Page 1 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
1
SHANE
Shane dreamed of him again that night: his vampire.
His. That was how Shane had been referring to the mysterious fanged stranger who’d kissed him at Vitalis-Barron Pharmaceutical’s masquerade gala.His, like that single press of lips made Shane entitled. It had felt that way at the time, like a declaration.
A claiming.
Shane swore he could still conjure the vampire’s touch as they’d danced beneath the shimmering chandeliers, and the prick of the vampire’s fangs on his finger. And that kiss... Shane’s vampire had paused his flight from security just long enough to steal it before vanishing back into the night, turning himself from a glorious monster into a sentimental memory.
And Shane couldn’t stop remembering.
It had been five months since that fateful October night, but his lips tingled even now, curled in the bed that he hadn’t shared with anyone in years. If he focused on that sensation, maybe he could fade into the dream again, the hazy realm of sleep letting his fantasies run wild.
But Shane had a vampire he actually knew, who’d agreed to send him the location of her black market blood dealer later today. It had taken a week of buttering her up, promising extensively that he wouldn’t say who’d given him the scoop—and that, yes, yes, he was taking his own life into his hands, he knew how dangerous it was to go tromping through a vampire’s lair, even a temporary one, especially with the recent uptick in aggression the local hunters were displaying. But he wouldn’t be tromping, exactly. He just wanted an interview, and it wasn’t like they’d kill him for asking questions. He couldn’t chicken out now; this was the make-or-break point of hisWar on Bloodarticle.
Shane rubbed his eyes, scowling at the clock.
1:07 pm.
Before his mysterious gala vampire had crawled into his dreams and made a home there, he would never have been caught in bed past noon on a workday. But who was counting, really? No one. Mostly because there was no one in his life right now who knew him well enough to notice.
He rolled out of bed, clumsily kicking off the sheet, which seemed determined to cling to his calf. One glance at his glucose monitoring app confirmed that he’d slept in longer than he should have.
“Gross,” he grumbled, and opened his bedside table, only to remember that he’d used up his last cartridge. The new ones were in the fridge. “Extra gross.”
He slumped his way toward the bathroom.
The trek should not have been so hard, considering the abysmally small square footage of his studio apartment. As he forced his way across, he compulsively rated everything he passed: the desk chair and coffee table hit the middle of the list, as necessary furnishings that were not yetentirelyoverridden by dishes and clothes, but the laundry basket that had tipped over at some point last week was a zero out of ten, and the pile of stuff in the corner got negative points. He’d been meaning to donate it for so long that any day now it might acquire sentience. The whole trek felt like a quest, complete with thenear-death experience of his cat trying to maul his leg. The skinny black fiend shrieked and dove back under the couch after.
“I’m docking a whole star for that, you nasty trash gremlin,” Shane called after her, and made a mental note to pick up more treats that weekend.
And then clean.
He had been meaning to clean—wanting things tobeclean, if for no other reason than that he knew he worked better in a tidy environment—it just never seemed to get done. There was always something slightly more important. Like his groaning bladder.
The toilet paper had run out, but he stretched for the last tissue in the box by the sink and quickly washed his hands after. He gave the dirty-blonde stubble around his mouth a little glare and untangled the waves of his hair with his fingers before banishing most of it to a high ponytail. A shower was probably in order later. In all fairness, a shower had been in order two days ago but who was counting? Again: no one.
Still, it was a good thing hisShane Rates Stuffseries didn’t include past, present, and future selves…
At leastthisself had aproperarticle to write.
The bathroom door caught on the jacket he’d draped over its handle. He pulled it loose, but something else came free, a few of its white feathers fluttering slowly to the ground. His mask from the gala.
Another feather broke off as he ran a finger over it, and he boosted one knee onto the bathroom counter to delicately loop its tie over the edge of his mirror. It hung gracefully, gently swaying back and forth against the glass.
The rest of his costume for the Vitalis-Barron gala had been a last-minute compilation of a white shawl over white clothing. He hadn’t thought much of it as he’d donned it—he’d arrivedat that gala expecting a dull night of dragging gossip from the rich attendees as he drearily snapped their pictures for ChatterDash’s online celebrity column—but one smile from his vampire had changed that.
“Cygnus, is it?”Shane’s vampire had mused, the heat in his gaze so strong, even behind his mask of blood-red whirls, that Shane could remember it long after the other few details he’d seen of his vampire’s face had slipped from his mind. His vampire’s perfect Dracula costume should have given him away then and there, yet the confidence with which he wore it swept over Shane.“You’re certainly lovely enough to be placed among the stars.”
Shane had felt like a prize then, a beautiful thing crowned in constellations and hunted across the night sky. He extended his hand toward the hanging mask and gave the little bow he should have offered back when his vampire asked him to dance. The encircling of his vampire’s arms then had been a wonder and a comfort, his mouth so near. Now that Shane knew real fangs had hidden within it, the memory sent a lovely shudder up his spine.
He pressed his fingers to his own lips, watching the way they parted in the mirror and wondering if his vampire had felt that same parting as they kissed, the same soft gust of his breath. Whether his vampire might still remember it.
Even if Shanehadbeen forgotten, he regretted nothing. It had brought him here, after all, to his vampire fixation and his first prestigious, paid article since college.
Moving to his kitchenette, he worked out his insulin with far less attention than he knew he should have, over-estimating to keep from having to poke himself again immediately after he ate. He jabbed his pen into a pinch of his stomach skin. His body was made for needles, he’d told his endocrinologist early into his transition. When he couldn’t remember a time in his lifebefore diabetes, it kind of had to be. The prick made him think of fangs though, graced by smirking lips beneath a dark half-mask.
