Page 24 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
“So you just bite them in the dark instead?” Wes shot back, but it felt less like a barb and more like a void, hollow and needy.
This had hurt him.
Oh god, this had hurt him; Vincent’s intrusion, however he acted. Of course it had, and Vincent felt like shit for assuming otherwise. He lowered his face, a little tremble running through his shoulders. “I’m so sorry that I did that to you—to anyone.”
“But you did! You fucking did man, and—” He seemed to cut himself short, like he was battling something internal, his face pinched and his jaw tight. A shaky sigh left him, and Vincent wasn’t sure he’d ever seen someone look so determined and so defeated at the same time. “I just need to know why. Why do you think that’s okay?”
“It isn’t okay,” Vincent said, and he meant it, felt it, deep down in his bones. “I’ve been stealing blood from sleeping humans because it’s not forcing anyone else to suffer in my place. If I do it right, then they don’t even know I was ever there. And that doesn’t make it okay. But that’s why I can only force myself to do it when it doesn’t mean holding someone down or burning them with my bite. Because if my existence starts hurting anyone but myself, then maybe I don’t deserve to exist at all.” The last words caught in his throat, and he could barely lift his gaze back to Wesley’s after.
Wes watched him with a twisted expression, tight and emotional and entirely unreadable. “Or, maybe,” he replied, voice as low and tense as the look on his face, “fuck that. You have a right to live the same good, happy life as every other damn person.” He clamped his mouth shut at the end and looked away, towards the sheer curtains on the dining room windows and the obscured lines of the cemetery beyond.
Vincent wanted to believe him. It sounded nice. And it sounded selfish. But Wes—Wes who’d done so much for him, after being hurt so much by him—had affirmed it. Vincent’s chest swelled like something was trying to burst out from beneath his ribs. He didn’t know what to do with that. Instead, he let himself sink back into his hunger, turning his attention to the bag in his hands.
“I…” Wesley started, not meeting his gaze. He rubbed a hand against his neck. “Maybe you should…”
As he fumbled for words, Vincent began to drink from the bag. His fangs punctured the plastic easily. The first rush of blood that hit his mouth was the best thing he could have imagined. It didn’t matter that it tasted a little bitter, a chemical edge to it from the plastic, nor that it was cold and thin with none of the sweet, dark flavor of Wesley’s blood. His body needed it so desperately that it could have been months old, scraped off the concrete, and Vincent would have still guzzled it without a word.
“Ah,” Wes ended.
Vincent stalled to glance at him properly, but he shook his head.
“Drink your blood.”
Vincent did. He forced himself to slow as the bag neared halfway empty. If his venom glands still hadn’t cleared of the hot sauce effect, he’d need to portion out the rest. Whatever Wes said, he refused to bite someone if it hurt them, and there was no way he’d ask Wesley to go through the effort of finding him a second bag of blood. He pulled his fangs free of the plastic and licked. As he drew his head up, the blood immediately sprung from the holes.
“Fuck.” He impulsively squeezed harder, shooting the liquid at his face in a spray before he had the sense to pinch the holes closed. “I forgot plastic doesn’t heal.”
Wesley laughed, and the sound almost sounded like himself again. “Dork.”
“That’s cruel! I’m half dead; my brain is mush. Cut me some slack.”
Wes only grinned. “Hey, I’m just happy not to be the one covered in blood this time.”
Vincent paused from licking the side of the bag to glare at him. “Be useful and get me something to put this in already.”
“Fine, fine.”
“Thank you!” Vincent shouted after him.
Wesley banged around in the kitchen for a minute, returning with a container and a lid and a couple of paper towels.
Vincent stood to set his bag casually into it with the fang holes facing up. He rearranged it a couple times before managing to fit it so it didn't start leaking again and accepted the paper towel for his face, turning it a bright scarlet as he cleaned the blood off his cheek and the crook of his chin. When Wesley didn’t take the container back to the fridge, he blinked. “Do you want me to…?” He didn’t quite know what he was asking. What odd notions of vampirism was Wesley trying to abide by now?
“You’re going to drink the rest of it, right?” Wes asked, sounding just a little flatter than normal.
“I feel okay, I thought maybe I’d save it.” Feelingokaymight have been an overstatement, but he did feel quite a bit better, a little faint and weak still but the ferocity of his hunger had subsided and he didn’t have the overwhelming urge to sink his teeth into Wesley. Just the regular urge, the one that came with a nice array of other desires, ones that pulled his gaze over the warm tan of Wesley’s skin and along his full lips and broad jaw and down to his sturdy wrists, perfect not only for nibbling but for running a thumb along in gentle circles as he was pinned in place—if the man wanted that. Vincent found his desires now involved slamming Wes into walls for reasons that had nothing to do with starvation and everything to do with the fact that the sound he’d made as Vincent had grabbed him had left something throbbing and a little undone inside Vincent. But he was fully capable of resistingthoseurges.
Wesley’s jaw pulsed. His eyes kept drifting between the bag and Vincent.
“I mean, if you don’t mind a half-drunk blood bag in your fridge,” Vincent added.
“You’re sure? You still look a bit ghostly.” He pushed the container towards Vincent, then seemed to think better of it, pulling it to his chest instead.
“I think I’m sure.” Vincent rolled his tongue through his mouth. As the final traces of blood vanished, it left a weird aftertaste clinging to his gums, but there was something better about this than the way it had been feeling for the week prior. “That might have fixed the hot mouth problem, actually.” He extended his fangs, wiggling his fingernail and tongue between them and the surrounding teeth. The subtle burning that had resonated from them since the spicy ramen incident was gone. “May’e tha hos sauce was jus’ caugh in ma fangs‘racks?”
“Your fang sacks?”
Vincent stopped fiddling long enough to speak clearly again. “Tracks! My fangs’ venom tracks. God, Wes.” But he was laughing, and the flabbergasted yet thoroughly amused smile on Wes’s face warmed his chest.
