Page 74 of By the Pint

“Not really,” he admitted, a sheepish expression on his face.

“How is it that a person with unlimited amounts of time has never watched a movie?”

“I don’t have a telly in my room at home, but I’ve watched movies before, sure.” He didn’t look so sure. His brows curved both upward and inward at the same time. I had to smother the urge to straighten them out with my thumb.

“Yeah? Name one,” I said instead.

He laughed in defiance, clearly not ready to admit defeat. “You know, the one with that guy, what’s-his-face, with the hair, and there are like, eight other guys, and it’s a heist or something in a St. Clouds casino.”

I actually knew the movie he was talking about.The Vault of Valkyrie.

“My flatmates made me watch it with them once. But Taur had been mentally fucking his wife the whole time, and then remembering I saw his thoughts, apologising and slipping right back into them; and Goldie was having some existential work crisis about a character in a game he’d designed; and Mal spent the whole time gathering my opinions on getting a larger dining table to accommodate all the extra people that were in our flat, and whether it should be an extendible one, and could I just ask Taur if he’d be up for making one at his job at the timberyard. I don’t know, it was pretty hard to concentrate.”

“Yeah, okay, fair point.” Same reason I never went to a movie theatre. Or an actual theatre.

“What’s yours?” he asked, poking my bicep.

Suddenly, I didn’t want to chat anymore. “Uh,Necromancer’s Noir?” I really just phrased that as a question.

“Don’t know it.” He raised that brow again. “What’s it about?”

Without realising, I picked up the end of his quilt and ran my fingers over the lines of stitching. So neat. Looked like a machine had done it.

“Hey, what’s it about?” he asked, softer this time, as though speaking to a shy child. He scooted closer to me on the sofa.

“It’s super old. Black and white. It’s about this guy, a vampire’s familiar”—Dima cocked his head to the side, but kept his eyes on me—“he, uh, he falls in love with his master, and she turns him into a vampire.”

“Hmm,” he mused. “So meta.”

“It is not meta,” I said, perhaps a little too defensively. “The vampire is a woman.” Plus, if it were to be meta, Dima would be my master, not Killian.

But no, that was stupid anyway, because I’d need to be in love with him. Which I definitely was not.

“It’s not meta,” I said, again into my lap.

“Sure.” His mega-watt Dima grin was back in full force.

“Hey, stop it,” I said, to which he started laughing. I wanted to slap a palm over that infuriating smile, but I figured he’d probably lick my hand.

“Correct,” he said, laughing more, hearing my thought because I’d done a shit job of protecting them again.

Instead, I tugged on the end of his quilt. For once, he held it in his hands.

His laughter turned into full snorts and then, impossibly, wheezing, then—

“Ouch! Crap!” Dima dropped the quilt and brought his finger up in front of his face. “Fucking needle.”

“Oh no, poor baby vampire, did you pwick yourself?” I covered my smile with the pad of my thumb. Dima didn’t bother to hide his. Or couldn’t.

“You made me bleed!” he said, shoving his finger under my nose.

“I see no blood.” I grabbed his wrist and brought my eye right down to his extended finger, inspecting it like I was looking through a microscope.

“Give it a second. There will be blood. It was really deep.” He jump-laughed, like he was being tickled, which gave me a great idea.

“No! I’m not ticklish!” Dima yelled, giving the impression the exact opposite was true. “Don’t tickle me. Don’t you dare. No! Look! There is blood!”

Sure enough, after a moment, a teeny-weeny drop of blood beaded at his fingertip.

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