Page 6 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
He did not want whatever pointless breakdown his body was trying to force upon him.
Another drink would help. If he made it a double, maybe it would drown his agitation enough that he’d be able to put thoughts of Shane aside and convince himself—and a random human—that he was still the vampire he so decisively showed the world; one who didn’t need to please Maul the way some of his subordinates did, or quake beneath him like the rest.
Shane’s scent still haunted him at every turn, though. His second glass was barely in hand when the tightness between his head and his heart turned painful. His eyes had to be moistening, because one of his contacts slipped awkwardly out of alignment, and when he tried to correct it, he only managed to pop it out of his eye entirely. It vanished onto the bar floor.
Fuck, this was stupid. He was stupid.
He yanked out the second one with a pathetic growl.
He shouldn’t have come. This could have been a decent night, curled up on his couch exchanging texts with his cousin—perhaps even hanging out with her for the first time all year and pretending he wasn’t still afraid she’d figure out whathe was after all this time. Pretending that the one person he loved wasn’t also so estranged. That he still knew what their relationship was about, even if they could no longer be the chaos children of their youth, breaking into hotels just to soak in the spa and making blood-drenched comedy-horror home videos with the thousand ketchup packets they’d smuggled out of fast-food restaurants.
He could still just go home, sit alone in his kitchen and watch Shane rate things through a phone screen, and wish they’d never met. His mind shouted to flee—to get to the car before the tidal wave of emotions rising inside him finally broke. With his contacts gone, and his eyes already tearing up, his poor vision couldn’t keep up with the dim lights and the pounding in his head. As he struggled to pull out his emergency glasses from his jacket pocket with one hand, he stumbled over a lip in the flooring, falling directly into another Fishnettery patron.
The man yelped as Andres’s new drink splashed, dousing his fingers and the front of the man’s jeans. Bitter alcohol dripped to the floor. Someone to his right laughed.
The lump in Andres’s throat broke, his entire persona cracking with it. He wiped back tears with the side of his arm, and shook his head, his brain sending up a series of curse words like alarms. Danger, danger, emotional collapse incoming. And he could still smell Shane as though his little swan was standing in front of him. “Fuck.”
“Shit, I’m so sorry,” the man he’d crashed into was saying.
Except it wasn’t justanyman saying it.
Andres was hearing things.
He pushed his glasses on.
Andres wasseeingthings too. Specifically, he was seeing Shane, standing with a hand still on Andres’s arm. In the dim fluorescence, his dirty-blonde waves were turned to a light brown and his scattered freckles washed out, but his pink lipswere as lush as ever and he had a softness to his features that provided him a masculine beauty. He wore an impeccably matched flannel, tattered coat, and hazy scarf situation, in greens and browns like he was some forest druid come straight from hibernation.
The sight of him broke Andres, a fresh flood of tears spilling over as a sound left him like a blubber. Shane was here, and Shane was seeinghim; was seeing the mysterious and majestic vampire who’d kissed him at a gala so many months ago, now without the mask that had held their act together, alone at a queer bar crying like an idiot over a spilled drink.
Andres’s little swan, his Cygnus, his perfect constellation, was here finally in front of him again, and the only thing he could wish for was to go back to being unseen.
3
SHANE
Filming in a public space always meant plenty of retakes, but this was the first time Shane was going to have to redo a shot because someone had literally run into him. It was fine, he told himself. He hadn’t been convinced that the clear-topped jellyfish tables outranked the not-so-subtle tentacle theming of the left room’s back corner, anyway. It just didn’t have the same artistic flair.
Shane shut his phone camera off—his text app showed nothing from his vampire contact yet, dammit—before sliding it away entirely. He could take the shot again, it was fine. After he dealt with the drunk fool in front of him.
The drunk,handsomefool, with his dark hair slicked back and his nails painted and—was that lace worked into his leather jacket? And those lips…
Shane shook his head, forcing his brain to recalibrate. He hadn’t come here to flirt, or to think about how every pretty man’s mouth reminded him of his vampire’s, or how every smile brought back memories of those ones that had been given only for him, like seductive inside jokes that had dug their hooks into Shane’s chest. How every casual movement made him think of his vampire leaning in for the brush of lips that had claimed the number one spot on Shane’s kiss list, the night he’d forever be comparing every other dalliance to. And regardless of his prettyface and fitted fashion and adorable glasses-nerd vibes, this person could hardly topthatchart.
“Fuck,” the stranger whispered, staring at Shane like a deer caught in the headlights.
God, this was uncomfortable. “I’m so sorry, that was my bad. Do you need…” Oh, shit—tears. Was this personcrying? Shane’s gut twisted. “Are you okay?”
That had clearly been the wrong question, because the stranger’s pale and panicked expression worsened. He wavered, his drink sloshing again.
Shane grabbed his arm out of instinct. His gaze lingered on the stranger’s lips. They parted with an intake of breath, a single tear sliding over them.
“Do you know me?” the stranger asked.
Do I know you?That wasn’t an unusual question here, where the same regulars might pass each other five or six times before finally colliding—in this case literally. There was an instance where Shane wanted to say yes, if only for the subtle brightening in his chest that whispered hewouldknow this beautiful fool someday, and that maybe that meant he always had, for better or worse. It was romantic fantasy though, and the reality was probably simpler: that they’d bumped into each other one of the times Shane had managed to drag himself here last month, and Shane’s inability to catalog faces for more than a week meant he couldn’t place the stranger.
The longer he said nothing, the weaker the stranger looked, like the noise and neon of the bar was swallowing him up.
“No, I don’t think so,” Shane replied. “But I’ve got you now. Come on, let’s sit you down.”
