“You have a type,” he muttered, nodding to the pink ice cream.
Rahil lifted a brow. “Are you saying your taste is better?”
His taste was limited yet highly varied, and right now it was perfect: long hair, brown skin, a pair of gorgeous fangs in an even more handsome smile. But he shrugged. “It’s adequate.”
Quick as a flash, Rahil slipped in to lick at the ice cream in Mercer’s cone.
In place of the horror and disgust Mercer knew he’d normally have felt at the intrusion was simply a quiet affection, born of a feeling he couldn’t quite place, much less name. He chuckled. “So?”
“Disgusting,” Rahil concluded. “I don’t know why you’d ever go for it.”
“Well, it does something for me, I suppose.” He felt his lips quirk and he let them, the awkward grin undeniable, if not unabashed. The joy must have secretly been an intoxicant because not only did he add, “You’ve got a little something,” but his body reached over to wipe a smudge of tan cream off the tip of Rahil’s nose. Before he could stop himself, he instinctively tucked the fingers into his mouth.
Mercer couldn’t decide if the way Rahil looked at him then was worth everything and more, or the force that would end his life. Probably both. At this rate, he was starting not to care so much about holding back.
And that meant the anxious part of him had begun to worry over whether or not the things he wanted were even on Rahil’s radar. He hadn’t been very specific when he’d asked Rahil out. He’d impliedcasual, when what he now realized he’d wanted was the option ofslow, and those could be very different things to different people.
“So, besides the blood and such, you’ve been primarily invested in hookups?” He remembered Rahil telling him there were only ever first dates: bleed ’em and leave ’em style.
“I… mh.” Rahil grunted, looking decisively at the lake. He picked at the edge of his cone with his nail. “Usually my dating isjustfor the meal, you know? Sometimes the sex is nice, too, but it’s mostly a quid pro quo.”
Mercer did not thinkthiswas how Rahil had described it last time; thatsometimesseemed to be doing a lot of work for him, and it made Mercer’s heart ache. Here he’d gone weeks refusing to let Rahil bite him, when they could have both gotten a very nice trade out of it the whole time. It seemed stupid in hindsight. Then again, if he’d let Rahil bite him in the beginning, maybe it wouldn’t have felt good to himthen. He’d found Rahil a gorgeous specimen to look at, certainly, but he hadn’t trusted him, hadn’t been soothed by his touch or seen the deep secrets in his past, hadn’t witnessed Rahil look into his soul in a way few others ever had.
It was those things that had made the experience breathtaking; they were their own part of the toxin.
But it was also those things that had made Mercer sure from the start that he would never want a hookup, or even a casual date, withanyone,and he’d come this far trying to ignore that fact. “I know what you said about the—the term of endearment”—Mercer couldn’t quite get himself to form the word suddenly—“but are you ever looking formorethan quid pro quo?”
Rahil shot the question right back at him. “Are you looking for anything at all?”
Mercer felt he deserved that. He grimaced. “Well, with the right person. I didn’t think so, but I’m less sure now. I’m hoping I’ll figure it out.”
“I’m hoping so, too,” Rahil said, and smiled.
Rahil paused by the railing to watch a party yacht cruise by, and Mercer joined him, feeling inches too close and feet too far from Rahil at the same time. What would it be like to wrap an arm around his back, to squeeze gently against his hip, to settle the side of his face into Rahil’s hair? Incredible, he imagined, better than his dreams. But how would it feel to have done all of that a thousand times, and to know he’d get to do it a thousand more? That was the sensation his heart had once yearned for. One he’d achieved, only to find that a time would always come when hecouldn’tdo it all again—when all he had was a cooling corpse and an imprint of fangs and a hundred-thousand invisible cuts in his heart.
The thought made him tuck his free arm against the railing and fling his mind out to sea.
The yacht that slowly drifted through the little lake-harbor in front of them seemed to glimmer with the effects of wealth: sparkling champagne and sheer dresses dripping with glitter and shiny silver Rolexes. Even in that perfect celebration though, a single pale-skinned young man with coiffed white-blonde hair sat alone at the back of the boat, his hands clenched in his lap. Alone. Unhappy. Perhaps those two things were unconnected, though. Perhaps this man was simply thinking of his baby at home.
Perhaps—
As Mercer watched, a tall, broad young man who seemed to be the life of the party—his jacket already off and his top button undone—detached himself from a gaggle of appreciators and slipped toward the back of the boat. He tapped the solitary man on the shoulder, laughing and shoving him before pulling him up.
Despite the distance, Mercer swore he could see the shift come over the loner, his meager protests giving way to a looseness, as though the person who’d come for him was a light against the darkness of the world and a shield for its pain. He let his exuberant friend coerce him onto a jet-ski beside the yacht and pressed up against his broad back as they roared away from the party.
Mercer’s heart ached, warm and wanting. He knew he was too invested in the simple emotions of two distant strangers not to be projecting onto them, but he could not deny the way their perceived friendship tugged at his chest. Who did he have, to pull him from the darkened edge of the crowd and whisk him away to better things? Lydia? But he could not even claimthatanymore, and really, was it his daughter’s responsibility to ensure that he enjoyed the world? Without her, though, he had no one.
The back of Mercer’s throat caught. He could feel his ice cream dribbling down the side of his cone, over two of his fingers, but he couldn’t seem to go back to it. With Rahil standing at his side, he could feel his own empty chest in a way he’d been avoiding at home, surrounded by photos of his tiny two-person, one-dog family and mementos only they knew the secrets to—Mercer Jacques Bloncourt was alone.
His daughter had been right about him.
He was that lonely whale after all, his voice echoing not into an endless sea but within the prison of his own creation. He was the one sitting at the back of the boat, waiting, waiting, but when someone had finally come for him…
Rahil nudged his shoulder gently into Mercer’s, and it was like coming awake for the first time in years.
“You all right?” Rahil asked, and Mercer couldn’t wrap his head around what the words meant.
He genuinely, desperately, wanted someone in his life, someone permanent andhis, someone who knew to look past his stony exterior, who teased him and cared for him and pulled him into the light.
