Page 23 of Overexposed

Auris looked straight at me. “I would love to read those manifests for you. If you ask very nicely, I might do voices for the total weight and shipping numbers. Eva is doing something very elaborate involving waffles on account of the fact we have company.”

“Company you are allowing to stare at her.”

Auris narrowed his eyes at me. “You are going to make me pay her a Christmas bonus, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “Yup.” I stretched, bending my arms above my head, and yawned. “Hey, all joking aside -- you were not happy about what happened to Charlie, were you?”

Auris froze for a few heartbeats, then shook his head. “No. I was not happy. I told you about how Tove didn’t like entrancement. What you saw last night is one of the things that can happen if someone does it without putting too much thought into it.”

“Look, I’m not exactly sure what I saw. I mean, Charlie seemed off? Scared, too. Why didn’t you entrance him?” I pointed my thumb vaguely in the direction of the kitchen. “Why are you not entrancing him now to make polite small talk with Eva instead of staring at her?”

“Those are two questions.” He nodded, hummed. “You deserve the answer to both, and it is important knowledge. Firstly, what you saw was someone who had been under a longstanding entrancement that ran contrary to their own wishes and in some instances their own well-being and minimal comforts.

“You yourself only experienced entrancement very briefly, but you started fighting against it right away. Yet, I only made you calm and not move. Charlie was forced to stay in a foreign country, one where he doesn’t speak the language, and even worse, he was given only minimal mobility. And then, a pandemic hit, and he was in a worse situation that he had no escape from.”

I nodded. Charlie had shown us his car -- or Jonathan’s he’d said -- but it had been too dark for me to see inside. He’d said it was “a shithole of a car” and to warn whoever was supposed to take care of it in the morning.

“You are saying he was fighting, and it made him a little, uhm. Not sure how to be delicate about it. A little crazy?”

“That’s it in a nutshell, yes. The effects will be different for different people, but he turned into a nervous wreck who’s had the first good night’s sleep in seven years last night, even if it was only six hours or so.”

My eyebrows flew up. “He told you that?”

“He did. Which leads me to the second reason I didn’t and won’t entrance him. It might simply make him worse again, forcing him to perform actions instead of making those actions of his own free will. You have to know that I showed off, when I met you and took you to the restaurant. With the priests, it was necessary to keep them fully under my control. Gloria, Eva, Jan, everyone else who works for me and knows me personally, they don’t want to actively harm me because they like and/or respect me. A long-term compulsion on them makes that very much easier for them. They’re hardly even aware of it.”

“Right. It aligns with their baseline intentions.”

Auris shrugged. “Basically.”

“Eva might feel differently if she gets stared at while at work.”

“For the sake of --” He flew up from the armchair and was straddling me in seconds, cupping my cheeks. “You are so good when you are trying to be bad, my sweet. So very, very good.”

“I wasn’t trying --”

“Shush. You were, and you know it.” His nostrils flared. “If you would like, we could shower together.”

“Are you… offering shower sex?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never done that,” I said, blushing.

“Would you like to?”

I nodded. “But can I brush my teeth first?”

That had Auris chuckle and move off me in the slow, human way. “By all means, not that I care. I don’t mind the humanness that comes with you being human, Ethan, never.”

“But I care,” I said and got out of bed. After three steps, I thought getting yesterday’s clothes off so Auris could watch was a good idea. I wondered whether I should in fact put some practice into stripping. It was something my vampire made me want to do for him quite a lot.

So my clothes hit the floor, another armchair in a corner, the top of the dresser. Auris didn’t give me any comments, not even when I closed the bathroom door behind me, fully naked. I peed, brushed my teeth, and turned on the shower, and because I had started to wonder about all the things Auris could and couldn’t sense last night, I said -- in a decidedly indoor voice -- “Come join me.”

The door opened so fast I had to wonder whether he’d been standing right outside. He’d stripped too, and because he knew me too well, he didn’t come into the bathroom straight away but remained standing in the doorway, one hand on the handle, hair cascading down over one side of his chest while the light from the bedroom windows spilled over his tresses.

I knew the light in the bedroom, and I knew he’d opened the curtains while he had been waiting out there. He looked mysterious for the very fact that there was still something dark about him -- there always was. At the same time, the light brought out his pale skin, his silvered eyes, his not quite normal human features that I could see with ease now.

I grinned. “You’re a calculating model,” I said.

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