Page 67 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
Andres looked confused for a moment. Confused, or… vacant. But then he blinked and his shoulders bobbed upward. He ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe I’m the one who’s not normal.”
The whole reaction certainly hit Shane as a bit irregular, though perhaps not in the way Andres meant it. It made him feel even worse than before. “I’m sorry. However you handled that trauma after doesn’t make it any less potent in the moment.”
“You could offer that advice to yourself, too,” Andres replied, giving him a weak smile. “You have every right to be hurt. Maulis…” He swallowed and removed his other hand from Shane’s thigh to run it through his hair as well. Partway through the motion, he seemed to rethink it, slowly reaching to fiddle with Shane’s hair instead. The touch appeared to calm him the same way it did Shane. “He’s a bastard. He’s been cruel to far more people than me. Crueler to them, I know. I have a special use to him, so he lets me do what I want, rents me my house, even listens to me sometimes. He never really tried to kill me.” Andres shrugged. “So it’s fine. I’m fine. But you don’t have to be.”
Fineseemed the wrong word, wrong in ways Shane couldn’t quite pinpoint, but that thought was derailed as the phlebotomist returned with a cup of juice and a collection of individually wrapped cookies and snack bars. She was followed by a golden-haired vampire dressed in a wool vest and slacks, a black turtleneck underneath. He wore a contemplative look with it, like he should have been stashed in the back of some dusty library musing on the meaning of life, or teaching Shakespeare to a room of posh graduate students instead of running a blood bank.
Shane felt his cheeks heat as the vampire approached, and he was suddenly conscious of how tightly he was holding his arms, still buried beneath Andres’s jacket. He couldn’t seem to let go, though. “I’m sorry. I’d donated before, I thought I’d be fine.”
“It’s all right, truly. That you were willing to try means more to us than the result.” The owner—Clementine—didn’t smile, but he seemed so sincere that it relaxed Shane. The gentle expression didn’t diminish as his gaze fixed on Andres, but his brow lifted. “Oh.”
Andres made a short, bemused noise. “First my work, now yours.”
“We just can’t get away from blood?” The other vampire suggested, as though he wasn’t sure whether it was a joke or not.
“I take it your romantic dilemma sorted itself out?”
Clementine smiled in response. “And yours?”
Andres drew a hand through the stray lock around Shane’s face, smirking. “Turns out, he remembered me after all.”
Whatever they were on about seemed amusing, but Shane could ask his vampire about it later. “Vitalis-Barron?” Shane suggested, trying to shift the topic.
“Right.” Clementine nodded. “So you’re taking down my old boss together?” He smiled properly then, his fangs out. “How can I be of service?”
Their conversation turned into a three-hour analysis of Vitalis-Barron’s security, layout, and employee population—in which it became clear that their security was extreme, their layout annoying, and their employees varied between those who knew the full scope of their villainy and the far larger set, who were only vaguely aware that some samples they received had come from vampires, but not that they might be taken under duress. Sometime around 2 a.m., Clementine’s boyfriend appeared with a pizza, and an hour after that their flagrant flirtatious touching, which would have put the couples in the dark corners of the Starlight Club to shame, had grown to the point that Shane and Andres excused themselves.
From there, the planning progressed to a text thread, where the remaining pieces came together little by little.
Dr. Clementine Hughes
On second thought, your best bet is probably to go after Anthony. He’s a bastard and a sociopath, but he also had the knowledge to fool Vitalis-Barron for years, and still—somehow—hasn’tbeen fired. I believe I am currently the only person from there who knows he’s been stealing from them, but I’ve decided to keep that information to myself because he still supplies a few nonhumans with medications they can find nowhere else, if only for his own selfish reasons. He’s loyal to nothing but the science, so he might not even need much convincing to help you.
He hasn’t missed this party since I started, so I imagine he’ll be there again. I don’t have any more specifics than that though, unfortunately. I’ve always avoided the biannual galas like the plague.
“We’re really doing this,” Andres muttered.
Shane glanced at them across the kitchen, catching their gaze for half a second as his vampire finished the dishes. He’d come to Andres’s house for once: a place that was, so far as Shane had seen, just as tidy as he’d imagined. He was dying to explore the upstairs—and one particular room in it, his mind still haunted by the image Andres had given Maul nearly a month ago. Shane didn’t care to be passed out or literally chained, but he burned at the thought of being laid bare and defenseless in Andres’s bed, whimpering and trembling beneath his vampire’s whims. If his vampire would make the next move already.
Shane had been imagining it all week—turning those musings into the best series of orgasms he’d ever had, in the bathtub, under the sheets, twice at his desk and even once in the kitchen. Yet Andres still had not tried to do more with him than kiss and nip, their mouth always agonizingly above his collarbone. Shane was about to be very annoyed, and an un-submissive level of demanding, if it continued.
At least he’d had enough else to occupy him, trying to track down the relatives and friends of those who Vitalis-Barron had kidnapped without putting himself in Maul’s line of sight. He’d uncovered little enough in the beginning, but the more he searched—and the more of his assigned clickbait articles heignored—the more he found situations where the murdered individual had people looking for them. He reached out to those he could, though he tried not to press them too hard, to turn up any more grief than he had to. Vitalis-Barron had caused enough pain without Shane adding salt to the wound.
As he worked, he kept coming back to the one oddity among the many, many names—one so-called patient of Vitalis-Barron whose identifier was left blank. They had no defining specifications—Dr. Blood had signed the patient’s consent form herself. The study listed for them had only the signifiersVR Study. Shane had found ten other vampires enrolled in it, all entering it around the same time, and marked as dead in quick succession after. The mystery patient had no death date, though, vanishing along with the VR Study.
It was so odd—and like the special project Dr. Blood had tried to recruit Clementine onto, it could have been nothing. Or it could have been so much more.
Andres snapped Shane out of his mental wandering with a soft touch to his shoulder. “I should start on your ensemble for Vitalis-Barron’s knock-off Met Gala today.” They looked almost embarrassed. “What are you most into? I’m sorry I never asked when I designed the first outfit. You could be a suit guy, for all I’d know.”
“I hate suits on myself, so you’re safe.”
It was the great tragedy of Shane’s transmasculine life. They just weren’t his style, even after transitioning. But then he’d donned the costume Andres had made him for the Starlight Club and felt like the world had aligned for him, letting him be suddenly perfectly beautiful and still perfectly a man; every aesthetic he’d wanted while yearning over Howl from the Ghibli movie and a dozen other beautiful animated boys, while no less the pinnacle of his version of masculinity.
“I love the flowing aspects of my Starlight Club outfit, and the sheer fabric, and the sparkles. I’m not into true dresses, but things that mimic the swirl of a dress when you spin? That’s a ten out of ten on the list of mundane things that feel weirdly like magic.” It was topped only by the very specific sensation he got from walking one foot after the other in the wind with his arms out, and the pressure of Andres’s fangs when they were just about to prick into his neck.
Andres was staring at that neck now. “And for skin? How much do you feel comfortable showing?”
“It depends on the setting. For the gala, I’d prefer more layers than I wore to the Starlight Club.”
