Chapter 12: The Scent of A Good Girlfriend

ELENA

"Wait, stop!" I exclaim, gripping the door handle of the Camaro as Damon turns onto the long driveway leading up to the lake house.

Damon gives me a thoroughly masculine look of smugness from underneath long eyelashes. He doesn't say a thing, the joke is so implied.

I blush. "No, I mean it this time."

He shakes his head, pursing his lips in feigned regret as he takes his foot off the brake. "Too late, sweetheart. We're already over the property boundary."

"No we aren't!" I blurt, bracing my hand against the glove box as if I can slow the car that way. "The driveway is just a access easement. The property line doesn't pick up until you're about fifty yards in front of the house."

Damon gives me a regretful look. "I'm only one man, Elena, and it's been a long…drive. I'm afraid it's time to face the music."

I drop my eyes to his lap and he shifts in his seat. "Only one man, huh?" I smile. "Not a particularly tired man though, it looks like."

His gaze flicks to my lips for a fraction of a second before he pretends to be checking the side mirror.

I slide my hand up the steering wheel, playing with his fingers as I drop my head onto his shoulder and sigh. The car is barely coasting, Damon's foot nowhere near the gas pedal. "I'll just miss you, that's all. I guess it doesn't bother you as much as it does me."

"Elena, we just made a two-hour drive take five hours. I think my feelings about you and your deviously flexible body have been fully explored."

I peek up at him, dropping my hand from the steering wheel so it can rest on his chest, my fingertips slipping between the buttons of his shirt to test the smooth skin of his chest beneath. The scratches I put there have already healed, so no trace remains of the last naughty little play session we had on the way here.

Now, his breathing deepens at the look in my eye and I trace the buttons on his shirt. I bite my bottom lip and think delightfully dirty thoughts until I feel my canines sharpen, pricking just a trace of blood. Damon has a more sensitive nose than any vampire I've ever met and I bet this will be enough to tempt him into letting me start out the chastity bet fully satisfied.

Damon stops the car just short of the property boundary marker and gives me a look that makes me think of black, shredded lace and the fact that I need to get a new pair of panties out of my suitcase before I see Caroline and Stefan.

"You know, it's just a bet," he says, his voice a rumble that hits me way down low. "You could lose."

I open the first button on his shirt and nip at his bottom lip, my gums tingling with the strange rush that tells me I'm about to draw blood.

"You could lose and win," I purr.

He wraps an arm around my waist and hauls me across the gearshift so I'm laying half in his lap. His thumb presses against my jaw, roughly opening my mouth for him and I moan against his teeth.

He's just flicked open the button on my jeans when a siren pops on in the distance and I flinch.

The wail of an ambulance always punches me straight in the chest. I was unconscious when Stefan pulled me out of my family's car and surrendered me to the paramedics but I woke up halfway to the hospital. The scream of the siren was my only companion in that first, lonely moment when I knew my parents were the permanent kind of gone.

I close my eyes and tell myself that a siren means that someone who needs it is getting help. It's a good sound. Really.

"Elena?" Damon abandons the button and his hand settles into the curve of my waist, as if he can sense my moods through the warmth of his palm on my skin.

"I'm okay." I take a discrete breath close to his neck. Damon's skin smells like bedtime to me, warm and dark with just a hint of sex.

They'll never take him away in an ambulance. He'll never get old or sick and he could live through any number of car accidents.

I never want to hear a siren in a world without Damon in it.

I pull away, letting my hair fall like a curtain between us as I scoot back into my seat.

"You were right." I try to keep my voice steady as I blink back the tears that are spilling into my eyelashes. "We're late. Stefan and Caroline are probably wondering what happened to us."

"Stefan and Caroline probably broke the coffee table celebrating our incredibly slow driving."

My breath catches on a watery giggle.

Damon rests a wrist on top of the steering wheel and stretches his other arm across the back of my seat, toying with a lock of my hair. "Want me to sing One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall?"

I look up at the ceiling of the car, willing the lump in my throat to recede.

"One hundred," Damon sings, in his best throaty Marilyn Monroe impression, "little bottles–"

I choke on my laughter and the tears blocking my breathing.

"Naughty little bottles," he embellishes. "Mr. Pres-i-dent…"

I give up and swipe at my eyes with my sleeve as I giggle. "Oh my gosh, stop, or I swear I'll really cry."

"Come on, you know it turned you on. I do a mean Marilyn."

"Love to see you pop out of a cake." I slant him a wobbly smile. "Sorry. It's been a while since my emotions got all vampire-y on me."

"Caroline says ice cream fixes hers." He takes his foot off the brake. "Let's go sweeten you up."

"We probably don't have any ice cream up here unless Jeremy left it last time, and then it'll be all freezer burned. Did you remember to get the chocolate for the s'mores Caroline wanted?"

"Fuck no. Do I look like a twelve-year old girl with a tie and 12 pieces of flair?"

"You don't have to be a Girl Scout to like s'mores. And they earn fabric badges, not buttons."

"Yeah, well I'm still not wasting good chocolate by melting glop on top of it."

He parks in front of the garage, which is packed full of boats and worn out hammocks and Jeremy's old sports equipment. "Looks like the coffee table is safe."

I frown at the empty parking space next to ours. "They're totally cheating. The bet was supposed to start when we arrived."

Damon grins. "Don't get mad, get even. I've never liked that damn coffee table anyway."

I smile at him as we climb the porch steps together, the last of my tears gone as if they never existed. The mood swings still catch me off guard, but they don't seem to faze Damon.

He slings an arm around my shoulder as I unlock the door. "Sure you don't want that ice cream? We can head back to town."

"No." I wink. "I hate the coffee table, too."

He steps inside and takes a breath to reply, but then all the humor drops out of his face. The colors of the room around me blur together as Damon's arm locks around my waist and he yanks me out of the house and all the way back to the Camaro in less than a full second.

Before I can start to sort out what just happened, a little blue car slams to a stop behind ours and Stefan is beside us in half a breath.

"What's wrong? What happened?"

"Someone's been staying in the house," Damon says. "Maybe even just a human squatter or something, but I doubt we'd get that lucky. Stay here with Elena while I check it out."

I cross my arms. "Are you serious, Damon? My stomach is somewhere up around my ears right now because you're afraid I can't take a vagrant in a fair fight?" I roll my eyes. "Unbelievable."

Caroline hurries over. "What do you mean someone's been staying here?"

"It's too clean." Damon keeps his body between me and the still-open door of the lake house. "It's a vacation home. It should smell a little dusty from being closed up, even if you cleaned before you left."

Caroline's eyes sparkle as she trades a smile with me. "I think," she says, tapping her lips with a finger as she pretends to consider, "that that might be the smell of a good girlfriend."

Damon frowns, his eyes already cutting back toward the house. "What?"

"What she means is that it smells clean because it is clean." I laugh. "I came up yesterday and did it because I knew you'd never do any housekeeping while we were all awake and so you'd just be twitchy and grouchy all day until we went to bed and you could dust."

He looks annoyed. "I do not get grouchy about dusting."

"Oh you mean that dart-y eye thing that you don't do when the living room is messy?" Stefan purses his lips to hide his smile. "The thing that doesn't make you look like a drug addict?"

"Like the sit-on-your-ass thing you do when the living room's dirty?" Damon turns his back on his brother to get our bags out of the trunk of the Camaro.

Stefan rolls his eyes at me and I laugh, following Damon inside to the room I've stayed in since I was a kid. The master bedroom is bigger, but I let Stefan and Caroline take it. If I slept in there, it would be too much of a reminder that my parents aren't just missing this one trip. They're missing all of them.

Damon drops the suitcases on the floor of the small closet and turns, quirking an eyebrow at me.

"Did you really?" he asks in a low voice. "Drive four hours round trip just to clean the house?"

I shrug one shoulder. "You already do way more than your share of the chores, Damon. I figured this was the best way to beat you to it."

His face is flashing through expressions too fast, the way it does when he's not sure how to respond. Usually, if I wait for him to decide, he picks the worst option.

Instead of waiting, I wrap my arms around his waist, tuck my head under his chin and squeeze, so he knows he doesn't have to say anything at all.

He buries his face in my hair as his arms settle around me. "What the hell are you doing with the likes of me?"

I just smile. "You're welcome." I only allow myself one more, too-short minute and then I push him away. "Now get your paws off me before we have to talk about you forfeiting that bet."

"I'm thinking about giving up gambling." His eyes go dark. "It's a sin."

"So is fornication."

He waggles his eyebrows. "Elena, what are you suggesting?"

"Not a thing." I reach back and open the hall door. "Maybe it would be better to have a little less privacy right now."

"Spoil sport." As soon as he turns toward the bed the smile drops off his face. "What. The. Fuck."

I follow his gaze.

To the unicorn that is tucked neatly into our bed, covers pulled up to its chin as it stares at us with innocently accusing eyes.

"I think it heard me say fornication," I whisper.

"Elena," Damon says, not taking his eyes off the unicorn. "Tell me you did not put that thing in our bed."

I prop my hands onto my hips. "Didn't you glue it to Caroline's bedpost?"

"With epoxy."

"Did you ever see that movie where the teenage girl keeps trying to get rid of the Ouijia board, but no matter what she does, it keeps appearing back in her closet, unharmed?" I struggle to keep a straight face.

Damon gives me a hard look. "Did you by any chance have some company yesterday when you were playing Santa's little elf? Maybe a blonde elf with an odd shaped tail and a couple extra points on her head, who happened to be firmly glued into a pair of panties?"

I bite my lip guiltily.

Caroline sashays into the room and snatches up her unicorn with a glare at my boyfriend. "No fair borrowing my stuffed animals without asking, Damon."

I can't resist the look on his face, so against my better judgment, I chime in, "Did I forget to pack your Mr. Snuggles? Oh, I'm sorry, honey."

Damon's head turns very slowly toward me, but before I can register his expression, I take my cue from Caroline and start running when she does.

She manages to get the front door open before we plow through it, no doubt a move she's perfected from having survived many of these pursuits. I only have a fraction of a second to register Stefan's confused expression as the three of us tumble out the door and explode into the forest in a blurring chase punctuated by laughter, shrieking near-captures, and Damon's dire promises of plush unicorn dismemberment.

For a moment, it feels just like it did when Jeremy and I used to play tag in these woods, back before there were vampires and witches and curses. Just family and trees and the breathless thrill of a hard run, without the hint of a siren in the crisp air.