The Bourbon Diaries ✢ The Vampire Diaries FanFiction ✢ TVD FanFic ✢ TVDU FanFic

Chapter Forty-Four - Stefanie Salvatore

Present day

Outskirts of Albemarle, NC

Oh, dear god, this man was going to kill her.

Stef crossed her arms over the back of the chaise lounge in the library, her breath halting, her heart hammering, her mind turning into primal mush. Why did she have to find Raid like this? From the sweatpants, the muscular bare chest, the ruffled hair, and the pouted lips, she couldn't tear her eyes away from him while he slept.

She wasn't prepared for this. She expected Raid to be awake. After coming downstairs mid-morning, she'd noticed a small pile of dry, folded laundry on the dining table and a warm, sweet smell coming from the kitchen. She'd picked up the t-shirt at the top of the pile, recognizing it as the one Raid wore when he first came to the house and, for a reason she didn't understand, still clung onto it, smiling fondly to herself as she'd strolled around the house to find him.

The rest of the house was empty. A message received from Zara informed her that she and Adam had gone to gather blood bags at Gabe's request. Meanwhile, Phoenix had joined Gabe in a college excursion with Flick. On the car ride back from the Halfway House last night, Flick revealed to Phoenix that she was going to turn eighteen at the end of the month. Stef didn't dare ask why he was enquiring about that, but given how quickly he became infatuated with someone, she considered checking the dumbass hadn't already bought a ring. Thankfully, Gabe opened up an alternative path by offering to help fund her dream of going to Virginia Tech to study fashion design. Had she been accepted into Virginia Tech? No. But it was nothing a little compulsion couldn't rectify.

She wondered how long Raid had been awake before he fell asleep in the library. If Adam had really woken him up for Fajr Salah like he intended, he couldn't have had more than two hours of sleep. She was about to break a promise she'd made to wake Raid up when---and if---she discovered her vampire powers had returned. She felt a little bad about that, since he'd kept his promise of not telling the others she'd lost them, even during their persistent questioning.

Truth be told, she'd first noticed her heightened senses returning the moment she'd collapsed into bed last night, her eyes tearing up in an emotional overload, her hearing capturing the sound of Raid heading downstairs, brushing Gabe off with the excuse that Cristian had upset her. It wasn't untrue. There had been a spark in Cristian's eyes when he discovered she no longer had a physical advantage over him... and she hated how vulnerable that had made her feel. He had reminded her how it felt to be human in the worst way, making her question how she could want something so much that made her feel so helpless. But then Raid had stepped in... and that feeling of helplessness went away... for a while. It might have remained had he stayed with her and held her throughout the night until morning. But she never invited him to stay---choosing instead to fight back her tears alone---and he respected her privacy like the gentleman he didn't believe he was, and she sometimes wished he wasn't. So she'd battled through the recovery of a heightened whirlpool of sadness and fear alone until she'd fallen asleep, realizing that Cristian wasn't the only one she was scared of being vulnerable around.

However, this morning was completely different. Her vampire powers had returned along with a much more confident set of heightened emotions. She was focused, she was active, she was happy, she was hungry, she was... horny.

The latter wasn't as convenient, so the sight of Raid looking tasty enough to bite her teeth into---both literally and figuratively---was making her more than a little frustrated.

Stef didn't know how she managed to peel her eyes away from Raid's torso long enough to notice it, but there was a paperback book wedged between him and the back of the couch, pages facing upwards, his hand resting over it, looking suspiciously like the one she had recently been reading. So, very carefully, she slid her fingers over the cover of the book, trying to gently angle it to see the title.