Page 16 of First Blood
“You promise you’ll answer the next one?”
He swallowed hard, and there he went with the lip-biting again. Fuck, but I wished he’d stop doing that. Or let me do it instead, if it really needed to happen. My cock hadn’t even had a chance to soften yet. Apparently arguing with him turned me on nearly as much as holding him.
“Fine,” he said grudgingly. “But you went first. So if you answer one, and then I answer another, you’ll still owe me one.”
My next question was going to be why he worked as a prostitute in the first place, but now I was starting to think his answer was going to be ‘to pay for law school.’ Christ.
I focused on the wall next to his head. There was a water stain there that looked a lot like an outline of Indonesia, and I tried to figure out how many islands were missing. I couldn’t meet his eyes.
“I was keeping an eye on you because I was worried. You nearly got killed last week. It’s been snowing, and it’s too damn cold to be out there in what you wear every night.”
There was a long pause before Laurie said in a small, tentative voice, “Were you protecting your investment? I mean, you like my blood. There wouldn’t be any more of it if I got murdered. Or froze to death.”
I managed to meet his gaze then, and any annoyance I felt over being forced to answer melted away like snow in the sun when I saw how vulnerable he looked. “I was protectingyou.” It was my turn to swallow down the tightness in my throat. “Not that I was doing a very good job. I didn’t follow you every time you got picked up.”
For a second his eyes lit up, and then that light faded. He smiled sadly. “I don’t think I’d have been able to do my job if I knew you were watching. Knowing you were up on the fire escape watching me come and go was bad enough.”
Well, fuck. “I thought I had a great hiding spot. I was really fucking proud of it.”
“Victor.” He sighed, and then he…the little fuckerpatted me on the arm.Me. He…patted me, comfortingly. The last time someone patronized me I threw him out of a seven-story window. And — Laurie wasn’t afraid to do it. It hadn’t even crossed his mind that I might react badly. My chest felt so tight I thought it might implode. “You know, it’s kind of hard to miss a six-foot-something vampire with ridiculous shoulders in a leather trench coat stomping around in an alley and climbing rattly ladders and cursing whenever snow falls off the roof onto his head.”
“Okay,” I muttered, feeling the back of my neck heat until it prickled. I’d have welcomed some of that snow right then. Luckily my skin was olive to start with and a little tanned, and I didn’t show much of a blush on my face. “Moving on. My question.” Laurie nodded. “What are you using the money for? It’s not for living on, and you don’t do drugs or gamble or have any vices at all that I can see.”
“How do you know? I could spend all day shooting heroin and betting on gnome fights for all you know.”
“One, I’d be able to smell and taste drugs if you used them. Two, I’d be able to smell it if you went to gnome fights, too. Those little fuckers are filthy.” That earned me a smile, at least. A lot of the local gnome population was part of a cult that didn’t believe in bathing. They staged the fights themselves to finance their religious activities, which seemed to involve a lot of rolling in mud and having wild sex. Luckily for everyone’s eyes and sanity, they didn’t charge admission for that part. “I know, okay? I haven’t followed you during the day, when you’re not working. I haven’t hung around your apartment.” Except for that one time I’d jerked off in the alley under his window, but I was never telling anyone about that. “But I know.”
Laurie dropped back down onto the pillow with a huff, staring up at the ceiling. “I’ve never been to a gnome fight. Are they really that gross?”
“Yes, and stop trying to distract me. It’s my turn for an answer.”
There was a long pause, during which Laurie opened his mouth and then closed it again five or six times. “I send the money to my sister.”
Fuckingwhat? He wasn’t even doing this forhimself? “And she’s okay with that? Your own family — she — Laurie, fuck that!”
“She thinks I work at Mr. Fenwick’s winery!” He turned his head on the pillow to look at me, his eyes flashing with something between defiance and hurt. “She doesn’t know. She has a couple of kids, and she’s in a tough spot. It’s not her fault. She made one mistake a long time ago — sometimes people do almost everything right and it just doesn’t work.”
“Yeah, but it’s not your responsibility —”
“She raised me, okay? She fucking raised me when our parents were high, or when they were gone for weeks, and she was a better parent to me than they ever were. She wouldn’t want me to do this for her, and that’s why I haven’t told her. So don’t you fucking tell me what’s my responsibility and what isn’t! I’m not letting my nephews go hungry because I was too much of a princess to give a few blowjobs!”
His voice had risen to almost a shout, and he was up on both elbows, every line of his body stiff with tension and anger.
You don’t live as long as I had without learning when to stop arguing, especially when continuing to argue basically meant insulting someone’s family. I’d loved my own parents and brother as much as Laurie obviously loved his sister and nephews, although those feelings had faded into a hazy, muted sense of loss over the centuries. Would I have sold my ass to feed them? Without question.
That didn’t mean I wanted Laurie doing it, but I understood it.
I couldn’t argue with his motives. But Icouldargue with the execution of his plan. “Why aren’t you actually working at the winery, then? It’s not like Fenwick doesn’t hire locals. You’re pretty.” Understatement of the year. “The fairies who hang around the tasting room would love you, and no one else wants to work Saturdays because they get so wasted. Fairy puke’s resistant to most standard cleaning chemicals, or at least that’s what I hear.”
“If you’re trying to sell me on changing jobs, you might need to try a different approach,” Laurie said faintly, his eyes wide. At least I’d distracted him out of his rage. “That’s —eww.”
“They’re small,” I offered. “So I guess it’s kind of like spattered glitter-glue — and that’s not really the point. Why aren’t you working there? Or working a job wherever your sister is? Sharing expenses?”
He’d started to laugh when the words ‘glitter-glue’ came out of my mouth, but the laugh died on his lips as I kept going.
“I agreed to answer one question, and I answered it. I’m not getting into the details.”
I took a second to decide how much I wanted to know, and realized, to my surprise, that I wanted it even more than I wanted to preserve whatever dignity I had left. “Ask me the same number of questions, then. I’ll answer them all to trade.”
