"I hate you," she said with resigned disgust.

He was crouched down beside her bed, sorting through the mess of panties, cigarette clamped between his lips. Dazed by wine and impending blood loss, Bonnie fingered the long elegant cigarettes from butt to end, yellow, rose, mint, lavender, and cornflower blue. They were nice. And she had asked for them, hadn't she? She ran the pad of her fingertips across the gold lettering on the box.

Instead of a witty retort, he tossed the strappy piece of lingerie he'd been admiring back into the pile and stood up. Pinching the cigarette between two fingers, he removed it from his mouth in a small cloud of smoke.

"Surely you don't mean that," he grinned. "Not after all we've been through."

"I mean it. Especially after all we've been through."

He sighed, never loosening his smile. "Well, haters gonna hate. That's what the hated say now, isn't it?"

Bonnie cocked her head, "You think just because you honor an offhand joke I made you get to do that thing?"

"You did say."

"No, what I said was get me French cigarettes, and I'll think about it."

"Okaaay. So start thinking."

She dared to glance into his eyes. They were wide and dark, but under relative control. His calm posture further confirmed the confidence with which he expected her to serve him. By accident, she allowed his eyes to suck her up and it occurred to her that he was right. To Hell with plans and defenses. He could turn around to leave that instant and she wouldn't let him. Her own hunger required satiation.

He took another step toward her where she sat in all her tension and tragedy on the bed.

"Well?" he prodded.

What was he doing to her? Her vertebrae seemed to separate as if her body was falling, or standing in an elevator at fast descent. She couldn't unstick her eyes from his and she noticed his beginning to darken the deeper they stared. Weren't witches supposed to be immune to those vampire tactics? Yet she felt lured. She began to shake. In need of breath, her mouth fell open just slightly and, caught briefly on the corner of vertigo, her head shifted backward. Maybe it was her blood fleeing downward, vacating the height of her head to leave it hollow and light, lolling on its hinges to her stretching neck. Without her mind's permission, she was exposing for him the thrumming landscape of skin that protected the spring of her life force. Even though she knew it wasn't exactly what he wanted. It was something awful in her, an anti-instinct, that made her want to please him; to be agreeable; self-sacrificial; to lay herself across the slaying stone so that he might be satisfied.

"Let me think for you, then."

It wasn't her. She felt like a different person as she watched him take a short drag from the cigarette and hold it in, as she let him guide her face by the jaw so that he could delicately skim his opening mouth over hers and let his lungful of smoke ghost to the back of her throat. And it didn't feel a right thing that Bonnie, the Bonnie she knew herself to be, would inhale at the same moment, the easier to accept his trash a welcome guest in her own lungs. She watched him watching her breathe his smoke in, a proud little darkness devouring her in his eyes. She thought he would try to kiss her then but instead he gifted the cigarette to her lips, wrapped his hands around her knees and yanked her to the edge of the bed.

She gasped as her ass slid forcefully his direction and the cigarette in her lips fell, burning little spots in the sheets, and in her skin, making her angrier.

"Fuck, Kai!"

He lowered his eyelids and tightened his jaw. It was an accident and the guilt was evident in his eyes, but repressed in his crooked lips and brows.

Bonnie picked up the cigarette and reignited it with a growled spell. They glared each other down as she took an elegant drag, and he kneeled on the floor before her like he said he would all those weeks ago. Biting his lip in the apparent inability to keep to himself, he laid a hand over the top of her thigh. For a moment, she allowed it. A taunting idea that she was an animal in a zoo and he was the zookeeper made her want to retaliate in small, calculated ways. So she smiled at him, exhaled a slow gust of smoke into his face and watched him, annoyed yet unsurprised, blink through it. Then she dabbed the cigarette out on the back of his hand.

He sucked in a sharp breath, but rather than jerk his hand away he clenched, digging his fingernails into her knee, looking on satisfied as it provoked an equally sharp intake of breath from Bonnie.

"Do you ever clip those?" she snapped.

"With my mouth," he shot back. And the way he said it made her think he was trying to accomplish something.

"Sick."

"I know you are, but what am I?" he teased. She rolled her eyes.

Now's the time, she supposed. Time to fake it.

She raised her eyebrow and glanced down at his hand on her leg.

"Sorry," she said.

"What?" He laughed.

"I said I'm sorry."

"Why?" His smile and laughter disappeared and a suspicious scowl spread over his face.

"I didn't mean to hurt you," Bonnie mumbled, trying to make her eyes big and her lips subtly pout. Maybe Kai was the type of man weakened by these things.

"Yes," he reassured matter-of-factly, "You did."

"Well I regret it. And I'm sorry."

His angry suspicion turned to concern. "Are you okay?"

She realized that a good play would require some transition. She couldn't just switch her attitude toward him in a night. If she was to be successful in winning the key out of her prison, she was in it for the long game.

"No," she answered truthfully. She was not okay. This he would believe.

His features contorted in utter confusion.

"Oh," he said. "Well…okay."

"Just take what you want and go. I'm tired."

He nodded, seeming suddenly just as anxious to leave as she was for him to stay. She knew it was backward. Just the thought of being alone again, alone after feeling what it was like to have Kai back, even in all his flaws and crimes…scared the holy hell out of her. And she wished he would force himself on her; take her body; move into her house; infiltrate; haunt her; because for as atypical as it felt for Bonnie to have a relationship with someone like Kai, his very presence reminded her who she was. Whatever she did or didn't do, thought or didn't think, said or didn't say around him, he served quite unknowingly as her compass. It took only the ten minutes he'd been standing unwelcome in her bedroom for her to understand that in the time he was gone, she had forgotten herself.

With unexpected gentleness and eyes closed, Kai dragged his open mouth along her inner thigh in search of the right spot. Bonnie gnashed her teeth. She hardly missed this anticipation, this waiting for him to bite. The frustration burbled in her chest and she found it unusually difficult to suppress.

Without thinking, she weaved her fingers through his hair and pulled them into a fist. He let his head be pulled by her hand, wincing. "What the hell?" he groaned.

Bonnie didn't have to grapple long for something to excuse this miniature outburst.

"You went to France without me?" she snarled through her teeth.

"I missed you."

"You went to France. Without me."

"We'll go back," he amended, glaring up at her and she found herself stricken by the black marbles his eyes had so quickly become. The veins of thirst danced frantically underneath and his fangs flashed at full length. She still gaped at him when he buried his face between her thighs. We. He was taking her to France. Forget fear of flight by an amateur pilot, she was finally going to see France. Maybe the rest of the world would follow. She felt his familiar pre-feed kiss on her skin and something that wanted to be a smile turned up one side of her face. His lips unveiled introductory pinpricks and she held her breath before the fast slope of teeth.

"I can't believe I'm letting you do this," she hissed more to herself than to him.

In fervor, he ran his hands up her legs and clawed onto her for support. She felt herself being pulled too close to the edge of the bed and the hand that wasn't in his hair clutched onto the blankets. They only moved with her so she switched to pushing back against his shoulder. He was cold. She watched the spidering veins on his face, both hoping it would end soon and hoping he'd keep going until he killed her. Wow, Bonnie, she cautioned herself. Awakening to the dark thought, the darkness in her spread its tattered spirit. Suddenly she couldn't think of anything she wanted more than to feed it. But she didn't know how, and so tried ignoring the idea by concentrating on the pain.

It wasn't as painful, however, as when he fed from her neck. It forced her to wonder why she didn't let him do it sooner. As his hand slowly inched further up her thigh, she guessed that was the reason. The way he liked to transition violence into sex alarmed her. Or it had before, anyway. This time she felt less bothered by it and more accustomed, even more attuned to her own sexuality as if Kai's way of doing things was the natural progression. Who cared if it wasn't?

The darkness she'd been trying to quash began to throb and she couldn't contain the need to hurt. She gripped the back of his head with both hands and pushed to deepen his bite, to worsen the wound, involve more nerves firing up into her brain, telling her to body to move, to panic, fight or flight, responses she wouldn't listen to. He responded well to her encouragement. He widened his jaws and entombed his fangs, bringing so much of her into his mouth she could feel his molars grating her open flesh while his tongue shoveled blood, and she moaned, and her darkness moaned, and it occurred to her that the agony, now and possibly always, made her want him more.

At the sound of her moan, he unlatched. The absence of pain angered her but he was looking up into her eyes, blood smeared across his face, his irises returned and he seemed…worried. She glanced to the wound on her thigh and it was chillingly deep, ragged and glistening red while little pulses of blood gushed out in waste down her leg, onto the bed and the floor. He got to his feet, bit open his wrist and pressed it to Bonnie's lips. It was a rather forceful healing, and she felt his fingers at the base of her skull, holding her in place and in feed until contentment was felt by him and not her. She ingested more blood than she would have liked and when he finally released her, he was again looking at her with such concern that it made her feel like she was the crazy one.

After the skin on her thigh fibered back together, Kai wiped the blood from his face onto the shoulder of his white shirt and she mirrored him.

"Oh my god," she muttered, looking down at the redness wet and dry.

He dropped back to his knees and after a soft glance at her for reassurance he licked at the leftovers of blood on her newly healed skin. Bonnie let her hands fall to her sides and noticed she was shaking. She shivered, too. She didn't know why her body might be so stunned except for the trauma done to her leg, but she was used to that sort of thing.

Kai started to kiss her thigh where he licked it clean. Her breath left her in that way it tended to every time he started on her this way. He wrapped his arms around her hips affectionately and nuzzled her cunt. Everything in her being felt reeled to him by invisible strings. She felt so drawn she had to touch him or she would explode. She let her trembling fingers meet the side of his face, tracing his eyebrow with her thumb. She held his ear and drew soft zigzags in his hair where before she took fistfuls to hurt.

"I missed you too," she said sadly, because it was true. It didn't need to change the fact that she was about to play the hell out of him. He sighed heavily into the fabric of her panties. After a desirous kiss to the spot just above her pubic bone, he broke off of her and stood. Bonnie wondered miserably what she'd done.

She watched as he held his hands loosely out before him, palms turned up toward the ceiling. With one last woeful glance at her, he closed his eyes and started chanting silently to himself.

"What are you doing?" she asked, her heartbeat raging between her legs. She didn't want him over there; she wanted him back where he belonged, teasing her morals out of her.

"Giving it back," was all he answered. She didn't know what he meant by it until a moment later when his eyes popped open and he gasped for air as though an invisible entity choked him. Whatever entity it was grabbed him by the collar and Bonnie watched in horror as he was pulled rapidly out of her room.

"Kai!" she shrieked after him. Forgetting her shakiness, she leapt up from the bed and fled after him. She couldn't hear or see him anymore, and so ventured into the darkness of her house calling him. What did he give back? And why would he give anything back to her? He couldn't mean…

Not knowing what else made more sense, Bonnie headed for her front door.

There he was, panting on her porch. He looked at her earnestly when she swung the door open and she didn't know what to make of it. Little bits of blood had flicked out from his eyes and nose and he wiped these up with his sleeve, either embarrassed or trying to appear that way in the event that such a feeling might win more amnesty. It almost did.

"You gave back my invitation barrier," she said, trying not to sound too impressed. "Why?"

He shrugged as he caught his breath. He gave her no real answer and she suspected he was embarrassed also by his kindness.

"Thanks," she said, relieving him of the pressure to speak. "But…" And she couldn't finish saying what she wanted to say. She held it in because of how stupid it made her, and how inevitable it was that she would regret it sooner than later.

"But what?"

But it was part of the play, wasn't it? She figured it was a logical next step.

"But what, Bonnie?"

She took in a breath and twisted her fingers up in the hem of her shirt. If she went forward with it, she could expect to lose that shirt. She could expect to hold fast through another rough stint…or maybe he would have her slowly for the amount of meaning bestowed upon him. Welcome, for the first time in his life. Maybe he wouldn't have her at all. Maybe instead they would sit together and not speak, but simply feel again what it was like to be in a room with another person and need nothing but a second breath to hear. She knew she didn't want him to go away. In fact, she knew for certain that the next time he left her house she wanted to be with him. She wanted to leave Mystic Falls altogether. However long it took to get the key out of him, she could play patiently, as long as there were new sights to distract her from the toxicity soon to flourish between them.

Bonnie realized she was stalling and that Kai was hanging onto her silence because perhaps he suspected what was about to happen, and how it was to change their lives. She took a step back into her house and let the door hang open, and she was already lamenting her decision but the hope in his eyes threatened to break her heart.

"You can come in."

A/N: Part Two is now posted! Head to my stories and you will find Oblivion. Thanks, readers! (I love you)