5. Aven
Aven
I'm holding the keys to my apartment like they're a live grenade.
My hands are doing this fine, vibrating tremor thing that has less to do with the gin I knocked back before closing the bar and more to do with the man standing close enough behind me that I can feel the shape of him in the hallway air.
Cain. The name sits in my head like a velvet curtain drawn over a window.
He's so close I can feel the heat of him, steady and pulsing, warmer than a vampire's got any right to be.
I know what he is. I've spent three years in seminary learning exactly which prayers to recite while driving a stake through a chest like his, which means inviting him into my apartment should qualify as either heresy, self-harm, or a creative interpretation of hospitality.
The dead are quiet because his fingers are still wrapped loosely around mine.
The contact is small, almost polite, but the silence it gives me is heavy.
For the first time since I hit puberty, the constant oily whispering of the spirits has vanished.
If I have to invite a literal predator into my living room to keep the ghosts of 1920s coal miners from narrating my dental hygiene routine, then theology can take the night off.
"The lock sticks," I mutter, my voice thin in the vacuum of the hallway. "You have to jiggle it. Like you're trying to tickle a safe." God, that was a stupid metaphor.
Cain doesn't crowd me, but the fact that he's not crowding me is almost worse. He's left space between his body and mine with the kind of care that makes me notice the space instead of feeling protected by it. "Take your time," he says, his voice low enough to move under my skin.
The tumblers finally give with a click that feels too much like judgment.
I push the door open and stumble inside, fumbling for the light switch.
The overhead bulb flickers on, revealing my apartment in all its depressing beige glory.
There's a half-empty glass of whiskey on the counter, a stack of overdue library books on the coffee table, and a laundry basket full of clean clothes I've been pretending are decorative.
Cain steps inside, and the room becomes smaller.
He doesn't look at the furniture first. He looks at the shape of the space, the corners, the windows, the door behind him.
His gaze snags for one quiet second on the locked drawer of my nightstand, the one where I keep the silver cross that still smells like scorched skin in the back of my head.
He says nothing. His silence is observant, not empty.
It's the silence of someone who knows how to read cages because he's survived too many of them.
"Make yourself at home," I say, heading straight for the kitchen because standing still feels like an invitation for my body to realize what it's done. “I’d offer you another scotch, but I get the feeling that’s not the part of your diet currently making you look like death warmed over, and I’m fresh out of O-negative.”
The joke lands badly. It deserves to. I brace both hands against the sink with my back to him and try to breathe through the impossible quiet.
Every survival instinct I own is screaming at me to run.
Every ruined part of me that's spent years full of dead voices is curled up around the silence like something starving that finally found warmth.
"You don't have to perform for me," Cain says.
I turn my head enough to look at him over my shoulder.
He's standing at the edge of the kitchen, torn shirt dark at the shoulder, exhaustion cutting deeper lines into his face now that the bar lights are gone.
He looks less like a beautiful threat and more like a man held together by control and blood loss.
That should make him less dangerous. It doesn't.
"I'm not performing," I say. "This is my natural charm. People find it deeply concerning."
His mouth almost moves into a smile. "You're afraid."
"Congratulations. You've solved the mystery of the seminarian who brought a vampire home after midnight.
" I push away from the sink, too restless to stay braced there, and the room tilts in a way that's got nothing to do with alcohol.
"There's probably a pamphlet about this somewhere.
It's got a very stern title and at least one illustration of hellfire. "
Cain's gaze stays on my face, not my mouth, not my throat, though I can feel the place where his attention wants to go. "I can leave."
The words land wrong. They should relieve me. They make my chest close instead.
The dead are quiet because he's here. They're not whispering from the bathroom tiles.
They're not scratching at the windows. They're not pressing their unfinished grief against the inside of my skull.
There's only the hum of the refrigerator, the distant sound of traffic, and Cain's breathing, as if he's trying not to frighten something already wounded.
"You leave, and they come back," I say.
"Yes."
His honesty should make me angry. It does, but the anger's got nowhere clean to go. I look at the floor, at the scuff marks near the cabinets, at anything that isn't his face. "That's cruel."
"I know."
I laugh once, but there's no humor in it. "You're supposed to argue with me. Say you're not cruel. Say this is all very normal and I'm being dramatic because I'm under-slept and spiritually compromised."
"It'd be easier to say that if I believed it."
The quiet stretches between us. It should feel peaceful, but it's got weight. It's got consequence. I can feel my own body inside it too clearly, every tremor, every bruise of want, every place where fear and need have started using the same language.
Cain takes one step closer and stops. "I don't want your gratitude for silence. I don't want you mistaking relief for consent."
The words cut through the room with more force than any seduction would have.
I stare at him, my throat tight, because the worst part is that he sees the trap in this before I can pretend there's no trap.
He knows the silence isn't neutral. He knows my yes is tangled in the fact that I'd crawl through broken glass for one night without ghosts.
"I know what I'm asking for," I say, though I'm not sure that's true. I only know what I can't survive losing yet.
His eyes darken. "Tell me anyway."
I hate him a little for making me name it. I hate him more for needing me to. "I want you to touch me. I want the quiet. I want to stop feeling like my body's a room everyone else died in."
His composure cracks just enough that I see the hunger under it with recognition, the same impossible pull that dragged him into my bar and made every spirit in the room go still.
He lifts his hand slowly, giving me time to move away.
I don't. His fingers touch my jaw, and the silence deepens until the apartment feels submerged.
The world outside the kitchen thins. The cross in the drawer, Ezra's face, the seminary, the dead, all of it slips beyond the reach of sound.
There's only the pressure of Cain's thumb against my skin and the violent relief of being held inside a quiet I didn't have to beg God for.
"Is this what you want?" he asks.
"I need it," I whisper, and the honesty breaks something open in my chest. "Please."
He leans in, but even then, he gives me time.
His mouth meets mine slowly, almost carefully, and that restraint is what ruins me.
I expected violence from something with fangs.
I expected hunger I could condemn after.
Instead, his kiss is controlled and dark and devastating, tasting of scotch, blood, and the silence he carries in his skin.
I grab the front of his shirt because I need something to do with my hands that isn't prayer.
The fabric's torn and stiff with drying blood beneath my fingers.
He makes a low sound against my mouth, more pain than pleasure for half a second, and I pull back just enough to see the tightness in his face.
"You're hurt."
"Yes."
"That wasn't an invitation to be dramatic."
"I'm not being dramatic." His thumb moves once along my jaw. "I'm deciding whether I can survive wanting you before I've fed properly."
That should sober me. It does. It also sends heat through me so sharp I have to close my eyes. "Are you going to hurt me?"
"No," he says, and there's no hesitation in it. "If I think I might, I stop. If you tell me to stop, I stop. If the silence makes it hard for you to tell me, you push me away once and I stop. Do you understand?"
I nod, but he doesn't move.
"Aven."
"I understand," I say, my voice raw. "I can push you away. I can tell you no. I'm not saying yes because I'm grateful. I'm saying yes because I want you, and I hate that I want you, and I want you anyway."
His eyes close for one breath. When they open again, the restraint in them is thinner, but it's still there.
The second kiss is harder and less careful around the edges.
He backs me against the counter, his hands settling at my waist, holding me with enough pressure to make my body understand I'm not floating away.
The silence thickens where he touches me.
My hands move to his shoulders, then hesitate near the wound, and he shifts so I grip his uninjured side instead.
The apartment around us becomes absurdly intimate in flashes: the toaster oven behind my hip, the sink dripping once into a coffee mug, the overhead bulb humming above us.
Cain's mouth moves down my jaw, then to the side of my throat, where my pulse is doing its best to leave my body.
His breath ghosts over the skin there. His fangs don't touch me.
"Bed," I say, because if I have to be damned, I refuse to be damned in front of my dishes.
He pauses, forehead briefly against my temple. "You're sure?"
"No," I say, because lying feels impossible inside the quiet. "But I'm choosing it."