Page 59 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
“I’m sorry. I forget my… my strength,” he muttered and reached out a hand to Shane.
As Shane slipped his fingers into his, Andres flinched. Another little shudder went through him. Shane shifted closer.“Is it the sun? I didn’t think to close the blinds until just now. I’m a terrible boyfriend.”
“It’s fine.” Slowly, Andres straightened himself, pulling his body up to sit on the edge of the bed. He looked unsteady but when Shane reached to help him, he battered the offer away. “I mean it, I’m fine. I’ve had far worse.”
You don’t look fine, Shane wanted to say.
Andres must have picked up on his hesitation, because he smiled weakly. “I have a little pain, but look, no shaking.” He held out his hand as though to demonstrate. “The aches have always been the worst part for me, but that’s easy to work through.”
“Blood helps, doesn’t it?” Shane asked. “I feel great, if you want to feed?”
“Maybe after your breakfast and insulin.”
“That will be fifteen minutes.”
This time the quirk of Andres’s lips looked more genuine. “I’m not dying, pet. And some food would do me good, too.”
Shane grumbled all the way to the kitchen, but exactly sixteen and a half minutes later, he sat in Andres’s lap, nibbling on a toaster waffle while his vampire lapped at his neck. It felt so normal that it caught in his chest, like just existing in that quiet domesticity was filling a place in his heart he hadn’t realized had been empty. There were sexual pieces of their relationship that he’d missed in previous ones—and the way Andres could so casually slide fangs into Shane’s neck first thing in the morning and trace the skin along the lip of his pajama pants in between bites of breakfast were certainly doing things for him—but he’d missed this too, thiscomfort. Not being made to feel like he needed to tone down who he was or quietly conduct his insulin routines out of sight. Hell, Andres would probably help him with his testosterone too.
And it wasn’t that his vampire withheld all judgment—they were certainly side eyeing the general clutter Shane had let pile back up over the weeks—but it was as if each objectionable part of Shane only made Andres care for him more.
The blood must have helped, or perhaps Andres truly was as fine as they claimed, because as soon as Shane had finished eating, they licked his bite closed and pressed a red kiss to his temple, and, to Shane’s delight, his vampire set about cleaning the apartment. Andres ignored the sunlight that still slipped in from between the closed blinds and save for an occasional wince that could have been about anything, and a momentary meltdown over a spider they forced Shane to remove from the premises while they hovered on tiptoes at a distance, they did seem fine.
Fine enough to start ordering Shane around.
Andres pointed to the pile of old stuff in the corner. “Why is this still here?”
“I was going to take it to the thrift shop down the street, but it just looked so sad at the thought of leaving me…”
“You’re outrageous,” Andres grumbled, pressing their lips to Shane’s hair. They picked up the entire load in one arm and headed for the door.
“Andres, thesun.”
“It’ll be five minutes,” they replied, already twisting the handle.
“Andres!” Shane scolded. “I’m perfectly capable of taking it out.”
“All right.” But Andres didn’t move from the door, staring Shane down like a predator on the hunt.
Shane groaned. He maneuvered to them, hopping over the cat’s toys and a stack of unread books and a pile of trash Andres had collected, and accepted the over-full donations box. “Fuck you.”
Andres kissed him properly, slipping one fang into Shane’s lip just enough to deliver a blissful dose of venom that tingled like a caress between Shane’s legs. They whispered against Shane’s mouth after, “I’ll do your laundry.”
“Fuckme,” Shane responded.
Andres grinned, gripping his chin possessively. “Oh, don’t worry, my pet. I fully plan on taking over every little piece of you in time.”
Somehow Shane made it to the thrift shop and back. When he returned, Andres was in the building’s basement, doing Shane’s laundry, so he started on one of the five useless clickbait articles he was supposed to finish that day, in between checking his phone for messages from Tara or their contact. Two-thirty in the afternoon, and still nothing.
“Aren’t you worried?” he asked when Andres returned.
They shrugged. “It’s only been sixteen hours. Give it another three. Then I’ll be worried.”
But Shane couldn’t maintain that kind of calm. Between what Andres had told him of the vampires’ valiant escape the night before, and Shane’s stand with the humans, they figured the Starlight Club had come out with limited casualties—limited being an unfortunately non-zero number. But that didn’t mean nothing else had followed the vampires home. And now more than ever, Tara’s contacts should have been willing to speak up. They had no guarantees, though.
He tried to remind himself that even if this fell through, they still had the Vitalis-Barron spring gala coming up—the Met-inspired one. But the more they knew before attending, the better that night was bound to go. And if anything was going to change long term, they’d need all the help they could get.
With his thoughts constantly swarming back to Vitalis-Barron, Shane finally gave up the clickbait in favor of his vampire article, transcribing Tara’s interview and bulking up hisoutline, sifting through the records of everyone he’d spoken to over the last few months to connect the dots and back up Tara’s pain and fear and hope. He shot Andres questions in between, to no avail.
