Her toes curl under my thumbs and I want to bite them. Not in the way a man bites when he's lost his mind to lust—in the way a starving thing bites when the food keeps wiggling. She knows. She's doing it on purpose, that slow stretch and flex, her honey-brown eyes never leaving whatever trashy romance she's reading on her phone.
"You're pressing too hard."
Her voice is honey over glass, sweet and sharp. She doesn't look up. The milkshake is balanced on the arm of her chair, half-empty, chocolate residue clinging to the rim where her mouth was.
I ease my thumb pressure. Count to five. Then press harder.
She hums. Not a complaint. A sound of acknowledgment, like she expected exactly this rebellion and logged it for later. The sound scrapes something raw inside my chest. Three hundred years of being feared, and I'm being catalogued by a human with a phone and a strawberry-scented lotion that's now coating my palms.
The room is warm. Too warm. Her warmth. That human furnace that keeps her alive and keeps me aware of every inch of space between us—which is approximately two feet of carpet and the distance from her ankles to my knees. I could cover it in a breath. I don't.
Her foot slips from my grip. She flexes her arch deliberately, and I catch it before it falls. My jaw locks so hard I hear my teeth grind.
"Careful," she murmurs, and there's a smile tucked into the word like a blade in a sleeve.
"I don't drop things."
"You dropped the glass of water earlier."
"You startled me."
"I sneezed."
"Loudly."
She finally looks up. Her eyes are molten caramel in the lamplight, and they hold mine with that devastating patience of someone who's already won every argument she'll ever have with me. "You're doing wonderfully," she says, and the condescension is so pure, so perfectly aimed, that I feel it in my fangs.
They ache. A deep, pulsing ache that starts at the root and spreads down to my throat. I've never felt anything like it—this craving that has nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with her specific chemistry. I've been a vampire for three centuries. I know what need feels like. This is need with a face and a name and a very smug smile.
"You're glaring again," she says, and goes back to her phone.
I don't stop glaring. I can't. The glare is the only thing I have left that feels like mine. My hands are hers. My time is hers. The milkshake I made was hers. Even the air in this room feels like it belongs to her now, warm and humid and carrying the faint trace of her scent—vanilla, paper, and something deeper, something that makes my stomach turn inside out.
Her blood.
I can still taste it. The memory is a live wire in my mouth, that first drop on my tongue, the way the world narrowed to the wound on her finger, to the copper-sweet flood that hit my system like a drug I'd been waiting centuries to find. I've drunk from animals. I've drunk from humans. I've never had anything that made me feel like I was drinking the sun.
Her foot shifts again. This time, her toes brush my wrist.
The contact is featherlight, almost accidental, but I freeze. The heat of her skin against the thin skin over my pulse point sends a shudder up my arm that I can't suppress. She feels it. I see her eyes flick to my face and hold there, reading everything I'm trying not to show.
"Interesting," she says, softly. Not to me. To herself.
"What is?" My voice is rougher than I meant it to be. The thirst is creeping in, curling around my vocal cords.
"You." She sets her phone down and gives me her full attention, her head tilted, the cascade of chestnut curls spilling over the chair's arm. "You flinched when I touched you. Not away—toward. Like you're starved for contact even as you're pretending to hate it."
"I hate it." The words come too fast, too sharp.
"Mm." She stretches her arms above her head, a slow, languid movement that makes her shirt ride up, exposing a strip of warm olive skin above her waistband. I look away. I look back. I hate myself for both. "Massage my shoulders instead."
The command lands like a slap. I stare at her. "Excuse me?"
"My shoulders. They're tight from all that wedding tension." She says it like she's ordering room service. "You can let go of my feet now. I'll survive."
The soles of her feet are pink from my grip. I released her without realizing. My hands hover in the empty air, and I feel the loss of contact as a physical absence—the warmth gone, the purpose gone. I don't want her to ask me for something else. I don't want her to tell me I'm done.
But I want blood more than I want dignity right now, so I rise.
She swivels in the chair, her back to me. She's wearing a thin silk robe over her slip, and the fabric gaps at her shoulder blades, revealing the dusky curve of her spine. She's not wearing a bra. I know this because the robe drapes too loosely, and there's no strap line beneath the silk. I file the knowledge somewhere I don't want it and settle my hands on her shoulders.
Her skin is hot. Human-hot. Alive-hot. The heat seeps through the silk and into my palms, and I press my thumbs into the muscle at the base of her neck purely to give my hands something to do that isn't trembling.
She sighs. The sound is soft, genuine, a release of tension that pulls something inside me taut in response. "Your hands are cold," she says, but it's not a complaint. "Vampire cold."
"I can stop."
"Don't."
The word is quiet, but it's an order. A permission. Both. I don't know which one I hate more. I work the knot in her right shoulder—I can feel it, a hard lump of stress beneath my thumb—and she exhales long and slow, her head drooping forward, exposing the back of her neck.
Her pulse beats there. Visible. Vulnerable. I can see the vein running beneath the skin, a thin blue river carrying the only thing in the world I want right now. My fangs extend before I can stop them, grazing my lower lip. The pain focuses me. Barely.
"You're thinking about it," she says. Her voice is dreamy, half-lidded. "I can feel the tension in your hands change."
I don't answer. I can't. If I open my mouth, I'll beg.
"You can have a drop," she says. "If you finish the massage. Both shoulders. All the way down."
A drop. One drop. Against everything I've been promised—the deal we made, the arrangement, the hope of more—one drop feels like an insult. It also feels like water in a desert. It also feels like the only reason I'm still here, pressing my thumbs into her trapezius instead of tearing the door off its hinges and feeding off the nearest human I can find, consequences be damned.
She's not my type. I keep repeating it like a litany. She's not my type. She's human. She's soft. She's smug. She's everything I've spent three centuries despising. But her blood sings to me in a frequency I can't turn off, and her body under my hands is a blasphemy I keep committing because the alternative is starvation on every level.
I work her shoulders until the knots soften. I trace the edge of her shoulder blades, the dip of her spine, the curve of her waist through the silk. I tell myself I'm being thorough. I'm being methodical. I'm earning my drop. But my hands have started to learn the geography of her, and that knowledge is settling into my bones like a poison I'll never sweat out.
"Good," she murmurs, and the word is almost a purr. "You're good at this…."
I pull my hands away as if burned. The loss of heat is immediate, sharp, a cold shock that leaves my fingers aching. I flex them at my sides. "I'm done."
She turns slowly, the robe slipping back into place, and looks up at me from the chair. Her honey-brown eyes are dark, lazy, satisfied. She looks like a cat who's finished her cream and is deciding whether to let the mouse live.
"Kneel."
The word hits my chest like a physical blow. I stiffen. "Excuse me?"
"You want a drop. I want you on your knees." She says it like she's discussing the weather. Like it's the most natural request in the world. Her hand lifts, and she holds out her left index finger—the same finger that had the paper cut, now healed but marked with the faintest white scar line. "Kneel, Eryth."
My name in her mouth. She says it like she owns it. Like she owns me.
I drop to my knees.
The impact sends a jolt through my knees, up my spine. The carpet is thick, but the gesture itself feels like a fall, like I've been pushed and chose to land. I'm eye level with her hand, with that impossible finger, with the memory of ecstasy I can't stop chasing. My mouth is dry. My fangs are fully extended, grazing my lower lip. I can smell her blood, distant and bright, even through the healed skin.
She holds her finger steady. "You'll take one drop. No more. If you take more, I'll lock myself in the bathroom and you won't taste me again for a week."
The threat is almost worse than the denial. A week. A week without her blood in a world that's already started to feel gray and muted in the hours since I last tasted it. I nod. The motion is jerky, animal.
She presses her finger to my lips.
I part them. I take her fingertip into my mouth. I bite—just enough, just barely—and the first bead of her blood hits my tongue.
It's heaven. It's hell. It's the only thing that makes sense in a world that's gone sideways. I taste her sugar, her iron, her heat. I taste the life in her, the stubborn, foolish, infuriating life that she wields like a weapon and I covet like a religion. My eyes slide closed. My mouth works her finger, gentler than I should be, longer than I'm allowed. One drop isn't enough. One drop is a door cracked open and slammed in my face.
She pulls her finger free. The loss is a physical tear, a parting of flesh from flesh. I watch her fingertip emerge from my mouth, wet with my saliva and a faint smear of red. She doesn't wipe it off. She holds my gaze and brings her finger to her own lips, tasting the smear herself, and the gesture is so intimate, so deliberately cruel, that I feel it in my groin.
"Good boy," she says. Then she picks up her phone and goes back to reading, as if I don't exist.
I stay on my knees. The heat in my chest is a wildfire I can't put out. My hands are fisted at my sides. My fangs ache for her throat. And I realize, with a clarity that cuts through the hunger, that I don't want to leave this room. Not because of the blood. Because of what the blood does to me when I'm this close to her.
She's not my type. But she's becoming my obsession. And I don't know if there's a difference anymore.