flirting first, and after enough refusals it became easy not to care—or throw himself into dating and fucking those few girls who didn’t. Emma the topless tightrope walker, for one. Emma, who even got on Steve’s nerves, once the novelty of shocking Chichi wore off.
“Yes?” Abe raises his eyebrows and looks at Steve with rather a confused expression. “Is something wrong?”
Maybe it doesn’t matter what Swanston thinks, what Port Carmila thinks, what Jack and Phil think; maybe it really doesn’t matter if he does spend a night with a pretty-boy vampire who lets him talk politics. Swanston, clearly, is all kinds of fucked-up—what kind of sad self-loathing does it take for a gay man to spend a year harassing another guy for the same perceived crime? The perfect sound-system is riding on this, after all, and Abe seems a little interested in him. It should have been easy, and yet Steve can’t help the feeling that he’s about to treat Abe the same way he himself has been treated over the past few years. That, in fact, there’s nothing at all okay about Jack’s dare at all, and Abe is too good a person to use that way.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Steve says, “before you get any wrong ideas about, well, me.” He grimaces. “You see, it’s my birthday…”
3: Attraction
Nothing good has ever started with “There’s something I have to tell you”, in Abe’s opinion—after all, he heard those words, or something awfully close to them, far too often in the hospital. Abe winces and nods, wondering what the problem is. There are a lot of them, after all, and Great-Aunt Elizabeth-Not-Lizzie-Thank-You-Very-Much spent the day of his turning listing them all, advising him at the end to stick to immortals or a life spent single and annoying his sister’s descendants—something she likes to rehash once every six months or so. Does he want to spend five hundred years moping after his flash-in-the-pan mortal lover the way her brother did? Because throwing one’s self into the blast zone of a nuclear bomb isn’t a guaranteed suicide!
There are many ways breathers have dealt with vampires over the years—at least until Britain started transporting theirs to Australia—and most of them involve something similar to a immobile, dismembered, conscious vampire chained at the bottom of the ocean. It’s more than the stuff of nightmares, save that Abe does not and cannot sleep, and it’s easily enough to have him sitting in the lounge room at 3 AM with Aristophanes’s The Frogs in one hand and a glass in the other, wondering whether or not he chose right in an immortal, difficult-to-end life over death.
One day, after all, he’s going to run out of books to read.
He can understand why a human might want nothing to do with a vampire—the blood requirement, after all, is no small amount disturbing—or why Steve might like talking to him, but, at the end of the day, prefer the company of someone human. Someone attractive, someone with a heartbeat, someone who won’t stay eternally eighteen. Steve seems smart enough to be able to think that sort of thing through and decide it’s better not to deal with it. He’ll be right, and Abe hasn’t come here to look at humans. He shouldn’t have even looked at Steve when he made that comment about Ares and Abe’s co-worker, save that Abe is tired of the snooty, self-absorbed preening going on at the other end of the bar. He shouldn’t have kept on talking, save that Steve is interesting and cute—and Abe is tired of sitting here alone.
Cute. Not handsome, no, but, despite the excess of hair gel holding a forest of spikes in place and a smile too broad to be truly attractive, he knows how to rock a blazer and a red T-shirt tight enough that when he turns towards the bar Abe can see the outline of a ring through his right nipple. He sits, legs swinging, head nodding in time to the music, entirely unselfconscious about either, and it’s so hard for Abe not to wonder what that seeming of relaxed ease might look like in bed—or if he’ll still look as relaxed once Abe mentions what cis male vampires do to enable sex in the first place.
Great-Aunt-Never-Aunty Lizzie would be screaming, if she weren’t on the other side of the country plaguing her breathing relatives. What if Steve doesn’t want to be turned, like most sensible humans? What if he waited until he was near death to turn, and Abe was stuck with a partner of eighty until the world ended? Most sensible humans and vampires are quick to argue against any seeming benefit of becoming undead, and that is if one has a choice. How can it not end but badly?
When Steve tells a story about a series of dares, a sound system and Steve’s heterosexuality, Abe tries to tell himself that it’s all for the best. It really is. He’s human. Great-Aunty Lizzie will do her head if she finds Abe dating a breather, and it’s not like it’ll stay a secret. Valentine will find out and blab it all over Facebook, never mind that Valentine himself has dated a score of vampires, fae and merfolk of all genders—but Valentine is a breather. Does Abe really want to deal with a vengeful matriarch, his sire, coming down to Port Carmila to teach him the error of his ways?
It took him three months to talk her into leaving the last time she came visiting.
“I’m sorry,” Steve says, and his button nose and dark brown eyes lend the expression so much genuine sorrow Abe can’t help but believe him. “I’ve been kind of leading you on, and that whole dare is a shitty thing to do anyway.” He slides off the bar stool and stands up. “I’ll go. Home, I mean. I’m not feeling comfortable doing this anymore.”
Steve glances over at the two awkward-looking guys sitting at a table by the door, shuffling a little closer to each other every time someone looks as if they are going to approach. A few do: anyone with even half a brain—for some of the zombies, literally—knows that they are as straight as they come, but the fun lies in listening to them try and explain that they aren’t interested. How much longer they can stand? Not long. Well, Steve doesn’t actually have to sleep with a gay vampire if he doesn’t want; he really just has to be seen getting close enough to one that the sex is a believable lie. A bit of kissing, a bit of dancing, done. His friends can go to the Broken Post, and Steve can go home and, in the morning, claim his birthday present. Isn’t it a whole bit wrong he has to jump through so many hoops just to get something anyone, anywhere else in Australia, would get just by waking up in the morning?
“Wait.” Abe’s not sure why the words spill from his mouth given what Steve just said. He’s not wrong. Fucking a vampire for a dare? It sounds the reverse of all the horrible things Great-Aunty Lizzie says, in point of fact, yet given everything Abe has just been thinking, it’s hard to get truly angry at someone flung into a most uncomfortable situation by his best friend—especially when vampires find it hard to resist breathers for similarly-objectifying reasons. Steve came over here and started talking like someone who wanted to chat a guy up and got side-tracked: there’s nothing in his manner that suggests a straight guy stranded in a gay bar. If he is prepared to go through with the dare, or was until he started feeling guilty about the notion, that means a tiny, slight chance he’ll think about it, right? “It’s okay. I’ll do it for you, if you want. We can kiss and dance for a bit. Then you can go home. They won’t know differently.”
Great-Aunty Lizzie would be screeching, but so would every gay and bisexual man Abe has ever known: what good is it to dance with a straight guy? Because he’s hoping that Steve isn’t quite as straight as he thinks, and doesn’t Abe know that’s a desperate, delusional hope?
Maybe it doesn’t have to be about romance. Abe doesn’t have so many friends in Port Carmila—even his co-workers abandon him at the bar to drool over a fae, and he doesn’t even like Swanston as much as they’re both gay in a straight-leaning town. Steve seems to be more than capable of interesting conversations. Why not?
Steve sits down and stares at him, his eyebrows raised, his lips parted.
“You seem interesting and I don’t have many friends,” Abe says, well aware of just how damn pathetic he sounds. “I’d like to be your friend, and friends should help each other out. Not dares.”
For a moment something tense and otherwise indecipherable flickers across Steve’s face, and A
be thinks he’s about to hear a straight guy tell him he’d really rather not—but then Steve flashes Abe a beaming, adorable grin. “You’re willing to do that?”
Abe’s thoughts about friendship fly straight out of his head: no, Abe doesn’t want to befriend him. Abe wants to nail him, even if the wanting, post-turning, is more of an intellectual exercise than a hormonal one. He just nods, though, and tries so very hard to not think about nailing the short, cute man swinging his legs on the bar stool.
“Mate. You bloody rock!” Steve pauses and shakes his head. “It’s not like you think. When Jack spent his days doing nothing but fish I dragged him home to his dad and yelled at them both until Jack agreed to go his GP. He did the same to me almost a year later, after I got bitten. It’s just … well, Port Carmila’s a weird fucking place.” He stops, looks across at Adam Swanston, grimaces, draws a breath. “Ready?”
He’s still not sure that a good friend would dare another friend to do something like fuck a gay vampire, but Abe nods. “If you’re not comfortable, we don’t have to.”
He called me a fag and a cocksucker, Steve said. Abe missed the horrors of being gay in high school