Andres’s cousin was here.
His cousin was Anthony Hilker’s girlfriend. His cousin, who was looking at Shane—Andres’s Shane—like she knew him. More than knew him, by the way they both seemed to light up, Shane understandably more awkward given the situation, but still affectionate and eager, hugging Natalie like they were old friends.
Andres remembered the gossip of the guest who’d pointed them this way, how Anthony’s girlfriend had been fired from Vitalis-Barron a few months before, which was around the time Natalie had told Andres her security career was over—she still had the brace on one knee from the crash that she claimed had gotten her laid off. In all her ranting, she’d never told him the name of the company, and Andres had never asked. But if Vitalis-Barron had been her employer, with how they collected and retained their vampiric victims, working “security” for them might have entailed so much more than he’d assumed.
The first jitters of panic tingled in the back of Andres’s spine, not an attack, but a warning. There was a reason he hadn’t told his family about his turning; a reason that circle of ignorance had included Natalie—his favorite, his hell beast, the kid he’d let trail around after him all their childhoods and come out to before anyone else—an impulse so deep he’d never questioned it.
Andres took a step back, the fear transforming into horror. He could feel the wave of his misery rising, threatening to crash. The feeling was pre-emptive, he told himself. She knew nothing of his fangs; to her, Andres was still the dorky but loving human she’d grown up with.
That much was obvious as Shane motioned behind himself, back to where Andres still stood, his words—my partner—ringing in Andres’s ears, and Natalie’s expression transformed again. The shock was there, but as it slid away, he could make out the love beneath, the enthusiasm of realizing that two people she cared deeply for also cared for each other.
She nudged Shane in the shoulder and winked. “He’s a good one. I can tell.”
Andres sighed. “Hey, Hellbeast.”
“Hey, bitch,” she replied, and threw herself at him.
He caught her on instinct, pulling his baby cousin close as he spun her around. He’d done so a thousand times before, but only now did he realize just how much of his vampiric strength he was putting into it. His chest tightened painfully, the panic taunting him again. As he set her down, he feigned a stumble, shaking out his arms. “You’re not ten anymore,” he grumbled.
Natalie scoffed and shoved her shoulder into his. “Yeah—when I was ten, you would drop me half the time.”
The space beneath his sternum hurt all the worse. That was love, he figured, ripe and deep and now miserable at the thought of what she’d done and might still do. She was the only person he’d truly loved—the only person until Shane. His little swan watched them with a confused sort of happiness.
Andres gave him a soft smile. “So, um, how do you know my cousin again?”
“Nat’s that friend I talk to online.” He said it like a singularity, which Andres probably should have recognized with how Shane’s chat app always seemed open to one specific DM. Shane’s brow lifted. “Wait, she’s your cousin. So you’re related.”
“That is usually how cousins work, yes.”
He made an exasperated noise. “Is there only one family in all of San Salud who actually likes me?”
Andres couldn’t help but laugh at that, regardless of all the less savory emotions still tormenting him, beating against the door of his heart. He tried his best to bar it closed.
“Not even a whole family,” Nat replied. “We’re just the weird ones. Though I still think if he hadn’t practically raised me, I would’ve been normal.”
Andres huffed. “You would have been boring.”
“Normal is boring,” Nat said, and stuck out her tongue at him.
Andres felt the urge to cry. He forced it down, nailing it to his spine where the tingling panic still threatened.
The miserable lurking fear was only made worse when Anthony finally chipped in. “I take it this is Andres?” He lifted a brow. “And Shane, was it?”
“So you do listen when I talk.” Nat swatted her boyfriend in the arm, but beneath the grumpy act, Andres could tell she was beaming.
“Most of the time,” Anthony responded and kissed her cheek.
It was so sweet. So sweet and so disastrous. They had based this little excursion on the hopes of persuading Anthony Hilker—with violence, if need be—to sneak them into Dr. Blood’s office before they fled, strangers into the night. But they weren’t strangers now, not with Natalie connecting them. And if Anthony even suspected what Andres was…
He tensed at the thought, his lungs fighting him for each inhale. He could not lose Natalie. He would not.
“Andres?” Shane’s voice sounded hollow, too far away, and the hand that grabbed onto Andres’s wrist felt worse than before—worse than ever—a cold, dead thing pulling him into Vitalis-Barron’s depths.
Andres’s body reacted like he had been hit by lightning, yanking him from Shane’s grasp so hard he tripped over his own feet. He fell. The wind was knocked from his lungs as he hit the ground, but somehow his muscles kept moving, putting another foot between himself and the beautiful man he knew with all his heart and mind he had nothing to fear from.
Shane looked genuinely scared. He held his wrist to his chest, his breathing heavy, and Andres could practically feel his elevated pulse. The awful shame and horror of what he’d done—what he’d never wanted to do in the first place—hit Andres like a physical blow. The guests nearby turned their attention on him, pinning him down with their horrified curiosity. He was the one who was the actor, the one who could sway people to him with enough confidence and the right words, but he had no words now, nothing he could do to convince Natalie and Anthony he hadn’t just thrown his own boyfriend off him in a panic, much less talk Shane out of having experienced it.
His magnificent Cygnus cleared his throat with a laugh, his voice shaky as he said, “Fuck, that thing was huge. How long had it been on your sleeve? Ew.”
Natalie had saved Andres from enough spiders—bless her—that she seemed not to question it. “What? Oh my god, where did it go—I want to see!”
“I think Andres vaulted it into the stratosphere.” Shane made a face. “We deserve a drink after that. We’ll be right back?”
“Oh, sure.” Nat’s brow tightened, but their cover was saved by a guest who greeted her and Anthony with enough enthusiasm to drag her attention away, sweeping her and her boyfriend into a conversation about work gossip as the chatter around them returned.
Shane didn’t reach for Andres—didn’t so much as touch him, arms tight at his sides and his expression cordial. Andres climbed to his feet, shakily following him toward one of the bars. The moment they were past the nearest row of flowering plants, Shane veered to the side, tucking them out of view. He turned on Andres with such ferocity and pain that it took Andres like a blade to the heart.
“What the hell?” Shane snapped.
“I’m sorry.” Andres’s voice sounded so pathetic, his whole being slowly crumbling in on itself. His vision blurred and a tear slipped free from one of his eyes. He did his best to quickly wipe it away without upsetting his contacts.
The stony hurt of Shane’s expression broke into gentle worry and he lifted his fingers like he might brush a hand over Andres’s cheek, before stalling and retreating instead. Andres’s heart ached from how much he wanted that touch. Wanted to accept it and lean into it and be taken in by it. And the fact that his own damn body wouldn’t let him—
He bit back something that he didn’t want to admit was a sob, hiding his face behind his hands. Where was that damned gala mask when he needed one? “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“It’s okay.” Shane sighed and wrapped his arms tighter to his chest. He glanced away, then back, and when his gaze met Andres’s again, he held it there. “But you did this at the boardwalk, and the next morning, and now... You hurt me.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to.” Andres would not keep crying. He could not. They had work to do here, and he was ruining it, turning his eyes puffy and smearing his makeup and making a spectacle of them both. But the more effort he put into keeping his calm, the harder it became. “I know I keep reacting, but I promise I’ve never wanted to.”
“Sometimes when I go to touch you, I swear you flinch?” It wasn’t an accusation the way Shane said it, but a question, his voice soft and his brow tight. “Has something happened to you, Andres? Did someone…”
“No? No!” Andres laughed, a bitter, choked sound that only made him feel worse. “Why would you ask that?”
Shane curled his arms across his chest, his hands creeping toward his neck. “It’s just that after the blood bank, I looked up more about physical reactions to past events—PTSD and stuff.” His tone softened, and he edged closer, just a hair, but enough to make Andres want to pull him all the way in, hold onto him and never let go. “I know I implied then that you got over Maul’s assault easily, but I was upset and I jumped to conclusions. If the way you’re reacting now is because of Maul, you could tell me, you know that right?”
It was sweet and honest and wrong. Shane was wrong. Andres couldn’t even fathom it, his mind glancing off the idea with a fit of panic. “It’s not like that!” It came out sharper than he meant it; as sharp as the truth. “As you’d said, what Maul did doesn’t bother me that way.”
“And there’s nothing else?” Shane asked, curling a little tighter.
“I think I’d know if someone fucked me up enough to cause this.” He would, he’d know. He’d remember it. Something that big and traumatic—he’d be like Shane, covering his weaknesses. The thought made him drag his hands back through his hair. They didn’t shake. So where the hell were his tears still coming from?
Shane didn’t meet his gaze as he whispered, “Then is it me?”
“No!” Andres responded instantly, throwing all his resolve into the word. He forced himself to breathe after. “I don’t know. I mean, I know it’s not you. But I don’t know what it is. It’s like something takes over my body and I’m aware, in my head, that you would never show me anything but affection. In that moment, I don’t see you, though. I just see an invader.”
“An invader?”
“I know how that sounds, okay. But I…” He swallowed around the lump in his throat, wiping back another tear. All he wanted was to stop talking about this, to pull Shane into his arms and let everything just stop. He trusted Shane. With his love, with his life. Maybe with his past too. Perhaps they could understand together. Andres ran both hands through his hair, wishing it were Shane’s dirty-blonde waves under his fingers, bringing with them the instinct to nurture and not to yank out. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been like this long before Maul. The reaction was just weaker, or maybe because I was weaker, it wasn’t so obvious the way it is now. If someone grabbed me back then, it wasn’t like I could do anything about it.”
Shane looked no less distressed and worried, but he nodded comfortingly, watching Andres with a gaze like a very specific kind of prey-thing; large and dangerous and prepared to fuck up the world for his family. “Who was grabbing you, my love?”
“Everyone?” Andres said, half an assumption and half a memory. “But no one was abusive,” he clarified. “I was just a small, distractable kid and I hit all my growth spurts late. People pulled me around. And sometimes my friends or partners, if I wouldn’t leave my sewing or I was caught up cleaning or reading or something. And I didn’t yank away back then. At least, not very hard. It would get a laugh most of the time—I was a joke to them anyway, the sad little neat-freak twink—and you know how parents and aunts and uncles are.” It was beginning to sound like a string of excuses, so he shut up.
“Andres.” Shane spoke tenderly. “I mean this with all my love, but I’m not sure if your opinion on what is and isn’t abusive is entirely accurate.”
“Oh,” was all Andres could think to say in response. “Well,” he added, and rubbed his wrists. Then another, softer, “Oh.” He finally managed something a lot like, “But I—” and then shut up again.
Maybe Shane was… right.
Andres didn’t want to admit that. The idea felt large and terrifying and awful and it meant… it meant… he didn’t even know. That he’d been a victim for the first half of his life? That he should have done something, changed something? His family wasn’t malicious, he knew that, and his friends had just been cruel in the same way that many boys were allowed, even encouraged, to be, and while he’d always been pretty sure the couple of partners he’d had before turning hadn’t liked him as much as they’d like the idea of a pretty twink they could fuck at their leisure, they’d never actually forced him into anything he hadn’t wanted. Just latched onto him, made it clear what they wanted, and that they could take it.
It didn’t feel like enough to fall apart over. Yet the memories crawled up Andres’s spine all the same, begging him to look away. Forget it all. Go back to the life where none of them could take from him any longer.
“Ah,” Andres said finally. “I guess that could be it.”
Shane was quiet for so long that Andres’s stomach began to hurt. He wiped away another awful tear. When his little swan spoke again, it was so gentle and so firm, he felt like the vulnerable one, being unfurled for a lover. “And Maul?”
“I haven’t thought about that night in years.” Andres couldn’t bring himself to do it now, either. He didn’t want to, he realized. Because it had hurt. Of course it had hurt. He’d been turned into a vampire. But there was a far worse part of it than that even: what Maul did to him had felt… normal.
Not right or good, but accurate, somehow. Like that was just how things were for human Andres; his plans and desires falling to the wayside because someone stronger wanted something from him. Even if it hurt him. Even if it drove fangs into the already mutilated flesh of his soul and fucked it up in a darker and more terrifying way than ever before.
Andres’s throat caught and slowly, terribly, he began to sob.
Shane didn’t reach for him, but he extended his wrists, vein-side up, calm but defiant. “Would you like to hold me?” he asked, a lifeline in a storm.
Andres grabbed onto him, pulling him close, wrapping him up like a security blanket. He cried softly in Shane’s hair, and it felt a little better, somehow, than standing there alone. People still glanced their way—he could feel their gazes, their unsubtle whispers—but it mattered less now, and that was a revelation. “Thank you.”
Shane kissed his temple in response.
They lingered there, Andres’s chest slowly turning from havoc to a post-cry emptiness, a feeling that said the world was supposed to get better, but offering no actual improvement yet. His contacts blurred across his eyes as he opened them, and he had to blink and twitch his gaze around to finally get the damn things back into place. By then, something almost like reassurance had settled in him.
There was a reason he was like this. And if there was a reason, at least he could understand it, predict it, work through it.
Andres ran his fingers through Shane’s hair, cradling his head tenderly. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”
“It’s not your fault.” And the way Shane said it made it true somehow. “What was it you told me—you can’t brute-force your body into accepting something that’s hurt it in the past? You were right, at least according to therapists on the internet. These instincts of yours are just trying to protect you from what it knows hurt you in the past—things you should never have needed to protect yourself from in the first place.”
Andres sniffled, and it was all he could do to press his forehead to Shane’s, and not lose himself. “Thank you.”
Shane drew his hands soothingly up and down Andres’s back, and it felt like being known. “Whatever happens, I will keep being here, with you.” His smile was contagious. “I’ll protect you too, for a change.”
The idea of his Cygnus standing between him and Maul made Andres panic just a little. He hugged Shane tighter. “I like the thought of that, but I don’t know if it’ll work.”
“Someday it will.” Shane seemed so certain. And so willing. “For now, we’ll take it slow. You’ve been gentle with me. I can be gentle with you too, my love.”
That, Andres could believe, and it made his heart feel whole in a way he hadn’t known it could. A few fresh tears slipped from the corners of his eyes, and he laugh-sobbed, wiping them away. God, he had to look a mess.
Yet his boyfriend was watching him like he was the most magnificent thing in the whole world: a treasure. Someone to be gentle with. “Would it help if I asked before I touched you?” Shane asked.
“Not all touches matter. It’s mostly when you have to reach for me. Especially if you’re moving toward my wrists.” He paused, then whimpered. “I… I’ve been fucked up. God.”
“That’s not your fault,” Shane repeated, putting emphasis on each word like he was prepared to crawl into Andres’s brain and slay his guilt single-handed. “And fuck them—fuck everyone who contributed to what you’re feeling now. You’ve gotten the better of them all, because you’re happy and you’re loved and you know that you are not your body’s impulses, even while they continue to happen. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes.” Andres was loved, and he was happy, and he could not deny that for a moment. “And when we’re home, I think I might… maybe we can talk about this more? About Maul and my past, and everything. After we’re done here.”
“Of course.” As Shane stepped back, he kept his hand near his side, merely widening his fingers, palm angled toward Andres, and his lips turning in a little smug quirk as he asked, “For now, my love, would you hold my hand? We have a mission to finish.”
Andres took it, fingers twining through Shane’s, and even there, puffy-eyed and surrounded by his enemies, he had never felt safer.