I’m just breathing—incapable of saying something clever right now. Brain is barely functioning. Does not compute. He pulls his fingers from me, and I hear him opening the condom. I can’t even offer to put it on for him. Lazy sod. Just lying here waiting to be fucked.

“Do you still want me?” he asks. I feel the smooth tip of his shaft against me. “May I have you?”

“Yes,” I manage, my face still hot and my heart pounding. May I have you. Jun was polite like this the first time we made love, too. He made me feel as if I was some delectable dessert that he very sincerely wanted to have a go at. Like I’m a piece of cake.

I’m feeling languid from the orgasm, but as he presses his tip in, I manage a bit more by slowly shifting my arse up and into him. He’s teetered on his side, holding himself up, but now I’m lifting myself into him and doing the work. He likes this, because I hear him groan deeply from his throat—almost like a growl—which gives me a little more moxie.

He rests more of his weight on me so he can relax his hips, and I take it. Steadily pulsing up and into his cock inside me as he shifts his arm down. He lays his hand over mine, encouraging me to spread my fingers until he can entwine them. This hand-holding thing he does while he’s making love puts me over the moon. My heart can’t take it.

I shift up into him harder as he holds my hand, determined. I hear and feel him losing himself as he’s telling me how good I feel. He doesn’t know why I surprise him all the time or why I smell like this. I want to know what I smell like, but I also want him to come, so I’m not going to distract him with my typical doctory curiosities: “And how long have I been smelling like this? Have you noticed a change in your stool?”

Just when I’m trying to think of what else I can do to get him there, he leans into my neck and licks me. It’s a hungry, long lap with his tongue just in the concave. When he speaks, the words are warm and breathy against my neck. Almost desperate. “Can I taste you? Please?”

I didn’t think it was possible, but my heart accelerates even more in my chest. I swallow. “Yes.” The low-levelers never ask me like this. They just do it without warning, like if I’m sleeping with them, what else should I expect? I’m a lowly human and my consent is unnecessary.

This vampire and the things he shows me—the way he treats me and the way he makes me feel…. It’s like I’ll never be the same. How can I ever accept anything less?

He bites down into the base of my neck. Even though he warned me, I still flinch from the shock of it. The pressure takes my breath away and I freeze, like time is standing still. I feel his thick incisors slide deeper into me, smoothly, but it doesn’t hurt? When he sucks at my flesh, he comes. His body jerks and stiffens as he holds me tight around my waist with his free arm. He groans, completely satisfied as he heavily breathes out.

He climaxes but I don’t, because there’s something else going on inside of me and it’s distracting the hell out of me. It feels like the knotty, twisty thing in my gut is unraveling, and it’s the weirdest fucking sensation. I don’t know what to make of it. Like a block of metal melting? Hot candle wax? I’m starting to worry that I’ve ruptured an organ or something, but the melty feeling is moving like electric spiders up my spine and to my head. It’s all so bizarre. I’m frozen, distracted, when Jun pulls his mouth from my neck, licks me and quickly shifts himself from inside me.

My body is shaking, hard. Trembling from the inside out, and I have no idea why. This weird feeling. Jun gets up and is removing the condom, readjusting himself. Despite my wobbly state (am I having a seizure?), I sit up and watch him. He’s got a very peculiar expression on his face. One I haven’t seen before. He’s staring forward and blinking with the used condom in his hand. Unreadable. Blank.

“Jun?” I prod. He turns his gaze to me and it’s still vacant. But when it subtly shifts into something like accusation, I draw back slightly.

He stands up without preamble, goes to the kitchen to discard the condom and washes his hands. All in silence, with me just watching him dumbstruck from the sofa. He moves from the kitchen and toward me. I think he’s coming to me, but he keeps going toward the glass walls.

“Jun, what is it?” I ask. I’m getting irritated now, and my heart is in my throat. What the hell?

He unlocks one of the walls and drags the massive glass to the side. Slowly, he walks out into his yard. He’s just standing there, barefoot, shirtless in his pajama bottoms and with his head lifted to the sky.

I stand, adjust my bottoms and cautiously walk toward the door. I can’t imagine what’s happened. I told him I tasted like shit, so he couldn’t be upset about that. I warned him—multiple times.

When I get to the door, I move to step onto the pavement, but the ground is really cold against my bare foot. I stay inside on the hardwood and call out, “Junichi, talk to me. What the hell is wrong with you?”

There’s a long moment of him frozen, perfectly still and just breathing like he’s waiting for something. When he turns, the golden autumn sunlight washes over his sculpted body. He looks radiant standing there. Like Adonis.

But his face is hard. “You’re a fucking vampire.”

I almost say, “I know you are, but what am I?” like a twelve-year-old.

I don’t say that, though, because he doesn’t look amused at all. He looks like I’ve betrayed him in some fundamental way—like I’ve lied about who I am. We’ve joked about this previously, but in this moment… it feels very serious now.

I shake my head, unblinking. “I’m not.”

Twenty

Junichi

Jae is standing in the doorway, staring at me with his chestnut eyes. His golden hair is a fluffy mess, and he’s got a little trail of blood going down his neck from where I fed. He’s shaking his head, serious. “I am not, Jun. I’m not.”

I don’t want to scare him, so I take a deep breath to calm myself. When I do, I notice how good I feel standing in the warm sunlight. Not burning at all.

I’m due to visit Ren tomorrow for my feeding. Since I constantly push feeding from him back until the last minute, I’m always running on empty by the time I get there. My energy is lower, I’m more irritable and my skin tone isn’t as rich as it should be. But I feel as if I’ve had an energy shot. Jae’s blood tastes exactly how he smells to me—like some brown sugar and rum dessert that my mom might make. It’s pulsing through me now and giving me life.

Just like a ranked vampire’s blood would.

I move back toward the door and Jae steps aside, staring at me as I pass him. I go straight to the kitchen, pull a clean cloth out of the drawer and wet it at the sink. After I ring it out, I walk back toward him, grab his hand and urge him toward the couch. “Can we sit, please?”

He sits, never taking his eyes off me. I reach up and gently dab the cloth against his skin to clean it. They’re not bleeding out anymore, but he still has small puncture marks from where I fed and there’s light bruising. I shake my head. If he is a ranked vampire, this should have healed instantly. Also, his skin was soft to bite into, not hard. Biting into another vampire is like biting into an apple—perfectly satisfying, crisp and juicy. Biting into a human is like biting into a jelly-filled donut. Jae’s flesh is all donut.

Nothing makes any fucking sense.

I wipe the blood from his collar bone. “Your blood is that of a ranked vampire. You had no idea?”

“What? No. That doesn’t make any sense—I haven’t lied to you about anything. I’m not trying to deceive you… How would I know what my blood tastes like?”

When he’s clean, I drop my hands in my lap and look at him. “You’ve never drunk blood? Not once?”

“No.”

“You’ve never had the urge to? Even a passing thought?”

“No.”

Now we’re staring at each other, his eyes resolute and mine disbelieving. I sit back and rub my palms against my face, sighing. “God, you make me so fucking nervous. I have no idea what’s going on with you and you’re not helping.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Jae asks, throwing his hands up. “I’ve been me my entire life. I know who I am—and what I am. But suddenly you’re telling me I’m something completely different and I have no evidence of it. I have no tangible reason to start behaving differently or think otherwise.”

His warm eyes are usually playful and teasing. Relaxed. Now they’re stressed. I’m pushing him, I know. He’s right, but I’m right, too. In my silence, he goes on, calmer this time.

“Even if what you say is true, what should I do, Jun? Do you want me to start feeding? Even though I don’t have any desire to do so?”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

“Right. Okay. So?”

I sigh. “So you make me very nervous. You’re an unknown and it makes me uncomfortable.”

When I say this, he sits up. His expression drops—hardens in a way I’m unfamiliar with. “So you’re done with me, then? We’re finished?”

I blink. I don’t like this expression on his face. “Why do you say that? That I’m ‘done’ with you—”

“Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? No use sugar-coating it. I’m a fucking weirdo that makes you uncomfortable, so we’re done.”

He moves to stand up from the couch, but I grab his waist and pull him back down in a soft tumble. While I hold him, I sit straighter and face him. “Please stop. We’re just talking. Can we talk?” I lift my hand and run my fingers into the back of his messy waves. He shifts his gaze from me, but he doesn’t pull away. “I didn’t say you make me uncomfortable. You make me feel very comfortable, Jae. Too comfortable—and that’s what makes me nervous. And ‘unknown’ does not mean ‘weird.’ Please don’t twist my words.”

I lean in slowly and brush my nose against his cheek. “Are you showing me your baggage right now?”