Page 13 of First Blood
And I wasn’t even sure myself.
Walking up the stairs behind him wasn’t as difficult as it would’ve been without my coat covering his perfect ass, and we made it to his door without my cock getting too excited. No one was around, and the only sounds were our footsteps and the occasional muted blare of a TV behind a closed apartment door.
He let us into his place, and I shoved the door shut behind us with my foot. He hit the light switch.
And then I had no idea what to do next.
He was mine, here in this little room. He’d given me permission to touch him and taste him.
But it was almost as cold in here as it was outside, the heating in this building apparently as up-to-date as the rest of it. Laurie hadn’t made any move to shed my coat, and no wonder. It was probably the only really warm thing in this apartment, including the couple of thin blankets draped over his bed. I’d need to open the coat to get to his neck. It felt like stripping him of his armor, like making him even more vulnerable — to the elements, to me. It felt wrong.
He walked over to the little kitchenette, worming one hand out of the coat to fidget with the few things on the square of countertop. A spoon, maybe left over from a hot drink he’d made earlier. A packet of sugar like you’d find at a diner. A folded paper towel.
“Do you want something to drink?” he asked abruptly, the words cracking the silence like a heavy boot on ice. And then he shook his head and laughed. “I mean, something other than me.”
“No.” That was ungracious, and I scrambled for a follow-up. “You need a space heater.”
Smooth, Victor. Very smooth.I winced a little.
“It’d only blow the fuse,” Laurie said mildly, and more kindly than I deserved. Of fucking course he needed a space heater. He wasn’t an idiot. Did I think that was an original idea, or something? He picked up the spoon and set it down again with a clatter, and then turned to me. “Why me?” he asked abruptly.
“Why…do I want to feed on you?”
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Lots of people in this town. I mean, I could see picking up a hooker if you wanted to be able to drain someone, or get rough, or get a dirty fuck while you were feeding. But you haven’t done any of that, so…why me?”
Not really any reason to lie, but I still felt incredibly awkward as I said, “It’s the way you smell. Like oranges and honey. I can’t really describe it.”
His laugh cracked through the room. More ice breaking, breaking up and rolling downstream. His eyes glittered, and his lips were so fucking pink. “I use Irish Spring. I can’t afford anything that smells like oranges and honey.”
“It’s not anything you use. It’s not external. It’s you. I could smell you from a couple of blocks away, the first night we met.”
Laurie wrinkled his nose. “Eww. I’d think the Irish Spring would be good enough to prevent that, anyway. No, I’m joking,” he continued, as I opened my mouth to argue some more. “I understand what you mean. It’s just hard to take ‘I could smell you from a couple of blocks away’ as a compliment.”
He grinned at me, the tiny lines at the corners of his eyes crinkling and his cheeks pink, and suddenly the six feet between us was six feet too many. Two steps and I’d closed the distance, his back against the counter and my chest brushing the front of my coat.
I lifted my hand and did what I’d been wanting to do since he looked up at me on my perch on the fire escape: I brushed one curl back from his forehead with my fingertip. “It’s a compliment.”
A slight shift of movement near my chest drew my attention: his fists clenching in the edges of my coat. “Does everyone, um, I don’t know how to ask this.” He closed his eyes for a moment, his lashes lying fanned against his red cheeks. When he opened them, I nearly drowned. He drew a deep breath. “Does everyone react like that? When you feed?”
I sucked in a deep breath of my own, and got hit with a lungful of pure Laurie, making my head spin. “Everyone gets a little high off of it,” I said carefully. I hadn’t been able to pull my hand away, and now my fingers were sliding into his hair, massaging gently. My hands weren’t gentle, as a rule. “It’s nothing unusual.”
Having a spontaneous orgasm and then passing outwasunusual, and so was my reaction to the scent and flavor of his blood. But I wasn’t opening that fucking can of worms for anything.
Laurie nodded. “Maybe we should lie down this time.” My heart jolted in my chest. “So you don’t have to put me to bed again. For a third time.”
“No!” Laurie jumped and tensed, ready to flee but with nowhere to go. Fuck. Fuck, fuck,fuck. How was I supposed to explain that lying down next to him on his narrow bed — on top of him, more like, because it was too narrow for me by myself, let alone both of us — was one of the worst ideas in the history of bad fucking ideas, ranking somewhere between invading Russia in winter and cancelingFirefly? “We shouldn’t lie down. The, uh, the bed’s too small.”
“We can fit.” Laurie lifted his chin and glared at me. The front of the coat rustled around, and I was pretty sure he’d crossed his arms under it.
I could kill you with one hand in one second. I could drain you. You could scream and scream and no one would come, and if they did I’d kill them too without breaking a sweat.
He knew it. I knew it.
And yet he was crossing his arms and doing his best to stare at me down his nose — and even though I had about six inches on him, he was somehow succeeding.
“Leave the coat on,” I said resignedly. I wasn’t going to win this, but at least I could put a couple of layers between us. It might keep my hard-on in check. And I liked the thought of him going to sleep wrapped up in something of mine, something that held my body heat and the faint scent of me.
Having him go to sleep wrapped up inmewould be better, but…Idid notfuck where I ate. I didn’t want a mate. I wasn’t staying in Lancaster forever. Humans were more trouble than they were worth.
