Аманда Хокинг - Flutter

“How? How are you both alive? And me too?” I pressed.

“I broke the bond.” The glimmer returned to his eyes and an easy smile spread out across his face, enchanting me more than it ever had before. “When you drank my blood, whatever tie you had with Peter was severed.”

That should’ve been kind of obvious to me. As soon as I mentioned Peter or thought of him, I didn’t that physical ache for him or that fluttery feeling in my heart. While I had felt legitimate concern for his wellbeing, the only things I really felt physically were a dull bloodlust and a pull towards Jack.

“So we’re… bonded now?” I spoke cautiously, afraid that it as too good to be true. After all this time trying to figure away around it, around Peter, it almost seemed impossible to believe that while I was sleeping, it had happened.

“What do you think?” Jack smiled crookedly at me.

His attempt at a joke was covering up a legitimate fear. He knew that he felt things more deeply for me than ever before, but since I had been unconscious the entire time, he had no idea where my feelings fell.

But sitting there, breathing him in, feeling the way my body felt magnetized to his, I knew we were.

My first big clue was when Jack had opened his veins in the den, and I had been unable to resist the scent of his blood. It tasted wonderful, and my mouth watered at the thought of it. But no vampires’ blood should be that appealing to humans, even if said human is in love with said vampire. People aren’t meant to have bloodlust, but I did, for Jack. Because his blood was meant for me.

“So then what happened?” I continued, trying to ignore the delirious happiness taking over me. My heart was speeding up and my thirst was intensifying, but I wanted my curiosity satisfied before I dealt with my other pressing needs.

“I don’t know.” Jack furrowed his brow, but it was more out of displeasure over the subject than his lack of knowledge. “I was in the den with you, and then Peter started just going crazy in the other room. I was afraid he would hurt you, so I ran out to find out what had happened. He was destroying the house, and Ezra could barely contain him. But he didn’t seem to care about me when I came out, which is good, because he probably…”

“But why? If he didn’t want to hurt you, why was he so angry?” I suppressed the shudder at the thought of a rabid Peter tearing into a weakened Jack as I lay passed out in the den.

“He felt it break,” Jack answered almost sadly, and lowered his eyes from mine. “The bond.

If you hadn’t been out, you would’ve felt it. And if you hadn’t bonded with me, you’d still be feeling it. Apparently, it’s… incredibly painful.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He shifted uncomfortably and hesitated before continuing. “Physically, I guess it’s a similar to turning, but on a much smaller scale. But… something happens emotionally too. It breaks your heart. And Peter was so riled up from everything else that had been going on.”

Jack didn’t like talking about the fact that Peter had actually cared for me. He didn’t want to believe it because of how Peter treated me and how much Jack loved me. On top of that, if he admitted that maybe Peter did truly love me, then what Jack had been doing with me suddenly became a betrayal, and Jack did not see that way, nor did he want to.

“So where is he now?” I was pressing my luck with Peter topic, so I hurried to get it out of the way.

“Nobody knows. He’s just gone, for good this time.” Jack shrugged, as if it was of no consequence to him, but then again, it probably wasn’t.

“Good,” I lied, and hoped he didn’t notice. Then I swatted his arm, probably harder than I meant to from the surprised grimace on his face.

“Thanks?” Jack looked totally bewildered.

“That’s for being the biggest idiot ever! How could you do something so stupid?” I yelled at him, and it was a tough decision not to hit him again. “You were going to kill yourself! If the bond hadn’t be snapped or rearranged or whatever, you would’ve been completely murdered! What the hell were you thinking?”

“I didn’t have a choice!” Jack responded, and he was suppressing the urge to laugh at my minioutburst.

“There was a good chance that I would die no matter what I did. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

“That’s not an excuse,” I grumbled, but a smile started to curl up at my lips.

“I just needed to know you were safe. That was the only thing that mattered to me,” Jack said earnestly and placed his hand on mine. Heat instantly spread through me, making my heart flutter, and I bit my lip to fight it back, just long enough so I could finish being mad at him.

“Well, your safety is really important to me, so that needs to matter to you too,” I countered.

“I’m sorry. I won’t let it happen again. I promise.” At that point, I’m pretty sure that he would’ve agreed to anything because he could feel the changes going on inside me, the lust that was starting build up inside of me.

With that, I lunged forward, kissing him intensely and pressing my body against his. He gave into it for a moment, but there was a hunger inside me that threatened to completely take control of my body. Just when I was about to let it, he pushed me back from him, and that’s when I got the big sex talk. It basically consisted of the fact that until I got things under control, we couldn’t really be physical in anyway because there was a good chance that I would bite him and I wouldn’t stop until he was dead. That didn’t sound that great to either of us, so I planned on going through a rigid boot camp, similar to the one that Jack had put Milo through.

After a few days of getting my bloodlust under control, Ezra thought it would be good if I went about cleaning up what was left of my human life. That meant doing fun things, like going with Jack to my mom’s house so we could have this incredibly intense fight when I said that I was moving in with Jack, again. She tried to convince me to stay, then cried a lot, called me names and told me she loved me. She managed to play the role of both good cop and bad cop.

When it was all said and done, she finally stormed off into the night. I packed up my things, and since I felt incredible guilt, I “borrowed” money from Jack to leave her. Then maybe she wouldn’t have work so hard, and at least that would be something. Milo called her after I left, as he had been infrequently doing since he moved out. He got to make up all sorts of fancy stories about a boarding school in New York, and that seemed to cheer her up a bit.

I got to formally drop out of high school, which I kind of enjoyed. Milo insisted that we both take our high school equivalency at a later time so we could go to college if we wanted, and I agreed to it, but I didn’t really have any intention of it. As far as I was concerned, I could spend the rest of my life as a trophy wife, and that was fine by me.

There was the issue with my “best friend” Jane, but I didn’t know how to resolve that. When I went to the high school, she saw me and instantly figured out what had happened. I still looked like me, but I was hotter than I had been before, maybe even hotter than her. Either way, all the boys thought I was anyway, because of my tricky vampire chemicals that made them think that way.

It was during the day, so I was incredibly tired. It was hard to get on read on whether she was annoyed at me being a vampire, or just annoyed because people wanted me instead of her. We exchanged a few heated words, and she ended the conversation with the flippant, “I hope you have a good death,” then stalked off, doing her stiletto catwalk. I tried calling and text messaging her a few times, but she didn’t respond to any of them.