Teren shook his head and grabbed his mother's arms, cutting her off. "She doesn't know. She never found out."
Alanna raised an eyebrow at him, surprised. "You didn't tell her what you were, when she got pregnant?"
He shook his head again and anger surged through me at hearing that stupid p-word again. "I thought you wouldn't bring anyone into this unknowingly. Isn't that what you said to me?"
He cringed and stepped away from his mother to finally step up to me again. Cautiously he put his hands over my arms, sliding them all the way down to my fingers, trying to relax me. All it did though was remind me that he'd probably slid his hands down that woman's arms in this exact same way, comforting her when she realized she was with child - his child. I bristled at the contact and he sighed.
"She's why, Emma." He stepped up to me and my belly brushed his stomach. He clenched my hands as he spoke softly. "When she found out, I realized how dangerous what we'd just done really was. She was the only one that I wasn't cautious with. She was the only one that I didn't make sure one of us was protected. And I just couldn't tell her what she was really carrying. If she had given birth..." He sighed and rested his head against mine. "I was sixteen, Emma. I was stupid...please don't hate me for that."
I started shaking as I held in my conflicting emotions. Anger still boiled in me, but so did understanding and compassion. Lord knows I hadn't made the smartest choices, especially at sixteen. I'd just managed to dodge the proverbial bullet. Teren hadn't been so lucky, and it had certainly woken him up as to how hard relationships were going to be for him. Even the first few times we were together, he'd been diligent about protection. Come to think of it, he'd been diligent until the day he watched me pop a pill. Feeling the truth in the hard lesson he'd learned, I relaxed slightly in his grip, finally letting his fingers interlace mine. He sighed again and rocked his head against me as he whispered that he was sorry.
Alanna came up to him, resting a hand on his back. "You should have told us, Teren."
He looked back at her, his eyes sad. "It didn't matter. She didn't know and she lost the baby." He shrugged, looking like a sixteen year old that had just gotten caught doing something really stupid.
Alanna shook her head at him. "No, you should have told us, so you wouldn't have had to go through that alone. We can't start lying to each other, Teren. We're all we have. We need to be honest. Here, if nowhere else, we need to be honest."
He swallowed and looked down, a tear finally dropping to his cheek. "I'm sorry, Mom. I just...I wanted her left alone." He looked up at her. "It was hard, not to tell you, but I wanted her...to remember." He spoke another Russian sentence to her and Alanna sighed heavily and lowered her hand from his back.
"I have to tell Halina, Teren. I can't keep something this big from her and mother won't." Her eyes drifted upstairs to where Imogen was hiding out the sunshine in her room. I thought that if there were more curtains in the entryway, Imogen would be right down in the middle of this conversation, putting in her two cents worth. As both vampires still had their head turned to the upstairs room, I thought maybe she was anyway.
Teren started shaking his head as he looked back down at his mom. "Just give it a few days. Emma said she was only visiting, just wait until she's left town before you tell Great-Gran. Please?"
Teren's hands tightened in mine as he begged for his ex-girlfriend's memory. Thinking back to her tears in the coffee shop over their lost child, I had no idea why he wanted her to remember that tragic event. Alanna seemed equally as confused as she looked at him.
"Teren, we removed the memory of your face from every other person in that school." She blinked as she thought about that. "I don't know how Grandmother missed her, really."
Teren interjected, his face sheepish as he twisted to face his parents. "Carrie's mom removed her when she discovered what had happened. She pulled her, and took her to another school, to get her away from me. Since you weren't aware how close she and I were, I never told you that she left."
Alanna's eyes widened. "Teren, we rely on you to tell us everything, so we can get everyone. It was the only reason we let you attend a regular school in the first place. If you've held back..." I could see Alanna's eyes calculating all the people they'd have to track down. It was daunting, even to me.
His head hung down under the weight of her words. "It was just her, Mom...she was the only one." He raised his head, his pale eyes pleading. I found myself squeezing his hand in encouragement. "And her parents never met me either. It was just her, I promise."
Jack finally stepped into the conversation. "Halina went to a lot of trouble to blur you out of the students' memories, to make sure that no one specifically remembered you. That was very foolish of you, Teren."
Teren seemed to crumble at his father's words. I think they crushed him more than his mom's. I put a hand on his chest and he looked over at me, grateful for the comfort and looking like he felt he didn't deserve it. I kind of wanted his parents to ease off, my own anger gone at his clear repentance. He honestly had only made a mistake that thousands of teenagers made every year, and I suppose for all parties, this one had worked out for the best.
Alanna wasn't quite done with her reprimand though. "I will give you time, but she has to be wiped. Her especially, since you are such a strong memory." She shook her head. "She knows too much, Teren."
"She knows nothing, Mom." He tried again.
Alanna firmly shook her head, not budging on the issue of her family's isolation. "She remembers you, that is too much." She raised an eyebrow as she gazed at him sternly. "What if you run into her in sixty years, Teren? She will be old and frail, but you, you will be the same man she knew, young and strong. What then?"
He frowned. "I was a kid. I look nothing like I did then. I should be allowed to keep my childhood." He frowned and sounded a little petulant. Alanna sighed, sounding like she'd had this argument with him before. He bristled at hearing a sigh he'd probably heard before. "Besides, she'll be older; she'll assume I'm a grandson or something."
Alanna looked down and shook her head. "That would probably work for some..." she lifted her head and sadly shook it, "but you've left her with too strong a connection to you. She'll look in your eyes, and see you looking back at her, and she will have no doubt over who you really are."
He shook his head, but she cut him off when he opened his mouth to speak. "It's part of your nature, Teren. It's part of what makes you a vampire. You have a strong magnetism that humans respond to. In small doses, it's fine...but you bedded this woman, repeatedly." She raised an eyebrow. "You were each other's firsts?" Teren looked embarrassed, but nodded. Alanna nodded in response, his answer seeming to solidify her point.
Alanna glanced at her husband and then back at Teren. She gave him a look that a parent gives a teenager when they are about to speak about something that will horrifically embarrass said teenager. "Your sexuality is also part of being a vampire; it's more in your vampiric blood than your human blood. It's just a vampire's nature." Teren flicked a quick glance at me and I flushed horribly, just as embarrassed as if I was young again, and my mom was trying to explain to me where the "boy" part went. Alanna quickly continued to the finale of her point. "This human, that you've let get so close to you, will always remember you, if that is left unchecked. Even ninety and senile...she will remember you, Teren." She shrugged. "Your nature...makes you unforgettable."
She smiled softly and squeezed Jack's hand, Jack looking a little embarrassed too, but giving his son a look of fatherly support. I tried to ignore that Alanna was basically saying that sex with a vampire was so good - no one would ever forget it. I knew that that was true, but I didn't like some strange woman out there also knowing that was true.
He hung his head and then finally, nodded. She put a friendly hand on his shoulder and spoke too softly for me to hear. He nodded again and finally lifted his head to look at her. "Why don't you take your wife home, dear?" Alanna looked over to me sympathetically. "I'm sure you have a lot to discuss."
He nodded a final time and then gave her and then his father a swift hug goodbye. Then he took me back to our home and spent the rest of the evening telling me about his greatest childhood mistake. By the time he was finished with his story, my anger was sapped and I held him and consoled him, finally feeling the experience through his terrified, teenage eyes instead of my own jealous ones. Experiencing it that way, I found I could let the horrid images of them hav**g s*x go, and could feel his fear, both at the thought of being a father so young, and at having the mother possibly go into hysterics if she ever found out what he was. And she would have, once the baby was born. Now that I was beginning to understand just how rare my initial reaction was, I couldn't imagine how frightened and alone young Teren must have been.
I couldn't forgive him for not telling me (that really should have been something he mentioned while we were trying) but I could understand why he didn't like talking about it. And after we spent an entire night talking about it, I let it go. Well, I tried to anyway.
Chapter 10 Of all the Cities, in all the World...
Teren and I didn't talk much about Carrie after that and he didn't meet up with her while she was in town. I think he wanted to; sometimes when we were at home, I'd catch him staring at the door, lost in thought. I think he wanted to see her, just to make sure she was okay, that her life had turned out well. As if he were somehow responsible for every bit of sadness she may have had over the past ten years, because he'd let her remember one tragic event that had happened when they were kids. But he didn't leave my side. Maybe he felt like he'd done enough damage, and was kissing up to me by not seeking her out or maybe he was nervous that she'd notice his changes. Either way, two weeks went by, and while I wasn't sure how long she was in town for, most vacations don't last longer than that.
I relaxed tremendously after that second week passed and I didn't see her again. I know it wasn't her fault that she had a history with my man, but I didn't exactly want to sit around and compare notes with her or anything. Once she left, I surprisingly found myself grateful that I had run into her at all. Teren may have never brought up that part of his history without a little prodding. He could just be secretive like that, if he thought he was protecting someone, and he didn't want to hurt me or expose Carrie to his family.
I was getting to be a little better with the fact that he hadn't told me. I mean, we really did jump right into this relationship head first and never really sat down to discuss our pasts. And there were certainly a lot of things in my past that he didn't know. For instance, I've never told him about the guy who slipped me a roofie at a party (thank god for girlfriends and nothing happened) or the guy who had become so obsessed with me in college that I'd nearly had to get a restraining order on him to get him to back off. There were a lot of little skeletons in our closets that Teren and I had just never had the time to sit down and look at. And he repeatedly assured me that Carrie was the biggest, the one he'd been trying to hide from his family, and had inadvertently hid from me as well.