Sunshine (37 page)

He raised his head. Another of my heartbeats, and another. He shifted his arms, so he was no longer holding me like a garage clamp holds a recalcitrant engine. I turned my head fractionally. I could see the gray gleam of his cheek and jaw in the blackness: my dark vision was adjusting. I felt my eyes
trying
to see, like when the eye doctor gives you one of those funny lenses to look through and everything is all wrong. It was disconcerting to see in what I knew was darkness like … burial; no, not a good metaphor. But wherever we were, it
felt
underground, and I didn't think that was just the darkness.

He raised his head a little farther and turned his head to look at me, and I saw the stagnant-pool color of his eyes change to bright emerald green again. I remembered that the first time I'd seen his eyes, the night at the lake, they had been stagnant-pool-colored; how had I not remembered that transformation? Probably because I hadn't seen it happen. That had been back in the days when I believed myself to be fully human, and when I couldn't look into a vampire's eyes.

He was also getting warmer. He was now no colder (say) than a hibernating lizard. This was still a little chilly from where I was though.

I felt his chest expand, and his first breath drifted across my face. I remembered being carried back from the lake, leaning against that chest, recognizing breathing, not recognizing any rhythm to it.

He'd taken his weight onto his elbows, so I could breathe more easily.

I remembered thinking, on the long walk in from the lake, that I wouldn't have been able to match my breathing to his. But he was matching his breathing to mine, now. I also abruptly realized that I was feeling his dick growing long and hard against my leg.

We were both naked.

I knew that vampire body temperature is at least somewhat under voluntary control, like circulation of the blood is. It is, perhaps, a bit variable, especially, perhaps, under stress. He'd gone from dead cold, you should pardon the expression, to what you might call normal human body heat, in about a minute. I'd known—I'd been pretty sure—he was in trouble; that's why I was here. Perhaps I'd—er—roused him too suddenly. Perhaps he was in what passes in vampire biological science for shock, and his control systems weren't responding.

That didn't explain the dick though.
It
was responding.

He was now suddenly hot, as hot as if he'd been in a kitchen baking cinnamon rolls in August. I already knew vampires could sweat, under certain conditions, like being chained to a wall of a house with sunlight coming in through the windows. He was sweating again now. Some of his sweat fell on me.

I've always rather liked sweat. On other occasions when I've had a naked, sweating male body up against mine, I've tended to feel that it meant he was getting into what was going on. This usually produces a similar enthusiasm in me. Not that there
was
anything going on … exactly. Yet. Remember how fast and suddenly this was all happening. And if he was in shock so was I. Maybe my brain hadn't fully come with me in that zap through the void, like my clothes manifestly hadn't. With a truly masterful erection now pressed against me I turned my head again and licked his sweating shoulder.

What happened next probably lasted about ten seconds. Maybe less.

I don't think I
heard
the sound he made; I think I only
felt
it. He moved his hands again, to tip my face toward him, and kissed me. I can't say I noticed any fangs. I had the lingering vestige of sense not to try anything clever with
my
teeth, which with a human lover I would have. But I was nonetheless busy with tongue and hands. I wriggled a little under him. I kissed him back as he tangled his fingers in my hair. I arched up off the floor a trifle to press myself more thoroughly against him. I was undoubtedly making some noises of my own.…

I always thought the earth was supposed to move when you arrived, not when you'd only started the journey.

One second I was raising my pelvis to meet him—and believe me, he was there—and the next second he had hurled himself off me and thrown me from him, and I was flying across the floor to fetch up with a bruising
whap
against the wall. He bounded to his feet and disappeared.

I lay there, considering. Point one: wherever the hell I was (and I hoped this was not too literal a remark), it had a smooth, glassily smooth, stone floor. The wall I had caromed into at a guess was the same material.

Point two: what the hell had
happened
?

Point three: where did I want to start counting?

I hoped I was going to have the opportunity to tell Yolande that she didn't have to make me anything special, that the herbs and candles had worked fine. If you wanted to call this fine.

I remembered, with an effort, that when I'd arrived—so to speak—Con had been cold and not breathing. But for all I knew this is merely the vampire equivalent of a nap. Lots of humans are cranky when they're woken unexpectedly. No. I didn't think his eyes would go stagnant-pond-colored for a nap. Okay. Maybe I had accomplished my mission—that he'd been in some kind of vampire trouble and I'd got him out of it.

I should have been embarrassed. I should have been paralyzed with embarrassment. I was sitting—no, I was crooked up—naked on a cold stone floor in the dark, having been cannoned off the wall by a … well, a creature … that I had been under the impression I was about to have an intimate encounter with. Maybe I should try to be grateful at having been spared intimacy with the most dangerous of the Others.

Gave a whole new meaning to the phrase
under the dark
.

I wasn't grateful. You want to talk cranky, coitus interruptus takes me well
beyond
cranky. My engorged labia felt like they were pressing on my brain—what there was of my brain—and if I didn't get to fuck someone, something,
now
—a vampire would do—I was going to fucking
explode
. My cunt ached like a bruise.

Beyond cranky, rather fortunately, doesn't transmute into embarrassment. It transmutes into fury. As my blood pressure began to rearrange itself to a more standard unengorged pattern I was
seething
. I couldn't care less that I was also naked and alone in the dark of I had no idea where. Well, I couldn't care much. Not very much. Really.

It was a large room. Empty—except for me—and the ceiling was so high even my dark-sighted eyes couldn't make it out. No furniture. No windows. No anything. Funny sort of place for a nap. Or maybe for a solitary siege. But then I wasn't a vampire.

It was at least as dark as the inside of my closet. So nothing flickered when I looked at it. What there was to look at. Wow, what a bonus. I would try to control my euphoria.

He reappeared. He was wearing what I was beginning to think of as his standard get-up of long loose black shirt and black trousers. No shoes. I couldn't be sure but I didn't think I'd ever seen him in shoes. He was carrying something else, which he came close enough to hand over without looking at me. I unfolded it and discovered another long loose black shirt. When I had pulled it over my head it came nearly to my knees.
Gods bloody damn it all
. I was not in a good mood.

He was still not looking at me. I was still seething.

“I beg your pardon most profoundly,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Nice to see you too.”

He made one of those quick vampire gestures, too rapid for human eyes. My no-longer-quite-human eyes could about follow it: at any rate they registered frustration. Good. That made two of us. Although on second thought, or maybe semi-thought, I doubted he was indicating physical frustration. Uncomfortably I began to be glad of the long black shirt, which probably made me look like death, especially in this light, er, this no-light: black is not my color, any way you hang it. But then looking like death might be very attractive to a vampire. In which case there was even less to explain why.… My anger was subsiding. I didn't
want
it to subside. I needed the warmth. But he'd thrown me away, hadn't he? Whatever his dick said,
he
didn't want me. Anger was much better than misery. Misery approached. I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered.

Maybe he saw the shiver. “After your—” He paused. “You need food,” he said. “I can't even feed you.” He glanced down at himself as if perhaps he was expecting a peanut-butter sandwich to be suspended about his person. If he was contemplating opening a vein and offering it to me, the answer was
No
. If he was contemplating it, he rejected the notion. I wondered what he meant by can't
even
feed me.

“I must also thank you for … retrieving me,” he said. Finally he looked at me.

Retrieving
? Shiva
wept
.

“Any time,” I said. “I'm sure I'll enjoy reviewing my assortment of
new
scars and recalling how I got them too. The ones from being slammed on my back and landed on like a sack of boulders, and the ones
a few seconds later
from being thrown across the room into a wall.”

I saw him flinch. One for the human.

“Sunshine,” he said. He made a move toward me, and I flinched away. One for the vampire.

I didn't mean to say it. I didn't mean to say anything about it. I was
determined
not to say anything about it. My voice came out high and strange, and sticky with wretchedness: “Why? I know about having to—
invite
—one of your kind.” For about six months when you're thirteen or fourteen it's every teenage girl's favorite story: because it's about finding out that you have
power
. “Maybe I got the details wrong? Like you need it
engraved
RSVP—I suppose you prefer the black border to the narrow gold line—delivered to your door at least forty-eight hours before the moment? Maybe you need it printed in blood on—on vellum. And silly me, I couldn't find your
door
to deliver it.” My voice was getting higher and higher and squeakier and squeakier. I shut up.

He stood there with his hands loose at his sides, staring at the floor. His hair flopped down over his forehead. I wanted to brush it back so I could see his eyes.… I wanted to do nothing of the kind. I would bite my own hand off before I voluntarily touched him again.

“I believe you were inviting more than you knew,” he said at last.

I sighed. “Oh good. Cryptic vampire utterances. My fave. Now you're going to say something opaque and oracular about the bond between us, aren't you? That it got me here but let's not get carried away maybe?”

He moved so quickly I would not have stepped aside in time, but he stopped himself short and did not touch me. But he didn't stop very short. As it was he was standing so near it was hard not to touch him. I put my hands behind my back like a dieter offered a choice of Bitter Chocolate Death or Meringuamania. “I do not disturb you by choice,” he said. “Can you not believe that?” He made another of those vampire noises: it went something like
urrrrrr
. “Perhaps you cannot. This—our situation—is not made easier by thousands of years of my kind … disturbing your kind.”

“Disturb is one word for it, I suppose,” I said, nastily. I was still in a bad mood, still unhappy and wanting to cause unhappiness in return. And still half blasted out of my skull by events since I had found out that evening that my landlady knew I was jiving with a vampire. A lot had happened in a short space of time. Not just one particular thing out of a morbidly kinky soap opera.

“I too am disturbed,” he said quietly.

I had my mouth open for my next uncharitable remark and changed my mind. I moved away from him, found the wall, and leaned back against it. I didn't want to sit on the floor—and have him looming over me—and there wasn't anything else to lean on. Except him, of course, and that wasn't an option right now. Disturbance: okay. If I could stop feeling mortally wounded in the ego for a moment I might begin to remember again what was going on here. He was a vampire. I was a human. We weren't supposed to have any bonds between us, except straightforward generic ones of murderous antagonism and so on. And, speaking of kinky soap opera, no one ever had an
affair
with a vampire, not even in
Blood Lore
, which was always getting prosecuted for one thing or another. The reason why, when you were thirteen or fourteen, you outgrew your fascination with the idea that a vampire couldn't do you unless you let him is that you began to take in the fact that shortly after you'd said, “Come and get me big boy,” you
died
.

It was illegal to write stories and make movies about sex between vampires and humans. It was, in fact, one of the few mandates the global council really agreed on. The stories and movies got written and made anyway, but if the government caught you at it, they threw your ass in jail. For a long time.

Okay. He probably was disturbed too.

I looked at him, wondering if he was wondering how we'd wound up here, wherever here was. About why we'd been able to create this antithetical bond, and what exactly it consisted of. It probably was a good idea not to make it any more complicated—and intense—than we had to.

A small part of me whispered, “Oh, rats.”

Another small part whispered, “Yeah, well, how come
he's
the one who managed to remember?”

Suddenly I was exhausted. “Truce?” I said, still leaning against the wall.

“Truce,” he said.

I was only going to shut my eyes for a moment.…

I
WOKE UP
feeling rather comfortable. I was lying on something soft, but not too soft, and wrapped in something warm and furry. And there was a smell of apples. My stomach roared. I opened my eyes.

No, I didn't open my eyes, I only thought I had. I was having the most ridiculous dream of my life thus far—and I'd had some pretty ridiculous dreams in my day—something out of
Gormenghast
or
The Castle of Otranto
or
House of Tombs
. I wanted to say to my imagination, oh, come
on
.