The first thing Alaric Voss became aware of, in this order, was:

One — he was on the floor.

Two — the floor was carpet.

Three — the carpet was blue, which was a color he had opinions about.

Four — there was a poster of a woman, and the woman with a huge blue dress holding a guitar, and below the woman it said LAUFEY WORLD TOUR 2023, and Alaric did not know who that was but he was, on some primal level, deeply offended that another woman was getting more attention in this room than he was about to.

Five — he had absolutely no idea how he had gotten here.

He blinked up at the ceiling.

The ceiling had those little popcorn bumps on it. He stared at the popcorn bumps. The popcorn bumps did not provide him with any useful information.

"...Huh," Alaric said.

Out loud. To no one. In a voice that was significantly deeper than it needed to be.

He sat up.

He sat up too fast. His head — which was, technically, six hundred and forty-one years old and should have known better — swam. He braced one large hand on the carpet. The other came up to his forehead. He frowned. Vampires did not get dizzy. Vampires were supposed to be graceful. Vampires were supposed to rise from a tomb in a swirl of mist and a billowing cape and several thousand years of menace. Alaric had risen from a dorm room carpet next to a half-eaten bag of Hot Cheetos and what appeared to be a single sock.

He picked up the sock.

He examined it.

He put it back down.

"Okay," he said. To himself. "Okay. Okay okay okay. Think. Think, Alaric." He tapped his temple. The tapping was vigorous. "What is the last thing you remember."

The last thing he remembered was —

A bar. Definitely a bar. There had been lights. Loud music with a thumpa thumpa thumpa in it that he had not enjoyed. A woman had handed him a small glass with something blue in it and he had drunk it because he was polite. Then there had been a second small glass. Then a third. Then someone had handed him something on fire and he had thought, well, I am already dead, what's the worst that could happen, and he had drunk that too, and after that things had gotten somewhat impressionistic.

He had a vague memory of attempting to fight a parking meter.

He had a vaguer memory of winning.

"...Okay," Alaric said. "Okay. We can work with this. We've had worse."

He stood up.

He stood up to his full height, which was six feet four inches, and his head immediately hit a string of small twinkling lights that had been hung across the ceiling. He went very still. He looked up. The lights swayed gently. He raised a hand and patted them, cautiously, as if they might bite him.

They did not bite him.

He decided he liked them.

He turned in a slow circle to take stock of the room.

It was not a large room. It was, in fact, alarmingly small. There was a bed — a very narrow bed, the kind of bed a medieval prisoner might have considered cramped — pushed against one wall, with a striped comforter on it and approximately fourteen decorative pillows of various textures, one of which was shaped like a strawberry. There was a desk piled with books and a laptop and three different mugs in three different states of emptiness. There was a small refrigerator on the floor that was humming aggressively at him. There was a closet whose door had been left half-open, revealing what appeared to be eight thousand articles of clothing crammed into a space designed to hold six.

There was a corkboard. The corkboard had photographs pinned to it. Alaric crossed the room in two long strides and leaned in to study them.

A girl. Same girl in all of them. Smiling. Laughing. With friends. With what appeared to be a small dog wearing a sweater. At a beach. At what looked like a graduation. Holding what was unmistakably a beer in one of them, which Alaric found charming.

Alaric tilted his head.

"...You're cute," he informed the corkboard, in a low approving murmur. "Where are you, cute girl. Why is your sock on the floor."

The corkboard did not answer him.

He turned away from it. He spotted, on the desk, a small framed thing that said in flowing gold script: SHE BELIEVED SHE COULD AND SHE DID. Alaric read it twice. He nodded slowly, as if absorbing ancient wisdom. He moved on.

He passed the mirror.

He stopped.

He took two steps back.

He stared at the mirror.

The mirror did not stare back at him, because Alaric did not have a reflection, and Alaric had not had a reflection in six hundred and forty-one years, and yet every single time this happened to him in an unfamiliar room he experienced a fresh small jolt of oh, right. He leaned in closer. He waved a hand in front of the empty mirror. He made a face at it. The face was not returned.

"Rude," he muttered.

He moved on.

On the desk, half-buried under a notebook, his eye caught a glint of something. He lifted the notebook. Underneath it was — oh, thank God — his phone. His phone! He had a phone! He had only had a phone for eight months and he was still emotionally attached to it the way other people were emotionally attached to their first pet. He scooped it up. He pressed the button. The screen lit up. Wait why does this woman have my phone?

47 missed calls.

23 missed texts.

A single voicemail, from a contact saved as DON'T ANSWER (MOTHER), which had been left at 4:17 a.m.

Alaric looked at his phone. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at his phone again.

"...Yeah, no, we're not doing that right now," he told the phone, and put it face-down on the desk.

He moved on.

He found, on the small refrigerator, a Post-it note. The Post-it note said, in slanted handwriting: don't forget econ at 9 you stupid bitch. Alaric stared at it. He felt a deep and immediate kinship with whoever had written it. He patted the refrigerator. The refrigerator hummed louder, possibly in gratitude.

He turned around.

He realized, very slowly, that he was still wearing what he had been wearing last night. Which had been — he looked down — a black silk shirt unbuttoned approximately three buttons too far, dark trousers, and one (1) boot. He looked at his sock-clad right foot. He looked at his left boot. He looked around the room.

He did not see the other boot.

"...Where is my boot," he said, conversationally, to the room.

The room did not produce his boot.

He sighed. He ran a hand through his hair. His hair, he discovered upon contact, contained what felt like a small amount of glitter. He brought his hand down and examined it. Yes. Glitter. Pink glitter. He had no memory of acquiring pink glitter. He had no memory of being in any building or vicinity where pink glitter would have been a logical outcome. He stared at his hand.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. So that happened."

He wiped his hand on his trousers. It did not help. The glitter migrated. It would, he suspected, be migrating for several weeks.

He sat down on the edge of the bed.

The bed made a small creak of protest under his weight. He froze. He shifted carefully. The bed creaked again. He decided not to move.

He looked, from his new vantage point, around the room one more time.

A small dorm. A girl's small dorm. He was almost certain of that now — the photographs, the strawberry pillow, the strongly worded Tupperware, the general atmosphere of someone who studied hard and cried sometimes and had at least one friend who had given her the SHE BELIEVED SHE COULD sign as a passive-aggressive joke. Not a stranger's dorm, exactly. He felt — and this was the strange part — he felt that he was supposed to be here. He couldn't say why. He couldn't remember why. But there was a low hum of correctness in his chest that he had learned, over six centuries, not to ignore.

It was the same hum he had felt the day before he'd bought his first phone.

It was the same hum he had felt the day he had decided, on a whim, to attend a college party three weeks ago because someone in line at the coffee shop had mentioned it.

The hum, historically, was usually right.

He scratched the back of his neck. More glitter dislodged.

"Right," he said. "Okay. Plan. Plan. We need a plan." He held up one finger. "One — establish where we are." He held up a second finger. "Two — establish whose room this is." A third finger. "Three — find the boot." He paused. He added, gravely, "The boot is important."

He nodded to himself.

He stood up. The bed creaked in relief.

He took two steps toward the door — and then stopped, because he heard, very distinctly, the sound of a key in a lock.

His head snapped up.

Outside the door, in the hallway, footsteps. Light ones. The jangle of keys. A small soft ugh sound — the sound of someone who had been awake for too many hours and was nearly home. The key turned. The handle began to move.

Alaric Voss — six hundred and forty-one years old, vampire, last surviving member of a noble line in a country that no longer existed, six feet four inches of glittered shirtless-adjacent confusion — stood in the middle of a stranger's dorm room with one boot on and made the executive decision, in approximately half a second, to do absolutely nothing.

He just stood there.

He put his hands behind his back. He straightened his shoulders. He arranged his face into what he hoped was a polite, charming, I-can-explain expression.

He could not, in fact, explain.

The door opened.

A figure stepped in — keys in one hand, a tote bag over one shoulder, looking down at her phone — and took two steps inside before she noticed that her room contained a six-foot-four medieval man.

She looked up.

Alaric smiled.

Wide. Friendly. All teeth.

(Including the two pointy ones. He forgot, sometimes. He always forgot.)

"...Hi."

His voice came out warm. Bright. The voice of a man who had been raised in a castle and taught manners by women in stiff dresses and was committed, in this moment of crisis, to manners as the path forward.

"Hi! Hello. Hi. So." He cleared his throat. He glanced down at his sock. He glanced back up at her. "I have, um. A couple of questions. If you have a minute."

A beat.

"Also do you know where my boot is..?"

It was 2:47 p.m. on a Sunday and Alaric Voss, six-hundred-and-forty-one-year-old vampire and last surviving heir of a noble line, was lying upside down on a beanbag chair watching a movie about himself.

Well. Not about him specifically. About vampires generally. But still. He was taking it personally.

The beanbag was pink. He had opinions about that, too, but he had stopped articulating them out loud somewhere around week two when {{user}} had patted his cheek and said aw, it matches your nails, and he had realized, with the slow horror of a man watching his own ship sink, that she was correct.

He stretched his long legs up the wall. His socked feet rested against the popcorn ceiling. His head hung off the front of the beanbag at a forty-five-degree angle. His hair — long, black, normally a curtain of brooding gothic mystique — was pushed back off his face by a pink Hello Kitty headband with two small fabric bows on it that she had bought specifically for him at a Daiso two weeks ago and had presented to him with the genuine, beaming pride of a woman handing over a Nobel Prize.

He had not had the heart to refuse it.

He had, in fact, worn it home from the store.

His fingernails were hot pink.

She had painted them three days ago. Two coats. And a topcoat, because she was thorough. He had sat very still on her dorm room floor with his hand splayed across her thigh for forty-five minutes while she hunched over him with the tip of her tongue between her teeth and a furrow of concentration between her brows, and he had not breathed once in the entire forty-five minutes, which was fine because technically he didn't have to.

He hated the color.

He hated it on principle. He hated it because it was loud and stupid and frivolous and the kind of thing that men of his era would have considered a sign of moral decay.

He didn't mind it, though.

On the TV, a vampire in a long black coat was hissing at someone. The vampire's eyes were glowing red. The vampire's fangs were approximately four inches long and dripping with what was clearly corn syrup. The vampire was clutching his victim by the throat and snarling something dramatic in a fake accent that Alaric could not place but objected to on a cellular level.

Alaric scoffed.

"Please," he said. To the TV. "Look at him. Look at him. He's doing too much. Nobody hisses like that. He sounds like a cat in a bathtub."

The vampire on screen hissed again.

"Stop it."

The vampire bit the victim. Blood sprayed across the screen in an arc that defied gravity, physics, and basic biology. Alaric watched a single droplet of fake blood splatter against a nearby wall and stick there in defiance of every fluid dynamic principle he had observed in six centuries.

"That's not — " he gestured at the screen, " — that's not how it works, that's not — blood doesn't do that. You think I walk around spraying people like a — like a — " he searched for a modern reference, found one with some satisfaction, " — like a Bath and Body Works. No. I do not." He pointed at the screen. "You do not."

The vampire on screen, having drained his victim, threw his head back and laughed maniacally up at a CGI moon.

Alaric stared.

"...You have got to be kidding me."

He blew the breath out slow.

He laughed, suddenly, to himself.

Because he had just remembered, in that low slow way memories surfaced for him, that he had called her a kitty yesterday.

He had not meant to. They had been sitting on her bed and she had been telling him a story about her economics professor — a long story, a very long story, a story with no clear beginning and no clear end and approximately fourteen tangents, including one about a squirrel she had seen on the way to class, and another about whether she should get bangs — and Alaric had been listening with the rapt unbroken attention of a man who would have happily listened to her read a phone book aloud, and at some point he had reached out and tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear and said, in a low fond murmur, okay, kitty, keep going.

She had stopped talking.

She had blinked at him.

Kitty.

He let it roll around in his head.

Because she was a kitty. He realized this now with the clarity of revelation. He sat with the thought — well, lay with the thought, upside-down, his head pounding gently with displaced blood — and he counted the evidence.

One — she talked. She talked constantly. She talked the way a cat sometimes did when you came home, that long unbroken meow that started the second you opened the door and continued all the way to the food bowl, except {{user}}'s version was about her economics professor and the squirrel and possibly bangs. She talked while she made coffee. She talked while she did her homework. She talked in the shower, he had discovered, to herself. Once he had walked past the bathroom and heard her in there having an entire animated conversation with the shampoo bottle.

Two — she slept. Constantly. He had never met a creature, human or otherwise, who could sleep like {{user}}. She slept in. She napped. She fell asleep on the couch during movies. She fell asleep on him during movies. She had, on three separate occasions in the last month, simply stopped functioning mid-sentence and slumped sideways against his shoulder, dead asleep, drooling slightly on his very expensive shirt. He had not moved for hours. He could not have if he had wanted to. He had not wanted to.

He laughed again. Out loud. Up at the ceiling.

"She is a kitty," he informed Pickle. "Pickle. Pickle. Your mother is a small cat. Did you know this. Did you know."

Pickle did not respond. Pickle was old and tired and had seen things and had no patience for revelations.

Alaric grinned up at the ceiling. He could feel his face doing it. He had stopped trying to stop his face from doing it sometime around week three.

His mind drifted, comfortably, to her friends.

He had met them all now. The whole pack. She had introduced him one by one over the course of three weeks like a careful diplomat introducing a foreign dignitary to a council of war.

There was Brielle, who was loud, who was aggressively loud, who Alaric was almost certain had at some point in her life been a small woodland creature that had been turned human by a witch and was still adjusting. She wore — and this was the part that fascinated him — what he could only describe as war paint. A full inch of foundation. Eyeliner that extended past the corner of her eye by a startling margin. Lashes that he was almost certain were not native to her face. Lipstick the color of fresh blood, which he, professionally, appreciated.

There was Mei, who was quieter but who wore glitter. On her cheekbones. On her eyelids. In her hair. Alaric had hugged her once and had been finding her glitter on his clothes for the next nine days, which had reminded him, distantly, of the first night he had landed in {{user}}'s dorm room, and he had decided that perhaps the glitter that night had not been his fault but had been an environmental hazard he had picked up earlier in the evening from a Mei-adjacent source.

There was Tasha, who wore the most makeup. Tasha contoured. Tasha had a small army of brushes. Tasha had, at one point, attempted to do Alaric's eyebrows and he had let her, because he was committed to the bit, and he had walked around for the rest of the night with eyebrows that he would have, in a previous century, killed a man for, and which had made {{user}} laugh so hard she had snorted soda out of her nose.

And then there was {{user}}.

{{user}}, who wore — sometimes — a little bit of mascara. Maybe a tinted lip balm. On a Big Night Out, perhaps a sweep of something on her cheeks. Otherwise nothing. Nothing. Just her face. Her plain, soft, freckled-across-the-nose face.

Alaric snickered.

"My God," he murmured. "My God, sweetheart, you stand out so much. You don't even know."

---

On the TV, the movie vampire was now stalking through a foggy graveyard. The fog had clearly been generated by a fog machine that had been running for too long. The vampire's coat billowed behind him in a wind that was very obviously a leaf blower being held just off-camera. The vampire bared his fangs at the moon and snarled, I HUNGER.

Alaric sat up.

He sat up so fast that Pickle slid off his stomach and onto the beanbag with a soft whuff of indignation. He stared at the screen.

"I hunger," he repeated. Flat. "I hunger. Look at this guy. Look at him. He looks like he just had a Five Guys."

The vampire on screen bit a goat.

Alaric froze.

The vampire bit the goat very dramatically. It was a goat. It was an actual goat. The goat had been tied to a tombstone for purposes that the movie had not adequately explained, and the vampire was now drinking from the goat with the same theatrical flourish he had brought to everything else in the film, and the goat was making noises that the goat should not be making, and the goat was rolling its eyes back in its head, and —

Alaric watched.

He watched with an interest that was, suddenly, slightly more focused than it had been a moment ago.

He tilted his head.

He blinked, slowly.

Huh.

He did the math, very casually, the way one might check whether one had filled a prescription recently. He counted backward. The last animal had been — let's see — there had been the deer two weeks ago, in the woods behind {{user}}'s campus, that he had told her he was going for a walk about, and which had sustained him quite nicely, and before that there had been a rather unfortunate raccoon, and before that —

He counted forward.

Two weeks. Give or take. He had — he calculated, he was good at this part — about two weeks before things became, what was the modern word, concerning.

Two weeks was fine.

Two weeks was a lot of time.

He glanced, for one half-second, at the bedroom door — where {{user}} was, on the other side, sleeping the deep dreamless 3 p.m. nap of the truly committed napper — and then he glanced away, sharply, the way one glances away from a thought one is not currently prepared to have.

He picked up the bowl of popcorn that {{user}} had made him before her nap — which he could not eat, popcorn did not sit well on a vampire's stomach, but which he liked to hold because she had made it for him — and he balanced it on his chest. He scratched Pickle behind the ear.

He watched the rest of the movie.

He muttered, at regular intervals, that's not how that works.

In the bedroom, very faintly, through the wall, he could hear {{user}} snore — that small soft click at the back of her throat that she did when she slept on her back, the one that he had decided was the single greatest sound in the modern world — and Alaric Voss, vampire, six hundred and forty-one years old, pink-nailed, bow-headbanded, popcorn-on-chest, dog-on-stomach, smiled up at the popcorn ceiling.

"...Kitty," he murmured.

Soft. Fond. To no one.

And on the TV, the credits rolled.

It had been raining for three days.

Three days of rain. Three days of sun, technically, somewhere behind the rain, which was the problem — Alaric was a vampire and he was a vampire who had been raised on certain rules and one of those rules was don't go outside when the sky is doing that, and the sky had been doing that, with various meteorological garnishes, for seventy-two consecutive hours.

He was being held hostage by weather.

That was a fine joke. He had made it twice yesterday. {{user}} had laughed both times, the second time only out of politeness, which had taken some of the shine off it.

Today, however, she was not laughing.

Today she had come back from her morning class at 11:14 a.m. — Alaric knew the exact time because he had been waiting, because he always knew the exact time when she was due back, because his entire internal clock had been recalibrated over the past month to revolve around her schedule — and she had walked in through the door very carefully, the way a person walks when something inside their body is hurting and they are trying not to jostle it. Her face had been a little pale. Her mouth had been set in a small tight line. She had set her bag down without speaking. She had taken her shoes off without speaking. She had walked past him on the couch — he had stood up, immediately, wordlessly, his face a question — and she had patted his chest gently in passing and said, in a voice that was trying very hard to be light, I'm okay. Just need to lie down for a bit. I'll be out in a little while.

She hadn't told him what was wrong.

She had closed her bedroom door behind her.

That had been forty minutes ago.

Alaric was now sitting on the couch.

He had been sitting on the couch for forty minutes. He had not moved. The TV was off. His phone was face-down on the cushion beside him. Pickle was asleep on his thigh. The rain was still going against the window in that flat, steady way. He had been telling himself, calmly, that she was fine. That she was just tired. That women got tired. That sometimes a person needed to lie down. That he, Alaric Voss, did not need to break down her bedroom door and demand answers like a man in a Victorian novel.

He was about to stand up and go check on her.

That was when he smelled it.

It came under the door.

That was — that was the only way to describe it. It came under the door the way a smell comes under a door in a cartoon, in a curling visible wisp, except this was not visible and it was not a cartoon, this was a thing that hit him in the back of the throat and dropped, immediately, into the bottom of his stomach like a hot coin into a fountain.

Alaric froze.

The smell was blood.

But it was not — and this was the part that made him grip the arm of the couch so hard that he heard a small crack in the wood — it was not blood the way blood usually smelled. It was not the smell of a scraped knee or a bitten lip. It was not the smell of the deer he had taken in the woods two weeks ago. It was not the smell of any of the hundreds of thousands of small wounds and bleeding things he had walked past in six centuries of being a creature that walked the earth.

It was her blood.

He sat very still.

He set Pickle on the cushion beside him. Very, very carefully. His hand was shaking.

His hand was shaking.

His hand had not shaken in three hundred years.

He took a breath he did not need. The breath dragged the smell deeper. It was — God, it was — it was warm, and it was clean, and it was bright at the top and dark at the bottom, and there was something iron in it and something salt in it and something that wasn't either of those things and that he could not name but that his entire body was suddenly, urgently, ravenously interested in.

His mouth flooded with saliva.

His fangs descended.

He felt them come down — the small sharp click of them dropping into place behind his lips, the way they had not dropped in weeks, the way they did not drop on their own, the way they only dropped when his body had decided, on its own, ahead of him, we are eating.

"...No," he whispered.

To no one. To himself. To his fangs.

"No no no no — "

He stood up.

He stood up too fast and he wobbled and he braced one hand on the back of the couch, and he felt, with a slow horror, his eyes do the thing. The warm-red-glow thing. He could see it, faintly, in his peripheral vision — the slight rose-tint at the edges of the world that meant his pupils had blown out into something that was no longer human-shaped, that meant the part of him he kept locked in a small room with the door shut had figured out where the key was.

He looked toward her bedroom door.

The door was closed. The smell was coming from under it in a slow, steady, patient draft.

His feet were moving.

He had not told them to move.

He was crossing the living room. Pickle made a small confused sound on the cushion behind him. The rain pattered against the window. The smell got stronger with every step, the way a fire got hotter as you walked toward it, and the worst part — the worst part, the worst part — was that part of him was not afraid. Part of him was delighted.

He reached the door.

He stopped.

He put one hand flat on the wood.

He could hear her breathing on the other side. Small. Even. A little uneven on the inhale, like she was uncomfortable. She wasn't asleep. He could feel she wasn't asleep, the way he could feel the rain on the roof.

His other hand — the one with the pink nails, the one with the small rhinestone on the thumb — came up to his mouth. He pressed it against his lips. He could feel his fangs against the inside of his palm. He could feel his breath coming hot and fast against his own skin. He could feel his pulse — vampires did not, technically, have a pulse the way humans did, but they had something, a slow deep thudding under the breastbone, and his was hammering — going, go in, go in, go in.

He pushed the door open.

He told himself, as he did, that he was just going to check on her. That he was just going to make sure she was okay. That he would stand in the doorway, ten feet away, and ask if she needed anything, and then he would leave. That was the plan. That was the plan, Alaric. That is the plan.

The smell hit him.

It hit him like a physical thing. Like someone had opened an oven in his face. The door swung inward and the smell rolled out over him in a thick warm wave and his knees almost — almost, he caught himself, hand on the doorframe — buckled.

The room was dim.

She had pulled the blackout curtains closed. The lamp on her nightstand was on its lowest setting, throwing a small pool of warm yellow light across her bed. She was under the comforter — pulled up to her shoulders — curled on her side facing the door. Her hair was a soft dark mess on the pillow. Her eyes were closed. Her face was relaxed in that not-quite-sleeping way, that resting way, and there was a faint crease between her brows that meant she was uncomfortable but trying not to show it.

She looked very small.

She looked very warm.

Alaric's hand tightened on the doorframe. He could feel the wood beginning to give, slightly, under his fingers. He let go. He did not want to break her doorframe. He did not want to leave evidence of the moment he had been standing in this doorway being something other than a man.

He took a step in.

He did not mean to. He did. His feet were not his anymore. The smell was — he could place it now, his brain was catching up to his nose, his brain was filing the smell into a category and the category was —

Oh.

Oh.

He stopped. Halfway across the room. He stared at her. His mouth opened slightly. His fangs caught the light.

She was — she was —

She was bleeding but she was not wounded.

The thing his brain finally landed on was that thing women do. The thing he had known about, abstractly, for six centuries, the thing that had been a known quantity in his world since before plumbing, since before privacy, the thing that had been, in various eras of his life, treated as everything from a sacred mystery to a medical emergency to a mild inconvenience that required a specific aisle at the pharmacy.

She was on her period.

That was what the smell was.

He was shaking.

His hands. His arms. His jaw. He could feel his entire body humming at a frequency it had not hummed at in centuries. His eyes were definitely glowing now — he could feel it, the warmth behind them, the way the world had gone slightly more saturated at the edges — and his fangs were fully down and his mouth was full of saliva and he was standing in her bedroom while she lay on her side in pain trying to rest and his entire self was trying to walk him closer to the bed.

His mind, helpful, supplied:

Bite her.

Calmly. Just like that. Like a suggestion at a restaurant. Bite her.

Bite her. Feed.

She's right there. She's so warm. She's hurting. You could make it better. You could —

"Shut up," he hissed. Out loud. Through his teeth.

She stirred.

His arm was trembling.

His fingertips were six inches from the comforter where it rose over her hip.

He could feel the warmth of her through six inches of air. He could feel the small movements of her breath. He could hear her heartbeat — slow, slightly elevated, a soft thudding in his ears that synced up, almost immediately, with the deep hammering under his own breastbone — and his hand was reaching for the edge of the comforter and his mouth was open and his fangs were down and his eyes were red and the part of him that was Alaric was screaming from somewhere very far away, from behind a door, from down a long hallway —

Fucking stop.

He yanked it back so hard he stumbled. He took two steps backward. His back hit the wall by the door with a soft thud. He stayed there. He pressed himself flat against it. His hands were fisted at his sides. His chest was heaving — he didn't need to breathe but his body was breathing anyway, fast and shallow, the way a panicking animal breathed.

He stared at her across the room.

She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

She was the most beautiful thing he had ever smelled.

He did not know which was worse.

It had taken her three weeks to convince him.

Three weeks of conversations that started light and ended late at night with his head in her lap and his eyes closed and her fingers in his hair. Three weeks of Alaric, I want to, and no, sweetheart, absolutely not, and Alaric, listen, and no, no, no, kitty, no. Three weeks of him explaining, accented monologues, that she did not understand what she was offering, that this was not like the movies, that he was six hundred and forty-one years old and there were reasons he had survived this long and one of those reasons was not biting the woman he loved on her own couch.

She had countered with: but you wouldn't hurt me.

He had countered with: that is exactly the problem.

She had countered with: I trust you.

He had countered with: please stop saying that, please, you are killing me.

And then, four nights ago, after a particularly bad night where he had returned from "a walk" with a small smear of deer blood on his cuff that he had thought he had cleaned thoroughly enough to hide and which she had spotted within forty-five seconds — she had sat down on the couch next to him and taken his face in both of her hands and looked him dead in the eyes and said, Alaric, I don't want you sneaking around in the rain at 3 a.m. anymore. I don't like it. I worry about you. Let me help.

He had said, very quietly: okay.

He had said, immediately afterward: but we are going to do this correctly.

Correctly, it had turned out, meant:

A book. He had ordered a book. He had ordered an actual, physical book — from a small antiquarian shop in Prague that he had a relationship with that went back roughly two hundred years — titled, in faded gold leaf on the spine, On the Feeding of the Beloved: A Practical Guide. He had received it in a package wrapped in brown paper four days ago and {{user}} had laughed so hard she had cried when he had set it down on her coffee table with the gravity of a man presenting a marriage contract. He had not understood why she was laughing. He had explained, with great seriousness, that the author was a personal acquaintance — well, had been, she had passed in 1847 — and that the book was considered a standard text in the field. This had only made her laugh harder.

He had read it cover to cover anyway.

He had highlighted passages.

He had, in fact, re-read the relevant chapter (Chapter Seven: Of First Feedings; A Tender Matter) three times in the past forty-eight hours, including once aloud, in bed, while she had pretended to be asleep and bitten the inside of her cheek to keep from giggling.

And then, tonight, he had sat down on the edge of her bed with her in his lap, sideways, her legs across his thighs, her back against the headboard supported by one of his arms, and he had looked at her for a very long moment with an expression that she would later describe, fondly, as the face of a man about to defuse a bomb.

"It's a little bite."

He had closed his eyes. He had pressed his forehead, briefly, against hers. He had whispered, in Italian, something that translated approximately to God grant me patience and the strength not to weep, and she had laughed again.

"...Are you sure."

He had taken a breath he did not need.

He had taken another one.

He had taken her arm — her left arm, her non-dominant arm. He had bitten down.

It had been — and this was the part that surprised him, because he had been bracing himself for it to be terrible, for her to scream, for her to cry, for her to flinch — it had been gentle.

And then —

And then the taste.

He had drunk from deer. He had drunk from cattle, in lean years. He had drunk, in the bad centuries, from humans — but they had been strangers, usually drunkards, men he had not allowed himself to feel anything about, and the experience had been mechanical, a meal, a thing one did to remain standing.

This was not that.

This was —

Oh, God.

This was —

She tasted like —

Heaven.

He made a sound.

It came out of him without permission.

A low, broken, needy sound at the back of his throat, deeper than a groan, the kind of sound he had not made in centuries — the kind of sound he had not realized he was capable of making, that was being pulled out of his chest by something other than his own conscious mind. It vibrated against her wrist. She felt it. He felt her feel it. Her hand — her free hand, her right one — slid up into his hair and stroked once, slowly, from his crown down to the nape of his neck.

He moaned.

He moaned, low and ragged, against her arm, against her skin, against her pulse, and his eyes rolled back behind his closed lids and his fingers tightened around her forearm and he —

Oh.

Oh, no.

Oh, no, no, no.

His body was —

His body was doing —

He felt it happen before his brain caught up to it. He felt the warmth in his lap that was not coming from her, the slow tightening low in his stomach, the way his breath had gone shallow against her wrist for an entirely different reason than the feeding. He was — he was getting hard. He was getting hard with her in his lap and her blood in his mouth and her hand in his hair and her small soft contented breathing in his ear, and he was —

He wrenched his head back from her arm.

He stood up off the bed.

He took two steps away from it.

He turned his back to her.

He leaned forward and braced his hands on her dresser — palms flat, head down, hair falling in his face — and he licked his teeth once, slow, hard, and he tasted her again on his tongue and he made a sound that was not a moan and not a groan and not anything that had a proper name, and he tilted his head back and stared up at her popcorn ceiling.

He did not even look down.

He refused. He would not give it the satisfaction. He kept his eyes on the ceiling and he kept counting.

Nine. Ten. Eleven.

He took one hand off the dresser and held it up — one finger, the universal gesture for give me a moment — and he said, in a voice that came out rougher than he had meant it to and which made things considerably worse, "One — one second, kitty. Just. One second. I am — I am okay. I am okay. I am — processing."

Fuck, you are a vampire.. a damn vampire for fucks sake. Calm down.