Blood Orange Soda: Paranormal Romance by James Michael Larranaga Page B

soon as you two were married? Then Kira and I would’ve been born pure Vampires.”
    “Biting a Normal and asking him or her to become a Vampire is a big step,” she says. “I learned the hard way to not pressure somebody into a biting.”
    “You’ve bitten others?” I ask.
    “For feedings, yes,” she says.
    “What about biting for love?” I ask.
    “Only one other,” Mom confesses, as her eyes stare off into the distance while she drives. “I was in love with a man named Jonathan before I met your father. I was a freshman at the university and he was a sophomore, and we hit it off as soon as I arrived on campus that fall. By the second semester I was madly in love with him. He was funny and smart and he was a writer. He’d sometimes leave me poems and love letters under my dorm room door. By summer, I was sure he was the one, and one night and I asked him if I could bite him.”
    She pauses for a long moment. I hate to pull her away from what seems to be such a happy memory, but I’m dying to know what happened.
    “And he said yes?” I ask.
    She blushes. “In the heat of passion, it’s hard to say no. He agreed, and turned his neck for me to bite. For a man to submit to a woman like that, it’s a big step in their relationship. A male Vampire biting a female Normal is more common—but a female Vampire biting a male Normal is so rare.”
    “He didn’t become a Vampire from that bite?”
    “No…” she says, with disappointment that hangs in the air.
    “You bit him, but he wasn’t in love with you,” I say, thinking back on what Jack told me earlier, that a Bitten must love the Vampire who does the biting.
    “That’s what I thought at first. For the next several weeks I expected our love to grow deeper, and for Jonathan to begin transforming. He didn’t. I asked if he loved me and he assured me he was in love. He said he wasn’t ready to transform into a Vampire, so he’d had his doctor write him a prescription for Reds.”
    “He prevented the transformation?”
    “Yes, and I was angry, foolishly so. I wanted him to be a Vampire like me. I was too young to see his side of it. He needed time to explain it to his parents and friends. The rest of the summer was hard for us,” my mom says.
    “He broke up with you?” I ask.
    “No, I broke up with him. As much as I loved him, I had to set him free. I thought we should both date other people before we chose marriage or before he transformed, if he were going to transform at all. I felt so terrible about it.”
    “How did you break up with him?”
    “I wrote him a note.”
    “You sent him a break-up letter?” I ask in surprise.
    “I didn’t mail it. I handed it to him on our last date. I sat with him while he read my written words. It was ironic that I gave a writer a goodbye letter. It was really a love letter. I wanted to remain friends, and I thought maybe down the road, after we both dated others, if we still felt passion for each other...” Her voice tapers off into a waning breath.
    “How did he take it?” I can only imagine the guy was pissed off.
    “He was hurt, but he took it much better than I had expected. My friends had prepared me for this, and cautioned me that some men don’t take break-ups well. Jonathan was unique. He understood it, but he said he couldn’t be my friend. He said he still loved me, and that it would be too hard to talk on the phone or hang out only as friends.”
    “He let you go, which is what you wanted, right?”
    “Yes and no. I needed time to meet new people. He needed to decide if he was ready to transform into a Vampire. The next year on campus was hard for us. We dated others, and it was always heartbreaking to see him with another woman. And I never expected that my First Bitten would vanish from my life.”
    “When did Dad come into the picture?”
    “You’ll recall your dad was a student teacher at the university? Well, he arrived on campus when I was a junior. We met in the cafeteria,