The Vampire Won't Bite Without My Yes, and I Keep Giving It novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Park Point

Their first night together, with his fangs at her throat and unused. She wakes at dusk to the Chair's engraved note.

I had two nights off.

I spent the first one at his door at a quarter to six with a paper bag of egg rolls.

He opened it in the last grey light, freshly shaved, in a dark green sweater.

"You brought supper," he said.

"For me. You get the company."

"Then I'm the lucky one."

He took my coat and hung it on a brass hook.

He did it.

His house smelled of lemon polish and old paper.

There were books on every wall, and ship models on the windowsills, and a desk in the study buried under maps.

On the desk lay a long green cloth ledger with a ribbon in it.

"What's that?" I said.

"Work," he said, too quickly.

I let it go.

I ate on a leather sofa with my boots off, and he sat at the other end with his knees turned toward me.

He didn't eat, and he didn't pretend to.

"You want to know about the Compact," he said.

"I want to know about you."

"They're the same thing, I'm afraid."

He told me about the Lakehead Compact.

Thirty-one vampires in the Twin Ports, he said, who kept the old laws and answered to a Chair.

The Chair's name was Ingeborg Haugen.

She had made him in 1850, aboard a steamer on Lake Superior, when he was a ship's engineer with a bad lung.

"She's the nearest thing to a mother I have," he said, "and I don't expect you'll like her."

"I've met her driver."

"Then you've met her."

I licked egg roll sauce off my thumb.

"What's the third bite thing about?"

"It's a safeguard."

He turned his glasses over in his hands.

"A human who's bitten again and again is said to sicken. Past three, she dies, or she turns."

"Nobody's tested it. Nobody dares."

"Who says?"

"Everyone. The Chair wrote it down in 1894, after a vampire drained a girl in the old West End."

"It's been law ever since."

"Did you ever know a donor who went past three?"

"I wouldn't have let her."

He said it so simply that something in my chest turned over.

"There's one human in the Hall who's never been logged," he said. "The Chair's husband. Ole. I've never asked why."

I set my plate down.

"I'm not really interested in the law tonight," I said.

"No?"

"I'm interested in your mouth."

He looked at me.

I slid across the leather until I was in his lap, my knees either side of his thighs.

He went very still, and his hands hovered an inch from my waist.

"Put them on me," I said.

He did.

They were warm now, warm from the sofa.

They slid under my shirt and spread over my ribs.

I kissed him slowly.

Then I stood, took his hand and said, "Where's your bed?"

His bedroom was at the back of the house, with a high iron bed and a window shuttered in steel.

He had lit a single lamp.

I pulled my sweater over my head, and his gaze followed it.

I unhooked my bra and let it go.

My breasts are heavy and I've never been shy about them, and he made a small broken sound.

"You're beautiful," he said. "You're unreasonably beautiful."

"Come here and say it with your hands."

He came to me and cupped them, and his thumbs found my nipples and rubbed until I arched.

I undressed him myself, with his eyes on my face.

He was narrow and pale, with freckles across his shoulders and a long scar from his hip to his ribs, from a boiler in 1849.

I kissed the scar from end to end.

When I took him in my hand, he said my name.

"Vinnie. Please."

"Lie down."

He lay back on the iron bed, and I climbed over him.

"Keep your glasses on," I said.

"Why?"

"I want you to see me."

He pushed them up his nose with a shaking finger.

His eyes were grey and wide behind the lenses.

He looked at me.

I took his cock in my hand and stroked him, long and slow, until his hips came off the mattress.

He was thick, and cool at the tip, and hot at the root.

"Slower," he whispered, "or I'll embarrass us both."

"You won't."

I rose up on my knees and lowered myself onto him, an inch at a time.

He stretched me, deep and full, and I took a breath and held it and let it out.

"Oh, God," I said.

"Vinnie." His hands closed on my hips, and they were trembling. "May I?"

"Move."

He lifted into me slowly, and I braced my palms on his chest and found a rhythm.

I rode him the way I plow a long hill, steady and certain, knowing where the road was.

His mouth fell open, and the points of his teeth showed, and he pressed his lips shut to hide them.

"Don't," I said.

"I'll hurt you."

"Let me see them."

He opened his mouth.

They were long and white and thin, the teeth of something that had been hungry a long time.

I felt my whole body clench around him.

He groaned.

"Vinnie, you can't do that and ask me to stay civil."

"I'm not asking you to be civil."

I leaned down and he lifted his head and his mouth hovered at the curve of my throat.

I felt the edge of one fang brush my pulse, just barely, and heat blazed through me from scalp to heels.

"Ask me," he said, his voice cracking. "Please. Say it, and I'll do it."

My whole body wanted to say it.

I wanted his mouth on my throat and his teeth in me, and I could feel the wanting in my teeth.

But I'd made a rule, and I needed to know I could keep it.

"Not yet," I said. "Not yet. I'm saving it."

"Then I'll wait," he said into my neck. "As long as you like."

I rode him harder.

I took his hands off my hips and pinned them above his head on the pillow, and he went absolutely still and let me.

"Look at me."

His eyes were on mine, wet and dazzled.

I moved over him in long hard strokes, and the sound of us filled the room, slapping and slick and obscene.

"You feel so good," I told him. "Fuck. You feel so good, Emlyn."

"Tell me," he said. "Tell me what you need."

"More. Harder. Hold still and let me take it."

I took it.

I ground down on him until my clit rubbed against his pelvis on every stroke, and the pressure built until I couldn't think.

"There," I said. "Oh, there. Don't move."

He didn't.

I came with a cry, clenched tight around his cock, with my forehead against his and my fingers locked around his wrists.

He broke a moment after.

He shouted my name once, hoarse and unguarded, and I felt him pulse deep inside me, again and again, while his whole body shook.

I collapsed on his chest.

He wrapped his arms around me, and we lay there with our hearts going.

His chest rose and fell, though he didn't need to breathe.

"I haven't done that in twenty-two years," he said into my hair. "I'd forgotten I could."

"You didn't forget a thing."

"Stay," he said. "Until the sun."

"I'll stay till you're locked in."

We lay in the lamplight, his fingertips tracing circles on my shoulder, and I didn't want to move.

Outside, the lake wind rattled the shutters.

He told me about a violin he'd once owned.

I told him about my mother's church in Gary, and the dawn came closer by the minute.

At seven-fifteen he kissed me, long and slow.

"I have to go in," he said.

"I know."

"Will you be here when I wake?"

"I'll be right here."

He went down the hall.

I heard the steel door close.

I lay in his bed in the dark, smelling lemon polish and him, and slept.

When I woke, the lamp was off and the room had gone blue with evening.

He was not beside me yet.

On the pillow, where his head should have been, lay a cream card with a cameo pressed into the corner.

The writing was upright and cold.

"Tonight, not Thursday. Nine o'clock. The Hall. Do not bring him."

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