largely thanks to cancer and the hours in hospital or off school at home, and now nobody is going to say anything about Abe’s sexuality to a vampire’s face if indeed there is anything to say that is not overshadowed by his new-found blood requirement. In that small respect Abe may have gotten off lightly, but Steve could have good reasons to not add fuel to the dying embers.
Steve shrugs in a short dip of the shoulders. He has that comfortable sense of ordinariness about him, cute in the way of a next-door-neighbour, but not so handsome that Abe feels way out his league. Approachable. While Abe has the feeling Steve would prefer not to hear it, the fact he looks like a Tokyo schoolboy only helps his case.
He must have had men approach him before?
“If we don’t do anything more interesting than talk soon, we’re going to have those two fucks come over, attempt some ear-burning witticism, try to get us dancing, and then bore us all by talking about snapper or something. I reckon you’re more comfortable than that.” Steve turns in his chair, one hand drifting across the space between them to rest on Abe’s thigh. As if he knows just what kind of effect that gesture has, Steve runs his fingernails over the inner seam of Abe’s jeans, drifting up towards Abe’s groin, and for all that Abe has lost a fair amount of sensation to death, his skin tingles when Steve stops just short of Abe’s balls. “Do your lips taste like blood? Or just cherry chap stick?”
“What are you—what?” The incredulity isn’t helped by the fact that Steve leaves his hand—his burning, hot-blooded hand—one wrong move from contact. Abe just has to slide forwards, and then Steve’s hand will brush his cock, and how glorious will that feel? Sometimes the decreased level of hormones really doesn’t matter: the touch of a breather is as heady, just for different reasons, as a man’s touch when Abe still breathed. He’s not physically aroused, and can’t be, but the thought of those warm, pulsing, living fingers touching him in any vaguely-intimate fashion leaves him wanting almost as much as he did when alive.
Sex, with a vampire, feels like a mockery, a mimicry lacking all the desperation and biological drive, a child’s playacting of a concept he can’t understand. Repetition without meaning. Sex with a breather, a man with a beating heart and panting breaths, feels like stepping back into the skin of a life Abe was denied at too-young an age. It’s just as addictive and compelling as sex used to be, which is why vampires come to Feeders, chase tourists, seek out the living—they’re desperate, one and all, for the leeches they laugh at. Not for their blood: their breath.
For a moment all Abe wants is to bundle Steve into his car, take him home and feel Steve’s warm exhalations on his cold skin.
He almost, almost reaches out to grab Steve’s shoulders and pull him close; Abe jerks his hands and grabs hold of the seat of his chair. No. It’s not going to happen. It’s never going to happen. Steve is straight, and Abe doesn’t need to scare away the one interesting person in Port Carmila by acting like an oversexed teenager. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Steve’s eyes never glance away from Abe’s face. “Flirting?”
“But you—but you’ve never done this before! You’re straight!” Straight and inexperienced with men and possibly vampires: he should be awkward, reluctant, shuddering at the thought of getting his hand anywhere near Abe’s cock, not going straight for the bullseye with a confidence that is going to drive Abe crazy because it isn’t real! Why does a man who isn’t at all sexually interested in him have to act like a man that wants Abe to take him back to his house and fuck him—or fuck Abe—senseless?
“I don’t think there’s that much difference, really.” Steve shrugs and angles his head up at Abe. “Most things a girl likes, I reckon, a guy is probably going to like well enough, at least to start with. Skin’s skin.”
It seems, to Abe, to be a sure sign of the cruelty of the universe that this man is apparently heterosexual, for all that he doesn’t sound it. What is Abe supposed to do, then? Does he lean in and touch Steve? Is that too much for him? How is Abe to know when Steve refuses to act like any ordinary straight man? What is Abe supposed to do other than sit there and desperately want someone he can’t have?
Steve doesn’t wait for an answer. He leans up and in, sliding his other hand around the back of Abe’s neck, guiding his head just a little until their lips meet in a soft, slightly-chaste kiss.
He can feel, even not quite touching him, the blood pulsing through Steve’s neck and throat, and just the thought is so heady and even frightening Abe pulls his head back, afraid he’ll too-easily grab Steve, haul him onto his lap and never let him go. Steve lets him move, but leaves his hand on Abe’s thigh, and Abe wonders if there is anything in the world ever so good as kissing somebody living and breathing and warm. No, there can’t be. Can’t be. “I … I thought I … how do you, I mean…”
Steve runs the very tip of his tongue over his lips. If the chill of Abe’s skin bothers him, it doesn’t seem to show, although gestures that leave Abe wondering just what Steve would look like on his knees with that hot tongue running over Abe’s cock have to be illegal. Or, at the very least, unfair. He’s straight. Steve is straight. He and Abe are kissing for the sake of the two fishermen in the corner by the steps and no other reason. Steve isn’t attracted to Abe even if Abe is half jumping out of his own skin.
“No offense, Abe, but I think I know a little bit more about seduction than you do.”
He would have said none taken, but Steve’s lips brush against his own and somehow Abe finds himself with one hand resting on top of Steve’s, kissing him back as if devouring him is a distinct possibility, only keeping the distance between them through sheer force of will. For a moment, as he lets his tongue trail over Steve’s and glories in the now-strange warmth of his mouth, he wonders what Steve might taste like, before and after sex. Will he mind if Abe makes a little cut and sips that warm, salty blood? No biting, no fangs, none of the horrible wounds made by the human-shaped mouth that in no way resemble the puncture marks in stories: biting is for the release of venom that turns a breather into a fellow walking, blood-devouring corpse. Not that. Just a sip from a cut, a taste of blood not tainted by plastic and anticoagulants and a day or two in the fridge. A taste of blood cut with serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin, the difference between the water one gulps to stay hydrated and the fine wine one tastes of an evening.
Will he mind that kind of sex?
“The fuck?” Steve jerks back onto his chair, his eyes wide, his tongue running over his lips. “Abe, what was that?”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit! What the hell made Abe think it is okay to kiss a straight breather guy like that? Steve isn’t a leech who knows what he’s getting into! “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—I forgot. I’ll stop. Steve, I’m so sorry. I won’t do that again. I—”
“Abe? Chill, right?” Steve grins and jerks his elbow in the direction of his friends by the door, both of whom have jaws hanging wide enough to catch a swarm of flies. Whatever saw them to dare Steve to fuck a gay vampire, they don’t seem to have expected Steve to go about the kissing with quite that much enthusiasm. The white blond rolls his eyes and slips the other a twenty-dollar note; the black man in the flanno shirt grins and tucks it in his pocket. “We’re cool on that. I don’t quite know how to put it, and I’m sorry if this is going to offend you, but your mouth tasted weird, just then.”
The depth of Abe’s relief startles him so much that he sighs, more out of habit rather than any need for oxygen. Force of habit, at least when it comes to breathing, is a hard beast to conquer. “Bad?” He brushed his teeth before going out, so it shouldn’t be the blood. Shouldn’t be. In his childhood, though, Abe never failed to notice a particular tang on Lizzie’s breath and skin; the fear of being the same has made him even more particular about hygiene post-death. What if he smells like a slaughterhouse and his co-workers don’t say anything because nobody knows how to bring up such an awkward topic?
“Kind of like chicken salt.” Steve shakes his head and wra
ps one arm around Abe’s shoulders, waving with the other arm as his friends apparently declare the dare won and head, far too quickly, up the steps—although the fisherman in flanno holds his phone out towards Steve and taps his fingers on the screen as he leaves. “Not bad, but it was there all of a sudden, and that was weird. Sorry.”
Abe leans closer to him, rather enjoying the warmth of a breather against his body while he ponders the best way of explaining a taste to which he is now so accustomed he doesn’t even notice it. “Venom, probably.” He pauses but can’t find a non-frightening way of putting it. “Most of us tend to release a little when we ... um, well, get excited? The one thing the media kind of, well, gets right with the, uh, biting-as-sex-metaphor.”
Steve raises both eyebrows, but, like a true native of Port Carmila, doesn’t freak over the prospect. “As long as it’s not enough to turn me, we’re good. Sorry. I just—well, the other time I kissed a vampire, the taste wasn’t nearly as strong.” A strange expression crosses Steve’s face before he breaks into another grin. “We were in Grade Two and one of the teachers caught us. I don’t even remember why we were doing it, actually, just that the teacher was