Page 29 of Thirsty
“Charlie,” Lorenzo said shortly. His pinched expression was swiftly devolving into a glare.
Charlie sighed. He supposed he did owe Lorenzo some sort of apology for hounding him so much over the last few days. “Look, about last night,” he said lowly, as Maggie sidled past them back to the party. “I’m sorry if I offended you. I realize I was asking a lot of questions, and—I don’t know. Maybe I was out of line.”
“Uh-huh,” Lorenzo said. His glare softened, but he still looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.
Charlie was hit with a grim pang of genuine guilt. “Look, if I touched a nerve or something—I’m sorry,” he offered. “Really.”
“Hm,” Lorenzo said, his dark eyes darting up and then away; but some of the tension left his shoulders.
He still looked like he was itching to get away. Just then, Charlie remembered. “Oh, I almost forgot.”
He dug around in his pocket and pulled out Lorenzo’s new driver’s license. “Here you go.”
Lorenzo just stared at it, shocked. “You didn’t.”
“I did,” Charlie said, trying not to sound smug.
“But—how?” Lorenzo asked. “The rules—”
He shrugged. “I bribed a DMV employee.”
Lorenzo looked thunderstruck. “What?”
“Don’t worry, it’s still a real license,” Charlie said. “Icould go to jail, maybe. But I doubt it.”
Lorenzo seemed to be having trouble processing. Charlie glanced at the license. “Good picture of you, though.”
After he just stood there for another moment, Charlie held the license out. “So,” he said, “a deal’s a deal.” As Lorenzo finally reached out to take it from him, he added, “Looks like you’re stuck with me.”
Lorenzo’s fingers brushed Charlie’s as he took the license, and the rough drag of it sent a shiver down Charlie’s spine. He met Lorenzo’s eye, and suddenly he was right back in that dark, narrow alley, caught in Lorenzo’s arms and the lee of his body; inside the almost painful desire to have Lorenzo’s hands on him, his fangs breaking his skin, his hot mouth dragging down Charlie’s neck.
Lorenzo was staring at him, looking strangely open and lost. And for some reason that reminded Charlie of the dream too.
Lorenzo yanked his hand from Charlie’s and stuffed the license into his back pocket. “Yes,” he muttered, and bolted out of the kitchen.
Charlie swallowed thickly.
Chapter 8
Sometimes Lorenzo’s supernaturally heightened senses felt like a curse. Usually he didn’t notice them; he’d been a vampire for over two hundred years, so he was used to the sharp eyesight and sensitive hearing by now. He remembered being overwhelmed by it back when he’d first turned—on a ship, of all places, suddenly feeling the pitch of the boat and hearing the boiling spray of the ocean to such a heightened degree that it felt like torture.
Now, of course, it was better. Enhanced eyesight helped when you could only ever go out at night, and the sharp hearing was useful. The heightened sense of smell was the strangest part, though. Humans ran the gamut—many smelled awful, like body odor or vape smoke; but sometimes he could smell a person’s blood so clearly that he could almost taste it on his tongue. Most of the time he tried to just shut it out, though it was hard to do so entirely. Rachel smelled like pears and rotting eggs; Maggie smelled like pebbles and rainstorms; Isolde smelled like something primally terrifying that he couldn’t put his finger on, and a little like horse.
Here, in his car, as he drove down a dark, winding road with Charlie in his passenger seat, it was very, very hard to shut out his scent.
He smelled nice—soapy and clean, the faint call of blood under a much stronger layer of warm human familiarity. He’d gotten a whiff of Charlie’s scent before, but it was stronger here, in the small car. He was starting to notice all its delicate layers—the floral and artificial scents that must have been his laundry detergent, fabric softener, maybe cologne; the city scents that clung to him, as they did all humans, going largely unnoticed—soot and dust.
And beneath all that, the sweat of his skin, tangy and tempting. And something more; a scent that seemed to seep into Lorenzo’s very bones; something just of Charlie’s, like a color only he could see. It drifted around him, maddening.
And it was impossibly distracting, knowing what Lorenzo knew now.
He hadn’t been able to smell, touch, or taste Charlie in the dream, because he hadn’t actually been there—it had all been in Charlie’s mind. But Charlie’s mind had still pulled him close, unafraid and clinging. Charlie had turned the dream into something hot and inescapable.
Charlie wanted him.
It was only a dream. There was no way to say for sure what it meant or what it portended. It was just that here, now, with Charlie right next to him and his delicious scent bottling up in the car, he couldn’t help but wonder what Charlie would be like—what he would taste or smell like—if Lorenzo touched him like that for real.
He cracked his window and cool air rushed in, dissipating the scent. He breathed a small sigh of relief. Charlie glanced at him. “You okay?”
