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“You keep changing the subject.” His tongue swipes at the big vein on my ankle, the venom making it more sensitive, then he runs his lips over it.

“I’ll stop.”

“Do you know what being so close to this vein does to me?” Placing his teeth on each side, he sucks on it, drawing blood through the skin.

The sensation runs up my leg and into my core.

He lets it go, red-lipped, leaving a spotted bruise behind.

“I can hear your blood coursing through your body.” He lifts my leg, licking in a line upward.

“You can’t imagine it. The hunger. What the fact that you exist does to me.

” He licks and sucks the tender skin behind my knee. “Your blood is part of me.”

He clamps down and sucks, giving me another hickey. He can’t be getting more than a drop this way. It’s excruciating.

“Just bite me.”

“I will bite every place I own.” He runs his finger along my neck vein, to my chest. “I will write myself on you with my teeth.”

He spreads my legs open, and I unfold like a morning flower. He kisses the bottom of my foot.

“The dorsal and venous arch connect the small and great saphenous veins.” His lips stop at the inside of the ankle he hasn’t marked.

“They are mine.” He sucks hard, but does not bite.

Capillaries burst, and I hitch with pleasure while he holds my leg still so he can pull tiny bits of blood through the skin.

When he lets go, there’s a dark stain where his lips meet and a fire in his eyes. “Shall I continue?”

“By all means.”

“Are you sure?” He runs his lips along the back of my leg.

“I’ll let you know if—” My sentence ends in a gasp when he sucks on the back of my knee.

He lets go for long enough to say, “The popliteal vein,” then sucks so hard between his teeth I feel as though I’m going to explode in a mess of scalding lava, “is mine.”

“Venom,” I gasp one word to explain why I’m writhing away from him.

“I know, snowbird. I know.” He kisses my inner thigh. “Stay still.”

“Is that an order?”

“Be still.” His command is my body’s law, so I am still as he licks and bites his way up until he finds the right spot and stops to breathe deeply, eyes fluttering closed as if he’s in the throes of sensory bliss. “The great saphenous vein is deeper, and thus, the reward is greater.”

With tender tongue and demanding teeth, he sucks inside my thigh hard enough to hurt, but every unit of pain is matched by an equal unit of pleasure. The tension between them is exquisite, rushing past each other in a buzzing cable between his mouth and my core.

He commanded me to be still, so I cannot arch or twist. There’s nowhere for the energy to go. All I can do is feel him breaking veins without breaking skin on one thigh, then the other.

“Don’t—” I cry.

He lets go. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t stop.”

“You hardly have to worry about that.”

I don’t know if he’s even thinking about veins anymore, because the anatomical narration stops.

He’s just sucking blood through my skin, leaving a trail of hickeys and bruises until tears spill down my cheeks.

He pulls aside the crotch of my underwear, and I have a moment of fear that he’s going to treat the center the way he treated the sides.

But his tongue is gentle and soft. I come immediately. He holds my legs down and continues until another orgasm makes me shake so hard, the boat rocks.

“Thank you,” I gasp.

“I’m not done.” He’s inside my thigh now, kissing skin, hooking his finger in my underwear.

“No?”

“Now, I’ll give you what you really want.” He pulls off my bottoms and leaves them on the floor of the boat.

“What’s that?” I reach for him, but he gently pushes me down.

“Knowledge.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“When the blood reawakens into a living body, you wake up able to smell a drop of rain a mile away.” He starts at my other knee, kissing and sucking where he hadn’t before.

“So imagine the overwhelming stench of the shit and piss that exploded out of you. Everything is louder. A whisper is a scream. The brain isn’t ready to take in everything a predator can sense. ”

When he gets close to the top of my thigh, his words float into the sleepy region of pure pleasure.

“Stop!”

He picks up his head. “What?” He’s still pale, but he has the slight brown blood-glow from just those few drops.

“I want to listen. I can’t if you’re doing that. Which… it just occurred to me that was on purpose. Jesus.”

“That’s enough of that,” he whispers.

I feel awful. If he was a regular guy, a mortal, a human, I’d never interrupt literal sex to demand he recount something traumatic just to sate my curiosity. “I’m sorry. If you don’t want to tell me… I mean, if it’s too painful, then forget it.”

He considers the folds in my hitched nightgown, then kisses my knee. “Choose which. Sex or story.”

I don’t even have to think about it.

“You.” I sit straight. “I want to know you.”

“You’re choosing my terrible story?”

“I am.” I let my feet slide off the bench and put them on the floor. “If you want to pick up where you left off later though?”

“Maybe.” He pulls my head to his and kisses me with his copper tongue. It tastes like pure, new love and nothing else. I have never tasted love without distraction, or ulterior motives, or insecurity.

The boat rocks a little, poking out from under the bridge. He says, “I’ll tell you about the change itself. Not everything leading up to it. Deal?”

We bend into each other. I put my hands on each side of his face and watch the dance of his irises. I want to know what happened before and after. I want every single detail, but I won’t press him to give information he wants to keep for himself.

“Deal.”

“All right.” He closes his eyes. Thinks. Then opens them. “You’ve been drained. You know what that’s like.”

“Yes—” For me, it was ninety percent sex, and I want to know if it was the same for him.

He cuts me off before I can ask. “The venom is guided by intention. After the skin is broken, I can make you want to fuck if I want. I can make it painless. Or initiate a blood-lock. I can release it to do nothing but keep your blood from clotting. That time I was drained, he intended to sire me, so I died wanting his blood. So when he gave it to me, I didn’t resist. I drank. I mean, my body drank.”

“What if he hadn’t done it with intention?”

“It’s a pain in the ass getting a dead person to drink anything, but it can be done.”

“What was death like?” I brush his hair behind his ears.

“Kind of nice.”

“Oh, that’s good to hear.”

“Waking up was not as good.”

“You mentioned the piss and shit.” I wrinkle my nose.

“And the heightened senses.” He pulls me close, putting his lips to my cheek.

“The body is freezing cold. Every bone itches, because the marrow is being eaten and replaced, but that’s nothing.

The hunger. It’s not an emptiness in the belly, but a thousand raging hungers in the blood.

Screaming, each of them, like newborn babies.

” He pulls back. “I was not a man prone to weeping, but the first time I fed, I was so relieved that I sobbed like a child.”

“Who was it?”

“Who was who?”

“Who did you feed on? Don’t you always remember your first?”

He touches my face and directs his gaze inward again. “And your second, and third.”

He makes an on-and-on gesture as if that’s all he’s going to say about it. He can have this, for now. He’ll tell me, eventually.

“Did it feel weird?” I ask. “Having a queen in your heart?”

He laughs. “Does it feel weird to change every day, every moment, from young person to slightly older person?”

“It feels absolutely normal because I’m human. I’m surrounded by billions of me.”

“There’s going to come a time when I won’t want you to die.

” He kisses my neck, licking and nipping at the artery.

He’s teasing himself. I don’t know how he stands it.

“I’ll be tempted to sire you. But I won’t.

It will kill you early and painfully.” He straightens and looks out into the dark corners of his mind. “It’s an unacceptable risk.”

“You’re stressing yourself out over nothing. I don’t want to murder a bunch of people.”

“You won’t have a choice.”

“Yeah well, that’s the point. And I don’t want a weird colony of…

things setting up shop in my veins, and I don’t want to live so long I can’t feel love.

I’m perfectly fine just doing my thing, getting old, having a party at my funeral.

So if you’re ever tempted, for whatever reason, I do not consent.

The answer is no.” I poke his forehead. “Opt out.”

It’s a hilarious joke that he doesn’t get. It’s fine. I’m just avoiding the elephant in the boat. We are different species, and we need different, mutually exclusive things to live on this planet. I’m built to kill him and draining me of blood is beneficial to his health.

I hate the distance between us. It’s an imposition and it’s fake.

“What’s on your mind?” he asks.

I answer truthfully, without thinking. “I wish I could see how you feel exactly. I wish I could feel closer to you. Will you never blood-lock with me again?”

“What if you see how I feel, and it’s just what you broke? What if it’s all a trick you played on me?”

“Maybe I can fix it.”

“What then? You find out I’m not capable of loving you the way you deserve to be loved?”

“I don’t want to force you. I know what it’s like. You put me in thrall, remember?”

“This isn’t the same, Luna. I like loving you. I like making you happy. If you take the love away, I don’t know what’s left.”

“But what if I go in and it does nothing? What if it turns out you really love me?”

“Luna.” He holds my head still to look directly at me.

Even in the dark, his eyes sparkle in a kaleidoscope of blue and green and brown.

They are a predator’s trick, built to draw me close to his teeth.

“I am too old. I’ve done too much. I lost the ability to truly love a long time ago.

You have to accept this. But you also have to accept that how you made me feel is all I have.

The reason I fight to live is so I can keep loving you. ”

“It’s fake.” My whisper barely makes a sound, but he hears everything. “Let me look inside you.”

He bends his head to run his fingers through his hair. I can’t see his face when he speaks. I have no senses left to latch onto. I wish we were in the liminal right now, so I could see what he’s feeling.

“I want that more than you can even imagine. But I have to trust you not to break or fix anything. Leave it alone. Let me love you.”

The boat has now mostly crossed under the bridge, but in this morning-deep dark of the night, we are alone.

“You trust me.” I pull the nightgown up around my waist and sit on his lap, facing him with my knees on either side. “You just wish you didn’t.”

“I’m cured. You can already see inside me.”

We kiss, and he offers his tongue, knowing what it will tell me.

I taste his love and fear. I taste his power and his frustration.

Lust/power/love/want—it all melds into one as our bodies grind together.

I grab for his clothes, trying to rip it all away, while he opens his fly to release his cock.

I slide against it, then it’s inside me.

We rock the boat and I am so tempted to make some mood-killing joke about it when I feel his teeth on my throat.

My shoulder hitches to block him. It’s instinct, and it’s wrong.

“Do it,” I whisper, looking up at the moon to expose my artery.

“I trust you,” he says.

“You do.”

“You will not scream.” His tongue is warm on my skin before it submits to the pressure of his razor-sharp teeth. My nerves scream and pain jolts up my spine.

No, no, no, it’s too much. Did it hurt like this before? I open my mouth, but nothing is allowed out.

Then the pleasure, bone to surface, muscle and tendon, is pulled toward his mouth as he drinks. There is no anxiety. No separation. I am not made of matter. Not solid or liquid. I am a direction. Movement toward him. The unstoppable force into his immovable object. I am whole again.

The direction is down.

I am in the well of his soul, surrounded by the golden coil.

It’s so beautiful I almost forget to look for the place I touched, because it’s different than I made it.

There’re other bends and twists and I know with a soul-deep intuition that losing Laro broke something inside him.

The changes have become an integral part of the coil itself.

And that’s the answer, isn’t it?

Like a paper clip or wire hanger molded into a different shape for another use, it may never go back to the way it was. The imperfection is part of a new perfection.

But is any vampire’s coil untouched?

There has to be a way.

He likes that he loves me, but I hate how it happened.

Maybe I’ll fix it, or maybe I’ll make him as crazy as I made my mother. As crazy as Laro.

I can truly hurt him, whether I mean to or not, so I leave his love untouched.