Page 15 of First Blood
Caught
It took two hours for Laurie to start to stir. First he nuzzled my shoulder, which made me tense up as hard as granite, and then his fingers flexed against my chest. He wriggled his body. I tried to pull my hips back to hide the erection that hadn’t faded one tiny bit this whole time, but there was nowhere for me to go.
Laurie tipped his head back on my arm and blinked up at me, his eyes still a little unfocused from sleep.
They focused fast once he realized what he was looking at. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and tried to extricate himself. He didn’t try very hard, though, and I didn’t help. I tightened the arm I had around his waist until he went still. “I didn’t…I was comfortable.”
“Me too.” Not at all. It was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life, crammed onto a narrow bed with a raging hard-on for hours, staying completely still so he didn’t wake up and end the torment. “I guess we both needed a nap.”
My voice sounded too low and harsh, no matter how softly I tried to speak. The room wasn’t cozy at all. It was the opposite: cold and bare and grimy. But the intimate space between Laurie’s face and mine was a little bubble of warmth. My arms around him made him safe, whether he knew it or not.
Laurie laughed softly. “You didn’t sleep.” He squirmed a little, his thigh rubbing against my cock, and his sleep-flushed cheeks deepened to crimson. “Not with that, you didn’t.”
“Ignore it. I am.”
“Hard to ignore.” He pressed his leg a little more firmly against my erection, and I bit back a groan. It really was hard to ignore, and the little bastard was making it even harder. So to speak. “You can fuck me. If you want. Or I could suck you off if you don’t want to go to all the effort. That has to be painful.”
If I’d made a list of all the shit I didn’t want right then, pity sex from the back-alley rentboy I was paying to feed me would’ve been right near the top. If only Rudolph Valentino could see me now. He probably wouldn’t be all that surprised.
“I keep feeding and fucking separate.” Laurie raised one perfectly arched, perfectly sardonic eyebrow and didn’t say a fucking word, because he didn’t need to. “Involuntary physical responses don’t count, okay?”
He shrugged, his shoulder jostling me. “Okay. So…don’t fuck me. Lie back and let me cause another involuntary physical response.”
I closed my eyes and counted to ten. “No,” I gritted out once I opened them again.
“I wouldn’t charge you any extra —”
“I don’t want a freebie,” I lied, a little too loudly. I wanted it so fucking badly. Fuck. I had to get him off the offensive, because I was defensive as hell and I hated it. “Why don’t you let me take a little of your blood every day? Why once a week? I already pay you twice what you make in a night. You could stop working the street completely.”
Too late, I realized that sounded like exactly what it was: a request for exclusivity, too revealing and too soon.
But Laurie had other concerns, thankfully. “That doesn’t work for me!” He tried to pull away again, and this time I let him. He went all of two inches before he bumped into the wall. “Look, I’m not going to do this more than once a week. I can’t.”
“Why not? I wouldn’t need to take that much. Just a taste.” I’d started this to get him off the topic of blowjobs, but now I wanted a goddamn answer. What the fuck made bending over a dumpster for a hundred dollars better than earning his living from me? “Five hundred dollars guaranteed for ten minutes of work, no risk, you don’t need to go out in the cold, and —”
“No risk? Norisk?” he spat. The glare returned, and his dark blue eyes had gone black. “I stop going to work, I lose my spot. I lose my regulars. And then you get tired of me in a few weeks, and what the fuck do I do then?”
“Find a better job?” The words burst out of me, even though I knew I should’ve bitten my tongue. I could’ve argued that I wouldn’t get tired of him in a few weeks, but he wouldn’t have believed me — and I couldn’t bring myself to admit it was true, anyway. “You don’t like what you do. There’s no way you like what you do.”
“Don’t presume to tell me why people choose my job when —”
“I have no fucking clue why you chose it, but I know you hate it! I can smell it on you, how fucking unhappy you are. And this has nothing to do with ‘people,’ just you. I’m notpresuminganything. Iknow.”
“Yeah?” He pushed himself up on his elbow so he could do the staring-down-his-nose thing again. “Are vampires mind readers too, now, on top of the super-strength and the living forever thing and the…” He gestured up and down my body. “…everything else?”
Everything else? My cock had been that big before I turned, thank you, and there wasn’t much else there to look at. Was there? Laurie was gorgeous. I was…a guy. With some muscles, I guess, but not anything special.
“It doesn’t take a mind reader to interpret the look on your face every time you come back from getting picked up, Laurie.”
“Yeah, well, I — I don’t — fuck,” he groaned, and dropped back onto the bed, covering his face with his hands. “It doesn’t matter,” he mumbled through them. “It’s none of your business. And you shouldn’t have been spying on me.” He moved his hands so he could frown at me more effectively. “Whywereyou spying on me?”
Oh, I so didn’t want to fucking answer that. “I’ll answer your question if you answer mine.”
“I already answered yours!”
Shit, he had. “A different one. Not that one.”
“Not fair. I answered a question. Now it’s your turn. Just because I didn’t give you the answer you wanted doesn’t mean I didn’t answer it.”
