Page 51 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
Shane could choose to hate him for it.
The knowledge was still sinking in, pressing its slow, terrible hooks into Andres’s heart. He’d been focusing so much on how Shane wouldn’t be able to see him as the over-emotional friend and still tremble beneath his touch and melt in his arms, that he hadn’t considered the option where Shane decided to no longer see him as either. Not lover or friend, but a monster.
Andres tried not to think about that. He tried to believe that if only he could knit the two halves of himself together strongly enough, they could still move forward. They could become one of the couples from the Starlight Club, mixing romanticized moments of power play into an ordinary life of extraordinary love. They could.
He just had to prove that.
Shane hadn’t replied yet. Standing at the railing, a soft flush in the moonlight, he looked fragile suddenly. He held his arms against his chest, his brow tight as he gazed across the water. Beneath the worry and the pain, part of Andres longed to unwind him, to peel him apart, to see him quaver and melt andfeel his pulse flutter. The more Shane bundled himself tighter, the more that impulse grew.
“Do you know what it feels like,” Shane asked, “when you’re so consumed by another person, so quickly and so completely, that when you lose them, even for a moment, it’s like your whole being is in suspense, pulled out of time? You become a Schrödinger’s person; whether you’re alive or dead depends on them, but you won’t know yet, not until they return.” He dragged his fingernails against his neck, pressing them to the bruises where Andres had bitten. “Is that love, or is it obsession?”
“I think it’s both, and it’s neither.” Andres stepped forward, soft, monstrous steps, coming up behind Shane like a creature of the darkness. “The feeling is the same, but it’s the action you let it drive you towards that makes it one or the other.”
Just keep loving, he’d been told by a stranger a few months ago, golden hair and fangs and so much of that singular emotion in his eyes that it had hurt to look at. Andres wondered where that vampire was now. If his loving had held him together or torn him apart.
Andres refused to keep letting his own obsession make that choice. So he’d have to try love and hope for the best.
Shane made a sound like a creature dying. Or one coming to life. “You know, I’m waiting for someone,” he said, his voice shaky with a humorless laugh.
Andres took one last step, until he was hovering over his Cygnus, around him. “And you’ve been so patient for me.” He whispered the words, leaning in. “But I think you’ve waited long enough, my pet.”
19
SHANE
The pieces had come together for Shane slowly but surely, drenched in numbing denial.
“Andres?”he’d asked the person he could recognize only as the farthest thing from a stranger, a part of him expecting—hoping—to be corrected. A tremble ran up his spine, and he gripped the boardwalk railing as he repeated the name. “Andres?”
He tried to turn, but a hand pressed against the side of his head and another cupped his hip. The hot breath on his neck slid all his suspicions perfectly and painfully into place.
“Be still for me.” Andres’s lips brushed Shane’s skin as he spoke. Shane couldn’t find the strength to disobey, his knees so weak that only the vampire behind him and the railing before him held him up.
His vampire, Andres Serrano.
Andres, whom Shane had been harboring a small, guilty crush on for weeks now, smiling over every time his phone chimed, was his vampire. His vampire, who’d been so very good to him tonight, who’d gotten him the interview of his dreams and then pressed him to a wall and bitten him like he was precious. Two personas, who’d both worn masks, kept this secret, lied through their teeth just to trick him into—intothis.
Whatever the hellthiswas.
Andres loosened Shane’s tight arms, winding through them, wrapping him up. A panicked tremble in the back of his mind shouted through his shock, screaming at him to refuse. To fight—
“Give me your neck.” Andres had it already, his mouth against it, but Shane knew what he was asking for: not just the flesh and the blood but the surrendering. Shane’s submission, the way he’d given it to his vampire every night.
But this was not justShane’s vampireanymore.
“Your neck, my Cygnus.” There was a little growl to his voice, so dark, so sensual and yet it was now unmistakably Andres’s.
His presence felt smothering, claustrophobic, and Shane curled toward the wood, instinct pushing him away from Andres. As he did, Andres loosened again, and Shane could feel the tremor that ran through the vampire’s chest. Two of his fingers slid beneath Shane’s, just as he had done during their first bite in the alley: a kind of safe word.
“Cygnus?” Andres said, like a question. Or a warning. “I want you. Will you let me?”
Shane trusted his vampire—hadtrusted, until now, untilthis—but in that moment he feared the predator behind him, feared him properly for the first time. It was a terrible sensation, thick and ugly like a room with nothing but empty blood bags and a needle jabbed into his arm. It closed up his lungs and got into his chest, and he could not—could not—
“No!” He squeezed Andres’s hand like he was trying to draw blood.
Andres let him go, his presence vanishing from Shane’s back in an instant.
He could breathe again.
