Page 11 of Overexposed

Our eyes remained bound while our bodies were that close, and I held on to him, held him close while each thrust was fire and color, the strobing brightness of a camera flash. It felt so good to have him inside me.

His cock was still thrusting when I spilled. There was something here that made me love this scene, Auris, powerful yet caring, but setting the pace. Taking me. And he decided the how, the speed of it. This was a kind of caretaking, and allowing it was reprieve as much as it was pleasure.

“Yes, good. So pretty,” he commented when my cock jerked, untouched but stimulated between our bodies. “So messy, but what a pretty mess it is.”

I bit my bottom lip and wished I could grow hard again, come all over again while he was still inside, while everything was still this phenomenally good.

It wasn’t how the world worked, though, or at least not my frail human body.

With low moans tearing from his lips, Auris went harder, buried a hand in my hair, and offered up a handful of bruising thrusts. I could feel him inside, his release, the warmth, all of it.

At that point, I wasn’t sure what words would have suited the situation, our tangle of limbs, panting breaths slicking over damp skin. I wanted to burrow into him. His arms tightening around me were more than just welcome. I needed them, needed the anchor that they were.

In that moment, the realization became visceral: I was not who I had been a month ago. I would never again be who I had been then. I didn’t know yet whether this new person was someone I liked or not, but this was me now: loved and sheltered, dark dreams haunting me if I let them, brightness and warmth in my vampire’s arms.

* * *

The next two weeks were, contrary to what I had imagined, busy. Auris had people. Staff. He had a tendency to keep everyone whose skills he appreciated on retainer, and when your new boyfriend needed to have all his stuff moved to storage while being in a different country during a pandemic, that came in handy. One of his people, a woman with scary good memory named Linda, took me into my old apartment via a Zoom call on her phone, and I pointed out what I wanted shipped, how to unplug stuff, all the little details.

Auris’s silent approval of me taking part in this transition made me feel as pleased as Eva’s cat looked whenever she snuck into our apartment to enjoy the afternoon sunlight from one of the kitchen chairs.

Throughout all that activity, I had a few meetings with the new management team, and instead of an app, we were moving forward with a new website dedicated to all the places where only the shadows of humanity remained. I called it Hidden Hollows, as a small nod to the church without which none of this would have happened. The church in which, within moments, my life had been changed forever.

“You look happy,” Auris said one afternoon.

I was lounging on the couch in the sunken floor part of the living room. I’d started out doing work -- like I was supposed to, but I’d ended with watching videos of the National Museum. They were all pre-pandemic, but there was a slow reopening happening, although that had been a week ago. This week, the news reports were talking about a new wave, so who knew. Auris glanced at my screen.

“I was legitimately working. Until a minute ago.”

“I saw that. You were very focused. Good work ethic. Good work posture with your legs up on the coffee table.”

“They are just named coffee table because foot table sounds silly.”

“I see. I appreciate the explanation. After all, I am far from being a native speaker in the language, and it is refreshing to learn new things.”

I shook my head at him. “Really, you can never tell anyone you’re a vampire. I mean, what if they get to know you? Realize how silly you are, deep down? If that got out, I can kiss my serious, angsty vampire cult goodbye, Auris. Seriously. Reputation is no joke.”

“My sweet, we talked about the cult you aren’t allowed to have.”

“Did we? When? Was I present?”

Auris leaned into my space, swiped my fingers off my laptop’s keyboard, and closed the screen. “Are you present now, my sweet? Are you here with me, where I want you to be?”

I nodded but leaned away from him instead of into him. He raised his eyebrows, but Auris wouldn’t pressure me, so he went right back to sitting next to me, turned toward me, and waited.

“I want to go to the museum,” I said. “Several. There are several here I want to visit. But before that, we should do what we came here to do. We came here to find that other vampire. The one they killed? And maybe we should find out where that happened?”

Auris froze for several seconds. He could do that, stilling to a point where it crept even me out. He only ever did it when we were alone, never when Eva was here to vacuum, cook, or clean.

“Sedlec Ossuary,” he finally said.

“Uh, what?”

“It’s the only place that makes any sense.” He tapped the laptop, and I opened it back up. “It’s spelled S-E-D-L-E-C.”

I typed it in. The photos I found were stunning, creepy, and something that belonged in every dictionary in order to illustrate the meaning of morbid.

“I can see what you mean,” I said. “That’s a bone church if ever I saw a bone church, like, there’s literally bones everywhere. So we are going there? Hey, this isn’t all that far. It’s in Kutna Hora? Jan can drive us there, right? We could even go today.”

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