Page 136 of Envious Of Fire
Elias quirks an eyebrow. “What?”
“You’re like a boulder of passion.” Drake smiles. “That’s sohot. It may seem like Kyle has all the strength, being what he is, but you’ve got this …raging fireinside you, a drive to protect your loved ones at all costs. Like the drive is wired into you, as much a part of you as your limbs and your head. I find that to be not only something worth admiring, but incredibly sexy.”
Elias’s gaze flits to Kyle. “Why’s it seem like your new boy-toy friend’s hitting onmenow?”
Kyle grimaces. “Boy-toy friend? Really?”
“All I’m saying,” Drake goes on, “is why choose? Kyle can be with both of us. We can all be together.” He peers at Kyle. “You said your boyfriend gets off on being bitten, right?”
Elias’s eyes grow. “You told him that?”
“Why don’t we make him our blood boy?” suggests Drake. “Y’know, pass him back and forth?”
It isn’t so much that Elias’s face has gone cherry red with a mixture of outrage and humiliation. It’s also that Kyle picks up an instant burst of excitement from within Elias, as if Drake just struck the sexual-fantasy nail on its sexual-fantasy head, before that excitement is quickly suppressed like a fire, Elias dowsing it with a deluge of anger at the mere suggestion.
But even that anger is consumed once again by the fire of passion. Soon, all Elias knows is confusion as he sputters for a response. “I can’t believe you told—I’m not just a—It isn’t—” He stares at the table, the odd contents that litter it. “I’m—”
“God, this is turning me on so fucking much,” says Drake, wide-eyed as he watches Elias, “the adorable way you’re trying to deny it. Can we do it now? If this is our last day alive, can we just have a quick little blood boy session? I don’t even want to drink that much, if at all. It’s more about the scene, less about the blood. Get what I mean?”
Kyle rises from the floor, comes up to Elias’s side. “Babe, it was just a—a quick mentioning of—He and I were getting to know each other, I was trying to talk him out of these ‘baitingtasks’ he goes on for Lazarus, and—” He sighs. “I didn’t mean to betray your confidence, I really didn’t. I feel so shitty.”
Elias closes his eyes and says nothing. Even his emotional landscape has closed up, all of it a vast, blank space—a lake with water so still, it looks like a hole into the sky.
Kyle has come to read Elias so well that he can tell when he’s tryingnotto be read. But Kyle knows he’s probably feeling betrayed right now. Humiliated. Demeaned.
“Drake doesn’t have bad intentions,” Kyle says, wonders if this isn’t totally the wrong direction to go, then goes anyway. “I can read him, remember? Can’t read full vampires like Lazarus, but I can read Drake. He’s just … a kind of unchecked cocktail of horniness and loneliness. He’s even feeling bad right now.”
“Just a little,” agrees Drake in a tiny voice. “Mostly wanting you to try out being a blood boy. I think you’ll like it.”
“You’re not helping,” Kyle throws over a shoulder, causing Drake to shrug and resume picking at his nails, then returns to Elias. “I didn’t mean to disrespect what we have.”
Elias closes his eyes.
Kyle feels a flicker of calm inside Elias that pierces through the stubborn nothingness. Then another flicker. Then a splash of something warm and happy, like love, compassion, empathy.
It’s confusing. “Babe?” Kyle tries again.
“Maybe he needs a trial run,” suggests Drake.
Kyle sighs. “Please, stop making this worse.”
“I don’t think I am.” Drake rises with grace from the floor, comes up to the foot of the stairs. Elias’s eyes are on him, wary. “Wanna know how it feels? To be a blood boy? Have you ever had any teeth in you other than Kyle’s? I’m gentle.”
“Drake,” warns Kyle.
Until he feels an unmistakable drumming of passion within Elias—a cautious, complicated, but certain desire in him—that causes his body to stay rooted to the spot, watching Drake withwary frustration, his jaw tight, his muscles stiff. Drake seems to sense whatever it is that Kyle does, because he reads it as an invitation. He takes Elias’s hand, studies it, then brings it to his lips, where he gives it a soft, experimental peck. Elias does not appear to object. Then Drake moves to the wrist. And then the forearm, up and up. Elias’s eyes are glued to him every second, his face nearly angry, eyebrows tugged together, his lips pursed. Drake does not look away from Elias as the trail of gentle kisses lead up his arm, up to his shoulder, then toward his neck.
That’s when Drake stops and peers at Kyle.
As if asking Kyle for permission, rather than Elias himself.
Or perhaps he knows he already has Elias’s permission.
It surprises them all when Kyle takes Elias’s other hand.
Elias’s eyes flash as he stares at his boyfriend, parts his lips, lets out a short, jagged breath.
Kyle places a kiss on the fingertips, then takes hold of his boyfriend’s arm with both hands, lifting it, then slowly draws a line of kisses up his forearm, across his bicep, reaches the other side of Elias’s neck.
