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I glanced at Ivy, whose brow was furrowed. Maybe after coffee and cookies…with a pint of double-chocolate monkey ice cream nearby in case of emergency.
"This is nice," Ivy said as she held up the same bit of black lace I had just put back. "Not for my costume, but I still like it."
"Try it on," I prompted, and she turned to the nearby dressing room with it. My smile faded when she disappeared behind the door, but we could still talk since her head showed. Tired, I flopped into the cushy chairs they had for bored boyfriends and stared at the ceiling. The long length of my neck pulled at the healing bites, and I shifted the complexion amulet to make sure it was in place.
Ivy silently pulled her shirt over her head and put the new one on. The music from the shop next door thumped like a heart, and I glanced around the moderately busy, trendy mall store. No one had rushed to help us after Ivy glared at the first woman who said hello, and for that I was grateful. How on earth was I going explain to Ivy that the past year had been a waste of her time and that she was never going to get her teeth in me again? Even if our auras had blended? At the very least, she'd get mad. And then leave. And then Jenks would kill me. Maybe if I ignored everything, it might go away. It sounded like a good idea—which meant it wasn't.
The dressing room door squeaked as Ivy came out. Her expression was hopeful as she posed for me, and just that faint glimmer of softer emotion in her eyes turned her beautiful.
"Damn, girl! You look great!" I said enthusiastically, thinking she would look good in anything with the faint, hesitant smile she now wore. The top hung perfectly on her, and the black lace stood out in sharp contrast to her pale skin. "You have got to get it. It was made for you." I nodded to further my approval. It was the perfect vampire tease of lace and skin. I couldn't get away with wearing it, but Ivy? Oh, yeah.
Ivy looked down at the black lace barely covering a few key places. A glimmer of silver and red showed where her belly button ring was, and her hand rose to her neck to hide the low scar Cormel had put there. I couldn't help but wonder who she was thinking of as she murmured, "It's nice."
Nice, nice, nice, everything is freaking nice. I didn't watch when she turned and went back into the dressing room. "You're not getting anything?" she asked over the door as the ripping sound of Velcro tore through the pounding music. "This is the third shop and you haven't even tried anything on."
Reclining in the soft leather, I looked at the ceiling. "Budget," I said simply.
Ivy's silence brought my gaze down, and I saw her looking at my neck, a painful self-recrimination pinching her brown eyes. "You don't trust me," she said out of the blue, and her motions, mostly hidden behind the door, stopped. "You don't trust me, and you're ashamed of me, and I don't blame you. You had to hurt me to get me to stop. I'd be ashamed of me, too."
Tension jerked through me and I sat upright. Two nearby shoppers turned toward us, and I stared blankly at Ivy. What in hell?
"I said I could do it, and I failed," Ivy said. Her shoulders were bare, and her motions were fast and jerky as she roughly put her T-shirt back on.
I stood, scrambling to figure out what was going on. I shouldn't have taken her shopping; I should have gotten her drunk. "You didn't fail. God, Ivy, sure, you lost it, but you caught it again. Don't you even remember what happened?"
Her back was to me as she returned the lacy chemise to its hanger, and I retreated when she came out. It had been…fantastic. But it isn't going to happen again.
She must have seen it in my face. Ivy stood stock-still before me with the lace top on a hanger, perfectly arranged and ready for the next person. "Then why are you ashamed of me?" she said softly, her fingers shaking.
"I'm not!"
Silent, she pushed past me to hang the shirt where she'd found it with a sharp clink and headed for the door.
"Ivy, wait." I started after her, ignoring the idiot of a clerk cheerfully telling us to come back for the big sale tomorrow. The spell checker at the entryway made a blip at my complexion charm, but no one stopped me. Ivy was already a store down. Her hair was shimmering in the sun coming through the skylights, and I jogged to catch up. Typical Ivy, ru
"Ivy, stop," I said as I caught up. "What the Turn gave you that idea? I'm not ashamed of you. God, I'm thrilled at the control you found. Did you not see how much better you did?" Not that it makes any difference in my decision.
Head down, she slowed and halted. People flowed around us, but we were alone. I waited until she looked up, and the pain in her eyes was almost scary. "You're hiding your bites," she said in a low voice. "You've never done that before. Never. It was…" She sank down on the bench beside us and looked at the floor. "Why else would you hide my mark, unless you're ashamed of me? I said I could handle it, and I couldn't. You trusted me, and I failed."
Oh, my God. Embarrassment warmed my cheeks as I realized the message I'd been sending. My hand came up, and I pulled the amulet over my head, tugging my hair as it pulled free. Why in hell didn't Cormel's book have anything useful in it? "I'm not ashamed of you," I said, throwing the charm into a nearby trash can. I lifted my chin as I felt the spell leave me and my red-rimmed bites appear. "I hid them because I'm ashamed of me. I have been living my life like a freaking kid with a video game, and it took me thinking I was bound to Kisten's killer to realize what I'm doing. That's why I was hiding them. Not because of you."
Her brown eyes were dark with tears she would never shed as she blinked up at me. "You had to slam me into a wall to get me to stop."
"I'm sorry for slamming you into a wall," I said, wanting to touch her arm so she knew how bad I felt. Instead, I sat down beside her, our knees almost touching as I faced her. "I…thought you were Kisten's killer." Her expression was pained, and I got mad. "I was having a freaking flashback, Ivy!" I exclaimed. "I'm sorry!"
Ivy's jaw clenched and relaxed. "That's what I'm saying," she said bitterly. "You thought I was Kisten's killer. How bad is that, Rachel, when I turn into something so close to Kisten's murderer that it triggers a memory of…that?"
Oh. I slumped back against the hard bench and put a hand to my head as it started to hurt. "He was playing on my scar, Ivy. So were you. My back was to the wall, and I was scared both times. That's all it was. It wasn't you, it was the vampire stuff."
She turned to me, though I was still looking down the hall. "He?" she asked.
I felt my focus blur as I thought about that, weighing what little memory I had regained against my emotions. "Yeah," I said softly. "It was a man. A man attacked me." I could almost smell him, a mix of cold and stone…. Old dust. Cold. Like cement."
Ivy wrapped her arms around herself and took a deep breath. "A man," she said, and I noticed her long fingers were clenched about her upper arms with a white-knuckle strength. "I thought it might have been me."
She stood up with her head bowed, and I followed her. Silent, we angled to a coffee cart in an unspoken agreement, and I felt for the presence of my bag. "I told you it wasn't you months ago."
Her posture was heavy with relief, and her fingers shook as she fixed two cups of coffee, handing me one after I paid the woman at the register. It was a comfortable pattern, and I took a sip as we slowly started down the busy corridor for the car. Ivy's posture had shifted, as if a huge doubt had been removed from her soul along with the amulet around my neck. I could walk away from this and leave everything as it was, but I had to tell her now. To wait would make me a coward. "Ivy?"