The memory of Damon’s Don Juan maneuvers at the pensione, bringing in a new girl every night, sitting close to her on a soft, deeplyupholstered couch, and looking deeply into her eyes, while talking in a catvelvety voice about this and that, all slid right out of his mind. He was with Bonnie, little Bonnie, and he was making her comfortable before she did him the greatest favor a human could do a vampire.
Bonnie was looking up at him with eyes—while not Elena’s blueviolet—were a marvelous color all of their own. Pure, innocent eyes. She edged a little closer to him, still looking up. She seemed to find something fascinating about his face.
“Stefan?” she said softly. “While we’re—while you’re—you know—then we’ll be able to talk with our minds, won’t we?”
“We should. But I understand perfectly if you don’t want me to read your mind at all.”
“But I do—for a special reason.”
She was wearing some scent—or maybe it was just the scent of her skin. And that skin! Even more transparent than Elena’s; even less tanned. Stefan could spend all night tracing the blue, pale and darker of the veins that wandered beneath her skin. He was especially mesmerized by the veins in her throat; but he also found somehow that it struck him to the heart to see the blue lines at her temples, throbbing in rhythm with her heart. He knew he would never forget this moment, watching the utter vulnerability and utter trust he was being shown.
“Having been a telepath for—well, probably all my eighteen years,” Bonnie was saying (and chalking up another point to herself for having gotten her age in so neatly and unforgettably), “I’ve learned one or two things. And one is that I’m very good at visualizing. I was thinking that while we were joined by sharing blood, I might think of some pictures of Elena, some things we did, things that happened before you came along.” He hadn’t responded. Bonnie felt an awful plunge from her heart literally to the soles of her feet. Her pulse was suddenly hammering. What if he already had all he needed of Elena? What if old memories would only bring him pain?
But then she looked at his face. He was gazing down at her as if he were about to kneel on the ground before her. He lifted fingers to his lips, and she realized, tears rushing to her eyes, that it was to keep his upper lip from trembling.
He probably doesn’t want me to look at his face just now, Bonnie thought. She looked at her own lap instead, and at the four or five dark splotches teardrops had made on her jeans. She sniffled.
And then she felt pain, a crushing pain in each arm, as Stefan took hold of her arms.
“You’d do that for me? You’d let me read your mind—maybe even go a little deeper and watch the pictures like movies? I swear I wouldn’t be reading your mind. I’d be looking through your eyes and your ears at Elena. She’s the only thing I—” Stefan broke off and said something in Italian.
“Sorry?”
“I said . . . I was a clod. Only I can’t repeat a more exact translation. Bonnie, please tell me you know what I mean. Tell me it’s all right.”
“It’s all right—I suppose,” Bonnie said slowly.
Stefan stared at her, obviously wanting desperately to fix things, not knowing how to begin to go about it.’
“I’d like,” Bonnie said, feeding him his lines, “to think that you cared something about me. And not just as Elena’s friend, either. As Bonnie—as myself.” No one could have mistaken Stefan’s fervor. “I do, I do care about you.” His voice was muffled against the top of her head. “You are one of the few, the dearest friends that I have, and I love you.”
“Not really.”
“Yes, really.”
“You’re hurting my arms.”
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry.” She was taking a chance here: he might try to rub the pain away, or he might even have run off to find some homemade cure for aches’n’pains’n’therheumatiz. But instead he took her into his arms, exactly on cue, and Bonnie did the rest by shifting her weight so that she was sitting on his lap instead of beside him.
Stefan
What a cuddly bunny she was, this little lass that he could pick up with one hand. And how kind.
And what a witch.
He knew that Meredith could not have told Bonnie what it was he wanted. Damon couldn’t—even if Damon could somehow find out, the last thing he would want was for Stefan to get ahead of him that way, to have even more intimate memories of Elena than he did.
That left Elena, and Bonnie would have told him if it had been Elena’s idea. Scratch that, if Bonnie had known it was Elena’s idea. There was a core of bright warmth at Bonnie’s center that burned away any kind of black falsehood.
Maybe that was what kept her so warm. Here she was, dressed in less than he was, really, but radiating heat like a contented, purring cat. That last thought gave Stefan pause.
It didn’t seem right, for him to be dressed in his Tshirt while she was wearing only a camisole.
He had been startled when she’d taken off her sweater. But the next moment he had seen the gesture for what it was, a sign to convey familiarity and trust. The girls wore them all the time outside in the summer, it surely couldn’t be improper here.
He could never be sure whether his next move was the kind of noble gesture like that of the Victorian host throwing down knife and fork as a savage guest began eating with greasy fingers, or whether it was from far more human needs. He pulled back slightly and stripped off his own Tshirt.
Bonnie looked at him with wet, wondering eyes. He smiled a little and said, “It seemed I was overdressed with you just in the camiso