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They drove. That’s what life had become, an endless cycle of driving and cheap motel rooms. Kate wasn’t sure what she wanted from life, but this probably wasn’t it.
There was something meditative about it though - the blur of scenery and steady rhythms of the road. She had a lot to reflect on. Reflect is what she did, and every night she prayed on it. Seth mostly snorted or rolled his eyes at that, sitting pensive in front of the television and drinking cheap liquor. (Something he seemed to do an awful lot of.) Still, Kate prayed for her mama and daddy. She prayed, especially, for Scott. She prayed for Richie, too. Out loud. Even though it seemed to annoy Seth a lot some days.
It wasn’t that Kate expected him to join her in prayer. She wished he would, but that seemed unlikely. She wasn’t sure what she did expect.
They ended up selling the car for a beat up hatch-back. It gave them some money, even if Seth did seem eager to waste or lose most of it. More than once, Kate had to retrieve him from a bar. The worst was when he picked a fight with some locals. Kate crossed the street in the rain and found him left near some dumpsters, drunk and bleeding and down for the count. She couldn’t exactly drag him across the street, so she just held a piece of cardboard over the both of them and settled next to him in the damp.
Kate’s daddy had left her with a unshakable disgust for drunkenness. Her face must have said as much. Seth couldn’t look at it for long when he came to.
“How long have you been there?” he slurred, thumbing dried blood from the corner of his mouth.
“A while,” said Kate, keeping her words curt, trying to come off as just angry instead of how she really felt.
“Why?”
“You’re all I’ve got now, aren’t you?” Her voice broke a little at the end. She was looking away, but she felt Seth squeeze her shoulder. They sat together like that a while longer before walking back to the motel.
They always got rooms with two beds if they could. If they couldn’t, Seth would sleep on the sofa. Some nights Kate wished he wouldn’t. She felt so alone. She’d lay on her side in bed, in the dark, watching the shape of Seth’s body by the dim street light filtering in through the curtains. “Do you want to talk?” she’d asked more than once.
“No,” he said, flatly, every time. Though, once, he added, “But you can, if you need to,” after.
Kate would have taken him up on that. She started to, but suddenly it all seemed so unnecessary and pointless. Kate cried instead, something she really didn’t do often and never around Seth. Once she started, she couldn’t stop. It was ugly sobbing that made her feel physically ill, like she couldn’t catch her breath, like she was going to be sick. It went on for minutes before Seth said anything, but when he did his voice was closer.
“Hey,” said Seth, in the gentler voice he used when Kate thought he must be feeling guilty. The tears beading on her lashes made it sort of hard to see, but Kate saw him standing by the bed. When she didn’t say anything, he knelt down on the floor. Like that night in the rain, his hand found her shoulder again. When it did, she grabbed it, squeezing it with one hand, then grasping it with two. The need for the touch of another person was sudden, like taking a sip from a water fountain and realizing you were thirsty. So, so thirsty.
Kate didn’t trust Seth to come to her. She slid from the mattress and down to the floor beside him. It was even darker down there. He’d eased her down awkwardly and for a second Kate thought he might hug her. Kate would have welcomed a hug right about now, even from him.
There was a rising panic inside Kate’s chest. She felt it sometimes at night, when she started thinking on the past and on the future and on her present in this weird purgatory. Still holding tight to Seth’s hand, she laid down on the floor, close to him. Seth was probably embarrassed for her, or just plain uncomfortable. It didn’t matter at all right now. Nothing mattered except the wave of emotion she was riding, bleeding out into the water.
Seth did move after a while, but not to get away. He moved Kate, but not to the bed. Seth slept in his jeans with her around. Kate could feel them beneath her cheek. His free hand touched her hair, lightly at first, continuing when she didn’t object.
Kate sniffed in an effort to keep her nose from running. “You have rough hands.” Seth made an annoyed sound and made to pull his hand back. “Don’t stop,” Kate added, quickly. “Please.”
Seth didn’t. His fingers rubbed slow circles on her temples and against her scalp, until she fell asleep. When Kate woke up, her head was still resting on his lap.
Then they were back on the road, never more than a day or two from the border. Seth was bouncing ideas off her, talking about people he knew, talking like this was all part of some larger plan and they weren’t just driving aimlessly.
They were on their third day in a motel they’d stayed at before when Richie broke the pattern.
Kate woke to Seth talking, raising his voice to be heard through the closed door. He hadn’t switched on a lamp, but Kate’s eyes were adjusted enough to notice his stiff posture and the way his fingers twitched around his gun.
“This is the last time I’m gonna say it. Doing just fine on this little vacation without you. Turn around. Go home - wherever that is for you now.”
Kate sat up. “Seth?”
Seth looked back at her, hand flying up like he wanted her to be quiet, even though she wasn’t talking all that loud to begin with.
There was silence on the other side of the door. “Kate?”
The sound of Richie’s voice had Kate out of bed and over to a window in seconds.
“Leave her out of this,” Seth warned, trying, unsuccessfully, to keep the curtains closed.
Kate looked Richie up and down. It was still mostly dark outside, though the sky was lightening in the corners and she made it out when he raised a hand at her in a halfhearted wave of acknowledgment. “Have you seen my brother?” she called out to him.
“Let me in and we can talk.”
Kate frowned. “Is this a vampire thing?”
“It’s an I’m gonna shoot him if he tries to come in thing.” Seth leaned around her and raised his gun in mock salute. “Go home.” He closed the curtains back, yanking them so hard the right one ripped.
Kate ignored him. She went to the spot Seth had vacated and opened the door. “My brother?”
It was difficult to say why he looked different but he did. No glasses, maybe? It felt like more than that and likely was. Kate didn’t feel like she was in danger, though. Granted, she’d developed a high tolerance for danger as of late.
Richie stepped inside. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but never got to. All of a sudden, Seth was tackling him right back out like a defensive lineman.
“Seth!” Kate snapped, hurrying out after them. “Stop it!” Kate looked over, more than once, at the closed doors on other motel rooms. She tried to keep her own voice down to an urgent hiss even though the Gecko brothers were probably making enough noise to wake the whole place. A cloud of orange dust followed them to the road, where Richie ended up on his back. Kate ran over, bare feet stinging on the gravel. She tried to catch Seth’s fist on the rebound but ended up elbowed hard in the wrist. “Stop!”
Kate clenched her own fists but did nothing. She couldn’t. She could only stand back and watch Seth throttle Richie into the ground - which, all things considered - seemed oddly one-sided. Kate looked at Richie’s hands gripped the front of Seth’s shirt tight. She looked at the sky. “The sun’s coming up!”
It seemed to take Kate’s words a few moments to really register with Seth. When they did, he looked up, taking in the lightening sky with his eyes wide. “Shit.” He looked back down at his brother. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
Richie glared, turning his head and spitting out a mouthful of blood in response.
It was awkward getting back to the motel room. Richie was hesitant to move out from under the scant shade his brother’s body provided. In the end, Kate sprinted inside and back out again with a blanket off the bed. By then they had attracted a small audience, peering through windows and around cracked doors. Kate tried not to think too hard on how this must look. Beating a guy up, throwing a blanket over him, leading him inside. There was some smoke, which worried Kate and made Seth walk faster, wrapping one arm around his brother to hurry him along. The motel was in a bad part of town. Kate could only hope that meant no questions or knocks on the door from management.
Kate was locking the door back when she heard another one slam. Seth stood in front of the closed bathroom door, eyes closed, massaging the bridge of his nose.
Kate crossed halfway to him, then rocked back on her heels. “Is he okay?”
Seth looked up at her with a groan and a shrug. He opened the bathroom door and disappeared inside.
After a moment, Kate followed. She eased the door open to find Seth seated on the edge of the tub, in the dark, exchanging words with his brother who, presumably, sat in the tub behind him. When he noticed Kate he stood and left.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to bed,” said Seth, shouldering past her.
Kate watched him go then took his place at the tub, staring down at a shadowy mass of blankets that smelled slightly singed. “Are you all right?”
There were no windows in the bathroom, but there was a cheap plastic night light beside the mirror that allowed for some light. Still, the only thing she could make out of Ritchie after he’d pulled back the blanket were his eyes glowing yellow. “Why are you here?”
“Where else am I gonna go?” said Kate, in the hopes that answering his question with another question would keep him from pressing the matter. It did. “Have you seen my brother?”
“No.”
Kate felt her heart drop in her chest. “No?”
“We don’t exactly travel in the same circles.”
“You haven’t heard anything?”
The yellow eyes moved from her, going distant in thought. “No,” he said at last, meaning, Kate assumed, he had heard things but nothing that would be of any comfort or use.
Kate nodded, mostly to herself. It’s okay, she thought, even though nothing had been okay in months.
“Is there anything else?”
The question made Kate realize just how long she’d been sitting in silence, thinking about her family. It also made her realize her eyes had adjusted somewhat. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes.”
“You still can’t walk in the sun?”
“I can… A little.” Richie rolled over onto his side, away from her. She’d struck a nerve, apparently. “I’m getting better at it.”
“Don’t you heal?”
“Almost always. I’m sure I will after I feed.”
Kate looked back at the door, thinking of the people who had been watching them outside. “On a person?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“When I wake up.”
“Are you going to sleep here, though? In the bathtub.”
“If you’ll let me.” Those words had a bit of an edge to them. Richie had always been a predator, and now that was likely true more than ever. Kate knew she should leave.
“Will you kill them? The person you feed on, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have to? Have you ever fed on anyone and not killed them?” Kate watched Richie turn to look at her again. “Would that work?”
Glowing eyes regarded Kate silently for a moment. “Why?”
“Because I need to know.”
“For your brother?”
“That and I don’t like the idea of you murdering more people.” Kate’s arms were bare. She slept in a cotton night gown she’d bought on the road. Seth made fun of it, called her ‘Little House on the Prairie.' Kate rubbed her arms now, considering. “Have you?”
Richie sat up, slowly, eyes going from Kate, to her arms, to her face again. “Yes,” he said at last, sounding unsure. He reached for Kate’s left arm, and she let him take it. His touch gave her goosebumps. Richie held her arm with both hands, one at her wrist, the other at her elbow. She could feel his fingers tracing the shape of her veins.
Kate tried to take a deep breath but found it difficult. “If you want, you could-”
The door banged open. “No. No. Absolutely not.” Seth hit the light. Even Kate cringed back from that, blinking rapidly at the sudden change in brightness. “Get up.” Seth grabbed Kate by her other arm, trying to haul her to her feet. She resisted. Seth must have gotten a better look at his brother while she did.
Kate heard Seth sigh and his grip on her arm relax. He knelt next to the tub and put a hand to Richie’s chin, turning his face this way and that. One side, especially, was very red; white near the center and blackened around the edges, where the skin was peeling. “What’s that bitch teaching you, huh?”
Richie glared at his brother but didn’t move otherwise.
Kate watched them watch each other. There was a softness to Seth’s expression she wasn’t sure she had seen before. Finally, he let go of Richie and started rolling up one of his sleeves. “You better not turn me. You better not nearly kill me or some shit… In fact- Kate, get my gun.”
Richie didn’t even try to hide a sound of disgust. “I’d rather have her,” he said, indicating Kate with a nod. “You can’t begin to imagine how horrible you taste.”
“Tough. She’s not on the menu.” He held out his arm. “Think of it like medicine. Shut up and take it- Kate. The gun.”
Kate hurried from the bathroom. “The gun” in question was the one Seth had her practice with. She had it stowed away in a drawer on the nightstand. When she got back, Richie had that strange knife of his. He’d drawn a thin red line across Seth’s forearm. It beaded blood but not much. Seth took the knife from his brother. Kate cringed and glanced away as he made a more substantial cut of his own.
Seth was averting his gaze altogether. It wasn’t because of the blood. Richie’s face had changed. It prompted Kate’s gun hand to raise at first, but despite how frightening it might look, (And it did.)Seth didn’t actually look to be in any danger. It didn’t look like it did in movies or even how it had in the club. The cut on Seth’s arm bled slow. Richie's mouth worked around the wound. Sometimes he applied light pressure to make blood well up faster, and every time that happened it would trickle down Seth’s forearm. Richie would move quickly then, stopping the droplet of blood with his tongue and licking away the trail it had left.
Maybe Kate had just seen too much blood as of late, but this didn’t seem like enough.
Kate was going to use her own knife if she used anyone's. Seth was too preoccupied to see her leave the room and rifle through a pile of her own dirty clothes. Her pocket knife was in the back of her favorite pair of jeans. Seth only took notice when she was taking a seat on the edge of the tub. He saw the knife and reached to grab it from her, but she yanked it just out of reach. “I can make my own decisions.”
“Yeah, well, this is a bad one,” said Seth.
“Yeah, well, you can hold the gun.” Kate offered it to him and he took her up on it, holding it with his good hand and training it on Richie. Kate held the knife to her arm, thought better of it, and pulled her night gown up to her thighs.
Richie had been watching her since she sat down. He raised his eyebrows at her exposed legs. “You don’t have to do this.” It was unclear whether he meant letting him drink from her or… something else. Specifically, the something that was making Kate feel electrically charged as she waited for Richie’s mouth to touch her in a place she’d only imagined mouths touching her before.
Kate’s grip betrayed her when it came time to actually make the cut. After a couple of false starts, she raised her eyes to Richie, willing him to help. He did. Taking the knife from her, he ran his finger along the blade first, testing its sharpness. “All right,” he said, placing it back against Kate’s skin. Then again, “All right?”
Kate nodded and steeled herself for the pain to follow. It didn’t come. Richie was fast with a knife, precise. Mostly, it just stung. It might genuinely hurt later, but for the moment she was fully preoccupied by tongue and teeth.
“Richard,” Seth snapped. Kate raised a hand out blindly to dissuade him from pulling Richie away or cocking the gun or- whatever he was doing. Richie was going at her more voraciously than he had Seth. It was because she was delicious.
What a weird thing to realize.
Kate had never thought on the flavor of her own soul. All her beliefs, all the things she knew to be true deep in her heart; she could feel them like they were physical, swimming in her bloodstream, coming out on Richie’s tongue. She could see the ingredients that made him up, too. Dimly.
Kate felt like she was in a different place. Through someone else’s eyes and behind glasses, she saw a living room. She saw cartoons playing on a TV set with aluminum foil bunny ears. She was small. She was a boy. She saw another boy’s knees and felt a hand in her hair. It was a comforting touch she recognized from the night she’d spent with her head in Seth’s lap. She felt that the contact helped in a different way than it had helped that night. It took the edge off something; something dark and deeply rooted inside.
Kate saw fire. She saw bruises and heard children apologizing and pleading and desperately bargaining. She smelled alcohol. She smelled lighter fluid. She blinked and when she opened her eyes, her head was still in a lap. It was bigger, though. She was bigger. The darkness inside her was bigger too, and that terrified her.
“You’re fine,” said a voice, Seth’s, as his hand brushed stray hairs back from her forehead. “Don’t let assholes like that make you think you’re crazy. You’re fine.”
He was wrong, but she wanted him to be right. She repeated the words in her head like a mantra until she believed them enough to say them out loud. “I’m fine.” They both were. They had to be. They were all they had, if you didn’t count that wife of Seth’s. (And she didn’t.) Seth’s wife didn’t need Seth. Seth needed to be needed. Seth needed love out of obligation. Seth needed family.
Seth got nothing new from his wife. Nothing.
Suddenly Kate was in the bathroom again, in her own body. She started to fall backwards from the edge of the tub and Seth had caught her. “I’m fine,” she said, before he could ask. She was, mostly. Her leg was throbbing, but that didn’t bother her. What bothered her was what she now knew but hadn’t seen.
“This feels all kinds of wrong,” said Seth, pulling down her nightgown when she didn’t. He looked at Richie, still seated in the bathtub. He was wiping blood from his chin but, aside from that, looked human and whole. “Biting underage girls on the thigh and drinking their blood is a new low.”
“I’m not underage,” said Kate, absently. Her mind was still elsewhere.
“Huh?” Seth stood.
“I had a birthday last month,” she said, forcing her attention back to the present as Seth hauled her up from the floor.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You were hungover all day.”
Richie made a tsk’ing noise from the tub that earned him a dirty look from his brother. “That doesn’t make any of this any less fucked up,” Seth amended.
Richie laid back down, pulling the blankets over himself. Kate switched the light back off but didn’t leave. She wasn’t sure what to do with herself.
They took Kate to a bar.
It was nice that the Gecko brothers were spending time together without fighting, and it was nice that she was invited. What worried her was that the invitation seemed an awful lot like reparations. Kate had mixed feelings about a ‘sorry for destroying your family and missing your birthday because I was hungover’ bar outing.
Kate didn’t drink. Mostly she defused arguments. Her boys seemed to start a lot of those; having a questionable grasp of Spanish, taking bets on knife throwing, throwing said knives at dart boards intended for darts. Kate did a lot of apologizing for them, which worked fine until one very large fellow wanted more than an apology.
He was a big guy, with sideburns and a Southern accent. He reminded Kate of a member of her father’s congregation; the married man who was always giving her weird smiles and commenting on how much she’d grown up. Kate had prayed for him. She was less inclined to pray for this particular jerk.
"Why don’t we head around back and you show me how sorry you are?” He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her a couple of steps while she dragged her feet and told him to stop. Kate was pretty sure he was just a jerk who didn’t have a problem with pushing women around and not actually the sort to force her into anything. She probably could have gotten away from him had the brothers not intervened first.
They did, of course. A bar brawl followed, of course.
It was Seth that got them all out, finally. Only once the owner had stepped in with a gun. Richie didn’t look ready to back down. Kate wasn’t sure whether that was his newfound power or if he had always been that way. All the same, he followed his brother out the door. The jerk who had started this whole mess spat at them as they left, clutching his broken nose and glaring.
Kate trailed along behind them, across the road and across a wide stretch of dirt and shrubs. They’d walked to the bar. It was nice to walk places sometimes after days on the road. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said, finally.
Seth glanced back at her, “Of course we did. You’re part of the family now, little sister.”
Kate hadn’t meant it like that. She’d meant they didn’t have to start a bar brawl in the sense that it was wholly unnecessary and violent. What Seth had said distracted her from that. “Am I?”
Richie glanced back at her, giving her an appraising once over. Seth kept walking straight on. “You might as well be,” he said.
Kate spent the next ten minutes or so following them in silence. When they got to the motel she went to the bed and sat on it. Seth took off his jacket and kicked off his shoes. He retrieved a case from the closet that Kate recognized and settled down in a chair to clean his gun. Richie took a seat next to Kate and turned on the television, flipping channels and finding only late night infomercials.
“I don’t want to go to bars for my birthday,” Kate announced - not that it had necessarily been for her birthday, but she was feeling anxious and the subject she was heading for was a hard one to approach.
“Oh?” Seth didn’t look up from his gun.
Richie did look at her, and Kate saw his gaze flicker to her throat, like he was seeing the pulse there and knew her heart was racing.
“I’m a virgin,” Kate blurted.
Seth stopped what he was doing. “Okay.”
“I want…” she began.
“No,” Seth said, quickly, redoubling the intensity with which he was cleaning his gun.
“But,” began Kate, taking a deep breath. “I’m family, right?”
Seth stopped again and looked up. “What’s that supped to mean?” he asked, his voice lower than normal, like he was daring her to keep talking.
“I can’t say that I approve.” Kate looked at her knees. “But there’s not much either of you do that I can approve of. All things considered, I really don’t think…”
Richie gave his brother a blank look. “She knows we fuck sometimes.”
“Richie!” snapped Seth.
Kate felt her face grow hot.
“She wants to have a threesome,” Richie continued.
Seth shoved gun parts aside and stood. He paced the room in long, angry strides, stopping twice to glower down at his brother.
Richie just shrugged. “I saw into her when I was drinking her blood. Since then, she’s been thinking about it.”
“And you had to announce it to the world?”
“She was about to. It was just taking forever. I told you, I can’t afford to be here too long. I need to get back.”
Seth looked away. Kate opened her mouth, tempted to ask why they couldn’t just stick together regardless of who had to be where. It didn’t seem like the time, though. Instead, she said, “I want to feel like I belong here.”
“You don’t,” said Seth.
“Well, I want to belong somewhere!” Kate stood up. “I don’t belong back home. I don’t know where I’ll belong in the future, if anywhere, but… in the meantime…” Kate began to unbutton her blouse.
Richie moved across the mattress and away from her, glancing at his brother every few seconds as if to make sure they were seeing the same thing.
Seth had his back to them both. By the time he turned back around, Kate was stepping out of her jeans. “Jesus,” Seth cursed, grabbing his coat and throwing it at her. “Cover up.”
Kate didn’t. She let the coat fall at her bare feet. She was still in her bra and underwear. All things considered, a bikini covered less, and they had seen her in one of those.
“The preacher’s daughter has a wild side, I’ll give her that.” Seth’s words were directed at Richie. He was trying to diffuse the awkwardness of the situation.
“Please.” Kate felt something on her cheeks and wiped it with the back of her hand before she realized she was crying. “I need this.” She needed something. Maybe not this exactly, but right now her body certainly wanted it.
Richie’s expression was the first to change. He slid a little closer towards her, and she went to him. She put her hands on his shoulders and leaned down, kissing him on the mouth much as she had in the Titty Twister, before everything had really gone wrong.
Richie was receptive to the kiss. His hands found her waist and settled there after a brief moment’s hesitation. God help her, this felt like the right direction. Richie’s lips migrated from her mouth, to her jaw, to her neck. With context, it probably wasn’t an ideal spot to be kissed by him, but the adrenaline was not unpleasant. She bit her bottom lip and sat down next to him.
“Damn it.” Seth’s footsteps came closer. Kate anticipated his coming between them and putting a stop to things. He only did the first half, pulling Richie’s head back by the hair, away from Kate’s neck. The room seemed to spin as Seth kissed his brother. Richie smiled as he was shoved onto his back. Seth unbuttoned his shirt with one hand and Richie’s with the other. The look on Seth’s face was distant, resigned.
Kate moved behind Seth on her knees and drew his shirt from his shoulders. He sighed. She hugged him. “I don’t want to do anything that… I just want to be here. I want to be a part of… whatever this is.”
“Fucked up is what it is,” said Seth, but he didn’t make a move to stop her when she climbed between them. On her hands and knees over Richie, she tried to convey with her eyes and the set of her mouth that she wasn’t sure what to do next. Richie just watched her, reaching up and pushing back the hair that had fallen down into her face.
Seth provided the forward motion. He wrapped one arm around Kate, pulling her back against his bare chest as his other hand moved to unbutton Richie’s pants. Kate turned her head to kiss Seth. She missed and got his chin the first time. The second, he was more helpful. The kiss he gave her was quick and chaste, like the kiss you would give a family member.
Richie arched his back, raising his hips up off the bed so his pants could be pulled off entirely. Kate’s face went especially hot. She couldn’t bring herself to look down at him for more than just a quick glance. It probably would have been less weird had she just stared, but she couldn’t help it. She felt it all, though. Seth leaned down to kiss his brother and Kate came down with him, locked between them. Seth’s weight pressed down on her while Richie shifted beneath her.
There was a lot of shifting in general. Kate found herself rolling her own hips, taking quick, shallow breaths. When Seth pushed himself up and there was space between them again, Kate rose to her knees. Richie was tracing the shape of her collar bone. When his hand moved to the tops of her breasts, she tried to swat it away. “Please stop,” she said, and he did.
“You’re a beautiful girl, Kate,” said Richie. “And the most delicious person I’ve ever tasted.”
“Excuse my brother, Kate. He’s not much good at pillow talk.” Seth climbed off the bed and walked to where he kept his things. He was the sort of guy who always traveled prepared, though Kate had never actually caught him hooking up with someone. There was lubricant in his hand when he came back. He held it out to Kate, but she shook her head.
Seth unzipped his jeans and took himself in hand. Again, Kate found it difficult to look. She was still in her undergarments, now sitting off to one side. Richie rolled over onto his hands and knees, completely naked by this point. Both of Seth’s hands were slick. He worked one up and down his own shaft and touched the base of Richie’s spine with the other. “Isn’t this against your religion in about a dozen ways?”
“I think there are exceptions.” Kate was finally staring in earnest. “You two spread chaos wherever you go. I think it would be a bigger sin to inflict you on more women.”
Seth smiled at that. Richie was too preoccupied anticipating what came next. Seth’s fingers were tracing lazy circles lower and lower, until they were finally pushed into Richie. His mouth opened, breathing slowly, working wordlessly. Kate could see his fangs and was glad Seth probably couldn’t. It would likely ruin the mood.
Kate squirmed and slid her own fingers beneath the elastic of her underwear. She hadn’t intended to touch herself. She wasn’t sure how these things worked, but it seemed like poor threesome etiquette. He fingers kept gravitating there all the same.
Member shiny with lube, Seth pushed into Richie entirely. Kate moved with the rhythm of the thrusting and squeaking of box springs. Seth closed his eyes. The muscles in Richie’s arms tightened and jumped as he held himself up. They were all on the bed together and just now it felt so normal. No inhibition. No worrying about what came next. Just the carnal pleasure. Time had collapsed in on itself. There was only now, and now was warm and dizzying.
Kate moved closer. “Touch me,” she said, and Richie did. Bracing himself with only one arm, he raised the other to her side. He followed her curves, pressed against the shape of her bones, grazed the bandage on her thigh where he’d drank from her. He started to remove her underwear but she stopped him. “No,” she said, cupping his face with her hand. Having him listen to her made her feel in control. It had been a long time since Kate felt in control. “Don’t bite,” she said, fingers on his lips. With a rush of adrenaline, she pushed them into his mouth, and he let her. Kate felt his fangs retract. She saw Richie wince. Kate met Seth’s gaze as Richie sucked on her fingers.
Kate never climaxed.
Richie did, collapsing, sated, to the mattress.
Seth did, shuddering, then standing and leaving for the bathroom.
Kate just laid on her side next to Richie when it was over. “Need a hand?” he asked, but Kate declined.
Seth returned from the bathroom and, after much hesitation, laid down on Kate’s other side. Richie reached for his brother and laid a hand in his arm. Kate found herself caught between them again. She slept soundly like that.
Some time that night, Richie left for the windowless darkness of the bathroom. Sometime that night, Kate suspected Richie had killed that jerk from the bar, too. They passed the crime scene as they left, and Kate spotted a limb the policia had missed hanging from a tree. The tattered sleeve on it looked familiar.
Seth swore. Richie denied nothing but did suggest that if he had to eat someone at some point, it might as well be the assholes of the world who died. “You’re both monsters,” Kate had snapped when they wouldn’t stop bickering. She said it like an insult, but it might as well have been a compliment. With what she now knew about the world, it was why she felt safe with them.
Richie had taken an SUV with tinted windows to the motel. That’s what they were driving now. Richie had to get back to his master. Seth didn’t like it but agreed to take him as far as the border. Probably further. Even if he didn’t, Kate imagined they’d find some way to intrude on each others' lives again.
Kate felt like she could handle whatever came next. She kept them in her prayers and, at least for now, she kept the brothers - her brothers - close.