Page 51 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
“I guess you can look around if you want,” Wesley was saying, his voice a little louder than before. “But I think I’d have noticed if there was a vampire in my house.”
Double fuck.
Still crutching the tracker, Vincent sprinted across the kitchen to the window above the sink. It only squeaked a tiny bit as he pressed it open, popping out the screen and slipping through. No time to put it back, he closed the glass entirely and dashed across the darkening yard, diving over the low fence in a roll that brought him out of view of the house.
He scrambled around the dirt and weeds, catching the first rock he could find, and slammed it into the tracker. Once. Twice. On the third time the metal case popped apart, revealing bits of wiring. Vincent crushed that too.
The rock slipped from his grip. He gasped in a breath, hunching forward. Deep blue streaked the sky, the last hints of orange fading in the west, but his muscles ached and shook like it was in the grips of sun-poisoning again. He had to get somewhere safe, a place where he could lie down and wait for his body to figure itself out.
From the house, he could make out the sound of Wesley’s voice, not in fear or anger, just casually guiding Mr. Babcock and his assistant around. He was safe. Of course he’d be safe. He was the kind of person Babcock probably believed he was protecting.
Still, forcing himself down the hill toward the cemetery behind Wes’s house hurt almost as much as the sun-induced pain did. He started typing out a message to Wesley as he moved, half jogging and half stumbling:I’m safe. Hanging out near the big mausoleum behind your house.He lowered his finger toward the send button.
His phone went dead.
19
WESLEY
Matthew Babcock had come to Wes’s door. Matthew Babcock had walked through Wes’s house. Matthew Babcock had called Wes’s vampire—his kind, thoughtful, adorably awkward vampire—a dangerous menace, a burglar, and a serial assaulter.
Because Matthew Babcock was hunting Vincent.
Wesley had never particularly liked the man during their email exchanges, but he’d never wanted to punch him in the jaw the way he did now. Instead of beating him to a pulp, Wes waved Babcock off with a smile that hurt his teeth, his fist pinched so tightly that he had to hide it behind his back to keep from giving himself away.
Neighborhood Protection Agency his ass. Wes betted the badges were printed in some Vitalis-Barron warehouse. Whatever the man said, he knew exactly who and what Babcock was, and it was no better than a modern-day vampire hunter.
The only thing that had kept Wes’s ruse intact long enough to distract him was the fact that Babcock seemed to have no idea who Wesley was. It made sense. He’d never sent the man any pictures, and even knowing his full name would still bypass Wes’s pseudonym-heavy social media accounts with their anonymous icons of his legs swinging over a five-thousand-foot drop. The fact that Wes had never introduced himself meant the hope he’d harbored that he might get into Vitalis-Barron at Babcock’s side had probably sailed. Then it had been attacked by man-eating mermaids and sunk by a kraken, because there was no way Wes could stand to work with Babcock again now that he’d dangled Vincent in front of him by calling the vampire dangerous, treacherous, and cowardly.
And Vincent was absolutely, positively none of those things. The potentially drugged human being pushed into a car last weekend? That had been a fully consenting Wesley, still a tiny bit inebriated, but if anything he’d been the one who’d dragged Vincent back to his place not the other way around. But if Vincent was the vampire Babcock had been hunting, that meant Vincent had run into Babcock before. Vincent had been assaulted by Babcock before.
And he hadn’t said anything.
A rush of anger shot through Wesley, not at Vincent but at everything that had taught the vampire that he had to bottle that hurt up. Wes opened their messages, writing so fast that it was a miracle his autocorrect caught all his typos.
LordOfTheWin
The hunters are gone now. You can come back.
He flipped to his emails, forcing himself to take a few long, deep breaths. The only contact he wanted with Babcock now was to kick him in the balls, but if he could draw the man’s location out of him, at least he could tell Vincent where to avoid. Each word came slowly, painfully through a tunnel of anger.
Matthew,
I have a thing right now but let me know where you’re at and I’ll try to join you.
Wesley
He turned back to his chat with Vincent. No reply, not even the typing bubbles at the bottom. As he stared at his last message, Vincent’s icon dim to one side, he remembered the way the vampire had looked at him just before Babcock’s knock, like he was scared. Scared of Wesley.
“I know you’ve enjoyed what we’ve been doing, and I won’t ever judge you for just wanting to have some kinky fun, but I…”
Wesley’s brain filled out the missing words with ease:I can’t do it anymore. If I’m going to be working here, we have to stop whatever this is. I respect your kink, but seeing you this hot for me is uncomfortable. You’re my friend, Wesley. I can’t have any confusion there.
And then he’d touched Wesley’s cheek.
Wes’s fingers hovered over the spot. That was a normal friend thing, right? A normalI-want-to-end-whatever-this-is-and-just-be-friendsthing.
He could feel Kendall laughing somewhere in the back of his head. He wanted to call her and let her explain what the hell Vincent had been trying to do, but he was certain that he couldn’t have a conversation with her right now without splitting into a million emotional pieces. Just sitting here, doing nothing, was already putting him on the verge of a breakdown. Besides, Kendall wasn’t the person he needed to talk to now: Vincent was.
