Page 35 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
“I bet you can’t crash this party so hard that someone kicks us out,” he said.
Vincent swayed just a little. “Betyoucan’t! Wait—no, Wes, I don’t actually—Wes!”
Wesley won that wager in exactly four minutes and ten seconds, shirtless, with a microphone. “Just be happy I didn’t get arrested this time.”
“Wes! How many times have you done that?”
Wesley only cackled and pulled Vincent along.
He wagered a celebrity impression that Vincent couldn’t get one of the slightly-too-early-for-Halloween tourists to take a selfie with him. After he lost, Vincent wagered a fake fact about the moon that he could skip more stones across the smooth, dark lake than Wes, and won. Vincent seemed to be doing an awful lot of the winning in their friendship. With anyone else Wes might have been jealous, but the way it lit up Vincent’s face and made him look as if, for one shiny moment, he almost believed himself worthy, and that was far better than any victory.
Wesley bought them an extra-large hot apple cider calledthe sleeping devilfrom a food truck parked outside a cemetery-themed tourist-trap bar after Vincent spent three full minutes trying to drunkenly calculate whether the price of two small drinks would be more than one large one. They walked by a series of gated marinas, passing the drink back and forth and cursing every time they found it was still scalding. Vincent pointed at the distant boat parties and bet that Wesley couldn’t guess what they were up to. After each consecutively more outrageous story, Vincent nodded and conceded the win.
“Hey, hey, I wager you my most tasty blood that we can’t have our own boat party,” Wesley whispered, leaning in like it was a secret. He’d been doing that a lot since their first stop; making everything a secret, as though this entire night were an inside joke between the two of them and not a one-way street of him trying to get his lips as close to Vincent’s skin as possible.
Vincent laughed, and he turned his head to whisper back, his face so near to Wesley’s neck that Wes could feel the warmth of his breath in the chilly October air. “How are we going to get a boat?”
“We’ll steal it. Just for a bit.” Wes grinned. He swept toward one of the little bobbing dock ramps that stuck out into the lake, pulling up his hood as he went. When he reached the locked gate that separated them from the boats, he gave it a little rattle and looked up. “Can you climb?”
He couldn’t quite see Vincent’s expression beneath the vampire’s oversized cowl, but his half-gloved fingers wrapped back and forth around the cider cup and he sounded a little wary. “The fence, yeah. But isn’t this illegal?”
“How many homes have you broken into, Vinny?” Wesley nudged him in the shoulder and then took a few steps back. With as little fumbling as he could manage, he lunged at the fence. He grunted his way up and over it, the metal cold against his bare hands and his muscles screaming. A rush of excitement hit him at the top, and he landed with a smirk, turning back to loop one arm casually through the bars of the gate.
“That’s not fair,” Vincent grumbled. But he pressed the cider into Wes’s hand and scowled at the top of the fence.
Wesley lost track of his movement in the darkness, watching the vampire crouch on the dock one moment, then balance on the top of the gate the next. His coat fluttered around him as he dropped down the other side, arms outstretched and knees pulled in. Wes could see the bat comparison; majestic and shadowy and so graceful he seemed to be flying. It took Wes’s breath away. He fought to regain his senses as Vincent casually took back the cider.
“So, a boat then?” Vincent asked.
“A boat!” Wes clambered down the dock, glancing into one then the next before randomly picking a white speedboat with pink and purple stripes. He all but fell off the edge trying to climb in, the gentle rocking of the dock turning to a slightly different rhythm as he jumped to the little vessel’s deck. He tottered and flopped into the cushioned bench beside the driver’s seat.
Vincent laughed, joining him at a much more reasonable pace for someone carrying a steaming drink. He scooted close until their thighs touched, then their shoulders, snuggling down like a wolf in a den. Behind them, the back of the bench rose high enough to block out the boardwalk and before them stretched the lake, a few glimmering lights on its dark surface. It felt like a world all their own.
This seclusion hit Wes in a blow, both stronger and somehow different from the privacy of his own home. It made him want to slip his arm through Vincent’s and lean his head on the vampire’s shoulder and whisper all the desires that had been aching within him—the craving for Vincent’s mouth on his neck and his hands dragging down the front of Wesley’s pants, but something more than that too. For the promise of just this, again: to sit in the dark, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip, passing back and forth their drink in silence and simply existing together.
It was a yearning that should have been less sexual, a step back from the lust of his initial urges, but it wasn’t. Instead it was magnifying, turning those desires brighter and bolder. And he wanted it, more of it, now and tomorrow and the day after, and the fact that he’d almost taken this away from them to get into Vitalis-Barron turned his stomach.
Telling Vincent what he’d done would break this as certainly as delivering him to the lab would have. But maybe he didn’t have to say anything? In the end, nothing bad had come out of his assholery. He’d learned his lesson. He could be better to Vincent now without telling him how badly he’d fucked up—without ruining everything they had together—couldn’t he?
It sounded like the dialogue option in a dating sim that made everything blow up later in the story, but the other option, the one where he destroyed this moment forever, sounded far worse. Certain imminent destruction or a possible future one? That wasn’t such a hard choice after all.
“You should really just bite me already.” It sounded a little less like he was offering his body up on a platter and a little more like a bad advertisement for a health product.
Vincent drew back just enough for it to feel like miles without actually shifting their legs apart. In the dark his face was a silhouette, his voice soft and almost pathetically tender. “You don’t have to do this for me, you know.”
“No!” Wes didn’t mean to shout but it came out that way, all of his emotions tumbling together. He added, calmer, “I want to. I promised you could back when we first met.” Even if he’d had other reasons at the time, and now all that remained was his craving for Vincent’s mouth on his skin and his desire to give the vampire something as important and personal as he could, to start making up for everything he couldn’t risk telling him.
“This means a lot to me.” Vincent sounded almost breathless as he said it. He shifted further away again—way too fucking far—so he could turn toward Wesley. “I’ll be gentle. I don’t have to touch you, outside my fangs. And if you’re more comfortable with your wrist or your inner-arm instead, those work too; I only go for the neck because it’s faster. But maybe you want it over faster, I get that too. Or if you want to—”
“Vincent, shut up.” Wesley laughed, grabbing for him in the dark and finding the front of his coat, pulling him closer with a fist of it. “I said I fuckingwantyou to bite me. We’ve practically done this twice already. More, if you count the times I was sleeping. You don’t have to coddle me through it.”
“Alright.” Two of Vincent’s fingers rose to brush the edge of Wes’s hand where it still held his coat. “Just tell me how you want it and I will.”
Tell me how you want it.
Part of Wesley screamed to hide, or run, or at least tuck his desires away. He could just give Vincent his neck and be happy with that. Not be the cringe-inducing weirdo who not onlylikedto be bitten but liked to be pinned down and roughed up too. But part of Wes was also still a bit buzzed and outside his head the world had turned to an odd kind of static.
“You know what you did when you were starving?” he whispered. “I want you to bite me like that.”
