In the Company of Vampires(6)

“It’s not that I don’t want to see you,” I had tried to explain, but it had been difficult doing it over the phone. Part of me ached with the need to see him, but I knew I had to make a stand. I had to take back my own life. “I just want some time, Ben.”

“You’ve had time! It’s been four years since you left GothFaire. Fran, you’re my Beloved, the other half to my being. I need you. I can’t exist without you. You are the only one who can redeem me. Why can’t you understand that?”

And that was the point where I exploded on him. “I do understand it. I just reject the whole idea of Beloveds! I don’t want to be your soul mate because I have to, Ben! I don’t want to be bound to you just because of some quirk of fate. I want to make my own choices, make my own life, pick my own man! I want to know that the man I choose to spend my life with is right for me not because it was written into some grand plan, but because our hearts say we should be together. Is that so wrong?”

“How do you know that our hearts aren’t saying that?” he argued.

“Do you love me, Ben? Can you tell me, right here, right now, that you love me beyond all reason?”

“You are my Beloved,” he said in a low, angry voice. “I cannot help but honor and cherish you.”

His words pierced my heart like little shards of ice. “You can’t help but cherish me. That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Ben. Neither one of us had a choice in this relationship—you got stuck with me without any say in the matter, too. One minute we had two separate lives. The next we were tangled up together without either one of us wanting it. It just was. But that’s not good enough. Not any longer, it isn’t.”

Silence followed my tirade, a silence so filled with pain it almost made me relent. “You don’t want me.”

I took a deep, shaky breath. “I want to make my own choices. I don’t want to be handed a man and be told I have to bind my life to his simply because of a sympathetic link between us. I want to fall in love, not be told I must love. I want to make my own fate, not accept what life has dealt.”

Ben’s voice was flat and lifeless, as cold as the arctic wind. “It will be as you wish. Good-bye, Fran.”

I closed my eyes tight as I remembered the pain of hearing him speak those words, knowing they would be the last ones I’d hear from him. The year that had passed since that call had been filled with anguish over my decision. Had I been right to sever the relationship with Ben? Was he suffering because of it, or had he, too, been set free to make his own choices. At one time, when I was a naive sixteen, I had fancied myself in love with him. But even then I hadn’t wanted to be pushed into the irreversible commitment demanded as a Beloved without knowing my own mind first.

“Is it so much to ask to want to have a say in my own life?” I asked sadly, wiping at a tear that had sneaked out of the corner of my eye.

“No. But sometimes life doesn’t work that way.” Geoff held out a mug to me. “Sometimes life is messy and confusing and makes you cry, and you have to work like hell to get things straightened out. You going to see your boyfriend?” I started to protest, but she continued. “Oh, I know, you claim he’s not your boyfriend, but you don’t keep a man’s picture in your undies if he doesn’t still mean something to you.”

“He’s . . . it’s . . . no. I made my decision. I’m sure he’s happier for it.”

“I sure hope so, because you’ve been miserable as hell.” She pulled open the top drawer and extracted Ben from my panties. “I gotta admit he’s yummy,” she said, eyeing the picture. “You said he’s even better in person?”

“Yes.” My gaze was drawn to the picture, even though I’d stared at it so often it was permanently etched into my memory. Ben’s face was half in shadow in the picture, a little smile curling those delectable lips that I remembered with much fondness, but even with his face partially in shadow, I could see the warmth in his gold and brown eyes, see the stubbornness in his jaw, see the black as sin hair that he pulled back into a ponytail. Just looking at him made my body tingle and my heart thump uncomfortably.

“I’m surprised you left him,” Geoff said softly, her gaze now on me.

I made an effort to pull my mind back from the deep well of pain that surged up whenever I thought of him. “I had to. He wanted a commitment that I wasn’t ready to make. And everyone wanted me to make it, too. Well, everyone but my mother, who told me I needed to get out of the relationship because it wasn’t healthy.”