pissed. Don’t worry—it wasn’t actually paedophilia, because the vampire had only been about six-months turned.”
The absurd hope that flowers from Steve’s words is almost enough to make a dead heart beat. Abe doesn’t know every vampire in Port Carmila, true, but people don’t tend to forget the rare child-turned vampire or zombie, if only because it’s good for the locals to know that the eight-year-old kissing an eighteen-year-old is in this one instance a perfectly legitimate expression of sexuality. Abe’s fairly sure, though, that the only child-bodied adult vampire of Steve’s age is in fact one Shane Pike—and very much not a girl.
Of course, whoever Steve kisses in primary school has no real bearing on his sexuality as an adult. Right?
“Not even close,” Abe says once he realises that Steve has raised both eyebrows at him. “I’ll, uh, have to actually bite you to do that.” Abe meets Steve’s eyes, both as an attempt to make sure he understands and because he likes looking at Steve’s face. “It’s like a bee sting—only toxic, for most people, in large-enough doses.”
“Good to know.”
“I mean, some people can be all—” Abe stops only because Steve leans in and presses his lips to Abe’s in a slow, leisurely kiss, and then Abe doesn’t care about anything but the fact that Steve runs the tip of his tongue over Abe’s teeth and fangs. Nothing but the warmth of his breath and saliva, the flood of much-cooler venom over Abe’s tongue and the realisation that doesn’t stop Steve at all, and before Abe’s thought about what he should and shouldn’t be doing with a straight man who’s probably just kissing Abe so his dancing friends can confirm the dare, he’s sliding his tongue between Steve’s teeth and deepening the kiss. Steve drags his chair closer with a hip-rocking thrust, his chest only centimetres from Abe’s own, his heart beating just a little faster. What would he taste, now, if he let a drop of Steve’s blood roll over his tongue?
If Abe feels as though he’s drowning in blood-warm, hair-gel-scented bathwater, he can’t think of a better way to go.
Steve pulls back, panting, but his grin is fearless. “Want to dance?”
Dance? He wants to sit there all night and breathe in this can’t-be-straight man, but Steve is already jumping off his chair, so Abe nods, not caring that he’s not really a dancer if it means he gets to be anywhere close to Steve. “Uh, sure?”
Steve shrugs off his blazer, gives Abe and the world a very good view of the chest under that thin layer of T-shirt, swipes one hand at his eyes, and leads the way to an empty spot on the floor, already swaying with a confident grace. After one moment Abe doesn’t care about his own dancing ability or the fact they’re no longer kissing: Steve dancing is an eternal torment put on this earth to drive people crazy. He doesn’t follow the beat of the music, but Steve doesn’t so much dance as flirt—he knows how to hook Abe with just a glance, how to bend and flex his body so that even a vampire can’t help but ponder tearing off his clothes and throwing him over the closest object. He dances around Abe, slides in and out of his reach, twists and turns so that Abe can admire the entirety of his lithe body, teases with just a brush of fingertips over a shirtsleeve or half-shut, winking eyes, indifferent to anyone in the room but Abe.
His blood and breath sound amongst a song of passion-fuelled heartbeats, one note in an intoxicating chorus of life. The two girls Steve spoke to before approaching the bar—the butch breather and the antique zombie, one with an excited pulse, the other a strange sense of nothing to Abe’s blood-honed senses—grab each other and collapse in a burst of strange, absurd giggles before slapping each other’s hands and reaching for their phones even as they dance. Ares raises his head, just for a moment, and stares at Steve, his blood thick and cool and lacking the precise combination of hormones that makes human life an intoxicating feast. Adam Swanston stares at Steve, stares at Abe, stares at them both as though he can’t believe what he’s seeing.
Steve’s eyes, though, never drift away from Abe’s—not even when he throws out his right arm and shoots Swanston the finger before grabbing Abe’s hand and twirling into his arm.
Abe is his sole focus of interest in that room, and he can’t imagine why, but he doesn’t care. He just tries to keep up, and in this, at least, a vampire body is ideal: he can dance, with enough blood, until the end of time itself, and why not? Abe is never quite sure how long they dance—two songs? Three? More?—before the temptation is too much to resist. Abe places his hands on Steve’s hips and tugs him closer, Steve’s hot skin pressed against his, groin brushing against groin. Steve’s breaths are heavy against his ear, growing heavier as Abe pulls him as close as he dares, as close as two men can be in a gay club and not be fucking, and it is as wonderful as Abe ever imagined, so wonderful he finds himself following Steve’s lead without a thought for anyone watching, rocking and grinding with gleeful, amazing abandon—
Steve jerks away, shaking his head.
Abe stumbles, lets go, stares.
Steve’s eyes are wide in the reddish-black lighting; he rubs one hand against his cheekbone. Like every other breather on the floor, sweat beads on a flushed face, but there’s something in his expression Abe can only read as terror, and he doesn’t understand why. “Can’t ... can’t ... back in a sec...”
Abe is too taken aback to know what to say or do, but Steve doesn’t wait for a response: he tears out of Abe’s arms and towards the door, leaving Abe—and most of the club—staring after him.
4: Breath
Just like that, the moment—and the hope—is shattered. Idiot! How can Abe be so fucking stupid? Steve has guts and balls and is a natural flirt besides, but that doesn’t mean he’s prepared to be jammed up against a gay vampire who might as well be poking his cock into Steve’s hip. He might not be aware of just how much he flirts or how attractive he is, for that matter; he might not expect a man to be as entranced as a woman by his moves. How can he be in any way prepared? Abe swears—he only vaguely notices that everyone else close by, everyone that is not the cackling Adam Swanston, gives him sympathetic looks—and heads up the steps for the door. He’ll apologise. Steve seems interested as a friend, and if Abe hasn’t completely scared him off ... well, he’ll have to settle for that. They barely know each other, after all, and maybe once they get to know each other better, maybe once Steve gets used to the idea, he might find Abe interesting in that way in return. Steve kissed him, after all, and Abe didn’t feel any reluctance in that kiss.
Maybe, just maybe, there’s something worth salvaging.
The salt-tinged air is much colder out on the street. Louis, king of the fang, waves at Abe as he passes the bouncers, but Abe tosses a hand in his direction and scans the street for a flash of red. No, nothing: just a few girls in miniskirts and heels heading up the road towards the Broken Post—and then he sees a shadow slumped by the edge of the building, facing the crossroad to the breakwater.
He expected, maybe, to find Steve getting a breath, talking on the phone, texting, heading down the road after his friends.
Abe runs, his feet slamming against the concrete footpath in a way that would have caused stress fractures had he been human—and still does, as a vampire. Tissue tears, accompanied with spikes of pain he ignores: vampirism doesn’t wholly dull pain, but at long last Abe has learned to accept it as something that no longer indicates damage, the signals of a nervous system that doesn’t realise its messages are irrelevant and outdated. There’s no answering spike of adrenaline: his fear is strange, intellectual, unwedded to the body in which he dwells. A glass of blood and it doesn’t matter: the damage vanishes as if it never existed.
He will outlast breathers because he can push his body beyond human endurance, but Valentine will always beat him in a sprint, always punch him in the face before Abe can finish bringing up a hand to defend himself—because Valentine’s body is a glorious cocktail of irisin and testosterone and sundry other hormonal and nervous system responses that make him move and think more quickly than he can when not aroused, responses that are
muted in Abe’s undead body.
He spins around the corner and comes to a staggering halt with enough force to tear the ligaments in his ankles and knees.
Steve half lies, half sits on the ground, his one hand clenched around the front of his T-shirt, the other around his smartphone. He doesn’t tap the screen; he just holds the phone, all the while breathing heavily, unevenly, like a guy that had just been winded and couldn’t fill his lungs.
The street is much brighter than the dance floor, lit by traffic lights and the streetlights above, and under the fall of the steady, yellow light, what looked like the human flush of exertion in the club seems a mottled, reddish rash spread over his face, neck and forearms.
For a second Abe just stares.
“It’s okay,” he says without thinking. “Steve, it’s okay.” He crouches down beside him and takes Steve’s phone-holding hand in his right, scrambling at his jeans pockets with the other hand, but he finds nothing more than the bulky leather outline of a wallet. No pouch at his belt. A brush over his legs finds nothing hidden under his jeans. Abe almost swears, but then he notices the way Steve’s red T-shirt rides up the back, and, without apologising for the manhandling, he reaches underneath