Chapter Twenty-five – Jack
Chapter Twenty-five
Jack
And I didn’t find myself alone when I next woke. Paco was there, kicked back in a chair, heels up on the desk, flipping through my portfolio.
I sat up in bed, cognizant of the way my hair fell in front of my face, and how I was naked while he was not. He looked over, saw me sitting, and almost jumped out of his own skin.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized.
“What the fuck?” I complained. “I thought I told you to wait an hour.” I looked around the room, doing an inventory for other people, crosses, cameras.
“I just….” He put the portfolio down and looked abashed. “It just didn’t feel real. I thought maybe I’d come back here and you wouldn’t be here at all—or if you were, that what you’d told me yesterday was a lie, or some strange trick.”
“Yeah, because pretending to be a vampire is what gets me all the guys.” I swung my legs out of bed and stood up.
“Are you mad at me?”
“A little. And I still need to brush my teeth and shower.” I stalked into the bathroom and closed the door.
What had I been thinking, giving my room card to him?
I brushed my teeth and tongue, well aware of the irony that I couldn’t get to the teeth that most needed cleaning.
If Paco had meant me harm—hell, if he’d been a rogue Catholic—I could’ve been killed.
Or, unalived—I didn’t know what the word for killing something that was already dead was.
I spit the toothpaste into the sink, then cranked on the shower, stepping into the stream.
But who could blame him for wanting to satisfy his curiosity? If our positions were reversed, would I have done anything different?
There was a knock at the door. “Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I come in?”
I leaned against the back wall of the shower, letting the water sheet down me. “Sure.”
He opened up the door and then closed it behind himself, trapping the steam in. “I’m sorry.” His gaze roamed my body, barely hidden by fogged glass. I liked the weight of his attention like I liked the weight of him, on me.
“Not as sorry as you will be, if you don’t come in here,” I promised. “Right now.”
His lips quirked, he kicked off his shoes, and then he took me at my word, stepping into the shower with me, clothes and all.
His wet and wrung out clothing hung over every vent in the room, while we lay nakedly in the bed with the heater cranked up, twined with each other, learning things now, not just body parts.
I found out that Paco was an evening shift security guard, which explained how he could play so late with me, but that he wanted to be something more meaningful, like a cop or bodyguard, hence the Krav Maga.
I wanted to make a silly joke about him guarding my body, then remembered Tamo and stifled it.
“What did I look like?” I asked him, after bringing his fingertips to my lips to kiss. He traced the outline of my lips with a forefinger.
“Like you were sleeping. Only your chest didn’t move. I didn’t touch you or anything, I was too frightened to.”
“That was probably wise.”
“It—it wasn’t gross though. If that’s what you were worried about.”
I blew air through my lips like of course not, but I had been. To think of all the ways I’d been uniquely vulnerable to Paco these past two days—him seeing me dead had probably trumped them all.
Paco kept my room key for the next three nights.
I didn’t need it, I didn’t leave the room, all I needed was him.
He delivered himself, an hour past sundown, and the things we did to one another until the edge of dawn—I had never felt so intimately known as a mortal human as I did by him, at the end of that week.
On the fourth night, I stopped him as he reached for a condom.
“We don’t need those anymore, Paco—vampires don’t have STIs.”
He paused. We were both naked, he was kneeling on the bed, and I’d been luxuriously sucking his cock.
“I just…don’t believe it.”
“You saw me dead.”
“I know. But when I’m with you—I don’t remember that anymore.”
I wondered if that was some unknown mind-wiping vampiric skill on my part, or the work of pure emotion on his. I looked up at him from my lower position. “Do you want me to show you my teeth again?”
“Not when you’re down there.” He reached down and made a show of pulling his cock away from me.
“But you do believe me, right?” I asked, and kissed his much less tender knee.
“I both do and don’t believe you. It’s hard.”
“As hard as you?” I asked, reaching out to stroke him, and he purred.
“I could always bite you,” I teased, but like so many other teases, revealing a hidden truth.
I did want to bite him. Not to bleed him or hurt him—but in the same way that I’d eaten out Thea’s ass in the shower so long ago.
Because I wanted to know him, utterly, completely.
My fangs shifted at the thought of it, my ache for his blood becoming a full bodied throb.
“Someday, Paco—I do want to bite you. But I want you to want it, too.”
He looked down at me for a long second, his thoughts a mystery to me, then gently caught my head in his hands.
“No biting during blow-jobs,” he said, and brought my mouth back to his cock.
I sprawled on the bed after he left, the taste of his cum still thick in my mouth, replaying the hours that’d come before—the way he’d pressed me here, the way I’d pushed him there, the whispers and the groans. This wasn’t life as I’d once known it—but it was good, and getting better.
Then there was a knock outside my door. I stood and strode over, wondering if it was some neighbor come to ask us to keep it down—and saw Rosalie and Tamo standing outside. She knew it when I saw her through the peephole.
My stomach instantly filled with acid—what if they’d seen Paco in the hall?
“Let us in, or we’ll break the door.”
I reluctantly twisted the handle and then stepped back into a crouch at the bottleneck where the room went from hallway to bedroom. “What do you want?” I asked as Tamo stepped in, the scar I’d left on his forehead rough and jagged. She sighed and waved a hand in the air behind him.
“This room is rather like your home now. Please allow me entrance.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise I’ll make you and that would be in bad taste, would it not? Besides dawn’s coming, neither of us have particularly long.”
“Come in,” I said warily, taking a few more steps back.
“I take it you haven’t tried to go anywhere private then, hmm?
” she said, looking around at the tangle of sheets Paco’d left behind.
“No—I doubt you’ve left this room in a week.
Usually, when creatures such as you and I enter private territory, we have to ask.
It’s the old rules. Gives the prey a fighting chance. ”
I didn’t like hearing the word prey come from her mouth. It otherized the rest of humanity—Paco along with it.
“I half expected to find Thea here—but what I scent is much more manly,” she purred the words and I swallowed in fear.
“I knew I felt greatness in you, Jack—charisma, matched with a certain amount of moral adaptability. It’s why I can’t turn Tamo, no matter how much he might like—he’s as inflexible as they come, he’d leave a string of limbless corpses in his wake. ”
As she spoke, she stared at me with her dark bewitching eyes, words falling out of her perfectly red lips. I shook myself out from under her spell. “Why are you here?”
“To congratulate you on not having killed anyone for sixty-three days. That’s more of an accomplishment than you know.
” Her head tilted graciously to one side.
“I keep my eyes on the papers and my ears on the ground. Has there been an uptick of indigent murders, drained bloodless in the night? Girls crumpled behind dumpsters with their legs behind their ears? No, and no.” She reached up for my chin with her hand and I grit my teeth as she cupped it.
“You’ve learned to make your way in your new world nicely. Almost too much so.”
Paco. What did she know about him? I knew I’d tell her anything—everything—if she asked me too with her voice.
“I’m just here to make sure you’re not getting any ideas, Jack.
The nights can be lonely, even for one such as I.
For you?” She snorted with mirth and drew my chin down, forcing me to look at her.
“If you try to make another vampire I will kill you—after I force you to kill him in the most gruesome way imaginable.” She let the threat hover, then grinned as if she’d just offered me candy.
“So don’t get too comfortable here, okay?
” she said, and patted my cheek before dropping her hand.
“Okay,” I said.
“Good. And now it’s bedtime—for both of us, hmmm?
” she said, and sauntered back toward the door, then stopped and turned around.
“You still remember what it’s like to be human, so you want to pretend to be one.
That is a weakness, Jack, but don’t worry, it will fade.
” She smiled at me like that was something to look forward to, then walked out.
Tamo followed behind her—but not before casting me back a knowing look with a toothy grin. He knew where I slept now—and dawn was coming.