Chapter 379) Better The Devil You Know – Fallon’s P.O.V.

“Better the devil you know than the angel you don’t.”

Del Sol Valley
Barrett/Cameron Residence

It was one thing to fall in love, another to make it last … as many song lyrics go.

For me, this always held true, but only because I didn’t allow it to be any different. Why, we could discuss forever and a day, I have a million reasons, the essence of it all being that I simply didn’t believe I could find the type of relationship that would make being loyal worth my while and I was unwilling to get hurt in the process of trying to prove myself wrong.

If you can keep yourself from getting attached, it’s a pretty sweet deal, you get the butterflies of a fresh date, all the passion, the sweetness, they treat you like the queen you are … and when reality starts catching up, you move on to the next one. Totally mess-free.

Worked amazingly well for me for almost a decade of countless lovers, nameless and faceless in my memory, until I made the tactical error of actually caring. THAT’s when things got complicated. But we’ll get to that. Later.

You see, for 25 years now, well, at least ever since I was old enough to date without my parents giving me the third degree about it, so let’s say for about a decade, I have been doing it this way. Fun times without attachment. Playing the field. No strings. Don’t ask me about names. Too many to remember, nor did I ever care much. They had their fun, I had mine, we went our separate ways. I never promised anything more.

Oh yeah, I know, I know, I have heard it so many times. Oh Fallon, how could you? Such a nice and beautiful privileged girl doesn’t need to act so unladylike, blah blah blah blah.

Well, I know I am beautiful, I have eyes, I most certainly grew up privileged, never tried to be a lady and I am most definitely not nice. Nor humble, but I think you get that.

I don’t even bother pretending to be, yet people are still always confused by what some have called my ‘angelic doll face’, well, that is just about the only thing angelic about me. If you want nice, you want my twin sister Blythe. Same looks, but VERY different type of girl.
I am as naughty as they come. By choice, and I neither want nor need saving.
Plus, I really don’t care what you or anyone thinks of me. Not. One. Bit. Never have, not gonna start now. I don’t even want you to like me, but if you do, do so at your own risk.

Fast forward to recent days, knowing all this about me, and joke’s on me, for I wake up in my room – at his home. Yes, Vampires rest too, just differently than you. I am not here to teach you about my kind, if you want that, talk to my grandpa Caleb, he’ll happily lecture you on subject for several hours.
So yeah well, my official residence has been Bear’s house for about three months now, oh I fought that too, but gave into his pleading – after insisting on separate rooms. Hey, girl needs her space. Not like we can’t make it down a hallway to be with each other. We surmounted much bigger hurdles before.
He didn’t like that separate rooms thing much but let it ride anyway, and by now he has taught me all about his security business, in his strictly no-nonsense deep and serious ways, and I soaked all that knowledge up like a dry sponge.

I will admit I am pretty proud of how impressed Bear was by how fast I learned his business, how to shoot, how to make a fast escape by car, how to identify issues – honestly, a lot of that is very similar to things you learn by being a Vampire, and we already have much heightened senses and perception compared to any regular mortal. By now I was his official right hand, second in command at Barrett Security LLC.

And I will also admit am LOVING every second of it. I am so here for it. I am living and loving it! I didn’t know work could mean so much to me, be such an important part of my life, I used to think Bear’s passion for his ‘baby’ as he often refers to his business as was stupid, now I feel the same way. His ‘baby’ has become our ‘baby’, and this will be the only baby I will ever have. At least if I can help it. Trust me, I put much effort to keeping it that way.

Anyway, as Bear’s proxy I get to live the dream, go meet with wealthy celebrities and other VIPs while secretly indulging in the irony of me – a Vampire – promising I will protect their feeble little mortal lives as soon as they sign on the dotted line and fork over serious amounts of money. And as the bosslady, I get to whip a bunch of nicely build men around, Bear’s employees, each hand-selected, highly skilled, trained, dangerous and armed – and all look amazing shirtless. Dream life.

Well, until recently I would have had a field day in this setting, and most of those boys wouldn’t have been able to walk right for a week, but life’s irony is that now I don’t want any of them. I want Bear and only him. Gasp!
Disgusting, I know! Disappointed in myself, never mind that automatic smile that that appears every time I see him, my idiotic giggles sometimes and that uncontrollable urge to touch him and have him touch me.

You see normally I don’t bother screwing the help. My oldest sister Vivien is one of Bear’s clients, that’s how I first met him, and initially he only caught my attention because he was nothing like any of the other guys I had been through so far.

My – let’s call them ‘previous dates’ – all had been handsome and rich, celebrities, politicians, hedge fund boys, that kind. Bear was just a regular man, but so dangerous and dark somehow. Maybe you had to be a Vampire to understand what I mean, even though Bear was as mortal as they come he had such a dark aura, an essence of danger usually so unique to my kind, but he was warm and had a beating heart, two things very irresistible to any Vampire.

So, for the hulking mountain of a man, always so silent Bear, I made an exception, strayed from my ‘don’t boink the help’ rule – and while I admittedly enjoy it tremendously, I didn’t even notice the mess it created until it was already too late. I cared. Worse, I had fallen for him. YUCK!

Oh, he may be mortal, but his touch sure feels preternatural, just has a way to send the most intense shivers down my spine and do things to me I can’t openly talk about here, let’s just say it never takes much for him to get my juices flowing.

I even liked it when he held my hand the other day. I swear, many men have nearly lost a limb attempting such feeble rubbish with me. I am NOT – I repeat – NOT your run-of-the-mill sweet girl and I don’t do cutesy crap. I screw a person of interest until it becomes boring then I bid them farewell in very unmistakable ways and move on. Or better, I used to.
I still need smelling salts when I think about the fact that is has been nearly a year since Bear and I started doing whatever the heck this is that we have been doing. Yeah … I never had any – cough, cough – ‘relationships’ last beyond maybe a few weeks before. EVER! As in literally never. So, I don’t even know what to do with this thing, nor with myself. All I have been able to figure out so far is that walking away just doesn’t seem to be an option anymore.
Trust me, I tried to just end things with Bear, several times, and hated it each time, only to come crawling back. I was such a bitch to Bear, hoping he’d do the breaking up, but he just takes my moods in stride and eventually has this way of putting me in my place if I go too far.
And that fact right there, the balls he has shown dealing with me and my moods and even my over-protective dad trying to do a pissing competition with him – and Bear standing tall and strong through it all, even going after my dad for a rematch, that is one of the million reasons that make him stand out from all the rest to me and always will.
Everyone fears an angry Vampire. Except Bear. And I cannot even begin to describe how sexy I find that ‘devil may care’ attitude.

San Myshuno
Cameron-Camore Penthouse

Well, as my twin sister, lifelong bestie and partner in crime, Blythe put it “GURRRLLLL – doctor’s in and the diagnosis is serious: you are in LOVE!”

I told her what I thought of that, uncensored and laced with many choice words, but she just laughed. I know she is right, and that is precisely my problem. But I am not happy about it. I am pissed, at myself. I don’t do love. I make love, plenty of it and as passionately as possible, but then I walk away.

Nobody – least of all I myself – can imagine me with a boyfriend, let alone anything more. The fact that I was even thinking about what all this could mean already worried me greatly. I used to not care, and life was much easier that way.

Blythe’s husband, my glorious and extremely handsome brother-in-law Jensen, was one of the few lucky ones that got away from me, I had called dibs on him many years back, Blythe had tried to honor the twin-code and step aside, but he chose her over me anyway. They were sickeningly in love, and an era came to an end when he put a ring on her finger. This was not how Blythe and I had planned our future. It was supposed to be her and me against the rest of the world. Instead, she became Mrs. Cameron-Camore, moved to the other side of the country and chose being some hunky lawyer’s wife over being my ally through good and bad.
Oh well, water down the river, no room for hard feelings.

Here he was now, looking better than ever with his satiny milk-coffee-colored skin, courtesy of his Pacific-Islander mother, and that insane eye-shape, big eyes, dark as coals, inherited from his grandfather Kai, my dad’s late best friend, whom – just as a side-note between you and I, I have bedded more than once, completely off the record. If my dad had any idea he’d flip his shit with the velocity of an atom bomb, so … mum’s the word. Oh yeah, Kai had lost his wife to old age, mom and dad had moved him in with us, he was lonely, still handsome in his 70s and 80s, I don’t mind older men, if they make it worth my while. Kai most certainly knew how to make a woman happy, even one much younger who didn’t accept scraps in the bedroom – worked for me, and for him, as our fling ended organically when he met and married another young woman and moved away again. And then he died. At least I know better than most that man died happy. Fine by me, just the type of mess-less end I liked.
But if Jensen was anything like his grandpa between the sheets, Blythe better hope she never pisses me off enough that I wanna risk finding out for myself …. well, let’s just not go there.
I have enough problems without dipping into that pool, plus, my angelic sister would butcher me – and my always so composed mom would help her!
But if you had seen Jensen without a shirt at the Cameron Mansion pool, you’d understand me better. Blythe definitely didn’t marry bullshit either. Jensen brought a lot to the table.

Hmm-hmm! At least I could enjoy the eye-candy as I distracted myself from my own mess by eye-raping my beautiful brother-in-law.
Oblivious to the mental meat show he had just been a part of in my brain, Jensen, in his no BS attorney ways now said.
“Well, don’t knock being in love with a good man till you try, Fallon, and he sure sounds like one of the good ones. Love definitely is a gamechanger. Scary thought, you might end up liking it. Only one way to know for sure. From a man’s perspective I can say though, if he’s put up with you being you in all your Fallon-esque glory for this long and still wants you around, he is definitely serious about you. The fact you are standing here talking about it tells me, so are you.” he flashed his amazingly even white smile, even though I wanted to punch his pearly whites into the back of his head.

Yes, he was right, and yes, he has known Blythe and me since we were kids, so yes, he knows all my ugly sides. But still.

And why did nobody get falling in love wasn’t cute for me, but a serious problem!? A nuisance. A glitch.
I didn’t need – or appreciate – eye-glazed-over sappy analysis of what I already knew, I needed plausible and feasible solutions on how to FIX IT!

The glare I shot him didn’t need words, he and Blythe burst into laughter.

To add insult to injury, my sister and brother-in-law were currently expecting TWINS!

Naw, I wasn’t happy for her or for them.

All that read to me was that I lost her completely now. Marriages can fall apart, so her being married wasn’t as bad as I initially thought, and we still hung out a lot. But when she told me she was pregnant I knew it was over for good. She might just as well have told me one of us had a terminal illness, if Vampires actually got those.
Anyway, in my book, her being knocked up made her a traitor, succumbing to the status quo. What the hell? Can’t anyone stick to the script anymore? Happily grinning couples and babies everywhere.

Is there nothing else for people to strive for anymore?!

Even my damn little brother Gavin had a baby already, and a girlfriend, Bianca, whom he recently made his fiancée, at 22! And that after they were chasing each other since they were 15. If you asked me, she’s a bitch and if she had pulled even a fraction of the crap on me as she had on poor Gav, I wouldn’t even remember her name anymore by now, that’s how history she would be in my book. Yeah, I know, real love, blah blah blah. Gav gave me that spiel more than once when I told him what I really thought about her. If THAT’s what love is, I will gladly continue to pass forever! Once I figure out how to fix my current problem having gotten myself sucked into it somehow. If there was a way in, there is a way out. I just have to figure it out.

That whole ‘Gavin-luvs-Bianca -plus-baby-Jake-makes-happy-sappy-family‘ mess was the main reason I had even considered Bear’s invite to move in with him, but the final straw was when one of my parents’ former foster kids, Celeste, moved back in following her divorce. Oh yeah, right, that whole real love thing everyone is trying to sell me on – let’s ask Celeste about it, shall we? Cos she is miserable with a capital M!

With her bad karma around now as well, not even the Cameron Mansion is big enough for me to want to deal with that bullshit. So, in other words, my entire world was changing, and me along with it, without a plan, or a paddle to get myself back down this shit creek I was up.

While already in San Myshuno, I ported over to Brindleton Bay to see my brother Chase and his very yummy, but sadly also very married hunky best friend Colton, better known as the band 2Dark 2C.

- to be continued -