Eternal [HS]

Chapter Twenty-Four

THE NEXT MORNING GREETS HER WITH a pounding headache. It could come from dehydration, crying, hunger, PMS, or the additional blood he took from her yesterday, but it's the first thing she notices when she blinks her eyes open to an unfamiliar room.

Having expected to wake up in bed beside Harry, Jo jolts up from her cocoon of blankets to survey the room for danger or death of any sort. However, what she finds is far more interesting than any threat of violence or certain death. What she finds as she surveys the open space around her is Harry, and he's sitting before an easel in the center of the room with a paintbrush in his hand.

It almost doesn't feel real, it still feels as though she's trapped in the place she ventured when he bit her last night, but a pinch to her wrist proves it is.

Last night went differently than she expected it to.

The violence of it isn't what surprised her since they all knew what she was signing up to see by staying in the room with them, what surprised her was her willingness to participate in it. At the moment that Harry was about to strike a killing blow into Devin's heart, she wasn't thinking about anything except the woman they found in the woods. All she could see when she closed her eyes to blink was the horrific sight of her lying there, and, before she knew it, she was taking the knife from his hands.

The rest was a sequence of events that went off as a chain reaction, building up until it all accumulated into an explosion of stress and fear that she couldn't cope with on her own. It felt inescapable, like she was being buried alive in her own racing thoughts, and she was starting to get caught up in it when he reached through to pull her out. A light through the darkness, he thought quickly enough to bite her and set into motion that calming effect that is unlike anything else she has felt.

It felt much like she does now: warm, safe, and sitting comfortably in a bed of blankets. The bed she's now sitting up on isn't much of a bed as it is a futon unfolded with plenty of sheets and pillows from his bed to make it cozy for her, but it's just as comfortable. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the somewhat bright light in the room, though it isn't as bright as the garage had been.

The faint sound of music floating through the air greets her as she stumbles out of bed and into the direction of where he sits in a trance before the artwork he crafts. He knows she's awake, she knows that from how many times he has detected her presence without her doing so much as breathe, but he doesn't stand or say hello. All he does is sit on the stool and continue to make detailed brushstrokes onto the canvas.

It's still a work in progress, that much she can tell, yet there's enough groundwork laid out for her to see what it is and the sight of it grips her heart.

"You like to paint," she says as a means of greeting.

The underpainting provides a picture of two figures clinging to each other in the midst of what looks like a storm raining hell down on them. One figure clings to the other from behind for dear life with their face buried in their neck, and it dawns on her what, or who, it's meant to represent. It calls into her memory what happened last night in the garage—the sound of a blade slicing into skin, rapid breaths that would never be enough, and fangs sinking into the soft flesh of her neck.

He's a neat artist, so there are only a few splotches of paint on his clothes or hands here or there, not the untamable mess it always is when she dabbles in art, and towels are laid out around his diligently kept workspace just in case. She's careful not to slip on one of them when she approaches him from behind.

Her hands slide down over his bare shoulders, moving down his chest and feeling the effect of her touch relaxing his tense muscles.

It's mesmerizing to see that she has a similar effect on him to the one he has on her. She never thought that he'd return what was at first a silly little crush she developed in quiet moments where they'd bicker back and forth at one another in the earlier days of knowing one another, and now they're together. Well...she hopes they're together. They have yet to have a conversation about it.