Page 21 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
Wes?
Just let me know you’re not waiting up on me.
Wes would quit staring, any day now. Any day, his chest would stop with the subtle burning working its way up his esophagus. It wasn’t that he worried over Vincent; not after the way they’d met. He was only concerned that if Vincent stayed away now, he would never get the vampire to Vitalis-Barron. That was all.
HotMouth
Okay, I see you’re on so I’ll just assume you got this?
LordOfTheWin
Are you okay?
Sorry I was having a moment.
You can come anyway, of course. I’m more than a sexy neck.
He regretted the message the moment it sent. Maybe Vincent staying away was actually better for him. If he distracted himself with Vincent tonight, it would be another evening of laughing at his awkward jokes and basking in the little twitches of his lips and thinking way too much about how his mouth would feel on different parts of Wesley’s body, all while ignoring who the vampire was beneath the act and the betrayal Wes had planned for him. Through all his agonizing, he barely realized how long it took Vincent to respond.
HotMouth
You have a neck though, which could be a problem for me right now.
Not that I’m about to attack people at random or anything. I just might have trouble sitting next to you for long periods of time.
LordOfTheWin
Usually when someone says they’ll have trouble sitting next to me, they want to jump me in a very different way, so at least you’re being original about it.
HotMouth
XD
Vincent’s icon went its offline gray with his final emoji haunting the bottom of the chat. He wasn’t coming. And he was starving, so starving that he couldn’t just sit with Wesley and play video games. The kind of starving that reminded Wesley of the vampiric portrayals in those very games, the salivating lunging monsters who would drain their victims dry without a second thought, or else stop their feeding at the very last moment, just as they realized they were killing someone they loved.
He’d paused the vampire dating sim game on one such scene when he’d been playing before dinner, and it popped back up as he tapped a button on his controller. The vampire’s long nails dug into the player character’s arm so hard that blood welled beneath the painted points. Their fangs were bared and their eyes red with something that seemed halfway between hunger and lust. The player would live through it, of course. They would live to be fucked and bitten again, perhaps kick their vampire lover around a bit with their newly acquired martial arts skill in between. Maybe they’d even be equals for a moment. But then the vampire would swoop back in, hungry.
Wesley quit the game and, in a spontaneous rush, he deleted it too. The moment the file was gone, he sulkily maneuvered back through his past purchases and re-downloaded it. But he couldn’t bring himself to play again.
It didn’t matter how much he found himself cackling at Vincent’s jokes or grinning at his phone every time a new message appeared. Vincent was still the vampire who’d broken into his house. Maybe they weren’t all like the media portrayals, but this particular one shared some qualities with the bloodsuckers in his video games. He was still willing to go to great lengths for blood, still a predator, still a certain kind of monster. Wes just happened to like this kind of monster, was the problem. He liked Vincent.
And if he didn’t get the bloodsucker to Vitalis-Barron soon he was in danger of liking Vincent a little too much.
Wes squinted at his phone screen in the darkness. He barely shook as he began to type.
Matthew Babcock,
Actually, scratch that. If I can get a blood bag from you, I’m pretty sure he’ll drink it.
Wesley
10
VINCENT
By his seventh day without blood, Vincent Barnes was starving.
It was the kind of starving that superseded his hunger for traditional food, making a black hole in his gut that felt hollow no matter how many peanut butter sandwiches and baggies of nuts he forced into it. It ate through him like an infection, turning his skin pale and papery as a ghost and making his shaggy hair brittle and dry, matting it into tangles that he didn’t have the focus to work through. He couldn’t reach a deep sleep due to the incessant tug in his stomach and the dryness of his mouth no matter how much water he drank. Bags sunk under his eyes and the whites were shot through with a grimy, black substance that had started leaking a little out the edges when he closed them for too long.
