The Vampire's Release, A Paranormal Romance (Undead in Brown County #4) by S.J. Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

sense of loss as I looked at the woman I loved.   She looked at the broken neck of the green bottle in her shaking hand and then down at the mess she’d made on the pine floor.  The red wine had splashed against her jeans and pale yellow sweater.
    “This won’t come out,” she murmured helplessly.  “ This looks like blood.  Michael, it looks like blood.”   She reminded me of a trapped bird, desperately trying to flee from confinement.  Her face was elegant in its sadness.  But her eyes gave away everything.
    “Let it go,” I said harshly.
    When she didn’t respond, I rushed at her and pulled the dangerously serrated bottle neck from her hand.  I held it up in front of her face.
    “Do you see this?  Do you know that this piece of glass represents the way you have tried to push people away from you?  You were vulnerable for about ten seconds, Sarah.  Ten seconds .  And then you let your bitter side out.  Is that all it takes?”  I was shouting at her by then.   “If you are ever going to be happy, you have to stop this.  There’s more to life than you could possibly imagine.  If you don’t open yourself up and let people in without chasing them away, you will be miserable for the rest of your life.  Do you understand this?”
    “No.  You don’t get it…”
    “Shut up!”   I hurled the rest of the bottle against the wooden door and a resounding crack and shatter spread around us.  I turned away from her.  The urge to strike her was strong, splitting me apart inside.  I wanted to get away, but I knew it would make the situation worse.
    “Your mother left you.  Trevor used you and gave you up.  Your father is dead.  None of it was your fault, yet you constantly want to saddle yourself with this ridiculous notion of being unworthy.  It’s fucking destroying you.  Not just you.  Everyone who cares about you.  So just shut up.  I may not know the depth of your pain.  I may not have been with you through every single dramatic incident that has happened to you in your life, but I love you .  And I want you to be happy.”
    “It’s not that easy.”
    “It’s not supposed to be.”
    What followed was a long silence during which Sarah gazed alternately between the fire, the spilled wine, the broken bottle and me.  I saw the connection she was making internally.  I felt the energy in the room shift from something dark and threatening to something gray and mournful.  It was a slow drain coming from her.  The hate was shifting into something else .  Slowly and painfully.
    She began to cry in total silence.  No sobs, no sniffling. 
    Reluctantly, I left her to retrieve a broom and dustpan from the pantry.  When I came back and handed it to her, she looked at me with tired eyes still full of tears.
    “You can clean this up.  The whole thing.  When you’re ready, come upstairs.”
    “You’re not going to help?”
    “No.  This is your mess.  And when you finish and you throw away all those broken pieces, I want you to think very hard about the brittle pieces of yourself that you need to toss out.   When you clean this up, you come back to me as a whole person.  I don’t want a shadow of what you could be.”   I lifted her wet chin, still salty with tears and kissed her mouth very gently.  “If you can do that, I will do whatever I can to keep us together.  I want nothing more.”
    Then I turned and went up the stairs.

 
    CHAPTER 9 – Sarah
     
    I stood there for a very long time with the broom in my hand.  The fire crackled pleasingly in the background.  But I was rather lost.  Whatever I had been expecting from my reunion with Michael, it was a far cry from what had actually happened.
    When had things started to go wrong?   Probably the realization that no matter how happy I might be to see him again, we had no future together.  It made the crackling fire seem menacing.  It turned the chilled wine into a bitter truth serum that stole all the magic from