Page 39 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
Wesley’s approximately ten thousand different bath and body supplies lined the shower rack. An irrational number smelled faintly like Wes’s skin and hair, but somehow they took away from the overall Wesley aroma of the house instead of adding to it. After the whole night with him, Vincent had almost grown accustomed to the human’s natural scent. That should have made it less wonderful, but instead the familiarity turned it from a temptation at the front of his mind to a soft, happy thrill in the back.
Standing in Wes’s shower now, Vincent could imagine the man was here with him, giving rambling explanations of each product, laughing as they bumped each other in the small space, Wesley’s fingers fiddling with Vincent’s hair, working their way down Vincent’s body. Vincent cringed as the thought brought to mind all the things he wished he had said or done at dinner, or on the boat, or waiting for the cab, or even the first moment Wesley had opened the door that night.
He leaned on the wall of the shower and let the hot water soak over him. It felt like he’d come too far, skipped too many right times to tell Wes he liked him. Like he had doomed himself into this, maybe.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy the thoughts of Wesley’s body beneath him and Wes’s hard dick pressing against his hip, without the man ever having to know. He sunk a little lower against the tile, replaying that memory of the boat in excruciating detail as he rode out the pleasure he’d so desperately wanted then. It wasn’t as good as it would have beenwithWesley. But damn was it still good.
15
WESLEY
When the hot water ran out, Wesley assumed he must have taken longer in the shower than Vincent by at least fifty, possibly sixty years—a time he hoped Vincent would blame on the chill and not the fact that one thought of the vampire’s bite had set his body right off again. He’d laid beneath the stream, his head tipped back and one leg propped up, and taken all the time he’d desperately wanted Vincent to take with him, easing out his pleasure for so long that the sudden shift from hot to cold had been enough to make him come all on its own. But when he turned the water off he was met with cursing from across the house and something that sounded an awful lot like a particularly awkward vampire falling out of a shower.
“Vinny?” he shouted, wrapping the towel around him as he climbed out. With his body temperature no longer in the Antarctic regions and his brain a haze of tired and post-orgasmic, he felt a bit like he was sleepwalking.
“Fuck!” Vincent shouted back. “I’m okay.”
Wesley felt himself grin. He ruffled his clean hair into something that loosely resembled his usual part and shoved on his clothes, yawning as he made his way downstairs to flop on the couch and mindlessly scroll through his phone. He ended up on one of the vampire comics he’d been reading that morning—more a comedic series of skits about a trio of nonhuman roommates than a real story with anything romantic or sexual about it, but the vampire roommate had a few one offs with human dates that seemed a bit too close to what he’d experienced with Vincent to be coming from anything other than personal experience.
Not that he and Vincent were dating. Platonic kink exploration was a thing, right? That’s what Vincent had called it: not a fetish but a kink. It made sense, though he was fairly certain there were also aspects to it that weren’t as sexual as kinks. Unless there were kinks that weren’t necessarily sexual? He would have to look that up.
Wesley had barely input the words into his search bar when Vincent came thumping down the stairs. He shot up, turning his phone off like he might be judged for it, despite Vincent having already agreed to partake in his kink and admitted to enjoying it just as much as he did after. But all his embarrassment vanished as his eyes locked on the vampire and his chest tried to escape his ribcage.
Vincent looked different, impossibly, minutely different, like every little piece of him had been rearranged just slightly. He rubbed a hand-towel over his wet hair, bundling the ends to squeeze the water into it. The dark strands were clean and combed through, shining a little in the electric lights, and where they’d just begun to dry they seemed almost silky. The blue of his eyes looked brighter in comparison. The slightly grimy shadowing and light fuzz of stubble that Wes had always taken as a part of his overall grungy look were gone, leaving his face to its own natural, harsh contours. His feet were bare for the first time Wesley had ever seen and his nails looked like he’d found a manicurist hiding somewhere in Wes’s bathroom. He even seemed to hold himself a little looser, his weight relaxed onto one hip. The edge of his borrowed shirt rode up, revealing a thin waist, and his arms—arms Wes had never seen before—were well defined around their gangly joints.
Vincent paused, the hand towel still in his hair. “What?”
“N-nothing.” Fuck he really needed to pull it together. “You just clean up well.” He laughed, but it sounded wrong in his ears. God, his dick was doing things it didn’t have a right to after all the shit it had already pulled tonight. “I swear your skin is like an entirely different shade of pale.”
This new shade was clean and crisp and lovely and came with a bright pink flush in the cheeks. Vincent muttered, “It’s been a while since I took a shower like that.”
“It’s a good look on you!” Wes tried to reassure him.
But it seemed like some invisible damage had been done.
Vincent looked away and back again. As he lowered the towel from his hair, Wes caught sight of a series of short scars along the inside of his left arm. His brain stalled on them, leaving him to stare a moment longer than he should have as he tried to place their meaning. Oh. Oh,fuck.
“If my existence starts hurting anyone but myself, then maybe I don’t deserve to exist at all.”
Wes wanted to be angry, angry at the entire world for ever making Vincent feel this way, and angry at himself for laughing at Vincent as a child and fucking with him as an adult and for not being able to convince him of just how much he deserved to exist in any and every way possible. But all Wes could feel now was horror.
“I should go,” Vincent said.
No, he shouldn’t. Wes didn’t want him to. He wanted Vincent to stay and be safe and happy and know that there was someone who cared about him, as a weird shy kid or a vampire or anything else he was or ever would be.
Except Wesley had just cared so little for him that he’d nearly delivered him to Vitalis-Barron. In his rage and recklessness, he’d valued the company’s downfall more than the life of a vampire who was good and kind and deserved so much better than to be an unwitting sacrifice. If Wes had trusted Vincent, perhaps they could have worked together on this, but now that was not even an option, because the moment Vincent knew, he’d never trust Wesley enough to rely on him for anything again. And that knowledge was still skipping around in Wes’s head, making everything else too hard to put into words.
So instead he squeaked something like, “We’ve got time, it’s cool.”
Vincent’s brow tightened. He crossed his arm over his chest. “You’re tired.”
“I’m not—” Wes’s body chose that very moment to yawn. “Not that tired,” he finished.
Vincent edged toward his damp clothes piled beside the foot of the stairs, his prior relaxation vanishing with every tiny step.
“Tomorrow night?” Wes pleaded. “We can game then, or eat, or go on another adventure, or you can bite me, or you cannotbite me, whatever you want. Or it can be Sunday. Or Monday. My schedule’s basically just you.” He didn’t know what else to say, how else to say all the things inside him. Instead, he settled on, “Please?”
Vincent’s shoulders slowly loosened, the edge of one side of his mouth quirking. “I have to see if my phone works.” He swallowed. “But Sunday? How about Sunday.”
