Taste of Trust #2
“You are. You're furious because he might already know what I am to you, and underneath the fury you're scared, because you can't get to him fast enough to stop whatever he's planning, and you have already lost this exact fight once before, and you don't know how to survive losing it a second time.”
“If Vane understands what you are, he will use it.”
“What I am,” he said, quieter now. “Or what I am to you?”
I looked at him and did not have a clean answer for either version of the question, which was, in itself, an answer.
“Nico.” I said his name softly, meaning it as a warning, and it did not land as one.
“No.” He shook his head once. “You don't get to hide behind the contract right now. Not with me. Not after what you just told me.”
“I am trying to keep you alive.”
“I know.” Some of the anger went out of his voice on the words, replaced by a gentler, more dangerous note underneath it.
“That's the part that scares you. Not Vane.
Me. The fact that you actually care whether I live, and you don't know what to do with that after however many centuries of not letting yourself.”
I should have corrected him. I had a dozen old, cold things I knew how to say, sentences built and worn smooth over centuries specifically for moments like this one, designed to put distance back between myself and anyone standing too close to whatever in me was still capable of feeling this.
I did not reach for any of them.
Nico closed the rest of the distance between us and put his hand against my jaw, warm and certain, and I let him, which surprised me more than it should have.
Then he kissed me.
I kissed him back, and for one reckless second, the room, the murder, Vane, the centuries behind me, all of it narrowed down to the heat of his hand and the specific, unbearable fact that he had chosen to reach for me, tonight of all nights, knowing everything he now knew.
The problem was that I felt too much, all of it at once, without the careful spacing I usually allowed myself.
His hand against my jaw. The heat of his mouth, unhurried despite everything we had just said to each other.
The trust in the way he had reached for me, as though I were a man who could be touched without consequence, rather than the thing that had just described, in detail, exactly how many ways I knew how to end a life.
Beneath all of it, unavoidable, was the blood, warm and quick with his raised heartbeat, moving under his skin with every breath he took.
I had spent centuries keeping my hunger at a careful, professional distance from anyone I actually wanted to keep.
Now it stood close enough to answer him directly, and I did not entirely trust myself to keep it where it belonged.
“Draco.” He said my name like a question this time, feeling the shift in me before I had said anything to explain it.
“I want your blood, and I need you to know that before this goes any further.”
“Tell me what that means. All of it, not the polite version.”
I made myself hold the eye contact, because looking away would have been easier, and easy was not what he was owed tonight.
“I am a True Vampire. When I feed from someone I am close to, it deepens whatever already exists between us.
It does not create anything that was not already there.
It simply makes it harder to pretend it isn't.”
“Will it hurt?”
“Briefly. Then no. Then it is, by every account I have ever been given, considerably the opposite of hurting.”
“This bond you're talking about.” He tilted his head slightly, quiet for a moment, running the same careful assessment over me that I had watched him run over every object in his shop.
“It's already pretty deep, Draco. I just found out you loved someone enough that his name came out of my mouth without my permission.
I don't think there's a version of tonight where I walk out of this room less attached to you than I walked in.”
“I am not saying that to pressure you.” A small, humorless smile touched his mouth. “I'm saying it because it's true. Adding more doesn't scare me the way you clearly think it should.” He paused. “Does it scare you?”
“Yes,” I said, because it was the truth, and he had more than earned one tonight.
He reached up and pulled the collar of his shirt aside, baring the line of his throat, and looked at me with those steady eyes and waited, unflinching, as though offering his throat to a centuries old predator were an ordinary Tuesday for him.
I put my hand to the back of his neck, careful, and felt the pulse under my palm before I ever reached his skin with my mouth. I stood with my lips against his pulse point, his warmth beneath them, his heartbeat loud and close and utterly unafraid.
“Go on,” he said, quietly, his hand coming up to rest against my shoulder. “I've got you.”
I bit.
The first rush of his blood reached my tongue, and I understood, immediately and completely, that nothing I had drunk in centuries had prepared me for this.
It was not merely the taste, though the taste alone would have undone lesser men than I had once been.
It was the fact of it being his, offered rather than taken, given the way a man gives something he has already decided he does not need back.
I wanted more. I have wanted more from every throat I have ever put my mouth to, in one way or another, for longer than most civilizations have existed.
I restrained myself anyway. I put my palm flat against his chest instead and felt his heartbeat under it, strong and quick and entirely alive, and let that be enough, because it was the only kind of restraint I had left to offer him tonight.
I sealed the bite, pulled back, and held him up when his legs demonstrated strong opinions about what they had just been asked to endure. He leaned into me, forehead against my shoulder, breathing hard.
“Fuck,” he said, into the fabric of my collar.
“Yes,” I said. “That is generally the reaction.”
He huffed a sound that might have been a laugh, muffled against my shoulder, and I felt it more than heard it.
His hand had loosened on my shoulder but had not let go.
I kept my arm around him and stood in the dimmed office with his blood still on my tongue and his weight settled against my chest, and the specific, terrifying quality of being trusted by someone who had every reason not to trust me, and had done it anyway, twice tonight, once with a question and once with his throat.
I have been given blood by people who wanted to be remembered by me.
I have been given blood by people who wanted, very badly, to be forgotten.
I did not know, standing there with Nico breathing against my collar, whether I knew how to be worthy of either gift, let alone this new, unclassifiable third one he had just handed me without asking anything in return.
But I was, for the first time in longer than I could accurately measure, genuinely willing to find out.