The Dangers of Dating a Rebound Vampire by Molly Harper Page B

fracking frack?
    I turned toward the source of the noise and saw Nik, with his knees propped up on the planter box outside my window, tapping his fingernails lightly against the glass.
    â€œNi— Wha!” I hissed, clapping my hand over my mouth so my shouts wouldn’t draw attention from Cal and Iris.
    Now that he had my attention, Nik waved casually, as if it was totally normal to be balancing on a planter outside a girl’s bedroom window. Using every trick Cal had taught me, I crept noiselessly over to the window. My room was the only one in the house without sunproof shades, but it also required its own keypad and a thumbprint scanner to open from the inside . So Nik had to wait a while for me to negotiate with my brother-in-law’s insane security system.
    â€œGood evening, sladkaya .” He smiled as I opened the window, as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. His soft, sensual, filthy mouth.
    â€œAre you nuts?” I hissed. “My surrogate parents have superpowers!”
    He hopped gracefully through the open window, landing catlike on silent feet. “I only wanted to see if you were sleeping well after the stressful events of this evening.”
    â€œShh!” I hissed, pressing my fingers against his lips. He parted them ever so slightly and gently bit down on my fingertip. I used my free hand to tweak his nose, making him shake his head.
    â€œDo not worry about being overheard. Cal is currently distracting your sister with a very thorough massage.”
    I recoiled as if I’d been slapped in the face with a salmon. “Gross. And it should have been clear to you the minute you looked through my window that I was sleeping just fine,” I told him. “And if you think you are going to sneak into my room to watch me sleep, I am not above stabbing you again.”
    â€œIt did not look as though you were sleeping just fine at all,” he told me, with an innocent expression far too practiced to be natural. “You were tossing back and forth and muttering to yourself. What were you saying?”
    â€œI don’t know, I was asleep,” I murmured. “Now, get away from my window before we get into trouble.”
    â€œYou are not what you would call a ‘morning person,’ are you, my Gigi? How long would I have to wait after you wake to have a civilized conversation with you?”
    â€œWell, if you keep up that condescending tone, it could be a while,” I told him. “And if you make enough noise to draw Cal or Iris up here, a lot longer.”
    I was suddenly very self-conscious of my room, which had not changed since my senior year of high school. It was the one area of the house left untouched during Cal and Iris’s remodeling rampage, because Iris knew I needed to come back to a space that was familiar. While I loved that she knew me so well, for the first time, I wished that she’d updated the denim-blue walls, the quilted blue-and-white bedspread, the beaten-up bookshelves containing my old beaten-up paperbacks. And then there was my pinboard, which also hadn’t changed since high school, with the same pictures of me with my friends at volleyball games, parties, and dances. And pictures of Ben. What felt like an inordinate number of pictures of me with Ben.
    Aw, hell.
    Why hadn’t I pulled those down? Stupid ex-
boyfriend clutter blindness. I thought I’d gotten rid of all of those.
    â€œI pictured something a little more genie-in-a-bottle, big, round bed covered in pillows and scarves.” He scanned my pink checked pajama pants and tank top. “And I pictured you wearing less.”
    I grinned. “Oh, you did?”
    â€œA lot less,” he said. “And I have imagined it frequently over the past few days, fantasized about it shamelessly.”
    I ran the tip of my tongue along the blunt edges of my canine teeth. They weren’t as brilliantly white or razor-sharp as his, but the action