The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

American Pie

I WAITED IN MY ROOM FOR SADIE TO COME BACK. I PUT ON OLD VINYL albums and looked through Madeline and Patrick's wedding album. Madeline stashed it in here years ago, unable to look at it without crying, which she hated to do in front of Patrick. He was right.

I thought about what Patrick said. That he would have let Mark have her. That it was going to happen no matter what. That I should just do it and get it over with.

Whichever it that was, apparently.

It had been months since I let myself remember how thin the line was that I walked with Sadie. I hadn't gone near her in the winter, even leaving her bed at night to keep from losing my mind. But now in the summer, I felt like I could keep one lust-driven half of myself controlled while I explored the other. It's a funny thing being someone so chaste, as it were, whose life is so controlled by lust: the regular kind, the blood kind.

I changed Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for the Bon Iver album Ginny had left on my coffee table. My mind started to ask questions about whether the mistakes I'd made with Sadie were irrevocable errors, whether she would ever trust me and I, her. Whether we were actually destined to be together. If being together would make her happy.

But I worried more that we wouldn't end up together than I worried how she'd feel about it. So did that make me selfish? Or did I just love her?

Sadie told me once, the night I'd held her body against mine in Selcuk, that she thought immorality just gave us more opportunities for heartbreak. As adamant as I'd been about the benefits of immortality, I couldn't deny what I knew: I didn't know a single immortal whose heart was intact, whose soul wasn't in fragments. Patrick. Ginny. Mark. Madeline. Sadie. Kutoyis. My mother. My father. Who among them was not as broken as I? Which of them didn't wish for it to be different? To silently wish they'd lived just one lifetime, and, as Sadie argued, that would have been enough?

I heard her come in the house alone. I supposed Kutoyis had finally gone home after their day and a half of nonstop togetherness. Our house, however, was still empty. Mark and Ginny were still out feeding, and Patrick had left. Madeline had never come home, and if I had to guess, I'd bet my parents were likely pretending they were teenagers in the back of a car somewhere on the Reserve. Because they could.

So it was just me, the Bon Iver album, and Sadie. She called my name and came into my room, which was a good sign. When she was mad at me, she'd enter and leave rooms in silence, if even we talked in between.

"Over here," I called, listening to the sound of her bare feet against the wood floors as she approached me. She still wore the same dress she'd worn yesterday when this all began. She took off her jacket before she sat down.

I wondered if she knew how much it meant to me that she would leave her scarred parts exposed when we were alone. It was one of the softest, most intimate things she did with me.

"What are you doing?" she asked lightly.

"Just listening to music," I said.

"I always like music," she said. She sat next to me and rested her head on my shoulder. She picked up the album cover and flipped it over to read the back. We stayed like this for a while as one song on the album faded seamlessly into another. "Hey, you never played me "American Pie.' You promised you would."