Chapter 18
Rachel was going to court on one of her cases, and she’d asked Lorenzo and Maggie to watch her practice her opening statement.
Charlie happened to be over that night—okay, Lorenzo had invited him; he knew he needed to cool it with Charlie, but it was so hard to resist—and at some point in the last few weeks, Charlie had become almost as close with Rachel and Maggie as Lorenzo was, despite his being their actual roommate.
So when Charlie heard about Rachel’s mock speech, he sat down to watch too.
She was a few lines into her second attempt when Isolde came home. As soon as Rachel saw her, she rolled her eyes and fumbled her words. “Start over,” Maggie said encouragingly.
Rachel cleared her throat and started her speech again, and it went well until the sound of running water came from the kitchen. Her eye twitched a little, but she continued.
She managed to hold it together until Isolde reappeared, holding a glass of water. She turned toward her room, but then paused.
Rachel snapped. “Can I help you?”
“I was watching your speech,” Isolde said.
“Okay,” Rachel said. “Well, I’m trying to focus.”
“Someone watching your speech unnerves you?” Isolde said levelly. “You do need practice.”
Charlie winced and Maggie started to cut in, but Rachel spoke over her. “No comments about sin or degeneracy tonight?”
“Lorenzo and Charlie are sleeping together,” Isolde said. “I thought you knew that.”
“Y’know what—” Rachel seethed.
“Okay, hey!” Charlie said loudly. “Why don’t we talk this out? Because this is . . .” He gestured widely, encompassing the whole room. “I mean it’s great, but it’s not healthy.”
“I have nothing to say,” Isolde said.
“Me neither,” Rachel added.
“Okay, but like—you want to keep living like this?” Charlie asked.
No one said anything. Tentatively, Charlie said, “Maybe, Rachel, you could try to be less hostile, and Isolde, you could try to be more understanding.”
“Of what?” Isolde demanded.
“Do you really not get why Rachel is uncomfortable when you talk about sex?” Charlie asked.
“I’m not uncomfortable!” Rachel objected. “She’s weird. Focused on . . . purity and . . . rightness and . . . sin. When no one’s—when it’s not even—” she huffed out angrily through her teeth, and then stared Isolde down. “It’s impolite,” she said, almost pointedly.
Isolde crossed her arms.
“Okaay,” Charlie said, indulgently, before turning back to Isolde. “Then—can you understand why Rachel might find it . . . impolite? You’ve been living here for a while, you must have picked up on some things.”
“Her problem is with me, and with my people,” Isolde said coldly. “Our very nature.”
Charlie threw a hand up at Rachel before she could speak. “I get why you might feel that way,” he told Isolde. “But you’re also the one who chose to rent a room here, among all the humans and vampires and poltergeists. I mean, you left home.”
Isolde said nothing, her gaze turned inward.
“You chose to come live among all of us, with all our . . . impurities,” Charlie continued. “I’m sure there must have been some of your people who thought that was impure. The choice you made.”
Isolde sat down next to him on the couch. She was silent for a moment, and then said, softly, “Yes.”
An oppressive stillness overtook the room as they all simultaneously realized that they had no idea what to say. Rachel was still standing in the middle of the living room with her scripted cards, looking lost. “Well,” Charlie said, glancing at Lorenzo. “That must’ve been . . . hard.”
Maggie shuffled closer to Isolde on the couch, reaching out with her hand but then withdrawing it.
“It was my choice to take on human form,” Isolde said hollowly, staring at the floor.
“Very few of us do. For most it would be unthinkable. This place is . . .” She paused, diplomatically, and then said: “. . . different from our Wood.
“But your world became hard to ignore after a while,” she whispered. “And I was so curious.”
Charlie nodded. “And then, ever since I came here, it’s become so hard for me to find my way back to the Wood.
” She stared at her hands in her lap. “And even when I do, my people aren’t there.
I spend hours out there sometimes, but the wind is still.
It’s just . . . trees and rocks and water.
And the Wood—our Wood—is gone.” Very, very quietly, she said, “It’s like they . . . they don’t want me to find them.”
Maggie murmured something Lorenzo couldn’t hear, reaching out to rub Isolde’s back. Rachel had stopped moving completely. “That sounds . . . really lonely, and confusing,” Charlie said. “I probably can’t . . . ever really understand, completely. But. I can always listen.”
“No thank you,” Isolde said, and she stood up abruptly, stalking over to her room. Rachel watched her go.
Charlie blew out a breath. “Sorry, Rachel,” he said. “I—I didn’t mean to derail your thing.”
“No,” she said gruffly. “I just, uh. I think I’m good. Need to stop thinking about this for a bit.” She gestured to her cards, and then retreated to her own room.
Maggie left quietly after them. Charlie slumped back against the couch once they were alone, looking haunted. “Jesus,” he said. “I had no idea.”
“I don’t think any of us did,” Lorenzo replied.
“How awful.”
Lorenzo nodded in agreement. He’d never been cast out by a group like the unicorns, but feeling isolated and adrift? That he could understand.
“I pushed her,” Charlie was saying bitterly. “And now it’s . . . I screwed it all up. Again.”
Lorenzo wasn’t generally inclined to support Charlie’s interference in the personal lives of others, but his investment in whatever Rachel and Isolde were working through was touching. “You didn’t screw it up,” he said. “They’re upset, but it’s not about you.”
Charlie scoffed, and Lorenzo rubbed his back. “Why are you being so hard on yourself?”
At that, Charlie flicked him a quick look that Lorenzo couldn’t decipher. Then he shook his head, closed his eyes, and ground his knuckles against his brow.
“Hey, come here,” Lorenzo said, putting an arm around him.
Charlie still looked troubled, so Lorenzo kissed him.
He could tell that Charlie barely noticed it with everything else running through his head, though; so he took Charlie’s chin, turned his face, and kissed him again, deeply.
And this time he could feel it through Charlie’s skin and in the shift of his muscles, the way his anxiety faded and a breathlessness took over.
He gasped when Lorenzo broke off the kiss.
“My room?” Lorenzo murmured.
Charlie nodded frantically.
Later, Lorenzo lay with his head on Charlie’s chest, enjoying the rhythmic rise and fall of his breath and the swirling velvet sound of blood in his veins.
Charlie’s skin always smelled delicious after sex, hot and limber and sated, and he had to fight the urge to lick the warm sweat off him.
Charlie was a temptation in many more ways than one.
Not for the first time, Lorenzo thought about how hard it was to have only part of this—to hold back so much even while they were together.
Charlie had told him many times that their arrangement was “educational,” and Lorenzo could follow those rules, he felt reasonably sure.
Charlie said a lot with his eyes that he didn’t say out loud, and so what if that ran in both directions—so what if he could never really tell what Charlie was thinking, could never hope to be as detached as him, as unaffected, as above it all?
He could hope for the best and distract himself from the worst by jumping Charlie’s bones—he seemed to want him for that much, if not more. Nothing ventured, nothing lost.
He ventured a gentle hand through Charlie’s hair, and watched his eyelashes flutter closed against his cheeks. That was something gained, at least.
“Can I ask you something,” Charlie whispered.
Lorenzo rested his chin on his knuckles, his hand splayed on Charlie’s chest. “Yes?”
“Um. Do you . . . I mean . . .” Charlie was blushing, and shook his head after a moment, as if gathering his courage. Lorenzo waited with a slight prickling sense of unease, not sure where this was going.
Finally, Charlie blurted out, “Why don’t you bite me?”
Lorenzo’s mouth went dry. He was frozen in place for a moment before he rolled onto his back, away from Charlie.
Charlie had been thinking about this?
Wanting it?
A phantom ache swept through his mouth and throat, and he swallowed. Charlie had asked, so he tried to quiet the chanting of bite bite bite in his lizard brain and focus.
He couldn’t look at Charlie while he said it, so he spoke to the ceiling. “A bite is . . . significant for vampires. A big step in a relationship.”
Charlie rolled onto his side. “Really?” he asked. “Why?”
Lorenzo closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure how to explain it to a human. He wasn’t sure he even fully remembered what it had been like to be human, so how could he ever describe it in a way that made sense?
He glanced over at Charlie, and immediately regretted it.
He looked so open and trusting, and Lorenzo could imagine it instantly: not just how Charlie would taste, or how he’d react to Lorenzo’s bite; but how it would feel to consume Charlie in that way; to feel Charlie’s lifeblood become a part of him and take root inside, somewhere deeper than he could ever reach.
“Vampires live on blood,” Lorenzo whispered. “It makes us immortal. When you feed on someone—on a lover . . . when you take their life’s blood inside of you, for your sustenance . . .” He sighed, hoping he was sounding somber instead of desperate. “It is . . . incredibly intimate.”
Charlie was frowning slightly, his eyes still locked on Lorenzo. “Is it . . . I mean, is it always like that? When you bite someone for food?”
“No, of course not. It’s . . . different when a bite happens between a vampire and a human they are involved with romantically. Or sexually,” he hastened to add. “This . . . this essence you take of them, when you are already bonded in another way, it is . . .”
He sat up restlessly, drawing a knee up to his chest. “Some vampires don’t treat it that way—they just bite indiscriminately.
But most of us—we only bite a lover when it is someone we are—when it’s serious.
” He paused, staring down at the sheets crumpled by his hand.
“And I just . . . wasn’t sure that’s what we were doing. ”
Charlie nodded quickly. “No, you’re right,” he said. “This—that makes sense. Yeah.” He cleared his throat, not looking at Lorenzo. “Thank you for telling me. I—I’m glad to know, for my, um. My research.”
“Happy to help,” Lorenzo said quietly.