Chapter Two
A long silence stretched after she had said that to me, and I just stared at her blankly, my best friend–no, soul mate– straddled across my lap, telling me that she was a vampire. "W-what?" I sputtered after a second, confused. "A- a vampire?"
She nodded, an apprehensive look on her face, as if waiting for me to push her off and run away screaming. I still stared at her, then I started to chuckle. A vampire, really? What a way to lighten the mood. She let me laugh for a minute, and when I wiped away the tears I saw she had not cracked one grin. "Alice– are you serious?" I asked in bewilderment, and she nodded again, gravely.
"I was born in Mississippi in 1901, Mary Alice Brandon. I can see the future. My parents had me put in an asylum. One of the staff there created me before another vampire struck out to kill me, he wanted my blood very badly. The other vampire killed my creator before I ever even saw his face, because I have no human memories. Everything I know about my past, I found through research after the same vampire attacked my brother Edward and his wife, Bella, him letting the little secret slip about me."
I still had no words for her, as I listened to this unbelievable tale she was telling me, and yet I could sense the truth in it, though it instilled no fear in me of Alice. She was just as gentle, harmless, and pure as she had been to me the entire time I had been deceived by her human facade.
"I left Mississippi in 1920, two years after my transition, eternally nineteen years old, too beautiful for words, and utterly lost on what to do with myself, as the only thing I knew was that my name was Alice... I remembered my creator whispering that to me while I burned in darkness... 'My little Alice'. I had one thing to go on, and it was a vision I had after waking from the burning hell that was vampiric creation. I knew that I would mingle with humans, because it was in a human tavern. There was another blood drinker in the room, a tall, handsome blonde male, but covered in hideous scars. He became my brother. You know him as Jasper, he lives here with me. I met Jasper in real life in 1925, in Philadelphia, and I had another vision. This time it was that we would meet a family of vampires, the patriarch being a gentle soul called Carlisle, and his mate, a matronly persona named Esme. They had two 'children' in this life, they were Edward and Rosalie. Later, after Jazz and I were with them, they adopted Emmett after Rosalie brought him home in rough shape."
She paused to appraise my reaction, and I looked back at her mutely, my mouth hanging free of its own accord, and she gave a minuscule tinkle of a giggle. "Alice. I can't... I can't really grasp this. I-I've never heard anything like this before, only in cheesy romance novels or really bad movies. Yet you walk in the daylight with me all the time! You don't have any coffins lying around, your teeth are perfectly straight, no fangs! And I've never felt afraid of you, like humans are supposed to be!"
Alice tinkled another laugh. "Andie, think about it, love: you never see me when the sun is shining. I've never eaten in front of you. My skin freezes you, you flinch nearly every time I touch you. You've never seen eyes like mine before. You can't understand how I can quote all your favorite plays and some of your favorite books. You even point out to me sometimes about my vocabulary and my execution of language: you said it yourself, sometimes I speak like I am from another time."
My mouth fell open again as I racked my brains for a memory of Alice in the sun with me, but there was nothing. Always cloudy or raining when we did things out in the daylight. I remembered questioning about her dietary habits: she'd replied she was sensitive to a lot of food. And there were also times it seemed she appeared out of thin air, but I was always too happy to see her to question it. There was something else, too... "You never come around me when I'm menstruating," I said quietly, seeing the confirmation in the eyes of the girl I loved. "And your eyes turn black when you do, so I suppose that means you need to... feed."
She said nothing, and I gulped, the sound audible enough for the room at large to hear. "Alice... did you want me? You know..." I knew she would catch my unsaid fear, and she did, letting her eyes fall to her lap, folding her hands there.
"Yes," she whispered. Then, noticing the rate which my heart sped up, her face shot back up to look at me beseechingly. "I don't feed on humans. I've gone ninety one years without feeding on a human being. But your blood was different. It was like a finger beckoning to me. And that is really what caused me to notice you in the lecture hall."
"And now?" I asked hoarsely, scared to know the answer, because whatever it was would be the truth.
She smiled a real, honest smile, leaning forward and letting her nose travel up my neck to my ear, like always, only now I knew what she was really doing; I should have been frightened, but in the manner of honesty which we were speaking, if she asked, I would have to admit to her that it excited me. "The hunger for your blood is gone, but the smell is still delectable. It affects me quite differently now." She left her face in my neck, stroking up and down with her nose, showing me exactly how it affected her, which did not help the problem that was forming in my jeans. I wanted her kiss me there, I wanted her to lick the flesh of my throat. Hell, if she really wanted, I would let her take my life.
I wanted to groan in disappointment when she leaned back away from me, and I think my face gave it away, because she giggled at me again. "Silly Andie," she murmured affectionately, tucking a loose lock of brown hair behind my ear. "You're perfect for me... just as I am for you. All this aside, all my lies and deceit in the open, I still want to belong to you."
"Have you... had a vision of this?" I couldn't help but to ask, and she grew still, her eyes sliding out of focus slightly, and after a few moments, she came back with a wide grin and a squeal of happiness.
"Until just now, all I had seen is that I would fall for you. I couldn't know the outcome because you hadn't decided. But guess what?"
"I've decided," I replied factually, because I had made a decision.
She smiled at me, sliding her arms around my neck and pulling herself closer to me, chills sweeping through me as I caught the scent of her sweet breath as her face became closer to mine. "You have," she agreed, with that same satisfied grin. "You're mine, for eternity." The first brush of her lips was cautious, like she wasn't sure if I'd return the press, but my lips took a mind of their own and grasped hers tightly, as if it was air they needed to live. Hearing her sigh into the kiss and feeling her relax against me was more ecstasy than I deserved. Her lips were hard like a stone, only smooth like marble, or a fine ice sculpture, and the texture drove me wild, my heart feeling like it could explode at any moment. After a few moments of this intoxicating display of affection, she sighed into it, pulling back to look at me, and stroke my jaw.
"Eternity?" I asked, not forgetting the word she used to relay the time we would last. I found my hand rising to her neck, feeling the hard flesh there, wondering how I never noticed how different her body was from mine, in all the times we'd cuddled to watch movies on her couch.
"Well, I saw... are you sure you want to know?"
I debated that. I had a growing suspicion of what her news would be. Already I was feeling the denial wash over me. "Please," I said, deciding to face that fear.
"You will eventually be like me... I turn you, when you ask me to," she told me, watching my face carefully, and I saw disappointment in her eyes again as I balked, shaking my head in disbelief.
Me, Andrea Louise Fowler, a vampire? Immortal? No, I didn't think so. I hated to be on the grind to stay on top as it was, and was one of the few people in the world that would work until their dying day, welcoming death like a friend not seen in years. I couldn't tell Alice that, not after the look that had briefly crossed her expression, but now she gave me a tiny smile that did not reach her eyes. "It doesn't have to be that way, Andie," she told me softly. "My visions are based on the path of what pivotal decision is made at that time. It could always change. You can always just grow old with me, and I'll take care of you when you can't care for yourself." She brushed her lips across mine again, as if to seal the promise.
"And you'll move on when I'm gone?" I asked her after my head stopped reeling from her light kiss, and she gave me a sad smile.
"I'll die when you do, love. Your last breath will be my last."
I sat up off the couch in indignance, my face growing bright red and my blood surging, which I was now sure she could hear, but I didn't care. That answer was not the right one at all. "No! I don't want you to cease existing just because I will! That's not fair to you, you're immortal, so stay that way! Don't decide to commit suicide because I've died, Alice, what the hell is wrong with you? What would the world be if you weren't in it?"
"Does it matter, if you're not here? It doesn't to me, fuck this place, this existence, if I can't have it with you," she answered, running her fingers through my hair, watching it fall through her fingers like silk. "You are my mate, Andie. We vampires only truly mate once in our damnable existence." She pressed her lips to my forehead, smelling my hair. "I've seen first hand the shell a blood drinker becomes without its mate; I do not care to share that fate. So, yes, if you remain mortal, our lives will end the same day, no less than minutes apart."
My throat contracted as I thought about Alice dying, and I looked at her with fresh tears standing in my eyes. "How does a vampire die?" I whispered, keen on asking questions I really had no desire of which to know the answers.
She just stared at me. "I'm not going to tell you that," she said frankly a few seconds later. "It's morbid, and a very painful way to go. But for creatures like me, it is the only way."
I shut my eyes against the sting in my chest at her words, imagining the worst tortures possible: dismemberment, fire, among other things. "Maybe I'll change," I blurted out in a panic, my heart going crazy with the thoughts of Alice going through any sort of pain. "I don't know, Alice, I'm so confused, my head is spinning with everything you've told me tonight. The one thing I'm certain about is I want you, be you human or not, I don't care." I kissed those smooth as polished glass lips again, swooning inside myself, wondering if I would ever get used to the sensation of her kiss. I brought my hand up to her face, stroking along down her jaw, tracing fingers down her throat, then pushing that same hand behind her head, twisting my fingers in her pixie cut, holding her face to mine. I couldn't believe that tonight had happened, but was I ever thankful that it had. "I'm scared I'll wake up, and this will all have been one crazy, fucked up dream," I breathed against her cool mouth a few minutes later, feeling the cold air on mine when she chuckled.
"I had to tell you the truth. I wanted to this whole time, but my family wanted me to be sure that you were truly my mate first, not just a potent human. I called home Wednesday night after you dropped me off, and spoke to my mother, telling her everything, even what almost happened. She suggested it was time, and that it sounded like you were ready. As it turns out, she was right." A few chaste kisses, light caresses on my face, giving me chills.
I swallowed hard, looking back into her honeyed irises. "So, your family knows about me, then?"
She nodded with a shy smile. "I told them about you before I ever decided to introduce myself and befriend you." Then her face grew somber. "But I was looking for support then. I don't need that now."
I knew what she meant. They talked her through her desire for my blood, to protect her from doing something she would later regret. "Because you wanted to gnaw on my neck, right?" I teased her with a wry grin, worried she'd thought she'd made me uncomfortable.
She leaned forward and ran her nose up my neck again, pressing her lips to it, pulling the flesh with her lips, rather than her teeth, before she sat back up on my lap. "I still want to gnaw on your neck," she shot back playfully with a smoldering look that ignited a heat between my legs. I blushed when I saw her nostrils flare, and her look down between us at my zipper, then back up at me with a smug grin. "Problem, Andie?"
My blush deepened to a puce color, and she giggled at me. "How did you...?" I trailed off as she tapped her nose, bouncing her eyebrows. "So, even before you always knew when I was aroused around you?"
Her smugness melted and a playful air returned. "You must have a very active imagination, Andrea Louise," she goaded me, making my blush impossibly darker. I knew she meant the times we'd snuggled up for a movie together beneath a blanket on her couch, and my mind started to drift onto "what-if" scenarios. Or possibly when we were on the beach watching the tide, and I was daydreaming about throwing her down in the white sand, and making love to her while the surf came in around us. There were hundreds of times that I'd been aroused near her. Now I got to find out it was never a secret. I may as well have been carrying a rock hard penis in my pants around her.
I groaned in embarrassment, hiding my face in her chest, making her laugh, but she cradled my head there, petting my hair affectionately. "If it's any consolation to you, I have a pretty active imagination, too, and I would bet my Porsche that we were always thinking the same thing. Sometimes I would already be lost in a thought with you, and it would be your scent that brought me back. I've always been entertained with the phenomena, as it seems our brains work alike, and the same things act as aphrodisiacs for us," she said in an assuring tone, but her words only made my "problem" worse, as the dull ache became more pronounced. It was now a sharp throb in my clitoris as my thundering heart pushed pump after pump of blood through it, and it made Alice sigh into my ear, her breath floating across it nearly making me moan. It was unbearable, how turned on I was so quickly.
"Can you feel that?" I whispered to her, pulling her tighter against me by the small of her back, tilting my face up to taste the flesh beneath her jaw with the very tip of my tongue.
"You? Yes," she whispered back, still cradling my head as I continued to explore her neck, then her ears, and I felt her fingers tangle themselves in my hair. Her breath accelerated, but I noticed something lacking, her body was too quiet.
"Your heart," I said aloud in amazement.
"Does not beat," she finished my thought, ducking her face down and catching my mouth with hers. I could feel that she was holding back, her lips allowing me to shape mine around them, every move she made was cautious and calculated, and she wouldn't open up and let me in. She only allowed me to trace her bottom lip with my tongue. I knew now why she had to be honest with me before we got this close: I could tell now she was not human, no mistaking Alice for a human girl at all.
"Alice...?" I whimpered as she took a turn softly assaulting my neck, my arms still pulling her into me, but I felt her body's resistance: I couldn't budge her.
"Hmm?" I gasped as the shock of her cold, wet tongue swept up the left side of my neck and then gave my earlobe the tiniest suck, making me moan in my throat just a little.
"Is sex even possible for you?" I could tell my question had an explanation as an answer when she reluctantly pulled her face from beneath my hair with a heavy sigh, sitting up straight on my lap again. I flinched horribly when I saw her eyes: they had gone from their usual golden luster to an inky black.
"It's okay," she told me, knowing why I flinched. "Hunger and arousal are closely related to our senses and instincts. My eyes will lighten again." She paused as I relaxed, then went on. "But yes, it is possible for me, however... I'm not sure how it will work for us."
"What do you mean? The... blood lust?"
She smiled and shook her head. "That is the smallest problem for me out of a list. The biggest being that I could crush you if I got too enthusiastic. I think I could make love to you safely, if that's what you're wondering..."
"But I couldn't touch you?" I asked mournfully, the news killing a piece of me: I so wanted to touch her. I wanted to explore every part of her, kiss every inch of her icy planes.
Alice shifted uneasily, sliding off my lap to curl up into my right side, pulling my arm around her and anchoring it by sliding her fingers through mine. "Well, I know that when Bella was still human and she and Edward were... active... the passing of his venom into her mouth never harmed her. I think the virus has to be spread through the blood stream, i.e. through a bite. So I think," she stressed the word, "that part would be okay, it's just that... Andie, I've wanted you, and this intimacy, for a long time now. And if I get too caught up in the sensation of you doing things to me that I've only fantasized about, I could kill you by accident. I'm strong, you see. If I kissed you too hard, I could break your jaw. If I held you too firmly, I could obliterate every bone in your body. If, when you were kissing me down there, it were too much for me and I closed my legs, my thighs could crush your skull."
"But on the same note," I added slowly, "what if you were making love to me and you got too rough, thrusted too hard, not meaning to? And could you really handle the blood pumping through my body like that? Because Alice, I'm here to tell you, if you were to go down on me, I would get too enthusiastic, and I don't want you to push yourself."
"Yeah," she sighed defeatedly. "I don't know how the physical intimacy is going to work, Andie."
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, don't worry about it now. I am completely content with kissing you constantly, trust me. If my body wants more, I can do it myself when I'm alone, same as I do now."
Alice looked up at me with a crooked grin, again only revealing a single dimple. "I do that, too. It's all I have because I can't have you."
BOOM. Clitoral overdrive. "What... do you think about when you do it?" I was playing a dangerously sexy game with her now, going out of my way to drive us both insane with hormones and whatever held her vampire's libido strong.
She grinned widely, catching my game. "Well, what do you think about when you do it?" she answered devilishly, that same smoldering look returning to her eyes.
I shrugged a little, looking away from her gaze before I lost all bravado and melted into a pile of putty. "Oh, it depends... where we've been that day, what we're doing. What you wore, the things you say. I've only had one particular fantasy replay itself."
"Tell me," she said in a tone that was no less than demanding, but in a dominant way that gave me shivers.
I looked back at her with a teasing smile. "I asked first, so I think you should 'fess up."
She looked at me for a second with her mouth hanging open, showing off that pretty little pink tongue of hers, then I saw resolve leak into her eyes. "I think about when we're lying together in bed, spooned together, that I'd let my hand creep under your shirt and up your side. I think about how you'd turn in my arms and look at me with your mouth slightly open, your bottom lip tantalizing. I think about how my hand would be on your stomach, trailing up to your breast, and I think about the gasp you would make if I closed my hand on it. I think about deep, passionate kisses with throaty moans as I continue massaging your breast, maybe a little more vigorously as times goes on, and how your breath would sound as I kissed my way down your beautiful neck, pushing up your shirt for my mouth to replace my hands." She paused, giving me a little grin, her nostrils flaring again, and I didn't even care that she knew she had created a flood in my panties, I wanted her to know now. I wanted to drag her on top of me, shove her hand down my pants, and hump like crazy against her, wave after wave of pleasure ripping through me.
She let that little teaser sink in, and I fell back on the couch in a daze, my head full of what could happen next in her little scenario, which was what she wanted, I'm sure. I readjusted until I was lying with my head on the arm opposite of where her back rested on the other, kicking my shoes off, and stripping my jacket; I was hot. I closed my eyes and bid her go on, wanting her voice to map out the tryst in my head, and I crossed my ankles, squeezing my thighs together for some kind of pressure release for my ache. I couldn't wait til I got home...
A/N: Just bear with me, guys. I appreciate the feedback more than you'll ever know.