Page 38 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
But if you want a truth, here’s this: occasionally, when a truly wonderful coincidence happens, I wonder if perhaps God is real, and she created the world ten seconds before just so she could experience that moment with me.
Andres
What if you don’t recognize the coincidence when it happens?
Shane
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?
If a vampire wore a mask, did he have a face? Shane would find out. Sooner or later, one way or another. Coincidence or not.
16
ANDRES
Andres hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep since they’d visited Mercer’s metal shop, and he was beginning to feel it. Between his hours of sewing—and taking videos of his progress to put up on his channel, which he was thankful Shane had not connected to him yet, probably because it never showed his face—and starting a new infiltration project for Maul despite better Coachella results than expected, he’d been texting with the friend-version of Shane nearly constantly. He devoured Shane’s hopes and fears and poetic wonderings with the same passion that he drank his little swan’s blood.
With what time that left, Andres tossed and turned, his sleeping mind unable to decide whether roping Shane into this upcoming part of the investigation was a dream or a nightmare. In either one, he still felt a little like a monster. A monster who’d designed two impeccable outfits.
The rush orders from Mercer had been worth it, too, the jewelry matching perfectly to the clothing he’d designed. He would have paid every penny again, and the ten thousand on top of it, just to see Shane in them a single time, to run a fingertip along the upper edge of his collar and feel him tremble…
Andres clung to that imagery as he came up behind Shane in the dim alley. The chaos and joy of the boardwalk echoed from two streets over, just loud enough to hide his soft footsteps, butnot the inhale that Shane took as Andres traced three fingertips over his shoulder. “Shall we?”
Shane settled with a sigh, but when he spoke, his voice had that odd hollow ring he’d adopted at Mercer’s. Fear, annoyance, displeasure—Andres still couldn’t pinpoint it. “I think the theme of this night is that you give me orders, not options.”
“You’re always free to disobey.” He meant that, but with the way it came out in the sultry, deepened layers of his fictitious vampire voice, he wasn’t sure it sounded as such.
They walked around the side of the building, following a series of chalk-marked symbols to a simple wooden door. Andres knocked. The door cracked open, an androgynous person in an old-fashioned butler’s outfit peeking out. At the confident flash of Andres’s fangs, they were led inside, where an antique desk sat in an otherwise bare room with a curtain at one end, candles twinkling from sconces on the plain walls. Shane stiffened, halting in his tracks.
A rush of predictions spiraled through Andres’s mind—he wasn’t as accepting of this arrangement as he seemed, he couldn’t bear to go through with it, he’d realized that even pretending to belong to Andres in public was too despicable—before realizing just how many similarities this entrance space shared with the room Maul had nearly drained Shane dry in.
Gently, he pressed his palm to Shane’s back, rubbing his thumb up and down.I’m here for you, Andres wanted to say,and so long as that’s true, nothing will ever hurt you.
Shane released an audible breath. They approached the desk together.
Their host opened an elegant notebook, raising one brow. When they smiled, their fangs slipped out. “Names?”
“This is Cygnus and I’m his vampire.” He curled a finger through Shane’s hair as he said it, adding a little growl beneath his voice. From what he’d been able to learn of the place, theydidn’t seem to be actively forcing the humans to participate, but he knew the kind of thoughts that had led him to crave this scenario, and he could imagine just what monsters lay behind the curtain.
The host scanned their notebook and frowned. They took a second look at Andres’s mask. “I don’t have you on my list. Did you put any other names with that?” As they spoke, they withdrew a tablet from inside the top drawer, the technology breaking their otherwise faux-historic surroundings. They tilted its screen out of view, but seemed to be flicking through another registry.
Andres had expected this. “Were we meant to fill something out before arrival? I was recommended here by a friend who said she’d put in a booking for us. She didn’t mention anything else.”
The host’s other brow raised then too. “Which friend is this?”
“Tara Williams. She works here.” He said it with a confidence and poise that could outplay honesty. “I could call her, but I know she has duties tonight.”
“Oh, right, they’re on the floor I believe,” the host muttered, and Andres’s heart lifted at the casual use of Tara’s second set of pronouns. “Well, you won’t be as integrated as if you’d filled out our story forms, but tonight’s all free-play anyway. I’ll still need a few signatures for the non-disclosure and consent agreements.”
That was how they did it, then. They got their humans to sign things—things that were unlikely to hold up, should the club be taken to court—but which might convince someone unversed in the law or unable to find or afford a decent lawyer that they were trapped into this system of obedience and blood-letting. At least no one had asked for their legal names yet. Or Andres’s face.
“And I’ll need that mask off.”
Well, damn. He fiddled with Shane’s hair again, curling half his mouth up, a fang bared. “It’s part of our game, you see...”
“Just while you sign.” The host sighed, shuffling up two small stacks of forms. “Your identity is sacred to us, I assure you, but so is that of every person who’s already walked through these doors. We have nothing against masks, only those who have to hide beneath them from their own people.”
It was well said, Andres had to admit. He tried not to look at Shane, whose face had already tipped toward his, gaze searching like a spotlight. If he found out now, how much would that ruin? Everything, perhaps. Nothing, maybe. If Shane already didn’t want to be here, would he accept it more or less if he knew he had come with the silly, emotional fool he’d been platonically trading ridiculous musings with for weeks? He would shudder less, Andres was certain. And god, despite how much of a monster it made him, he didn’t want to lose that. Didn’t want to lose the way Shane had started looking at his lips, like he was remembering their kiss, or the tiny, whimpered moan that left him every time Andres’s fangs sunk in.
