Page 14 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
Wesley gave his bandaged neck an experimental pat, which made Vincent snap his name with a glare. He wiggled his hand at the vampire and stood, carefully stripping off his shirt.
Vincent stared at him. His throat bobbed yet again, before he looked away so suddenly it seemed like he was trying to unsee whatever he’d just taken in.
Wesley glanced down at himself, quickly checking that there was nothing obvious he should have been embarrassed about. All normal. Maybe Vincent was a prude? Wes bunched the shirt in his hands once, then extended it over. “Oh here, do you want it? Because you couldn’t feed on me. You’re probably still hungry.” The nicer he was, the more likely Vincent would come back.
It certainly got the vampire’s attention back like a flash. “Are you asking me if I want to suck on your bloody t-shirt?”
Wes made a face. “It does sound gross when you phrase it like that.” He pulled the shirt away and crossed to the foyer, instinctively stepping over the creaky spot in the flooring.
Behind him, Vincent shifted, then groaned. “No, wait, I never said I didn’t want it!”
Wesley turned back. The vampire had draped himself over the couch, his lip pulled between his teeth and his eyebrows tight and a little pleading. Wes threw him the shirt. He snatched it easily out of the air, his expression agonizingly soft. “Thank you.”
And there he was, being hot again. And adorable. With fangs. But those fangs had been in Wesley’s neck before he’d given permission. Those fangs were going to trade him the proof he needed to take down Vitalis-Barron. And then, those fangs would be free again, once the pharmaceutical company was swarmed by police and its CEO on trial and its laboratories locked down. Free to keep biting more humans in the dark.
Wes’s gaze darted back to Vincent, his mind conjuring all sorts of disastrous things, things like Vitalis-Barron’s downfall and a particular vampire breaking into his room to thank him for it. He charged up the stairs before the ridiculous ideas could take over any more of his body.
8
VINCENT
Vincent stared at the bloody shirt, trying to fathom how this awkward situation had happened, not once, but twice. Twice, with the same human. It had to be Wesley’s fault. Wesley was a nuisance, he decided. A nuisance with delicious blood and a gorgeous body, a thick, sculpted chest with some grabbable looking pudge around his stomach and an adorably wild trail of dark hair creeping up from below his pant-line nearly to his navel. Even his tan-lines were cute.
Which was, all in all, a terrible development and Vincent knew it.
He held Wes’s shirt to his mouth and breathed. It smelled just as much like the man whose scent surrounded him, delicious and dark, a little muskier and tangier than the blood itself. In short, it smelled like heaven.
As the urge to feed slowly grew in his gut, Vincent fought back a wave of mortification and let himself bundle the soaked fabric to stick it in his still burning mouth. He sucked. It wasn’t anything like drinking from Wesley’s neck, but it was still his blood, sweet and thick, and Vincent was ravenous despite the constant, searing throb that seemed to be inflicting him from lips to throat.
If only his parents could see him now.
Vincent had a silent chuckle over their imagined disgust and shifted a new slip of the shirt into his mouth. There was not nearly enough blood here. He’d have to wait until the spiciness settled and find a house to break into. Again.
“You still get to pick something for the night,” Wes said, bouncing his way back down the stairs. “Just nothing that involves your mouth, please, I can’t ruin any more shirts for you.”
Vincent tried not to choke. If Wes would stop saying mildly sexual things at every turn, maybe he could stop picturing Wes doing sexual things just as often. But they seemed to be complete accidents, and Vincent was hesitant to put a stop to them, in part because he didn’t want Wesley to feel self-conscious—if that was even a state the man was capable of—and because most of them were absolutely hilarious. And Vincent would be happily rerunning the visions they produced in private.
“What?” Wesley leaned against the back of the couch, looking just as delicious in his clean shirt as he had in the bloodied one, his skin a warm tan and a slight gleam to his full lower lip, like he’d licked it recently. “Did I ruin all your monstrously vampiric plans?”
“Absolutely all of them.” He could not believe he was saying this, but somehow the words were coming out of his mouth anyway, spurred on by the shirt he was now wringing between his hands. “Frankly, all my pastimes involve my mouth. I should have my opposable thumb permit taken away.”
Wes looked like he was about to say something, then promptly shut up. For the first time since Vincent had broken into his house—possibly for the first time since they’d met, over a decade and a half ago—Wesley looked away before Vincent did, almost flustered, and didn’t respond.
That felt wrong. It felt like it was Vincent’s job to be shier and smaller and more pathetic. He dropped Wes’s shirt and snatched up the nearest of the five visible game controllers. “Actually, opposable thumbs practice would be good for me. For my wager reward, I want to play one of your video games.”
That seemed to turn Wesley off and back on again. He blinked. Then his face lit up. “Yeah, dude, of course.”
It had been a frantic impulsive decision but now that he was holding the controller, watching Wesley boot up the console, a little flutter of excitement formed in Vincent’s chest. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed his own video games from his high school years. He wondered how long it had taken his parents to sell his console, or if they’d just thrown it into a dumpster with all the other things he hadn’t been able to fit in his suitcase, tossing him out of their lives the way they’d probably been wanting to for years.
As Vincent flicked along Wesley’s games list, pointing out some of his favorites—“Oh shit, did you ever play the old Dragon Eras? Those were the best. They’re like my comfort plays now.”—Vincent noticed a pattern toward the bottom: a collection of new vampire-related games. There had to be a least ten of them, excluding the first-person team shooter further up that had vampires in its list of general villains along with zombies, terrorists of uncomfortably specific nationality, and incredibly attractive assassins. Not a lot of points for realism.
Popular culture had never been great about accurately representing the vampiric community. A lot of people knew it, or at least admitted it was likely the case when pressed. That didn’t stop the ideas the media presented from leaking into the social subconscious. It didn’t stop the small subset of loud, angry anti-vampire bigots from feeding off those subconscious ruminations with vapid claims about the inherent danger of a group of people who were, sure, stronger and faster than others, but could also die from a mere half hour of direct sun exposure or a gram too much garlic. Vincent had grown up as a human in this world. Once upon a time he had been used to these sentiments, but even a callus could blister when placed under constant pressure.
He did his best not to sink into that misery—he knew just how trapped he would become if he did—and focused instead on the absurdity of the thing. Wesley Smith Garcia had managed to pack his catalog with over ten different vampire-focused games, most of them role-play heavy, which was more than Vincent had known existed in the mainstream. He tracked back through them with a cackle. “Youarea fetishist.”
Wesley looked a bit like he wanted to die. “I am not! I developed a perfectly healthy interest in vampires after I found out one of them had been biting me in my sleep.”
Vincent flushed. The dates of purchase for the first couple he opened did seem to track with that. It gave Vincent an odd mix of feelings: he would rather have not been sexualized for his vampirism, but had Wesley considered that part of him sexually appealing, Vincent certainly wouldn’t have said no. By the way the man was subtly scooting away from him, Vincent figured both those scenarios were out of the question. That was fine.
