Page 11 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
He popped the final brownie out of its container and broke it, handing one half to Vincent. “Might as well eat it now while we can actually taste it.”
Vincent nibbled on it experimentally. A little noise left him, more a hum than a moan, but it sounded just enough like something from Wesley’s dreams to make him feel light and wrong all over again. This was not okay. He needed to be sane of mind and focused on taking down Vitalis-Barron, notfeeling thingsabout the very vampire who had been sneaking into his room to feed on him for weeks. Searching for the first possible distraction, he snatched a bottle out of the hot sauce line up at random and slathered his own brownie in it before shoveling the thing in his mouth in one go. The instant burn shot his senses back into place, but they couldn’t quite overtake the memory of Vincent’s little flash of restrained bliss.
And now the vampire was looking at him like he’d lost his mind.
“Never ever claim that the Smith Garcia household doesn’t like it spicy,” Wesley wheezed, trying not to cough.
Something unreadable broke over Vincent’s face, a shambled mixture of pinched and flushed choking. It turned into a laugh as Vincent pressed his fist to his mouth and leaned against the kitchen wall. He looked somewhere off to the right as he muttered, “Yeah. Yeah you do.”
For lack of anything intelligible to say through his sudden rush of brain mush, Wes cleared his throat. “Noodles?”
Vincent nodded. His expression returned to the distant and mildly panicked one he’d worn all night, but that moment of—of what? Joy?—clung to Wes’s thoughts like a leech. Now he couldn’t seem to stop staring at Vincent. This was bad. Shy kid Vincent was one thing, and weirdly enticing vampire Vincent was another, but this Vincent was both of those while also being easy to joke with and casually sweet.
And Wesley had to turn him in to Vitalis-Barron. However well they got along now, that was still the plan. That would keep being the plan, even if Wesley couldn’t take his eyes off the vampire as he deliberated over the travel mugs, his lips a little pinched and his expression thoughtful. He chose the one with the warrior-princess cartoon.
“Astril was always my favorite team member, but Bellony had more fan merchandise, so she would do in a pinch,” Vincent said, tapping the faded picture.
Wes’s chest tugged itself into a knot. “Yeah, my mom used to say that, too.”
Vincent opened his mouth and closed it again. He glanced toward the hall out of the kitchen, the one that wrapped back toward the stairs. “I remember your mom because she would bring us sopes on Labor Day. Or Memorial Day? One of those Monday holidays. She didn’t even know us, but she did it.”
Wesley gave a little laugh, small and wet. “She always loved shoving food at people. She was just like that.”
Vincent nodded. He lifted his noodle mug like a toast. “Bottoms up?”
The return to topics unrelated to his mother should have released some of the tension building in Wes, but it still felt like a blister in his gut. He just had to keep pressing forward. Not think about her too hard. Not think about Vitalis-Barron either, not until he was at their doorstep tearing them down. So he grinned, lifting his own ramen. “On my count. Three. Two. One.”
Around the third rushed bite Wesley Smith Garcia realized he had made a mistake: a very big, very spicy mistake that was currently burning its way through the roof of his mouth and turning his lips numb and forming a debilitating lump in his throat. He tried and failed not to cough on the lump, and that only shot the spiciness straight up the back of his nose. His eyes burned. He was fairly certain that holes were being scorched through his skull and into his brain, his vision peppering with black spots. His knees went weak.
He slammed his mug onto the counter and barreled for the fridge. The milk carton almost slipped from his grasp three times in a row before he managed to twist off the lid. He took a long swig directly from the carton and poured a little across the lower half of his face for good measure. His world went from inside-an-active-volcano level hot to merely smoldering, and his vision cleared, his breathing almost evening out. One hand still on the fridge to prop himself up, he turned his attention back to Vincent. He could let him take a single bite, then reassure him that the ramen wasn’t worth the torment, and he was better off letting Wesley claim the victory by default.
But there was the vampire, mug tipped over his mouth as he drank the last of his hot sauce broth. He lowered it, panting in great sharp breaths, his cheeks bright red and his eyes wild. They barely seemed to focus on Wesley, locking and then slipping away and then locking again. “Did I… win?” he huffed.
“Fuck,” was all Wes could say to that. He held out the milk.
Vincent took it gingerly, pouring a little into his mouth at a time as he slipped slowly down the wall.
“Fuck,” Wes said again. If vampires burned up during the day, what if they burned up from hot sauce too? What if he’d just murdered Vincent Barnes. Murdered the vampire who might get him the truth about his mother’s death. “Dude, are you okay?”
“Think so,” Vincent wheezed. “Just—” He paused, guzzling more of the milk. “Need a minute.”
Wesley slumped onto the ground across from him. His own mouth was still a raging inferno, but he couldn’t bear to ask for the milk back. As Vincent seemed to shift through various stages of undeath, his legs loosened from where they tucked against his chest, slowly splaying between Wesley’s. One of his feet tapped Wesley’s as it waggled back and forth. Duct tape crisscrossed the bottom.
Wesley’s brow furrowed. That was taking the whole dumpster grunge to an unusual level, but to each his own, he figured. It wasn’t his concern. He shouldn’t have been concerned about this vampire who’d broken into his house to drink his blood in the first place. Except when he phrased it like that, his brain flashed up what it might be like for a vampire to consensually slip into his room and wake him with tiny nibbles as they tenderly pinned him down, their fingers tight in his hair, maybe their other hand slipping between his thighs—
Fuck, that was enough already. He couldn’t bear any more hot sauce brain resetting.
Vincent hummed softly to himself and continued sipping at the milk. If he had looked a bit wrecked earlier, he was absolutely dismantled now, his hair unkempt, cheeks still brightly flushed, his usually thin lips a little swollen and puckered, as though he’d just come out of a rather long make-out session. Wesley detoured away from that train of thought before he could let it spiral and tried to focus on how they’d gotten to this point at all.
“Oh god.” Wes popped back up. “I went to this little town in the mountains last year where one of those boutique hot sauce shops sold me what they claimed was the world’s spiciest sauce. I stashed it in the cupboard when I came back for winter break and then forgot about it.” Because his mother had vanished and never returned, and he’d had to throw her a funeral without knowing why. Without being able to prove why. He fumbled through the hot sauces, finding the little bottle sitting carelessly beside the others. “We used half of it.”
“Fuck you.” Vincent tipped his head back, his eyes numbly roaming the ceiling, but his lips were fixed in an almost goofy smile that made all of this kind of worth it.
Except Vincent had won.
Wes had been meant to win. This was going to be his way of getting Vincent to Vitalis-Barron and instead here was Vincent, half dazed on his floor and having earned himself control of a momentary piece of Wesley’s life. He could do anything with that—and he was a vampire.
What would a vampire want from Wesley? His skin tingled at the thought. To chase him through the house before he bit him? To pin him on his stomach, helpless, neck crested to one side? To drain him until his vision blurred and he couldn’t struggle anymore? Hopefully not that; it made him feel a little faint and the wrong kind of tense. Not that he was counting the others as the right kind of tense, even if they did put an exhilarating flutter in his stomach.
