**IMPORTANT NOTE AT THE END.

Meet Me In The Middle - Jessie Ware

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The only thought that kept assaulting my mind was, Christian and I are stuck together. Not for a little amount of time either, it was three - four tops - consecutive days. This was nothing like Alaska, I was fine, sane - normal. Just me and Chris. Fire against ice. And at the moment, I can't figure out who's who.

I glanced at the closed bathroom door where Christian was currently taking his shower and exhaled. This has been the weirdest twenty-four hours of my life. First I almost get kidnapped, then I'm walking ten miles in the desert with a man determined to keep me out of harm's way - although he's the one that put me there in the first place - and now I'm sat in a simple motel room with that very man taking a shower in the next room.

Is this seriously real life?

Standing, I glanced out of the window. The sun was beginning its slow descent, the temperature was only slightly cooler here than it was in the city. It was a quaint town; from what I could see there were no tourists around which made our arrival all the more alerting. We stuck out here and we needed to leave as soon as we could.

But firstly, we had to actually discuss an actual plan. So what, I knew we were going to the Swiss Inn but that was a few days away.

I picked up Kate's note and re-read it:

'Yes, we're fine. We passed the town two hours ago, just as you two were crossing the bridge. We couldn't come back for you, it would change too much and there was more of a chance of all of us getting caught. Stay safe Chels and behave yourself Christian. Oh, be careful in the next two towns. They'll be drawing close and in the last one, find a couple that own a tourist bus business. They'll help you get to Arish. They're partial to a good runaway couple. Best to learn each-other's middle names ha. I'll leave a note on the way if you guys run into any trouble. Love you both, Kate and Cal. xx'

"Question," I said when the shower stopped. "Why did you tell me to turn my phone off?"

"They're tracking it." He said, his voice slightly muffled by the door. "We'll have to leave them here and leave at sundown. It'll be easier to travel at night."

I glanced at my backpack and frowned. "What about laptops, think they'd track those?"

Christian didn't reply so I quickly pulled it out and turned it on. If I had to leave it here too I needed to at least back-up my iCloud. I had weeks' worth of data on here. Stretching on the bed, I started the back-up process. It was risky but any normal person would do this too. Come on, contacts? E-mails and documents? It's like getting the blue screen of death and losing everything, I just wasn't ready for that.

The door the bathroom opened and I glanced up from my screen.

"Are you serious? If you're checking your e-mails, so help me Chels, I'll snap your laptop in half and burn it..."

Am I crazy for staring? Maybe... but women possess a gene that we just can't control. And that would be the gene that allowed us females to admire the human body for all that God created. Admiring the beauty that is the male body is just too difficult to well, not do. Especially one as stunning as Christian Beaumont's. Lean but toned, very toned. A sprinkle of hair across his chest and stomach... Thank the stars he was wearing boxers. I forced myself not to look below the waistband and praised myself when I didn't. Instead my gaze strayed to the marks on his side.

The only thing imperfect about his body were the teeth marks along his ribs. Vampires didn't scar. We healed. However, if one is bitten by another without exchanging blood - which usually only happened during intimate circumstances - then we scar. They were pale, scars from goodness knows when. There was also a mark that wasn't a bite on his abdomen similar to the one on his hand. He'd lived so long, the battle scars were expected. How did he get them? I was immediately intrigued.

He moved toward his bag with fluid movements and I was stupid enough to watch every step. Why? Well, who damn well wouldn't? It's that damn gene.

"What?"

Darting my eyes back to my screen and swallowing my embarrassment, I ignored his question and said, "I'm backing up my iCloud so go away."

"I'm not joking, I'll break it in two." From the corner of my eye, I thanked God when he shrugged his t-shirt and shorts on. "Give it to me."

"No. We're leaving soon so this shouldn't matter." I clicked safari. "Wow, they have wifi here."

"Chelsea."

"Calm down, Christian I'm only checking my e-mail and we should probably check google maps just so we know where we're going."

He didn't fight me on that. See, it's always the women that asks for directions. I checked my e-mails quickly first, while Christian packed up the remainder of our things as well as the food and water he'd bought when I was in the shower.

Most of them were junk or promotional e-mails. Nothing important, or worth taking note of. But then one caught my eye and the subject field made me gasp.

"What's wrong?"

I clicked on it and cursed. "Oh, no. Joe."

"Joe?"

"He's my friend from Ukraine."

Christian was beside me in an instant. "Is this that werepanther everyone's talking about?"

Even he knows? "Yes, it is. Look what he said."

His eyes skimmed over the e-mail, frowning as he drew to the end of it. "See?" I said. "A few days ago, I told him Kate and Cal were coming to visit and he's always wanted to meet a witch."

"So his smart idea was to surprise you?"

"It was sweet idea." I defended. "He's a sweet guy, all werepanther's are sweet they're just... well, just-"

"If you say misunderstood, I'll walk straight out of that door." He stood up, running his hands over his damp head of hair. "He's here, in Egypt."

"Looks like it. He's probably gone to my apartment."

"This... is actually good."

Did I really want to know why? "Why?"

"Although I'm still trying to figure out where the hell I was when you met a damn werepanther, having him here can work to our advantage. He's on our side, the Steinsson's don't know about him."

"Christian, I could never ask him to do that." I scowled. "And what do you mean our side, he's my friend not yours. If anything he's on my side."

"You going to tell him to rip me a new one then?"

A grin tugged at my lips. "I would if I needed to. I'm going to send an e-mail telling him to go to Arish."

The amusement on his face vanished. "Well that's the stupidest idea, no. You may as well text Feisal and Dante our exact location. Just tell him to head toward Gaza. He'll pass through Arish and I'm sure Kate will intercept."

"Putting all of this pressure on Kate is unfair," I mumbled as I typed out a quick message.

"I'm sure this comes naturally to her. Bring up maps before you send it."

Both of us stared at google maps, trying to figure out which town we were in. Then we saw the next two or three towns between Arish. The first was an eighteen mile walk from here which was just over four hours. Another twenty miles to the next and then the last town, Al Mazar was just two miles from it. Then Arish was a good, hm, twenty-six miles from there.

"According to google, if we walk at an average pace from Mazar to Arish it'll take... eight hours and forty-six minutes."

Christian picked up his bag and yanked out his phone. "Well, lucky for us, we're catching a ride with a lovely couple that own a tourist business. Send the e-mail and let's get moving."

"Do I really have to leave it here? This is a Macbook after all, they don't come cheap."

"I'll buy you a new one when this is all over."

"And a new phone?"

"Sure, why not, I'm not exactly buying boats at the moment."

Satisfied, I smiled and clicked send. "Okay."

**

Walking in the desert at night compared to earlier today was practically a walk in the park. It was cool, still warm but one hundred percent cooler than earlier. I hadn't bothered changing into my other set of clothes, they would only get dirty anyway. We walked just off the road, so if anyone saw us they wouldn't be able to see our faces. The night was silent, the sand dunes not that far from where we walked were probably infested with insects from hell. The sky, well that was a picture. There were so many stars, so many different colours leaking from one corner of the earth to the other. Now you don't see this in the city.

I glanced at my watch. We'd been walking for near enough two hours, barely any words spoken apart from, "Put your hat on, Chelsea." Or, "Don't get bitten by a snake, we don't have time to stop for you to heal." Such a lovely guy.

I took a small sip of water from my bag and glanced at him. He was all business now, his pupils a little larger so he could catch any sign of unusual movement. His jaw tensed as he darted his eyes over the roads, toward the sandy hills a fair distance away. A serious Christian, was a serious Christian.

I glanced at his side where his marks were and found myself fascinated all over again. A geologist loves the process and history of which the earth is shaped. And despite myself, Christian has always been an unidentified rock. He was fascinating. Sure he was a pain in the ass but he was still full of mysteries. Somebody I had yet to place under the microscope.

"I know you were looking."

I blinked out of my thoughts and met his eye. He caught me staring, dammit. "Excuse me?"

"Earlier. At my side."

Oh good, he didn't notice me ogling the rest of him then. "Yeah, I don't see that kind of thing very often so..." I shrugged as nonchalantly as possible. "How did you, you know, get them?"

His gaze roamed over my face as if he were searching for something. Maybe my curiosity wasn't barefaced enough. He probably thought I was playing some sort of game but for the first time I wasn't.

"Okay. It happened over three hundred years ago," He began. "I was in the wrong place at the wrong time as usual. A bunch of Russian vampires were bored, they were younger than me but there were so many I couldn't overpower them especially with the way they jumped me. I was captured and held for about, I don't know, eight days?"

I inhaled smoothly and let it out just as carefully to hide my shock but he saw right through it. His smile was a little forced as he continued. "There wasn't any real reasoning behind it. They'd heard of me, of how old I was and what use I could be. They were sadistic beings."

"Were they similar to the Steinsson's?"

"Not really, no. They did what they did for fun. Wanted to see if I was as big and bad as the rumours. They strapped me up, let me bleed out so I would starve quicker and bit me."

"I don't understand why they bit you," I frowned, sidestepping a weird looking plant. "Was it just for the sake of it? To scar you?"

"No, they wanted to, 'taste ancient blood.' I have three more scars on my calves. There were about seven or eight of them. All quite young, no older than eighty." That's considered young? Well I suppose to him, it is. He must see me as a baby.

"How did you get out?"

"That's a very good question." He let out a small laugh. "When you've been cut up and bled out, you're left thirsty almost immediately. You're more animal than sane when you're that thirsty. On the eighth day, one of the women pitied me enough to let me stretch my legs. Which of course was a mistake."

"You killed them?"

"Didn't leave one alive, no." He rubbed a hand over his side and to me it looked like an unconscious movement. "Two were in the shower when I ripped their spines out, the others were lounging around in the living room. None of them stood a chance."

I listened to him, heard the coolness in his voice but I also heard the sliver of unease in retelling the memory. It was obvious he still had the scars - but not just the physical ones. Christian was a mystery to me; he's lived for so long, outside he seemed like a man that had it together, he was playful, spirited albeit he had his... merciless side. I'd seen that first-hand. But this was a side I hadn't seen before. It was unfamiliar, foreign territory and I wanted to explore more of it.

"What about that scar," I said pointing to the one running from his forefinger to his thumb. It was a jagged mark similar to the one on his ribs. "It doesn't look anything like a bite."

"It's not."

When he didn't offer any explanation, I decided not to push. For now. Of course, I was interested, he probably had a million and one stories within him and I had a few days of walking to get a bunch of them out of him. Why not? We needed something to talk about.

So, I tried to lighten the mood slightly. "We're going to be together for a while, I think it's customary to keep up a good conversation and with your hundreds of years of life, I'm sure you have plenty of stories to tell."

A smile tugged at his lips and I mentally patted myself on the back when he relaxed. "I have a lot of stories, yeah."

"And I have a lot of questions."

"I'm sure you do. Ask away, we have plenty of time. Here," There was a steep sand ridge ahead, a small bridge running right over it but Christian was leading me down instead of across. "Take my hand."

I looked down the hill and then at him with frantic eyes. "Are you crazy, why don't we cross the bridge?"

"Because if we get caught we're screwed, now do you want help or not?"

I grumbled a reply and grabbed his large hand. "Here's a good question. I've never seen you with anyone except my family, like Evie and everybody. Haven't you kept any friends from the past?"

"You've missed the point of the Steinsson story and the one I just told you if you're asking me that, kitten."

My foot slipped a little but his grip stopped me from toppling over. "How so?"

"What is the common factor in both of those anecdotes?"

"You're the unluckiest vampire ever?" I joked. He glanced at me with a glare and my smile dropped. "Okay. Your age is the only things they have in common."

He stopped so suddenly that I managed to trip over my own feet within the slope of sand. With a startled squeal, I flew into his back managing to knock him down with me. The hill was so steep we started rolling, one of his arms circling around me while the other tried to grapple onto something. My elbow poked into his side and his grunt of pain echoed in my ear as we continued to tumble.  Who knows where our bags rolled to but by the time we made it to the bottom, he was on top of me and his face was a mere few inches from mine.

I tried to wiggle free but he suddenly shushed me with wild eyes, placed his hand over my mouth and looked to the side. Above us, on the bridge, two cars slowly crawled past. My heart beat a mile a minute as they paused on the middle of the bridge directly above us. Shit. It was them. It must be, why else would any car be driving so leisurely especially on an empty road at 2am.

I could hear the voices in one of them. I don't see anything. Keep moving. Check everywhere.

Neither car lingered long thankfully. They sped off quickly across the bridge not even stopping to check the hills beneath it. The silence of the night resumed and I exhaled a heavy breath. That was far too close for comfort.

Then our particular position registered in my mind and I evaluated it: my legs open as wide as San Francisco Bridge, Christian kneeling between them and his forearms resting beside my head. Our bodies were touching but he'd subtly shifted his off of mine a few centimetres probably trying to stop from crushing me.

His eyes refocused and found mine. "Still think walking across was a good idea?"

I stared past his intimidating gaze to the sky and tried to shrug against the sand.

"I didn't have friends because they used me. I don't trust anyone, Chelsea. At mine and my sister's age, it's hard to trust. Hard to make friends. We had each other and that's all we needed."

I met his intense stare. "What about now? Who do you trust?"

His pregnant pause felt long. I didn't want to notice how he was plastered against me but I did. I didn't want to notice the amount of heat that radiated off him but, hell I did. And I hated myself for doing it. So I turned my head to the side and rolled out from underneath him. Sluggishly, I stood and wiped off as much as the sand from clothes and watched as he stood.

"I think you should be asking yourself that question too." He said with his back to me, grabbing both of our bags. "We should hurry, we're not too far now and you must be tired."

Who do I trust? To be honest, I didn't entirely trust Christian just yet. It looked like this was the sort of trouble he got in all the damn time. And it was because I didn't know him. I didn't know him like Evie knew him. They were friends a long before I knew him. He may have turned me, he may have helped me when I was lost but he was as unpredictable as the weather in autumn.

He walked up the hill ahead of me with both of our bags and I swiftly adjusted my hat before joining him. There were lessons to be learnt on this trip it looks like. One of them, might be Christian's aversion to personal space.

**

"Wife?"

Christian and I looked at one another. "No." He answered, smirking.

The Egyptian male behind the desk of the hostel looked at me, lingering a little at my exposed legs, and then back to Christian. "She is... lady of the night?" He asked, his heavy accent curling on the word lady.

But then his words registered and I gasped. "Did you just call me a prostitute?"

It was probably four o'clock in the morning so his assumption wasn't unwarranted but there is that little thingy in everyone's head called a freaking filter. You don't just say those things to people.

Christian grabbed my arm and swiped the keys from the table before I could advance on the older guy behind the desk. "Thank you. Room 4A correct?"

The asshole nodded and pointed up the stairs while Chris dragged me away by the arm. "Calm down. What's wrong are you tired?"

I ignored the beginning of the burning itch in my throat and nodded. "Yeah." I lied. "Exhausted."

"You lying to me? You scratch your neck when you lie."

"No. I really am tired. Plus it wasn't any of that guys business." I insisted as we walked into our room. Kate said that to me once, when I told her I'd taken our laundry out of the dryer but I hadn't even put it in the wash. I needed to sort that out.

It was a tasteful room, the window smaller than the one in our first. The walls were bare, the wallpaper old, almost reminiscent to the nineties. All in all the room was worth its twenty dollars a night.

There was a double bed but at this point I didn't care. I was tired and thirsty. I may have already fed this week but with all the walking, all the healing, the lack of sleep, the rise and fall of my emotions, it was all too much. We get snippy, we get agitated, and it's a normal side effect.

"I'm ready to collapse." Kicking my shoes off and flipping the hat off, I yawned. "Have you got a spare t-shirt?"

"For?"

"Bed." I yawned again. "I didn't bring much with me."

"But do you need a shirt?"

I glared at him and he grinned. "I'm joking." He threw me a t-shirt and I changed in the bathroom. He wasn't in the room when I came back so I quickly slipped underneath the cover - putting one of the pillows in the middle - and shut my eyes.

The door opened but I didn't bother turning over. "The only note Kate left was that she'll meet Joe in Arish so I guess we'll be okay here for a while."

"Oh, thank god I can sleep all day." I groaned, relaxing.

"We can hang out during the day and leave at night."

"Mhm." I sighed snuggling into the scratchy pillow. "Cool."

When the room fell silent, I glanced over my shoulder and saw him settle into the armchair beside the beaten up old table in the corner of the room. "What are you doing?"

He shut his eyes. "Sleeping."

"Don't be stupid, that must be so uncomfortable. Just lie down here, I don't care." I groused turning back over. I heard the creak of the floorboard before he settled beside me on top of the sheets instead of beneath them. I never pegged him as this much of a gentleman. "Just as long as you keep your hands to yourself."

"I was just about to say exactly the same thing to you."

Neither of us said anything, but I knew he wasn't asleep. His heart beat was steady but not steady enough for him to be asleep. The bed wasn't as big as I thought what with Christian's body in it too. Thankfully, the pillow was just enough to separate us. Tomorrow was another day. Or more like today is a new day. I just needed to keep a level head, stay focused and... I suppose learn to trust Christian.

"Just a warning," I murmured quietly. "Sometimes I snore."

The bed vibrated with Christian's laugh. "Forewarning too, I move a lot when I sleep."

"Hence the pillow."

"You think a pillow will stop me?"

"Touch me and I'll cut your hands off and feed them to a camel in the morning. No, I'll cut off each individual digit, then your wrists then I'll feed each section to twelve different camels."

This time he laughed from the gut. "I knew you needed to feed."

I threw my elbow out and socked him in the ribs. "Sleep with one eye open, Christian."

His laughter was the last thing I heard before I succumbed to my exhaustion. The first thing I'm going to do when I wake up is go through the markets for some clothes, a few supplies and food. Walking into the town earlier, the first thing I noticed were the empty market stalls not far from the hostel. I could only imagine what it was like during the day, busy with street merchants, locals, a million different scents and sights, I was excited.

The food here, I knew would be traditional and tasty so I was looking forward to it. If I had to take something from this then I may as well make the most of being in some of these towns.

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I'm going on holiday next week so no update until after next week. If you don't follow me on Snapchat (Misguidedsw) totally do, it'll be a fun festival week ;D (Venice and Croatia)

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