Crave (Harlequin Teen)

does?”
    She stood up and gave me a look of pity. “It would make things a lot easier for you two if she were just allergic to cotton ribbon.”
     
    “Emily said to tell you she fixed it,” I said later that afternoon outside Mrs. Daniels’s office as I held out the innocent-looking bracelet. “Want to try it on one more time?”
    “Um…” Savannah chewed on her lower lip. “Are you sure your sister isn’t trying to get rid of me?”
    “Yeah, I’m sure.”
    She took a deep, shaky breath. “Okay, I trust you. Go for it. But if I conk out again, can you try to catch me this time? My right arm is already bruising up from the last try.” She smiled and held out her trembling left wrist.
    Her arm was bruised? I winced.
    And yet I actually wanted her to pass out this time, messed up as that wish might be. Because if she did, then Emily and I were wrong about her being a half vampire. I would just have to be sure to catch her.
    But when I tied the bracelet around her wrist, nothing happened. The knots tightened in my stomach.
    “Whew! Okay, let’s go to practice,” she said, grinning with the relief I wished I felt as she unlocked the office closet and grabbed the equipment.
    I followed her downstairs, guilt making me want to puke. I could only hope she would understand when she learned the truth someday. And forgive me.

CHAPTER 16
    Savannah
    November and December were two of the happiest months of my life. And all because of Tristan.
    They were also the hardest, for the same reason.
    I’d thought he would grow tired of me, find someone else. Someone he could publicly date. Like Bethany Brookes, who was constantly coming over to flirt with him at every freakin’ practice. But even though he was polite, he never gave her much attention.
    Whatever his reasons for being with me, Tristan found ways to make it work for us, from secret dinners and dancing in the Charmers practice room after hours, to sweet notes left in my locker when he delivered the Charmers game-day good-luck notes. And of course we could always count on dream connecting, which we did at least twice a week.
    On every date, real and dreamed, he managed to pull me out of my shell. I’d never been much of a talker before, preferring to listen to others. But something about the way Tristan looked at me just drove me to chatter. Maybe talking was my way of fighting the urge to kiss him all the time, which tended to make him shaky on real dates and completely end our connected dreams.
    Or maybe I was just trying to forget the fact that I still hadn’t told him I might be turning into a vampire. Which was a debate-worthy topic all on its own, considering the vamp-ward bracelet he’d given me no longer affected me. So how could I really be turning into a full-fledged vampire?
    But no matter how much I loved being with Tristan, it wasn’t perfect. The council’s watchers hadn’t gotten tired of hanging around campus. They’d even started to spy on me at Charmers events. They scared me half to death outside the annual Fall Ball where, after putting up with Bethany Brookes’s totally unsubtle flirting with Tristan all night, he and I had tried to sneak outside and have just one dance together. Only to have that dance cut short when I looked up and spotted the watchers spying on us from the parking lot. The only high point of the evening had been seeing Anne get revenge on Brat Twin Vanessa by arriving on the arm of her newly dumped ex-boyfriend, Ron Abernathy. Anne and Ron had further shocked everyone by coming dressed as a football player and a cheerleader. Only for revenge would Anne stoop to wearing a fake version of the enemy’s uniform. The icing on the cake was how Anne actually looked better in the fake uniform than Vanessa did in the real version. Afterward, Ron began to sit at our lunch table every day, which made Anne smile a lot more than she ever had before.
    But even with so much happiness in the air now, I couldn’t completely forget that Tristan and I were breaking the rules every time we saw each other outside of school events. And to add to that pile of guilt, there were all the things that having to keep our relationship secret meant. Tristan couldn’t take me to the movies or out to eat, couldn’t sit with me at lunch, couldn’t explain to his friends why he wasn’t dating anyone right now. He couldn’t even dance with me inside the building at the Fall Ball, because it was too easy for everyone to figure out who