The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (16 page)

“Yours,” I say immediately, and she looks thoughtful.

“What chords do you know?”

I tell her, trying not to be embarrassed at how short the list is.

“Okay, the transitions in mine aren’t the easiest, but I bet it won’t take you too long to pick them up. You ready?”

I nod, and she leans over my shoulder, her cheek brushing my ear as her fingers shape mine, showing me where to place them and how to move smoothly in between. My fingertips are nearly twice as wide as hers, and my hands feel clumsy at first, but everywhere our skin touches, it is perfect and the moment feels breathless, like an inhale before the first verse.

I haven’t strummed a single note, and already there’s never been a song I wanted to play more.

STEFAN

The warm scent of fabric softener and the soft thump of dryers are almost comforting, though I normally hate doing laundry. After so many nights in the stuffy air of Matt’s truck, anything different is good, even if I have to give up a few hours of sleep to do it.

“So what do you think?” Caroline says, peeking up through her eyelashes at me from across the folding table. “Are we going to have to get Matt sexual assault counseling when we get back?”

“The humans need sleep more than we do,” I protest. “It made sense for them to room together today so that we don’t have to wake them up when we get back. And it’s safer to do laundry during the day when the Augustine vampires can’t be out.”

Caroline raises a silent eyebrow at me.

“Okay,” I relent, keeping my eyes innocently on Ric’s plaid shirt as I fold the sleeves in. “And maybe I would have volunteered to do laundry for the entire state of Maryland if it got me away from Katherine for a few hours.”

“Hey, I’m not judging!” Caroline says, raising her hands. “If I was stuck rooming with Katherine I might have been desperate enough to volunteer to help
Damon
if it got me away for the day. Though come to think of it, I don’t even want to know where he and Ric went to get enough privacy to touch up the concrete job on Silas’s coffin. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for a garage, you know?”

“I’m sure it won’t slow Damon down any,” I say, frowning at a giant pile of mismatched socks in nine different sizes. “He’ll probably just compel a whole Home Depot and do it right in the middle of the concrete aisle.”

Caroline goes over to the dryer and hauls out another armload of clothes. “Once we fold this load, we’ll be good to head back.” She grins at me and bats her eyelashes. “What are we going to do for our little slumber party night? Stay up late and gossip about our crushes?”

“Well, we’ll get plenty of sleep that way.”

Caroline sighs. “For real. Our love lives are pitiful.”

“Barren,” I deadpan.

Caroline scoffs. “Save it for someone who might actually feel sorry for you, Salvatore. You’re going to be single for about another four minutes until some new googly-eyed girl comes and snatches you up.”

She smiles, though it looks a little forced. Her eyes stray to my lips, and I blink, not sure if I just misread that, but when I look back at her, she’s busily folding jeans.

“I could say the same to you,” I say, trying to make her feel better, but also mostly serious. Since I’ve known her, the amount of time Caroline’s relationship status has been set to “single” could be measured in weeks. Barely.

Caroline bumps me out of the way with her hip and starts matching up socks at about four times the speed I was doing it. I take over the warm pile of clothes she just retrieved from the dryer and she shoots me a look.

“Wanna hear something ironic?” she asks, her tone a little more subdued than usual.

“More ironic than me folding my ex-girlfriend’s underwear?” I ask with a grimace, setting aside a pair of the lacy boyshorts Elena has always favored.

“That’s not ironic so much as it is cruel,” Caroline declares, and takes me by the hips, swinging us around to swap places again. “Here, socks are safer. No, my irony is now that
I’m
the one on the run for my life, Tyler finally called me back.”

“What? How? I thought you ditched your phone when you left Whitmore?”

“I might have left him a voicemail with my new number.” Caroline shoots me a darting, sidelong look. “Or maybe two. Because I obviously have no sense of self-preservation.”

“Hmm,” I murmur noncommittally. She’s expecting me to yell at her, but she should know better by now. She’s always harder on herself than anybody else would be anyway.

“I know, I
know
,” she groans. “And it was the day after I gave you that whole speech about how it had been over between us for a long time and I just needed to accept it and everything. And then he calls just like, ‘Hey Caroline, how have you been?’” She shakes her head so hard that her hair swirls out and brushes past my shoulder. “Check your crammed voicemail box and you’d know exactly how I’ve been, jerk.”

“So maybe your love life isn’t so barren after all?” I ask, trying to sound neutral.

I’m trying to be a good friend and listen when she wants to talk, like she does for me, but honestly I’m bored as hell of hearing about Tyler. He was never good enough for her, not even during the scant few weeks where he finally stopped acting like an asshole to everyone. It’s terrible what happened to his mom and that he’s stuck being on the run from Klaus, but just because I feel sorry for him doesn’t mean he deserves a girl like Caroline.

“Oh, it’s barren alright. I told him I’m done.”

In my peripheral vision, I can see her peeking over at me, but I try to keep my face smooth, not sure what reaction she’s hoping to see from me.

“Apparently he’s been dodging my calls all this time because he’s on some suicide mission to kill Klaus.” She shakes her head again. “Even if we still had anything like a relationship left, I’m not going to be with someone who lives in the past.”

I give up on the socks for the moment and give her a level look. “You know, even if you don’t carry it around like a hopeless revenge plot, or a whole room full of mementos, everything you are in the present is because of the past, Caroline.”

“I guess…” she says, wrinkling her nose. “But I chose to let some parts go, and I’m a lot happier now. I don’t know why he can’t do the same.”

I look down at the table. “Maybe you’re just better at it than people like me and Tyler. I’ve been trying to do that since I got out of the safe Silas stuck me in, and it’s not working out so great.”

“You said you’re handling human blood better,” Caroline points out, always the positive thinker. “And you can live feed now without us having to stop you, which is way better than you’ve ever done before.”

“Yes, but the regret…” I release a soft, self-deprecating chuckle. “That one’s a little stickier to get rid of.”

“You keep saying that, but you’re doing better than you think,” she says, pushing aside a pile of shirts and starting to organize the rest of the clothes. “Is this Jeremy or Matt?” she asks, pointing to a tee shirt.

I shrug. “No idea. And how exactly am I doing better? I still feel terrible every time I have to compel someone to forget I fed from them.”

She puts the tee shirt aside and frowns at a black camisole. “Yeah, but you haven’t even bought a new journal yet, and I haven’t caught you staring at Cali with the mopey eyes all week.” She pins me with a sidelong look that makes me want to squirm. “Give yourself some credit, Stefan. That’s what this is all about anyway, right? Allowing yourself to enjoy your life and go after what you want. I think you’ve been trying so hard that you haven’t even noticed that you’re already most of the way there.”

I pause, the laundromat somehow seeming quieter, smaller. I give Caroline a faint smile, my eyes searching the familiar, delicate lines of her face. “How did you get to know me so well?”

She turns her head, the soft waves of her hair brushing her cheek as she smiles at me. “I don’t know, maybe because I actually listen when you talk.”

I want to hug her, but as her eyes linger on mine, there’s a strange tension between us and I feel like if I reach for her, I might be stepping over a line I can’t uncross. Then she glances down with an odd little twist to her mouth and the moment is gone.

She sorts the clean clothes, layering a man’s dark jeans together with a new stack of slender, plum-colored Henleys, dropping the lacy boyshorts on top. My eyes drift away before I have to see her collect my lonely pile of pants and boring shirts.

“So how am I doing on the going after what I want part?” I ask her, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

“I think you’ll do fine as soon as you figure out what that is,” Caroline says, stacking clothes a little too quickly. “Maybe you’re just waiting for the next girl with googly eyes to be the right one.” She clears her throat and lifts her chin firmly. “But you’re doing the right thing in letting the past go. Because when she gets here, you want to be free to be with her, not still stuck in the cycle of who you’ve been.”

A slight smile touches my lips. “So I should learn from Tyler’s mistakes?”

I watch her move, the way she somehow manages to be efficient and yet feminine in even the smallest movement of her hands. She absolutely deserves someone who is free to appreciate her, to build a future with her.

She scoffs, blushing a little though I’m not sure why. “Yeah, well it doesn’t hurt to answer a girl’s calls, too.”

As if in demonstration, my phone vibrates in my pocket and I pull it out, waggling it playfully at Caroline to try and combat the wisp of inexplicable sadness that has crept into her eyes.

“Here, I’ll practice,” I tease her, and try not to let my smile falter when I see that it’s Elena. Talk about irony. “Hi,” I answer, pinching the phone against my shoulder so I can go back to the pile of socks, which doesn’t seem to be shrinking at all. Why can’t everyone just wear the same damn kind? It’s not like there’s that much variety in feet. “What’s up?”

“We’ve got a problem,” Elena says flatly.

Caroline glances at me and starts hurriedly pulling piles of clothes together, dumping the rest of the socks into a bag to take back to the hotel.

I frown and move quickly around the row of washers, scanning the street outside the front window of the laundromat for anything out of the ordinary.

“What kind of problem?”

“Katherine’s gone; Matt said she made another pass at him. He turned her down, of course, and he left for a few minutes to kind of give her some privacy to shower and get ready for bed. When he came back all her stuff was missing and so was she. She took her phone, but she’s not answering it.”

Cars are passing on the street outside, but no one is paying any attention to us. I rub my eyes, sighing.

“I should have seen this coming. If there’s one thing Katherine hates, it’s being rejected and no one wanted to share a room with her, and Matt blowing her off and I…” I trail off, wishing I would have left that part out.

“Wait, she was hitting on you, too?” Elena says, sounding more angry than she has a right to be.

And even though I can’t stand Katherine, irritation pings through me at Elena’s reaction. “She’s all alone, Elena. She’s human now and she’s looking at a really short life to live and how so far, she’s spending it all by herself. No wonder she’s freaking out. But she’s Katherine, so she’s coping the only way she knows how: by seducing people.”

“Yeah, well, she’s hanging out with the wrong crowd if she’s looking for a lover,” Elena says. “She’s screwed all of us over too many times. I should have known that just because she helped us once that didn’t mean anything would change. But I just don’t understand why she would take off now, when we’re just trying to protect her from the Augustines?”