Page 28 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
But Shane did not want Andres to fuck off.
As painful as it was to suppress his growing crush, he wanted more of them in his life. He thought, not for the first time, that a relationship with them would be honest and appropriate and healthy—nothing like the connection he had with his vampire.
He didn’t want his vampire to fuck off either though, and that was the problem. It seemed Shane was always thinking about one of the two. With Andres, those daydreams were soft and fluttery, a giddiness he hadn’t felt for someone in years, but with his vampire… the fire those fantasies set ablaze was one Shane had never felt before.
And, god, he really had to stop envisioning himself chained up for his vampire’s pleasure.
Even all these days later, he could not get out of his head the exact way his vampire had spelled out that fabrication of Shane in bed, like it was such an easy thing to imagine. It haunted Shane, choked him in the night, made him burn between his legs. He’d find himself tracing his own throat, like part of his subconscious expected to discover metal there.
There was something wrong with him, surely.
The way he’d accepted all this—his vampire’s ownership of his blood, his demands and his pet names—was already putting into question Shane’s sanity. No one should have been able to waltz into Shane’s life and force that on him. But with his vampire, he didn’t feel forced. He felt guided, gently manipulated by protective arms, a cage that was also a shield and blanket.
He could not stop alternating between giddy texts with Andres and hot anticipation of the moments when he’d be in front of his apartment after dusk and he’d feel a breath on his neck, a hand fluttering down his arm. Every time, his heart leapt and his legs turned to putty, his breath catching in his chest as his vampire whispered a greeting into his ear, possessive and dark. They didn’t talk nearly as much as they had that first meeting that Maul had interrupted, but his vampire would always respond to him with the same intense fascination and joy that he had so many months ago at the October gala, continuing conversations from their prior meetings without missing a beat. He still wore his mask for every encounter, though between thedarkness and his tendency to creep up behind Shane, a monster amongst shadows, it seemed more for the drama of it than anything else—the same reason he’d given no name yet, forcing Shane to think of him only ashisvampire.
Over a week after their night in the alley, Shane knew the drill, knew to stand outside in the shadows near his regular parking spot along the street—he’d stopped going any farther from his house after sunset, the quiet fear of running into Maul at the grocery store or walking along the boardwalk always lingering in the back of his mind.
He twirled a finger through his hair as he finished a message to Andres. The longer their relationship—friendship—progressed, the more obvious it was that he knew Andres—this person he hadn’t seen or touched since their first meeting—far better than the vampire who pressed his mouth to Shane’s neck every night. Though he supposed they both had masks of their own, even if Shane had seen Andres’s face before they’d vanished behind a wall of text.
The moment Shane slipped his phone away, he was pushed against the side of his car with a pressure so soft it was barely there, the murmur of his vampire’s greeting behind him. Always behind him.
It was lovely, and it was empty too, somehow.
Before his vampire could get too far—could distract him from all thoughts of relationships with his overwhelming touch, Shane asked, “I’m not just a thing you take pleasure in, am I?”
“Well, I certainly do take pleasure in you,” his vampire replied, chest brushing Shane’s back. “Do you think there’s anything so wrong with that? Do you wish that I’d find you less lovely, or that you’d taste of ash on my tongue? Would you prefer to be treated like a ball and chain and not a delicacy?” As he spoke, he gently drew Shane’s hair behind his ear, each touch like fire.
Shane couldn’t help but bask in that flame even as he tried to keep his mind centered. “If I did taste of ash, would you still have paid so much to save me?”
“You’d have to unravel time with that question,” his vampire replied, running two fingers along the side of Shane’s neck. “If you tasted any differently, you would not be yourself, and I wouldn’t have seen you that night at the gala and known that my world would stop dead if I didn’t dance with you. And if we hadn’t danced, you would never have realized what I was. Perhaps you’d never have come looking for vampires at all.”
Shane felt his whole body tremble at the brush of his vampire’s mouth on his neck. “Imagine I had. Imagine I was dying behind that curtain, but you found no pleasure in the thought of me.”
“We all want to believe we’re the kind of person who’d sacrifice for a stranger, don’t we?” His fingers tightened into Shane’s hair, but it didn’t hurt, just held him there, held his soul aloft. “Yet I don’t think most of us truly would.”
“That’s a hopeless outlook.”
“It’s realistic.” He nuzzled his nose against the back of Shane’s ear. The edge of his mask pressed against Shane’s temple. “If there was any reality where I’d left you to die, then I would have been a fool and a monster.”
Shane wanted to melt into him at those words, to defy every possible warning sign and be consumed. Instead he whispered, “You don’t know me.”
The hesitation—the tension—that radiated from his vampire in that moment could have cut like a blade. “I sink my teeth into your flesh and I taste your life,” he finally breathed. “I know you better than you might think, my little swan. Now, give me your lovely neck.”
Shane tipped his head back, leaning into his vampire’s touch, but he continued thinking of those words long after the pain of the bite had faded into bliss.
The twinge it left behind made him feel like he knew his vampire far more than he realized.
12
SHANE
Juggling both relationships with Shane became easy strangely fast. Every time he slipped up behind Shane on the way to his car in the evening or as Shane lingered with a drink on the dark porch in front of his apartment, Andres could be his favorite parts of his vampiric presence: sensual and in control and just a little bit demanding, and with the Shane he spoke to over text, he could bare the deepest parts of his soul, switching seamlessly between the two; soft smiles for one and dark smirks for the other.
But Shane would never truly belong to either version of Andres in the way he wanted, not while his mask was necessary.
He was accepting of Andres’s bite. He never fought, never asked Andres to stop, merely trembled, his lashes fluttering and his breath quickening. As much as Andres enjoyed that vulnerability—that fear—he worried more with each passing meeting that he’d played their first encounter too mysterious. He had thought, vaguely, that Shane would either grow comfortable with him, or else push back if he didn’t. Instead he kept quivering and wilting and finally submitting.
Andres couldn’t stop his doubts from creeping in, slow and sure.
