Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(38)

So had she, actually, and all the logical objections to why this wasn’t a good idea kind of vanished under the heat of his touch…until Claire realized he’d left her bedroom door wide-open, and someone was standing in the doorway.

“Your coffee’s getting cold,” Eve said. She was clearly on her way to the bathroom, arms full of black clothes, hair untied and in a multicolored mess around her pale face. She blew the two of them a kiss.

Claire yelped and jumped away, rebuttoning her top and retying her robe at light speed. Shane hardly seemed bothered at all, but she could feel the hot blush staining her cheeks. “Um, hi, Eve,” she said. “Sorry.”

“I’m not sorry,” Shane said, and gave Eve a mean glare. Eve gave Shane a wicked grin. “Don’t you have better things to do?”

“Than mess up your morning sexytime? Nope, never. Dibs on the shower! And you might want to remember this thing actually swings shut. Pro tip.” Eve slammed the door between them.

Shane picked up a handy book and started to throw it, but Claire grabbed it out of his hands. “Not the advanced calc book!” She searched around and found a history text instead. He shook his head sadly.

“Moment’s over,” he said, and he wasn’t just talking about the opportunity to throw something. He retrieved his coffee and sipped it, and she tried to get her racing heartbeat under control as she tasted hers. It was good and strong, and although it wasn’t as good as what might have been her morning wake-up, it wasn’t shabby. “What was Miranda in here gabbing about last night?”

“Things.” Claire shrugged. “You know. She’s lonely.”

“I know the feeling, believe me.” He gave her a puppy-dog look, and she aimed a kick in his direction, which he dodged.

“But she did say something weird.”

“Miranda? Go figure!”

“She said—” Should she even repeat this? Somehow, saying it aloud, to Shane, made it more…real. But he needed to know. “She said Michael and Eve were talking about moving.”

“Moving,” he repeated, as if he didn’t know the word. “Moving what?”

“I guess out. To another house.”

“Why would we move?”

“Not we, Shane. Them. Michael and Eve. As a couple. Moving.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he still didn’t get it, and then he did. “Oh.” He looked as if someone had shot his dog, and he sat down on the unmade bed and stared down into his coffee cup. It was one of Eve’s, black with purple bats all over it. “You mean, leave us behind.”

He’d just distilled it down to the sharp, hurting point: leave us. Because that was what it was, really: not that they needed space, but that Michael and Eve were leaving Claire and Shane behind, in their past.

“They need space, is what Miranda said. Y’know, together-type space.”

“They’re not the only ones,” Shane said. He didn’t look up. “Hell. Michael didn’t say anything.”

“Neither did Eve. So maybe it’s just, you know…”

“Talk? Maybe. But if they’re talking about it, it’s real enough to matter.” He pulled in a breath and let it out slowly. “I’ve been thinking about it myself.”

“Michael and Eve moving out?” Was she the only one who hadn’t seen this coming?

“No. Moving out myself.”

Claire couldn’t have been more stunned if he’d announced he’d decided to turn vampire. She sat down too fast and just managed not to slop coffee all over herself; even that barely registered as a blip, because her attention was suddenly and completely on her boyfriend, and there was a sick, hurting knot in her stomach. “What?”

“It’s just—” He gestured vaguely at the door. “We’re in one another’s pockets around here. Sometimes it’d be nice to just have it be…”

“You want to move out,” Claire said. “By yourself.”

“No!” Shane finally glanced up, startled. “I mean—we could…find a place—”

The moment froze, with the two of them staring at each other; this was a conversation Claire had never expected to have, and certainly not in the early morning in her pajamas with her hair in a mess. It clearly wasn’t something Shane had thought through, either. The whole thing suddenly felt raw, fragile, wrong. And she didn’t know why. It made the aching lump in her guts hurt even worse.

“Anyway,” Shane finally said, in that we’re-going-to-pretend-that-never-happened kind of tone, “it’s just that this is Michael’s house. It ought to be Michael and Eve’s, if it’s anybody’s. I could always—we could—” He couldn’t seem to get his words together, either, and she saw the same growing panic in him that she was feeling. Not ready for this, she thought. Really not ready. It reminded her of what her mother had said, so prophetically, last night on the phone. Are you sure you’re not moving too fast?

She hated it when her mom was right.

“Okay, clearly, this is crazy talk anyway,” Shane said, in a deliberately blow-off tone. “Let us never speak of it again. Wrestle you for dibs on the shower after Eve gets done with it.”

“You take it,” Claire said. Her lips felt numb. She drank coffee, but that was just to have something to do; she didn’t taste it, and her brain felt overwhelmed with all the surges of emotion. Too many things were happening too quickly, none of them in tune. “I’ll wait.”