Not If You Were the Last Vampire on Earth by Cara Coe Read Free Book Online Page B

effect. It had an intentional bed-head feel to it and gave me an edgier look.  I put the scissors down before I could second guess my final product and bald myself trying to make it perfect.
    I glanced at the clock. Eleven thirty-six. I still hadn’t called him.
    I pulled my boots on and slipped out of the cottage past my sleeping dogs. I didn’t want their company for this walk.
    I didn’t go out after dark very often. Not since the wolf attack. With humans gone, night time creatures encroached further into the city, claiming the concrete and bricks for their own. I carried a flashlight in my hand and a gun tucked into my back waistband.
    Every day I looked forward to picking a spot in the early afternoon in which to get comfortable and make my call. The surroundings where I settled starting picking up grains of him. What I was looking at when he shared a story or what was in my view that inspired a conversation soon etched a memory of him in that object or that space and I enjoyed passing it some time later and remembering.
    If we were going to include night conversations, it was time to snatch one of these phones and put it in my cottage. I headed for the house on Windsong Road. The woman that had lived there had a few phones like the ones I needed in several rooms. I’d take one of those back with me.
    I stood in the entrance way and contemplated which room I would call him from. The study would be the most innocent choice. It was hunkered down with heavy oak: sturdy oak desk, tall oak cabinet, rigid oak chair. All that oak made you sit up straight and keep your logic close. No room for funny business or weird feelings.
    The upstairs bedroom had a corded phone on the nightstand. I blushed just picturing me laying on the bed, his voice pressed to my ear in the middle of the night.
    Nope. Not happening.
    I chose the living room sofa. I stowed my gun and flashlight on the coffee table and kicked my boots off to the side. I pressed in the numbers on the phone slowly. It was almost midnight at this point. He probably wouldn’t even answer. Surely, he didn’t mean call him in the dead of night when he mentioned-
    “Hello?”
    Oh, crap. He answered on the first ring. I coughed.
    “Uh, hey. It’s me.”
    My insides were tumbling. That must be why I was mumbling stupid sentences like, “Hey, it’s me.” Like he needs differentiating between me and the zero other girls in existence that call him.
    “Hi, you.” His voice was soft. This must be a new nighttime soft.
    I let out a nervous breath before speaking. “So…do we pick new names for this call or go with the ones we had earlier? I don’t know the protocol. We’ve never done two calls in one day.”
    “Why don’t we skip the aliases for this call? It’ll just be you and me. I am absolutely ecstatic to hear from you tonight, by the way.”
    “You are?”
    “I am.”
    “Oh.”
    Quiet hung between us. Where my quiet was a nervous ball of twine, I could sense his was an easy one. I could almost see him stretched out languidly, smiling, enjoying the charged silence between us on the phone.
    “I changed my hair,” I blurted out. “I cut it off and dyed chunks of it red.”
    “Why did you change your hair?”
    “Because I was embarrassed when I described it to you. All tangled and crazy. I had to fix it.”
    “I loved what you described to me, even the tangled and crazy parts. Never be embarrassed about your tangled or crazy parts. Any of them.”
    This wasn’t working. Everything he said kept having an effect on my body. I squeezed my legs together. “I thought about you earlier today.” I hadn’t meant to say that, but it seemed that it was a running theme today, this unbridled honesty.
    “After we talked?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Well, I think about you all the time on or off the phone so I can relate.”
    “I thought about you like…that.”
    His breath grew uneven. “Like what?”
    “Like…like…” I blew out a sigh. I couldn’t say