Chapter 6: The Paper in His Pocket
Three nights after the paper, Eric was still awake at two in the morning.
The room he'd taken off the west corridor was smaller than the north hall, and that was the point. One window. No bench in the frame, no fountain light on the floorboards. Just the river far off and the wall lamp on the parapet going down every hour when the guard walked his round. He'd moved his own things in on the first night, two shirts, the cord, the paperback with the broken spine. He hadn't asked permission and nobody had stopped him.
He lay on his back with his eyes open and the pillow under his head and the folded page under the pillow.
The sixth line was the one that wouldn't let go. He could see it when he shut his eyes, the way he'd written it, the period at the end sitting there like a nail. If I ask, tell me no, and put me in the west corridor. He'd meant it when he wrote it. That was the part that ate at him. He'd sat at the little desk in the north hall with the lamp low and he'd meant every word of it, and it had still been a lie.
He turned onto his side. The sheet was damp where his face had been.
He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, hard, the way you'd wipe something off a counter. It didn't help. It never did, and it hadn't for three nights, and he was sick of himself for it. He was thirty-one years old. He'd stitched a man's shoulder in a hotel bathroom at twenty-two with a sewing kit and no light and his hands hadn't shaken once. Now he was crying into a pillow in a house full of people who did not cry, about a paper he had written himself.
Because you wrote it, he thought. That's the thing. Nobody made you.
He wished he'd never put the pen to it. He wished he'd gone to the study with nothing in his hands and said it out loud instead, the whole ugly thing, the way it actually was. But out loud it would have sounded like begging. And he'd spent twelve years learning never to beg in that house, not for food, not for a coat, not for the man to look at him on the days he needed to be looked at. He'd watched other men beg. He knew what it bought them.
So he'd written rules instead. Boundaries, he'd told himself, sitting there with the ink wet. You're allowed to have boundaries. You're allowed to want more than crumbs.
That was the word he kept coming back to. Crumbs. A hand on the back of his neck in the car, gone by the time they reached the gate. A look across a table. Two hours of a man setting forks for him and then not crossing a rug. He'd taken crumbs for twelve years and called it a life, and he couldn't do it anymore, and so he'd written six lines to stop himself from taking them.
It hadn't stopped anything. It had just made the ache official.
He pressed his palm flat against his sternum, over the shirt, the way you'd press a wound. The tightness was there. It had been there since the study, since the rug, since the man said no to him with his hands at his sides and his voice even. It wasn't a hunger he could feed or a bruise he could ice. It was lower than that and older than that, some hook in him that had been set years ago and only now was being pulled.
He wanted Andre in every way a man could want another man. In bed, yes. In the mouth, in the hands, in the dark, all of it, he wanted that and he'd never once pretended otherwise. But it was more than the body. He wanted to sit in the morning room at the table by the window with the paper on the left. He wanted to be the one who knew the linen blend, to be the name in the corner of the ledgers, to be the hand the man reached for without looking. He wanted to be the thing Andre Mariano did not know how to keep.
And that was the fear, wasn't it. The real one, the one under the pillow with the paper.
Maybe it was only him.
Maybe Andre had felt something for a boy on a plane and had said so the way he said everything, well and truly and once, and had then closed the book on it. Maybe there was no hook in him at all. Maybe the no on the rug had been the whole of the truth, and Eric had spent three nights sobbing over a man who had already finished the conversation and moved on to the next folio.
That thought made his chest go tighter, not looser, and he turned his face into the pillow and lay still.
He heard the clock in the downstairs hall strike two. Somewhere below, a door opened and shut in the kitchens. The guard on the east wall coughed and spat over the parapet, a habit Andre hated and had never corrected, because the guard was good on the wall and Andre had a long memory for what a man was worth.
Then the floorboard creaked outside his door.
Eric's eyes came open in the dark.
The west corridor was old wood over old joists, and it talked all night, and he'd learned in three nights which boards creaked when and why. The one outside his door creaked when a person put weight on the second half of it, stepping toward the room. Nobody walked the west corridor at two in the morning. The staff were in the east wing. The maids did the upstairs in the morning. The guards stayed off the residential floors unless there was an order.
The board creaked again. Same board. Same weight.
He lay still and listened to his own heart. Twelve years of this. Twelve years of lying in the dark in a house full of killers, counting the boards, knowing the difference between a man who walked past and a man who stopped. This one had stopped.
He sat up and put his feet on the floor.
He didn't turn the lamp on. He crossed the little room in the dark, bare feet on the cold boards, and he put his hand on the door handle and stood there a second with his forehead nearly touching the wood. He knew who it was. He didn't know how he knew, but he did, the way you know rain before it starts. His mouth had gone dry. His hand was steady.
He opened the door.
Andre Mariano stood in the middle of the west corridor with the moonlight on him.
He hadn't brought a lamp. The tall arched windows let the cold light in from the courtyard side, and it lay along the boards in pale bars, and he was standing between two of them, so that his face was half lit and half gone. He wore the shirt with the sleeves rolled, no jacket, no tie. There was no sign he had been to bed; his hair was in place, his collar straight, and his stillness in the light was the stillness Eric had known since he was nineteen years old. The eyes were on him. They had been on the door when it opened.
He was holding two pages.
Eric's eyes went to his hands before he could stop them. One page was the list, he knew the crease of it, the fold at the corner. The other one was folded smaller. It had writing on it in a hand Eric had seen on shipping manifests and on the bottom of a signed page and on nothing else in his life.
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Down the corridor, a moth was knocking itself on the glass of the far window.
"You wrote six," Andre said.
His voice was low, the way it was in the small hours when he'd been working and the house had gone quiet. Not the study voice. Not the voice that signed folios. Eric had heard this voice maybe a dozen times in twelve years.
"I counted," Eric said.
"You counted wrong." Andre took a half step and the board under him creaked. He held up the smaller page. "There's a seventh. It needs to be on the record with the rest."
Eric's throat had gone thick. He kept his hand on the door and did not step back and did not step out. "I didn't write a seventh."
"No. You didn't." Andre unfolded the page. It was one line, in his own hand, and he did not hand it over. He turned it so it faced the light and read it the way Eric had read his own terms in the study three days before, flat and level and without hurry. "Seven. If Eric tears this page, the six terms are void, and I leave this house before dawn and do not return to it."
The corridor went silent.
Eric looked at the paper, then at the man's face, and his chest did the thing it had been doing for three nights, the tight hook pulling.
"You wrote that," he said.
"I did."
"Tonight."
"An hour ago."
Eric's hand tightened on the door edge. He could feel the grain of the wood under his fingers. The moth hit the glass again and fell off, and neither of them looked at it. "Why."
"Because six terms written by a man who won't look at me is a door with the key on the inside," Andre said. "And I've spent four hundred years learning which doors to stand outside of. This is the last one I'll stand outside of. You get to shut it yourself."
He held the page out. He did not cross the middle of the corridor. He held it out at the distance where Eric would have to step to take it, and he waited, and his arm did not shake, and his face in the light did not change.
Eric looked at the page and did not take it.
"Tear it," Andre said. "Now. In front of me. Put the six with it and I'll be out of the gate before the kitchen fires. You'll have the house, the accounts, the whole of it. I'll write the transfers myself." He paused. "It's your call to make. It always was. I just wanted you to know which door it was."
Eric didn't move.
The page hung in the air between them, and the moth hit the glass again behind Andre's shoulder, and the corridor held still the way the house held still on the nights when something was about to be decided. Eric's pulse was in his ears. He could hear his own breathing and he tried to make it slow.
He looked at the page. One line in that square hand. If Eric tears this page, the six terms are void.
He could see the whole of it just by looking. Tear the paper, Andre's gone by four, the gate closes, the plane warms on the strip and lifts, and the house goes back to being a house with a desk in it and a man who sits behind the desk and doesn't look at the window table. Eric would have the accounts and the room and the river and nobody at two in the morning. He would have won. He would have gotten exactly what he asked for in six lines on a folded sheet.
His hand came off the door.
He stepped out into the corridor and took the page. It was cold from the man's fingers. He held it by the corner, where the fold was, and he looked at the writing up close in the moonlight, and it was real, it was a real line in real ink, and there was no signature under it yet.
He did not tear it.
He folded it once, along the crease Andre had already made, and put it in the pocket of his shirt, next to his chest, and left his hand there a second, flat over it.
Andre watched him do all of it and said nothing. His arm came back down to his side. His face in the light didn't change, but the stillness in him did, a small, private shift, like a boat taking the weight of a step.
"You didn't do it," he said.
"No."
"Why not."
Eric's voice came out rougher than he wanted. "You know why not."
"I don't. Say it."
"Because I don't want you to leave." He said it to the man's collar, then to his face, and once it was out he couldn't put it back. "Ever. That's the seventh line. I don't want you to go. Not out the gate, not in the morning, not ever."
The corridor was quiet enough to hear the river.
"That's not a term," Andre said. "That's a wish. Terms have consequences. That one has none. It just asks."
"Then write it down and hold me to it."
"Eric."
"You said it was my call." Eric took a step and the floorboard under him gave. "So this is it. That's what I'm calling. I don't want you to leave. I don't care what's on the paper or what I wrote three nights ago on your desk. I wrote a wall and I've been lying behind it for three nights crying into a pillow like a kid, and you're standing in my hallway with the door in your hand, and I'm done pretending the wall was for me. It was for you. I wanted to make it hurt. So you'd stop looking at me like I was furniture."
Something crossed Andre's face. It was gone before it finished, the way a dropped glass is gone before it hits, but Eric had spent twelve years learning to read that face in half a second, and he'd seen it.
"Say the rest," Andre said.
"There's no rest."
"There is," Andre said.
The word landed on the boards between them and stayed there. Eric's mouth was still open from the lie he'd just told, and he shut it. The corridor tilted a little. He put his shoulder against the doorframe because the frame was there.
Andre didn't move. He didn't fill the silence either, the way he did in the study when he wanted a man to hear his own answer come back to him. He just stood in the cold bar of light and let Eric look at him and let the moth keep hitting the glass.
Eric opened his mouth. Nothing came. He shut it again.
He could feel the folded page in his shirt pocket against his chest, the corner of it pressing where his heart was going. Say it, he thought. You just tore the man's door off the hinge and now you're going to stand here with your mouth full of paper?
"There's more," he said.
"I know."
"Don't do that. Don't tell me you know."
"I've known for three days." Andre's voice stayed level. "I want to hear it in your words."
So Eric gave it to him.
It came out all at once, the way a thing comes out when it has been held too long, and once it started he couldn't steer it. He didn't look at Andre's face for most of it. He looked at the boards, at the moon-bars, at the moth on the glass, anywhere but the collar and the eyes.
"You're right, there's more." His voice scraped. "I don't even know what this is. This thing in me. I've been calling it a pool because I don't have a better word for it. It's not what I felt when I was twenty. It's not infatuation and it's not want and it's not being scared of you, because I stopped being scared of you years ago." He made himself breathe. "When you're not there, my chest hurts. Physically. Right here." He put his palm flat over the folded page. "The night you took the plane to the jungle, I lay in the room over Rosa's cantina and it felt like somebody had their fist in me. I thought it was the town. I thought it was the water. It wasn't. It was you being gone."
Andre didn't answer, and Eric was grateful for it. Any answer would have stopped him, and he needed, once in twelve years, to finish a sentence.
"I want to be around you more than I should want to." He said the rest to the floor. "More than a man who works for you should. More than a man who has a room off your corridor should. I make excuses to walk the east hallway because I know you come back from the wall at seven. I've done that for years. I knew your step on the boards before I knew your face in the dark tonight, and I didn't learn that for the job." His jaw was tight. "I need more than what we have. And I don't know what that is. That's the truth. I don't know what I'm asking for and I've been writing papers instead of saying it because a paper I can draft and a paper I can hold."
He stopped. The clock downstairs had not moved on yet.
"There's the bite," he said.
He said it flat, and then it caught up with him and he was not flat anymore.
"I asked you for it. You said no. Fine. I put it on the list so I'd stop asking, so I'd have a wall high enough that I couldn't climb it in the dark." He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. "It didn't work. It gets stronger. Every day it gets stronger. It's not about the veins or the fangs or whatever the men in this house get out of it. I don't want to be your dinner. I want to feel closer to you than skin allows, and I don't have a single other place to put that. So I want your mouth on my throat and your weight on me and I want it because it's the closest thing a human being can get to the inside of you. That's why. That's the whole reason." His voice dropped. "It's like a toothache. It's a knowing ache. I know exactly what it wants and I can't have it and I still want it more every morning."
The draft came down the corridor and moved the hair at Andre's collar. Andre's hands had stayed at his sides the whole time.
"And the word," Eric said.
He looked up now. He made himself do it, because that was the one he had to ask with his face.
"You've called me beloved. Henry told me what it is. He told me it's a claim, it's a vow, it binds you and not me, and that you haven't done it in two hundred years until me. He told me you haven't bitten anyone since Antonia Fortier." His throat closed and he pushed through it. "I don't really know what it means. I've been turning it over for weeks and I still don't. Maybe it means I'm property. Maybe it means something you say to a thing you don't want to lose. I don't know, and that's the part that's eating me. Because I feel it, whatever it is. I feel it. And I don't know if it's just me."
He got quiet. This was the last of it. He could feel the last of it coming up like a tide and he let it come.
"So I need to know." His hands had found each other in front of him and were holding on. "I need you to tell me. Am I the only one of us who feels like this. Because if it's just me, I need to hear it from you, tonight, so I can put it down and go to sleep and stop making a fool of myself in your hallway at two in the morning."
He meant to say the rest steady. He couldn't. It came out of him barely there, the way a man says the one thing he is most afraid of.
"Please."
Then it was quiet.
The moth had stopped hitting the glass. The river was the only sound, far off past the west gate, and the wall lamp going down its hourly notch on the parapet, and Eric's own breathing that he couldn't slow down.
Andre looked at him for a long time. Long enough that Eric started to hear the shape of the not-answer he was braced for, the clean apology, the rest of the sentence from the study, the part that said no with the mouth and stood at its window later and lied about being satisfied. He'd been on the receiving end of that arithmetic for years. He knew its face.
Andre took one step and crossed out of the moon-bar into the dark of the corridor floor, and then another, and the board under him creaked, and he stopped close enough that Eric could smell him, the same cold clean he'd smelled for twelve years, and underneath it the pisco from somewhere, faint, and the paper in his shirt.
Then Andre reached out and put his hand flat on Eric's chest. Over the shirt. Over the folded page.
"Not just you," he said.
Eric's eyes burned so fast it was almost shameful. He tried to hold it and his face did what it wanted anyway, and he turned it toward his shoulder, and Andre's hand stayed where it was and pressed a little, harder, not to soothe, to hold the page still.
"I told you in the study I don't haven't felt fear in four hundred years until you," Andre said. "That was the truth, and it wasn't all of it. I said you were the only door in my wall. I said I looked forward to your face each night." His voice was very low. "I didn't say that I have not drunk from anyone since 1823 and that the reason is that the last time I did, I found that I did not want it to close. I didn't say that I have thought about your throat every day for years and gone to bed angry at my own mouth. I didn't say that I bought a cantina in your jungle town before I bought the fuel for the plane, because I had already begun to plan for the possibility that you would not come back to me, and I did not want you to be somewhere I could not find you in the dark."
He stopped. Eric had gone still. Andre's thumb moved once, along the top edge of the folded paper, like he was smoothing a bill.
"You asked who wrote the seventh line." Andre said it quietly. "I wrote it because you wrote the sixth and put a period on it. You signed your own hand off my collar and I stood in my window and told the glass I was satisfied. I was lying. Henry knew I was lying. I knew Henry knew, which is why I went down and did it to his face." His mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Four hundred years. One cook. One boy. Two people in this world who can tell when I am lying, and here you both are."
He took the page out of Eric's pocket. He did it slow, with two fingers, the way you'd take a splinter out of a child, and he unfolded it in the cold light and looked at the one line he had written himself, and then he looked at Eric.
"You want to know what beloved is."
Eric nodded because he couldn't say yes.
"It is the word the blood uses for a claim it will not release." Andre folded the page and did not put it back in the pocket; he kept it in his hand. "It is said once. It is said to one person. It obligates me, not you. It means that when I have a thing I could do, I think first of the shape of you in a room, and that if I ever found you in a well somewhere I would burn the state of Chiapas to the ground looking for the man who put you there. That is the plain meaning. There is no poetry in it. It is a leash, and the hook is in my chest, and I put it there myself, and nobody asked me to." He paused. "I have never said it to anyone but you. I said it about you, not to you, because I did not think you would want it said to your face, and because a man does not say a thing like that out loud unless he is prepared to be told no to it. I have not been prepared. That is the whole of it. You asked, so there it is."
Eric's hand found the front of Andre's shirt before he'd decided to move it. He got a fistful of the linen and held it, and his knuckles were against the man's chest, and Andre did not step back from it, and that was its own answer, the biggest one on the whole floor.
"You should have said it to my face," Eric said. His voice was wrecked.
"I should have."
"Three weeks ago I was sitting on your rug with my chest open and you stood on the other side of it because you were afraid the word would make me furniture."
"Yes."
"You were afraid you'd say it and I'd say thank you, and go eat at the staff table, and age, and die, and you'd be standing at your window being satisfied about it for the rest of time."
"Yes." Andre's jaw tightened at the corner. It was the closest to a flinch Eric had ever seen him give. "You have spent twelve years learning me. I have spent twelve years not knowing what to do with the fact that you did. There is no version of this where I am the clever one. Say what you need to say."
Eric let go of the shirt. He put his hand flat on Andre's chest, where the linen had been crushed by his fist, and held it there, and looked up into the eyes that were watching him in the dark, and they were not the study eyes. They were not the folio eyes either. He'd seen that face in half a second for twelve years and he still didn't have a word for what was in it now.
"I tore a door off your wall tonight," he said. "I don't want to put it back up. You asked me if I wanted you to leave. I told you the truth. Now you're standing in my corridor telling me you'd burn a state for me, so I'm going to ask you one more time and I want the real answer, not the one you think keeps me safe."
He swallowed.
"Do you want me. Not as the kid you bought, not as the man who does the east stores and signs your manifests. Do you want me in the morning room and in your bed and at two in the morning in a hallway with my shirt off. Do you want me at your throat and in your mouth and in the whole of the rest of your long life, however many years of it I've got."
He dropped his voice to almost nothing.
"Because if you do, I don't want the paper. I don't want the seventh line. I want you to say it once, out loud, without a signature under it, and then I want you to stop standing in your window lying to the glass."
Andre looked down at the hand on his chest. And then he lifted his own hand and closed it over Eric's, and held it there against the linen, and when he spoke it was just the two of them in the dark corridor with the moon on the boards and nobody else in the world awake.
"I want you," he said. "Beloved."
The word sat in the corridor between them, and Eric stopped breathing.
He didn't mean to. It just happened, the same way your body slams shut when you step off a curb you didn't see. His chest locked. The folded page under Andre's hand went still against him. For the length of ten seconds, maybe fifteen, Eric didn't take a single breath, and the corridor and the moon-bars and the moth on the glass all went bright and far away.
Then it came out of him in a rush, one long ragged pull of air that filled his lungs all the way down.
Air, clean and cold, and under it the pisco on Andre's breath and the starch of his own shirt. His head went light and then settled.
"Ok," he said.
It wasn't much. It was the only thing in his mouth that fit.
He looked up and his eyes did what they had been trying not to do since he opened the door. They went to Andre's mouth. Just for a second. He saw the full line of it, the faint pale scars of fangs behind the lower lip, the place where it had moved when it said his word. He watched it and he couldn't look away, and he knew his face had already given him up.
Andre's eyes went dark. Not the gold, not the molten thing that came before violence. Something lower and slower than that, pupils widening in the cold light like a shutter opening on a room.
Above the west wall, the sky tore open.
The thunder came in on top of the lightning with no gap at all, and the whole corridor flashed white, the arched windows going bright, the boards jumping, the rain breaking loose off the eaves in a slap of water. Eric flinched. Twelve years in that house and he still flinched at thunder.
Andre didn't. He just stood there with his hand over Eric's on his chest and waited it out.
"Ask," he said.
Eric wet his mouth. The rain hammered the courtyard and the old joists ticked under the floor.
"Can you please kiss me," he said.
His voice came out shot through. He got the rest of it out anyway, because it was true and because he'd already burned every other bridge in the house tonight.
"We haven't kissed in days. It's the last time I've gotten sleep."
Andre looked at him for one more beat. Then he let go of the page and the page went to the floor, and he took Eric's face in both hands.
He kissed him.
It was not the study kiss, and it was nothing like the plane. The plane had been the first taste of a thing both of them had spent years refusing to name. The study had been hunger with a signature under it. This one was slower and it went deeper, and Andre tilted Eric's head back with his thumbs along the jaw and put his mouth on him like a man putting a key into a lock he had been circling for a decade.
Eric made a sound and grabbed the front of that shirt again with both fists.
Andre walked him backward. Not fast. He did it the way he did everything, three steps of pressure and no wasted motion, and Eric's bare heels slid on the boards until his shoulder hit the doorframe of his room and he stopped and Andre kept going, mouth still on his, one hand sliding off his jaw and down to the handle.
The door gave. The room was dark behind them and smelled of the river and his own slept-in sheets.
Andre got him through it and shut the door with his foot, and the hallway went away, and the rain stayed on the roof right above their heads, and Eric was up against the wall next to his own bed in the dark with a four-hundred-year-old man's tongue in his mouth.
He let go of the shirt and got his hands up into the man's hair. Short and black and just as neat as it had been ten minutes ago, and he wrecked it, gripped it, pulled his mouth down harder. Andre made a low sound against his teeth, and that sound went straight down Eric's spine and pooled low and hot.
"You asked," Andre said against his mouth. "You have me. Say what you want."
"I want you out of the shirt."
Andre stepped back just far enough to do it. He pulled the linen over his head in one motion and dropped it, and the moonlight came through the one window and laid a pale bar across his chest and his shoulders, and Eric looked at him and felt his throat get thick all over again.
He had seen this body a hundred times. In hotel rooms, in the dark of the plane, in the study three nights ago bent over him. It had never once stopped doing this to him. Lean and hard, no marks on it anywhere, a body that healed every night before it woke. The thin blue veins under the collar. The stillness, even now, even with his chest moving, the way it only moved when he made it.
Eric got his own shirt off and let it fall, the folded page fluttering out of the pocket to the floor between their feet. Neither of them looked at it.
Andre stepped in and put his hands on him. Both of them, flat on his chest, on the scars on his forearms first, up over the pectorals, and his palms were cold against Eric's warm skin and the contrast made Eric's whole body tighten. The mouth came back down, on his jaw, on the side of his throat, and Eric tipped his head back against the wall and let him, and the fangs brushed him there, dragged, and didn't break skin, and it was the closest thing to being bitten he'd ever had and it emptied his head clean out.
"Do it," Eric said, breathless. "You can do it. You don't have to stop."
"I'm not stopping." Andre's voice was thick against his pulse. "I'm taking my time."
Eric got his hands out of Andre's hair and flat on the man's chest, and he pushed.
Not hard. Just enough. Andre's mouth came off his throat and his eyes came up, and there was a question sitting in them, the cold question of a man who had never in four hundred years been pushed away mid-hunger.
"No," Eric said.
The word landed in the small dark room and the rain went on hammering the roof.
"Not tonight. Not like that." His voice came out wrecked and he didn't try to fix it. "You had me on your desk with your folios and your rug and your arithmetic. You can make love with me another time. I don't want to be made love to."
Andre's hands were still flat on his chest and his thumbs had gone still.
Eric took the man's jaw in both hands and made him look at him, and he said the rest of it without blinking, because it had been down in him all night and he was done wrapping it in paper.
"I need to feel you. I need you to put me in a wall and make me feel like I'm yours, not like I'm the man in the east stores you're being careful with." His throat closed on the next part and he pushed it out anyway. "Please, Andre. I need you to fuck me. Fuck me like you mean it."
Something in Andre snapped.
Eric felt it go. There was no other word for it. The man's whole body changed against him, the way a held breath changes into a growl. His eyes went gold at the rim, the aged bourbon burning up, and his mouth pulled back just enough to show the full line of the fangs, ivory and long and wet in the moonlight.
His hands came off Eric's chest and took his wrists.
He pinned them to the wall above Eric's head, both of them crossed at the wrist, one of his hands doing what would have taken four men, and his other hand went down. It got the front of Eric's trousers, popped the button, dragged the zip, and shoved the cotton down his thighs in one motion that scraped the skin of his hip.
Eric's head hit the wall. His back arched off it. He was already hard and the cold air and the man's knuckles across his cock made him jerk against the grip on his wrists.
"Say it again," Andre said.
His voice had dropped into a register Eric had heard maybe twice in twelve years. Once in a warehouse in Tamaulipas, over a man on his knees. Once in the study three years ago, through a cracked door, aimed at a pool boy.
Eric said it again.
"You're mine," Andre said, and it wasn't a claim like the word on the paper had been. It was a fact he was reading off a ledger. "You were mine at nineteen and you're mine at thirty-one and you can write whatever the fuck you like on a page. I signed it. It means nothing in this room. Say it."
"I'm yours."
Say it like you're not trying to survive it."
"I'm yours." Eric's voice cracked open on it. "I've been yours since the plane. I just didn't have the balls to say it."
Andre let go of his wrists. Eric's arms came down and he grabbed at the man, anywhere, the back of his neck, the ridge of his shoulder, and Andre got a hand under each of his thighs and lifted him clean off the floor like he weighed nothing and dumped him onto the bed.
The bed was small and the frame was old and it cracked against the wall and the mattress gave under him, and then Andre was over him with his knee between Eric's legs and his mouth on his collarbone and his teeth dragging, not breaking. Cold mouth, warm skin, the wet of it.
He worked Eric's trousers the rest of the way down his legs and off his ankles and threw them somewhere in the dark. Then his own belt, the sound of it, the leather sliding through. The zip. He got out of them fast and kicked them off the end of the bed.
Eric looked down the length of him and his mouth went dry. He'd seen the man naked before. He'd never been given the time to actually look. The moonlight came through the one window and cut across his hip and the long line of his cock, already hard, the vein running up the shaft, the head dark with blood. Four hundred years of a body that never bruised and never scarred and healed every night before it woke.
Andre caught him looking and didn't smile.
"You want it," he said. "You'll take all of it."
"Yes."
"Turn over."
Eric turned over. His hands found the headboard and he got his knees under him and his face down into the pillow that still smelled of his own crying, and he felt the man come up behind him and settle his weight, and the cold of his thighs against the back of Eric's, and the head of his cock sitting against the crease of his ass, heavy, not pushing.
Andre's hand came up the back of his neck.
Eric flinched. The fourth line. The list. Both of them felt him flinch.
Andre stopped with his palm flat on the knob of Eric's spine.
"You wrote a term," he said, low, at Eric's ear. "Say the term now and I take my hand off."
Eric's eyes were shut against the pillow. His heart was going like a bird in a hand.
"No," he said.
"No what."
"No term. Not tonight. Put your hand where you want it."
Andre left his hand there, on the back of Eric's neck, warm now from Eric's skin, and he bent over him and spoke into the side of his face.
"Then hear me. Anything I do that you don't want, you say the word paper. One word. That's the only term on this mattress. Everything else is mine."
"Okay."
"Say it."
"Paper. Okay. I've got it."
"Good."
Andre's hand slid down off his neck, down his spine, over the dip at his tailbone, and two fingers went lower and pressed into him, dry, and Eric hissed through his teeth and pushed back anyway. Andre pulled his hand back and there was a sound and then the fingers came back slick, oil, and this time two of them went in to the second knuckle and Eric's whole body tightened and then let go.
Andre worked him open with two fingers and then three. He did it slow, with his free hand flat on the small of Eric's back holding him down, and Eric could hear himself making noise into the pillow and he didn't care who heard it. The rain covered most of it. The rain covered everything.
"
"Keep your knees apart," Andre said.
Eric's knees had drifted back together without him noticing, thigh against thigh on the damp sheet. He pushed them apart and the cool air moved up between them. Behind him the mattress shifted with the man's weight, then stopped.
Andre took his fingers out. Eric's whole body flinched around the loss, empty and open and cold, and he braced for the cock, and got nothing.
Then there was a wet sound and a breath of air against him, and a mouth.
Eric's eyes flew open.
The first pass of the tongue was flat and broad and it went from the bottom of his tailbone all the way down, slow, deliberate, the whole width of it, and Eric's spine snapped straight before he could stop it. His hands knotted in the pillow. His mouth opened on a sound that had no shape to it at all.
Not his fingers. His tongue.
His eyes rolled up into the dark behind his own skull and stayed there.
He had been touched in this room three nights ago and in a study a week before that, and by the same man in a hotel in Tamaulipas four years ago, and nothing in twelve years had prepared him for this. There was no cold in it. The mouth came down on him warm from his own skin, wetter than he expected, and it was not a lick, not a testing lick, not the polite exploratory thing you'd get from a stranger.
Andre kissed it.
That was the only way Eric's rattled brain could name it. He kissed the hole like it was a mouth. Full lips, closed at first, pressed against him and held there, an actual kiss, slow and firm, and the pressure of it opened him a fraction and the lips sealed over the opening and stayed.
Eric's sound came out of the pillow, high and thin and mortifying.
Then the mouth moved off, and pecked him. Small light kisses, one after another, just off the hole, on the crease, up one side and down the other. It was tender and it was filthy at once and it made Eric's cock jump against his own belly, untouched, leaking onto the sheet.
"You're tight as a fist back here," Andre said, from somewhere behind his own thighs. "You know that."
"I know it."
"Say the rest."
"I'm tight because you keep teasing me."
"I'm not teasing. I'm eating you. There's a difference and I want you to learn it."
And then the tongue came back and it stabbed into him.
Not a lick. A point. It pushed past the ring of muscle, past where the fingers had been, and went deep, and Eric's hips bucked so hard the headboard smacked the wall, and the sound he made was not one he would have allowed out of his own mouth in daylight.
The tongue twisted, scooped, curled, worked in and out in long strokes and then short shallow ones, faster, and the wet noise of it filled the little room under the rain. Eric grabbed the headboard slats and pushed back into it without deciding to and got a low laugh against his hole, which vibrated up into him and made his balls draw up tight.
"You like being licked open like a whore."
"Yes."
"Say it properly."
"I like being licked open like a whore." His voice broke halfway through and he didn't care.
"Say whose whore."
"Yours. Yours."
Andre's tongue pulled out and the flat of it came back, dragging, and then the lips sealed again and he sucked. He sucked on the hole the way you'd suck on a mouth you were kissing too hard, and the suction pulled Eric's insides down into a bright, shameful kind of ache, and his hips chased it, and the pillow soaked up his moaning.
He lifted his head once and turned his face to the side and saw the moon bar on the floor and the two shirts lying together and the folded page. He saw his own hands on the headboard, the old white scars on the forearms, the leather cord riding up his wrist.
Then the mouth stopped and the voice came back, low and unhurried and right at the place where it did the most damage.
"You spent three days writing me rules about your neck," Andre said. "You didn't write one about your ass. I checked."
"I didn't think about it."
"No. You thought about the neck because the neck is where you wanted me to prove something." A kiss, wet, right on the hole, and Eric's whole body clenched. "This is where you just want to be used. So I'm using it."
"Yes."
"You don't get to say yes like that, like you're agreeing with a memo. Say thank you."
"Thank you."
"Thank you, what."
"Thank you for using my ass."
"Thank you for what I'm doing to it."
"Thank you for what you're doing to it." Eric's voice was wet and thin and he had stopped trying to hold anything in.
Andre ate him for a long time after that as though the time didn't exist, which for him it did not. He alternated, and Eric learned the rhythm of it without meaning to. Broad flat strokes first, the whole tongue, root to tip and back, so slow it should have been boring and was instead the exact opposite of boring. Then the point of it in and out, fast, drilling, until the muscle went loose and gave under him. Then the closed-lip kisses, one on each side of the hole, in that order, always that order, on and on, until Eric was shaking.
Nobody had done this to him.
Twelve years in a house of vampires and killers and one man who owned the whole south of everything, and nobody had ever put their tongue in him. He'd thought about it. He'd thought about it in the dark more nights than he would ever admit. But thinking about it was like thinking about being bitten, and being bitten was on the sixth line of a piece of paper he had signed with his own hand, and this was on no line at all.
He felt his own tears come back up, hot, and he didn't know if they were from the shake in his legs or from something else entirely, and he turned his face deeper into the pillow so the man behind him would not see them, which was funny, because the man behind him could hear his own heart beat.
"They're the wrong shape," Andre said, between kisses, against the inside of his thigh.
"What."
"Your hands. On the headboard. The left one's knuckles are white and the right one's not. You always do that when you're about to cry."
"I'm not crying."
"You're crying and you're leaking on my sheets and you've got your face in a pillow that smells like three nights of it." The tongue dragged up the crease and stopped at his tailbone, and the man spoke with his mouth still there. "I'm not going to give you a pass on lying in this room."
Eric wiped his face on the pillow and turned his head and got a breath and said it.
"I'm crying because you're doing the thing I wanted and I couldn't ask for it, and I still feel like I have to earn it."
"You don't."
"Then stop being gentle about it."
"I'm not being gentle. I'm being thorough." Andre bit him, then, not with fangs. Just teeth, on the back of the thigh, a full mouthful of skin taken and held, hard enough to bruise, and he shook his head against it once like a dog with a rope, and Eric howled into the mattress and loved it, every second.
The teeth let go and the tongue came back, and this time it did not come in any pattern at all. Deep stabs and flat licks and long sucking pulls, mixed, no order, and the not knowing what came next was worse than all of it, and Eric lost his grip on the slat and had to find it again.
"Look at you," Andre said. "You can't even hold on. Thirty-one years old and a tongue takes your hands off a board."
"Fuck."
"Say my name instead. It's better for you."
"Andre."
"Again."
"Andre. Andre, please."
"Please what. You said you didn't want to be made love to. Those were your words and I'll hold you to them. So be specific. Please what."
Eric tried to make his mouth obey and it wouldn't. He got one hand back on the headboard and pushed his hips back into the mouth that wasn't currently on him, offering himself up like a plate, and heard the pleasure in the man's breathing go down a note.
"Please put it in me," he said. "Please put your cock in my ass and fuck me. I don't want the fingers and I don't want the tongue anymore, I want to be filled up, I want to feel it tomorrow when I walk the corridor."
"You'll feel it for three days."
"Good."
Andre pulled back. There was the tap of the bottle on the mattress and the slick sound of the man's hand on himself, and Eric lay there with his face down and his knees wide and his ass up, and the shame and the want were the same temperature now, and he had stopped being able to tell them apart.
"Andre."
"Yes."
"When you do it. Put your hand on my neck."
The room went quiet except for the rain.
"Say that again," Andre said.
"Put your hand on the back of my neck when you fuck me. I flinched before and I know it, and I want you to put it back. The fourth line's void tonight. I'm taking it off the page myself."
"You're not taking it off. You're breaking it."
"Then I'm breaking it."
Andre's hand came down, flat and cool, and closed on the back of Eric's neck exactly where it had been all those years, the way a man holds a horse or a dog or a boy he doesn't want to lose in a crowd, and Eric's whole body went soft in the middle.
"Say paper if it ever stops being what you want," Andre said.
"I won't."
"Say it anyway if it happens."
"Okay."
"Okay is not a word I want in my bed."
"Yes, Andre."
"Better."
There was the sound of the oil again, more of it, three fingers' worth worked in and around, and Eric felt it going cold and slick down over his hole and down the seam of him, and then the mattress dipped and the man was up on his knees behind him with his thighs against the backs of Eric's thighs, and the head of it sat against him, blunt and heavy, not pushing.
Andre leaned over him, all of that cold weight along Eric's back, chest to spine, and put his mouth at Eric's ear.
"Last thing," he said. "And then I'm going to put it in you and not stop until I'm done with you."
Eric's heart was a fist in his chest. He got one hand back and put it on the man's hip.
"Say it."
"You wrote six lines to keep me at arm's length and you never wrote one to keep me off your neck, because you knew. You knew the day you wrote it that you'd break the fourth one first. That's what made you cry, more than the rug. You wanted to be kept, and you didn't know how to say it, so you wrote a wall and waited for me to walk through it."
"I know."
"And you'll do it again. Not this week. But you will." Andre's mouth moved against his ear, not a kiss. "When you do, I'll still be standing in the hall."
His hips shifted and the head of his cock pressed, insistent, a fraction in, and Eric's breath stopped and his whole body strained at the cold ring of it, the size of it, the knowledge of what came next.
"Say whose ass you're taking this in," Andre said.
"Yours."
"Say it like you mean it."
"Yours," Eric said, and then, with the man's hand closed hard on the back of his neck, "I'm yours. All of it. Everything I've got."
Andre pushed in.
The sound of it was obscene. Wet and loud, a slow squelch as the head of Andre's cock forced through the ring of muscle and sank into him, the oil giving way to something tighter and hotter, and Eric's whole body arched back like a bowstring.
His mouth opened against the pillow and what came out was not a word. A low hum, deep in his chest, long and satisfied, the sound of a man getting exactly what he'd been starving for.
Behind him Andre went still. Then his hand on Eric's neck tightened, fingers digging in, and he pulled Eric's hips back against him with his other hand until there was nothing left to give, until the man was buried to the hilt and Eric could feel the cold weight of his balls pressed against his own.
"Stay," Andre said. His voice was wrecked in a way Eric had never heard it. Not the cold register of the study or the measured tone of the corridor. Something lower down, older, a voice that had been kept behind a door for four hundred years and was now just out.
Eric stayed. He couldn't have moved if he'd wanted to. His knees were shot, his thighs trembling, his hands fisted in the soaked pillow, and the stretch of it was so much, so full, that his mind had gone white at the edges.
Andre pulled back, slow, dragging every inch of himself through the clench of Eric's body, and then pushed back in. The squelch again. The wet slap of skin. The headboard cracked against the wall and neither of them cared.
Thunder rolled directly overhead, close enough that the window glass buzzed in its frame. The rain hadn't let up; if anything it had gotten heavier, hammering the roof in sheets, and somewhere down the corridor a shutter was banging loose.
The room was too dark to see much beyond the pale bar of moonlight on the floor. But Eric could feel the room changing around them, warmth bleeding in from somewhere, a low orange flicker starting to crawl across the wall.
He turned his head enough to look. The fireplace. He hadn't lit it. The fireplace in his small west room was burning now, real flame, logs he hadn't put there catching and popping, and the heat rolled out across the floor in a wave.
Andre must have done it. Sometime in the last minute, between pushing in and now, the man had reached out with whatever it was he had and lit a fire without moving his hips. Because his hips hadn't stopped. Because he was fucking Eric steady now, long deep strokes, not fast, not rough, just relentless, and the heat from the fire hit the sweat already beading on Eric's back and made him slick from neck to tailbone in seconds.
That was when Eric realized they weren't on the bed anymore.
The mattress had given way at some point. He didn't remember the transition. One second he was face-down in the pillow, the next his forearms hit hardwood and the rug burned against his knees and the sound of Andre's hips slapping against him went from muffled to sharp in the small room.
The rug. The same cheap wool rug he'd stood on three nights ago when he read his terms out loud. It was under him now, rough against his chest, and the fire was two feet away and the sweat was sheeting down his back and Andre was behind him, over him, inside him, and the whole room smelled of burning pine and sex and the river.
Andre's hand came off his neck and grabbed a fistful of his hair instead. Short and black and already damp, and he hauled Eric's head back, up and back, until his spine curved and his face came off the rug and his throat was a long pale line in the firelight, and Eric's mouth opened on a sound that was half moan and half sob.
Andre bent over him. Chest to back. Cold skin against sweat-slick heat. His mouth came to the side of Eric's face, right against his cheek, his ear, the corner of his jaw, and he held them there like that, faces flushed together, breathing the same air.
"You want me to fuck you," Andre said, low and rough against his skin. "This is how I'm going to do it."
His hips snapped, hard, one sharp thrust that bottomed him out and punched the air from Eric's lungs.
"You will have no doubt that you're mine." Another thrust, same pace, same force. "And that your sweet asshole belongs to me."
Eric's whole body was shaking. His hands scrabbled at the rug and found nothing to hold.
"You want to know how it feels," Andre said, and his voice cracked open on the word feels, "when an ancient vampire finally gives in to his monstrous desires because his beloved just keeps pushing."
Smack. His palm came down on Eric's ass, hard, flat, right on the swell where it met his thigh. The crack of it echoed in the small room and Eric's hips bucked forward into the empty air.
"And pushing."
Smack. The other cheek this time, same hand, same force, and Eric's mouth opened and nothing came out.
"Smack."
Andre did it again, on the same spot, and the heat bloomed up under his palm.
"And pushing."
Smack. Eric's skin was on fire everywhere. Ass, back, neck, the whole length of him burning, and Andre hadn't stopped fucking him through any of it, the rhythm unbroken, in and out, in and out, wet and loud and relentless.
"I only fear you don't understand what you've unleashed."
Andre said it right into his ear, a whisper with teeth in it, and then he yanked Eric's head around by the hair and kissed him.
Rough was too small a word. It was brutal, open-mouthed, tongue shoved past Eric's teeth like the man was trying to climb inside him from both ends at once. Fangs dragged across Eric's lower lip and he tasted copper and didn't care. Andre's free hand came around and closed on Eric's throat, not squeezing, just holding, thumb on one side, fingers on the other, palm flat over the pulse.
Eric kissed him back with everything he had. He got one hand up and grabbed the back of Andre's head and held on, and his hips were moving now, meeting every thrust, grinding back into the slap of skin, chasing the sting of the smacks and the drag of the cock inside him and the taste of his own blood in the man's mouth.
Andre broke the kiss just enough to speak, lips still against Eric's.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.