his head. No. He is not a monster. He is never going to kiss Steve again; he is just going to be Steve’s friend. “I thought video games or something?”
Steve breaks into yet another smirking, adorable grin, but he doesn’t seem too offended. “Eigo wa nan desu ka? I hide my hentai collection and my Hello Kitty sex-bot in my wardrobe if you think Trivial Pursuit isn’t Japanese enough.”
Abe looked down at the floor and regrets the fact that he can no longer wish himself dead.
He doesn’t mention that he doesn’t have a clue what “hentai” means.
“Our game board is from the seventies or something like that,” Steve says, bypassing the awkwardness, “which means no one knows the answers about sports stars, films ... well, anything but geography, really. It’ll skullfuck you. If you provide the blood, I’ll provide the popcorn, and we can spend the afternoon learning what it feels like to know fuck all about anything, and dropping crazy, outrageous hints to try and get someone to answer a question. It’s a fucking riot.”
Oddly enough, that sounds like a great deal of fun. “Can I bring Cluedo?”
“Abe Browning, in the gay club, with his fangs?”
He forces a smile. “Exactly.”
Steve’s near-constant grin is warm and broad and like nothing else Abe has seen directed at him for a long time. Not before his death and rebirth. Not before cancer. Not before the life he thought he’d have fell out of his fingers and spun out of control—but Steve might know something of how to live that life and how to thrive in it. Steve, it seems, doesn’t feel any need at all to control anything. “I won’t let you fall down a cliff face, Abe. Promise.”
“I can’t promise the same,” Abe says. It would be easier to run. Easier.
Steve raises one eyebrow, but the smile doesn’t leave his face. “It seems to me, man, like you already did.”
Abe grips Steve’s hand in return and prays to something that this, abseiling and allergies and the most interesting not-straight man in Port Carmila all works out—somehow.
Whatever he does, whatever happens, he has to make sure that Abe’s company never again leads to Steve’s death.
6: Friendship
“So, what happened? Was it ugly?” Next-door-Greg leans over the fence, clad in a pair of cut-offs, a faded cap over his curling hair and a singlet, watching as Steve secures his gear, plus a picnic cooler, in the tray of his Toyota ute.
Morning brought a gorgeous, mild summer’s day, slightly overcast, one just perfect for heading out to the middle of nowhere and their first attempt at rock climbing. Driving out with Abe, at the very least, gives him something to listen to other than talkback radio, and if he looks forward to it more than he should admit given the problems involved in dating a vampire ... well. Is it really something he has to worry about, yet? What will happen will happen, and they’ll find a way to make it work. Kissing isn’t a relationship prerequisite. In the meantime, why can’t he just enjoy the thought of Abe—who, last week, surprised himself but not Steve when he managed to survive abseiling down the baby slope—climbing up a cliff?
“Swelled up this big.” Steve gestures with his fingers; Greg, who at least is an educated audience, winces. “In a way, it was kind of funny. All the usual things—pollen, food allergens, insects, whatever—did absolutely nothing. Which is good: I’d really hate to stop eating processed food because everything contains nuts. Vampire venom? Yep. And zombie saliva. There’s some kind of protein or something the undead develop.” Steve shrugs, tugs the last rope tight, braces his arms over the back of the tray. It’s not exactly a surprise—more like the welcome-and-unwelcome confirmation of something everyone suspected—but it’s a relief to know that his anaphylaxis has a cause, which means he can now, theoretically, try and avoid kissing vampires or being bitten by zombies. “Apparently it’s not uncommon, but most breathers still don’t kiss vampires, either. So it’s not like they have a huge amount of data on the subject.”
Feral zombies, of course, don’t do the courteous thing and avoid nibbling on the allergic. Both his immunologist and his GP like the idea of desensitisation, and so does Steve, but he hopes they can work something out that doesn’t involve his driving up to the city every week. He doesn’t think it that big a deal, though—truly, what’s the difference between bleeding to death and gasping to death from a zombie bite? So he packs a little extra heat and makes sure that everybody understands the action plan. He rolls his eyes when Abe insists on photocopying the action plan. He tells Johanna and Izzy that Izzy shouldn’t spit on him. Johanna kisses Izzy and chases Steve around her flat pretending to kiss him. Life goes on.
Not so long ago he’d have been glad of the most perfect excuse to turn his back on Port Carmila for good. Sydney has to be safer for a man allergic to the undead, right?
It would sound like a story to say that Abe changed everything, and in fact that’s not even true. Adam Swanston changed everything. Pathetic, ridiculous Adam Swanston, a boy so fucking afraid of his own sexuality that he spent a year harassing Steve just because he’s comfortable with hair gel, but a man who nevertheless manages to live as an out gay man in a tourist town and survive what everyone knows and thinks, changed everything. If he can do that, if Johanna and Izzy can do that, then Steve can live here as his whatever-sexual virus-carrier anaphylactic self. Besides, Abe isn’t going to be happy in Sydney, and all his friends are here. Crazy, absurd, amazing friends who scheme and pull handguns on vampires and try their hardest to keep him alive. Friends who give him hell over his hair but don’t waste a second on the things that matter.
It might just be the near-death experience: they’re often said to provide perspective. Steve’s fairly sure, however, the perspective comes from the kissing and dancing that preceded it—and the realisation that he doesn’t want to waste another minute on avoiding awesome experiences because of one broken man.
So the near-death thing might’ve helped.
Greg raises his eyebrows. “So, about that...”
Steve glances back at him and tries to sound as innocent as possible. “About what, mate?”
Mum and Chichi dropped hints and suggestions about the problems involved, because apparently Steve isn’t a millennial able to Google safe-sex practices, but Mum must have said something to Chichi, because neither have said as much as a single word about Steve’s sexuality to Steve once they got past that awkward moment of gaping in the ED. The fact they both like Abe helps, although it’s kind of hard to dislike a vampire who brings cupcakes as well as blood to a game day, polishes his shoes, expresses a genuine interest in Japanese literature and apologises repeatedly for putting their son’s life at risk.
He figured everything will be okay when he caught Chichi telling Soba over Skype that his son is what they call ‘pansexual’ and, no, that has nothing to do with the English sense of kitchens.
The regret of his life, Steve thinks, is knowing he might not get the chance to experience that kiss and the dancing that followed without being distracted by the bloody itching. Still, as long as Abe keeps his lips to himself they can go dancing again, and it’s not as though Abe’s lips and fangs are connected to all the parts of his body. Why can’t they hit Feeders that evening and burn up the dance floor?
He knows what he wants, he thinks. He didn’t know he wanted it until his annoying friends pushed him in the right direction, but he knows what he wants.
Greg’s piercing look says he knows Steve’s being an arse. “So? What are you doing about your pretty-boy vampire?”
Stocking up on condoms, dental dams and Glad Wrap, so that when Abe is less worried about killing Steve—right now he’s still not comfortable touching him, although Steve hopes that will pass given enough time—he can present an action plan of his own.
“What am I supposed to do? I can’t make him not venomous.”
Greg pushes a curl off his olive-toned face as though hesitating before asking for something more specific, but he doesn’t have the chance to speak: Jack’s du
al-cab, ever adorned with fishing rods, pulls up across the street.
Phil slams the passenger door hard enough to rattle the windows in all the surrounding houses and disturb the resting dead. “Hey! Steve!”
He waves back. No-one besides Johanna, who mentioned it in passing before curling up on the foot of Steve’s bed and demanding every detail about Abe and what Steve means to do about him, said anything about Steve’s failing his dare; Steve just resigns himself to his radio. Maybe he can talk his boss into more hours. At the very least he knows he’s given it a shot worthy of Jack’s gossiping to half the town about the kiss, and that’s good enough. As birthdays go it is certainly memorable: he made a new friend, discovered a few new things about himself and ended up with a new handgun and a watch he is probably going to smash sooner or later.
Breathing in a world of theoretical death, Steve decides, counts as a good birthday.
“You going somewhere, Akira-san?” Jack wears his battered, hook-and-sinker-studded hat, a tangle of fishing line coiled around one wrist and a dangerous, evil grin. Phil, at his side, is just as geared up for fishing in a many-pocketed vest and his lucky barracuda-print T-shirt. He waves a hand at Greg—Steve and his mates have become quite well acquainted with Port Carmila’s paramedics over the years—and both