realized how serious, even domestic this relationship was—Joey hadn't tried to look cute for his boyfriend. Not even a tiny bit. The outfit wasn't flattering, the fabric hung loosely on him. That shirt had once been black—she recognized it. Now it was gray. And his pajama bottoms were too short.
"I really don't want any of your shit, Mom," Joey mumbled as he brought over the sandwich and set it down beside Glenn, then pulled up a chair beside the other boy. Leaning close to his boyfriend, he whispered something to Glenn so low that it was unintelligible to Elena. Glenn finally stopped sobbing, his body quieting as Joey draped his arm around him, as Joey kissed his hair was a gentle touch Elena hadn't realized he possessed.
Elena narrowed her eyes, trying to understand this couple. She and Joey had quarreled to no end about this relationship, and now she wondered if she'd been unfair. If she'd been overprotective, or just expected the worst after the prank that had gotten both of them kicked out of their dormitory one month after they'd started dating at the beginning of junior year.
Glenn sat up and turned to look at her. Joey kept his arm around his shoulders. "My parents basically disowned me. And they definitely threw me out."
Whatever resentment Elena had been holding towards Glenn, it just melted. She glanced at Joey, and now she understood her son's exhaustion, and his protectiveness, his defensiveness tonight. "Damon told me they don't accept you. Is that what's going on?"
Joey nodded, looking too tired to be angry. "They're shitty little bigots, and they tried to set him up with a girl tonight, last night, whatever. The daughter of some friends of theirs. Even though they know about me. He came out to them years ago! Old news that he screws guys. They don't care what he wants, or who he is. They just figured they could set him up with some girl, and she'd make him respectable."
Elena pulled Glenn into a hug and was relieved when he didn't pull away. He put his head on her shoulder and cried again, still quietly. "It's okay, sweetheart. Some people just suck. Even in 2041. Okay? They're your parents, and it's okay if you love them, or hate them, or whatever you feel. But they're wrong on this. Do you hear me? They're. Wrong. I'm glad you came to my house tonight. Nobody will ever make you feel like that in our house. I promise."
Joey smiled at her. "Yeah, this is the house where saying you're gay barely makes anybody bat an eye, because it's not like you ever died and came back to life. You're just into dudes." Elena couldn't help laughing. And then Joey was talking to her, his voice surprisingly casual, and intimate, talking to her like she got him, like she was real to him. "So anyway, Mom, here's what happened next. Glenn tells his parents to send the girl home. During dinner. At the table! They don't like that. It's apparently super rude, and they think everybody should go back to eating their crab soup. So ... then he starts telling the girl about me, which doesn't go over well. Then he blurts out to his folks, and everybody at the table, that we're moving in together, and all hell breaks loose, and there's a big scene. His mom sobbing like somebody's dead. And so Glenn's here. I told him to just hop in the car. You guys were already asleep."
Elena felt her whole body clench up at the words "we're moving in together" and tried not to let on how incredibly insane that made her—tried not to telegraph her shock to the poor red-haired boy who was still clinging to her. But she couldn't help her sharp tone when she snapped, "Joseph Salvatore, since when are you moving in together with anybody?"
Glenn did pull away from her now, biting his lip and looking downright scared. Of Elena? When had she become scary to anyone?
Joey rolled his eyes. "Dad was supposed to tell you."
"What?"
"Okay, maybe I asked him to tell you, and he said I should man up and tell you myself."
She sighed, turning back to Glenn and trying to smile in the kindest way possible. This was no longer about him. "Glenn, I'm really fine with you. And you've had a rough night. And maybe I've taken too long to come around, but you two are actually sweet together. There's a lot of affection. I can see it."
"Mom!" Joey hissed.
"What? I'm not allowed to say nice things? I'm not allowed to say critical things, and now I'm not allowed to say nice things?"
"No, that's not it."
"Then what's the problem, Joey?"
"There's a but coming."
"Well, it does drive me up the wall when certain Salvatore men keep me out of the loop because they think it'll be better if they come up with a clever way to tell me news that isn't really that big of a deal anyway!" She couldn't help her voice rising on every word.
"Oh, it's not a big deal? Listen to yourself, Mom. Look at how much you're not overreacting! And maybe think about how hypocritical you are. Weren't you shacking up with Dad when you were still in high school?"
Elena felt her blood beginning to boil. "There were extenuating circumstances! Jeremy wanted to kill me."
Glenn laughed. A surprising sound, but he seemed to have been jolted from his melancholy by Elena and Joey sniping at one another. "You people never have a regular explanation for anything, do you?" he asked, chuckling some more. It was a beautiful sound right now, that low-pitched chuckle.
Elena couldn't help smiling at the poor boy, glad he seemed to be coming back to his normal self. "My brother had become this sort of magically charged vampire hunter," Elena said, realizing with every word how ridiculous the truth sounded. But Joey had told all their secrets to this boy years ago, and so she didn't have to life. It was always a relief to tell the real stories, not lies about her past made up for the Council and the townspeople.
When Glenn's eyebrows rose practically into his red hair, which was shaggily growing out of the his ill-chosen buzz cut, she smiled again. "I know, I know. My adolescence was insane. But that's nothing to do with you two."
"Mom," Joey whined. "As far as I can tell, when you were my age you were doing whatever the hell you wanted to do. You never had to deal with all these stupid rules."
Elena's jaw dropped, and she just stared at her son.
Glenn gaped at Joey. "Too far. Babe, maybe you should back off."
Joey gulped.
Elena let out a long, shuddery sigh. And then she exploded at her idiotic, self-centered, privileged son. "Are you kidding me, Joey? When I was your age I was doing nothing. Literally nothing. I was in a goddamned coffin."
"I'm sorry. I didn't—"
"And when I was eighteen, or twenty, and you seem to think I was having all these fun, exciting, wild times? Doing whatever the hell I liked? I was almost never doing anything resembling what I wanted to be doing. I would have loved to have your life."
Joey looked genuinely contrite now. "Mom, I'm sorry."
"My parents died, Joey. And then my aunt died, and we had nobody except for Alaric. And then he died. And I died too, but I came back to life, sort of. And my brother wanted to kill me. Then he didn't. Then Uncle Jeremy went and died, but he came back to life for real. And there were so many other deaths. So many funerals. Those years were terrifying, for all of us. Even your dad was terrified. Even he wasn't having fun, most of the time." Elena felt her voice breaking. She never lost her cool with her kids, not like this.
She prided herself on keeping this side of herself from them. The scared little girl had no right to mother anyone.
Joey came to sit beside her, put an arm around her.
"I just want good things for you, sweetheart," Elena murmured. "I don't want you to have my life."
"I was being an asshole. I'm sorry, Mom."
"I'm sorry it's taken me so long to come around to you and Glenn. But you are sweet together."
"I know we are." Joey smiled and brushed his sandy hair out of his eyes. It really needed a cut. He was beginning to look like a surfer.
Elena peered directly into her son's blue-gray eyes. "I just don't like it when you lie to me, Joey. That's the only problem here. Promise."
Joey stuck his tongue out at her. Actually stuck his tongue out, when this whole thing was about how he was trying to convince her that he was old enough to move in with his boyfriend. "Nobody exactly lied," he said, taking a bite of the sandwich he'd made for Glenn, which Glenn had so far ignored.
"Nobody exactly told me the truth," Elena said. "And you've clearly been planning this. For how long?"
Joey shrugged.
"Fine, you have my blessing to move in with your boyfriend. ... But Glenn, if you need Damon to go talk some sense into your parents, he will. Or I will. Or Caroline will, for that matter. Not that she'd compel them. Don't worry about that. But she is terrifying when she's pissed off. In an efficient and mock-friendly way."
"Just don't send Klaus," Joey said, mouth full of ham sandwich. "He'll actually kill them. And nobody will ever find the bodies."
That got Glenn laughing. And stealing his sandwich back from Joey.
The three of them settled into a comfortable silence, until Elena asked, "Where exactly are you going to move in to?"
She'd gotten used to having Joey home, to having all her kids but Gil under the same roof. And Gil was only a couple hours away. But she'd known Joey would want to go back to New York sooner or later. Now she felt herself missing him before he was even gone.
"There's an apartment above the Grill. The renters just moved out. I was going to put in a deposit tomorrow." Joey got up and was back at the fridge, rummaging around for more food and pulling out a casserole dish of macaroni and cheese Lucia had made for dinner the night before.
Elena couldn't help laughing. "Here? You want to live in Mystic Falls? Oh Glenn, that's incredibly sweet of you to think you need to move close to Joey's family. But you boys will be so bored here. I thought you meant an apartment together in New York? I always had this fantasy about a loft in Soho. Or I've heard there's some nice parts of D.C."
But Joey was shaking his head. He brought a fork and the casserole dish over to the table and began eating the mac and cheese directly out of the baking dish. Elena forced herself not to comment on her son's complete lack of manners. "I already heard it from Dad," he said. "But I don't care about any of that stuff. We're going to be young for years. We can go do the club scene later and have plenty of time before we're old and boring like you."
"We are not old and boring," Elena said, knowing she was falling for his trap, but not able to stop herself.
"Yes, you are. But don't worry, you and Dad are 'sweet together,' " he said with air quotes and mocking voice.
"But back to the point, Joey—"
Joey threw up his hands. "The point is I want to be close to Summer! At least for now. She puts on this tough act, but she's a mess."
"Your father and I are taking care of your sister."
"She doesn't need anybody to take care of her. But she needs me."
Elena knew her eldest children had always had a special bond, a bond she'd never quite understood. They were only ten months apart, and they'd always been able to understand each other in ways the rest of the world couldn't.
She couldn't help being awed by Joey in this moment, by how gentle he was when he talked about his big sister. Even though in the next moment he took a giant bite of mac and cheese and started talking with his mouth full.
He said, "Besides, I got a job teaching at the Salvatore School. The history teacher just quit. Auntie Care thinks I'll be great at it. She thinks you know about all this, by the way."
Elena put Caroline on her list of people to lecture. Caroline should have realized something was up. "Since when do you want to teach?" Elena asked her son. "You have literally never talked about this before."
"I don't want to do anything," Joey said. "But Dad said that's not an option in the long term. Even though we're rich."
"Your father's rich," Elena said. An old refrain.
"Semantics, mom. Anyway, he says I'll be a brat if I don't get a job doing something. And I got a long-ass lecture from him last week about the fact that it's November, and I graduated in May, and I haven't done anything. He was not fun at all about it. You'd think he never spent a century and a half without a job. ... So, Auntie Care needs a teacher who can handle history, math, and magic. And voila, I can. Did she tell you she's staying on at the school, helping to officially run it?"
Elena nodded. Caroline was throwing herself in as a real, on-site administrator and teacher for the first time in ages. Since before Lucia was born. It had been long enough that Caroline felt like she could take on a new identity, as her own daughter, and stick around Mystic Falls for a couple years. The townspeople thought she was an assistant, since she looked so young. But the students and parents knew the truth, and knew exactly who she was. Her identity had never been a secret at the school itself. She'd been here since spring, and it had been amazing so far, except for the fact that Klaus was also here. Not full-time, but too much for Elena's comfort level.
"It's a win for everybody," Joey was saying. "Because I'll get to spend some time studying magic and digging around in the library, trying to figure out what the hell's going on and why nothing seems to be particularly wrong in the world. Magic-wise. I mean, something was supposed to happen, and nothing happened."
Elena nodded. It was unsettling that there hadn't been any disasters, or news on the magic brimming over situation, or anything out of the ordinary in Mystic Falls. The witch births had petered out, and everything seemed to be going back to normal. Of course Joey would want to know more, and of course he'd jump at the chance to spend more time with Alaric's library of occult books.
Joey got up, fishing another fork out of the drawer, and handed it to Elena as he sat back down. Elena sighed and dug into the mac and cheese. "Those kids are going to eat you alive, Joey."
"I can handle them."
Elena couldn't help grinning. "I think I'm going to enjoy this. Oh, and your sisters are definitely going to enjoy this. You think you're going to get the twins to call you 'Mr. Salvatore'?"
"Mock me all you want, Mom. I'm going to kick ass as a teacher."
Elena stopped herself from laughing, unwilling to make him truly mad. "And you, Glenn? You studied literature, didn't you? Don't tell me they need an English teacher at the school?"
Glenn shook his head. "Actually, Damon needs a bartender. And I've been talking with one of the cooks about starting a band."
He smiled shyly and peered at her with such hopeful eyes, like he really wanted her to respond well. Elena couldn't help smiling at him. How had she been so wrong about this kid? He was downright adorable. "You guys have this all planned out, huh?" she said.
They nodded.
Holding Glenn's hand, Joey said, "We've been talking about this for months. I didn't actually talk to Dad until last week, so you don't have to be that mad at him. It was kind of up in the air, because we didn't know where we'd end up living, you know? But then Glenn was the one who suggested he just come to Mystic Falls. I didn't have to ask him. I even said no, but he just freaking insisted."
Elena raised her eyebrows, having newfound respect for the red-headed boy, despite that neck tattoo. And she felt peace washing through her body again, that same peace and relief she'd felt standing upstairs outside Summer's room, listening to her daughter sing her grandson to sleep. Joey wasn't moving away. Not this year at least. With all this uncertainty in the magical world, Elena had felt a pit in her stomach every time she'd thought about Joey leaving.
Besides—Summer did need him. Those two always needed each other.
"Thank you," she said to Glenn, her voice soft. She forced herself to not tear up and embarrass her son.
"I love him," Joey said. He put his arm around Glenn, pulling the boy close. "This is like a real thing that's happening. We're not just screwing or something. We're moving in together and there's nothing anybody can say that's going to make me not love him."
Elena nodded.
"And I love your son," Glenn said, smiling shyly at her.
Elena smiled at them. A real smile. "Fine. Glenn, you can stay in Joey's room for now. But before either one of you signs a lease on that apartment above the Grill, I want to walk through it with you and talk to whoever's renting it. That building is ancient, and there've been a million fires and catastrophes in there."
"Mom!"
"I just want to make sure it's safe. And that you're not going to end up with constant plumbing problems."
Joey threw up his hands in the air. "Fine. We'll go tomorrow. Glenn hasn't actually seen the apartment yet."
Glenn was frowning. "How many fires?"
Elena had to laugh. "Don't worry, Glenn. There are other apartments in Mystic Falls if this one doesn't check out. You and my son are getting an apartment, and I'll just pretend not to be horrified that I'm old enough to have a son who's renting an apartment with his boyfriend. Now—bed."
She took the food away from Joey, turned off all the lights, and herded them upstairs, into Joey's room, stopping herself from kissing Joey on the forehead like he was a child.
A few minutes after four, Elena climbed back into bed with Damon, curling up in his arms again, and praying that nobody else woke up.
Damon still smelled like the wind. But of course he also smelled like home.
