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“Joe,” Nicky says softly over the episode of Stranger Things playing on the TV.
With great willpower, Joe tears his attention away from Max’s attempt to escape Vecna and looks at his boyfriend. He can tell just by Nicky’s face what he wants.
(What he needs, Joe corrects himself.)
“Let me put on something else,” he tells Nicky. Lately, Nicky feeding from him has become…distracting. Not the kind of activity that can be done in tandem with binging the newest season of his favorite show.
“I can wait until the episode ends,” Nicky offers.
“No worries,” Joe says, trying to sound casual, like he hasn’t been getting antsy over the past few days waiting for this. He switches to Love Is Blind and starts rolling up his sleeve.
Arm extended, he moves in a little closer to Nicky, which isn’t much, as they were already cuddled pretty snugly.
Nicky frowns a little. “Are you all right?” he asks.
“Yes,” Joe says, maybe a bit too quickly. “Why?”
Nicky traces the vein of Joe’s forearm with his thumb. “Your pulse is racing.”
“Oh. It’s probably just the show,” he lies. He doesn’t think it sounds terribly convincing, but Nicky seems to accept it. He leans down to Joe’s arm and runs his tongue over the skin first, waits a moment, and then bites down.
Joe exhales, a little light-headed. He hadn’t meant to hold his breath—he knows better than to—and now he feels extra floaty.
He runs the fingers of his free hand through Nicky’s hair. Nicky makes a low noise in the back of his throat, something animal-sounding. Almost like a purr.
Nicky always has so much control. He’s so careful. Sometimes, Joe wishes he wouldn’t be.
The thoughts began idly but have become intrusive. Joe thinks about it more than he cares to admit, all the campy tropes from the black and white vampire movies—seduction and thralldom and neck-biting and being drained almost dry. He thinks about the one time that Nicky fed from him, the time that it started to hurt a little, and he thinks about what if Nicky hadn’t stopped.
Joe shifts a little, half-hard from indulging this line of thought.
Nicky pulls away. The only tell that he’s been drinking is the slight rush of color in his face, the plumpness in his lips. Never an errant drop of blood; Nicky is a clean eater.
“All right?” Nicky asks.
“Mm-hm,” Joe affirms.
Nicky studies him for a moment. “You seem…”
“What?”
Nicky bites at his own lip, giving Joe a glimpse of razor-sharp canine. “Aroused.”
“I—wait. Can you smell that? Or taste it?”
“I can see it,” Nicky says dryly.
“Oh.” Joe feels his face heat. “Well. Yeah.”
Nicky smiles at him and the next moment they’re kissing. It’s sweet and unhurried, like it usually is after Nicky’s fed, but for some reason it leaves Joe feeling unsatiated.
“Can I take you to bed?” Nicky asks, voice low as he drops kisses down Joe’s neck.
“Yes,” Joe breathes, trying not to fantasize too hard about Nicky biting down.
Undressed in Nicky’s bed, Joe sprawls out, trying not to think too hard about how he’s trying to make himself look appetizing.
“You didn’t feed very long,” he points out as Nicky sheds his own shirt.
“No,” Nicky agrees with a little smile. “I got distracted.” He presses a kiss to the vee of Joe’s hipbone.
“Well.” Joe spreads his legs pointedly in invitation.
Nicky’s smile broadens. He settles between Joe’s legs and lifts one over his shoulder, licking at the inside of it.
Joe twitches a little at the sensation. “Do it,” he breathes.
Nicky glances up at him for one bemused moment before he lowers his head and begins to drink. Like usual, there’s no piercing sensation, just the now-familiar feels of pressure and heat, accompanied by the syrupy feeling of the world slowing down.
“Nicky,” Joe breathes. He reaches down to touch Nicky’s head, light, encouraging.
In response, Nicky snakes a hand to wrap around Joe’s cock, working him in hard, languid strokes.
“Fuck. Nicky.” The sensation, the feeling of being consumed on multiple levels, is overwhelming. It scratches at the (weird, out-of-left-field) itch Joe’s been having.
Nicky pulls away from his thigh, clean and painless. “You taste…”
“Yeah?” Joe prompts, panting a little.
“Amazing. Like—like you were made for me.”
Joe never gets tired of hearing it. He clings to Nicky’s shoulders. “Fuck me? Please?”
Nicky kisses him and then he does, opening Joe up with as much methodical care as he does anything else.
“You’re needy tonight,” he teases lightly as Joe wraps his legs around Nicky’s waist.
“Just wanted you,” Joe sighs into Nicky’s neck. “You’re so—” He breaks off with a groan.
“So what?”
“Fuck, Nicky, I’m close.”
Nicky sucks a kiss onto the place where Joe’s neck meets his shoulder. “Then come.”
Joe does. Already relaxed from Nicky feeding on him, he feels boneless post-orgasm as Nicky chases his own release.
After, they spoon. Nicky dozes a little. That was one thing Joe hadn’t known about vampires, before he met Nicky—that they slept as much or more as humans.
Over the course of the last three months, Nicky’s debunked several more vampire myths: No issues with garlic, Dracula is wholly fictional, flying is off the table, and yes, they do have reflections.
That doesn’t mean all of Joe’s curiosity has been satisfied, though.
“Can you hypnotize people?” he asks now, limbs curled around Nicky’s.
Nicky laughs. “No.”
“Oh.” Joe’s quiet for a moment, then, “Could you pretend?”
It sort of slips out of him, his tongue loosened by the drinking and the sex and the feeling of Nicky in his arms. All known intoxicants.
Nicky laughs again, then stops when he realizes Joe’s not joking.
“Er,” Joe says.
Nicky turns, wiggling in Joe’s arms so they can face each other. He doesn’t look mad, which for some reason Joe half-expected, just thoughtful. “Is that a…” Nicky hestates, searching for the right word. “...fantasy? Of yours?”
“No! I mean—only recently,” Joe admits. He winces. “Sorry. It’s tacky? Offensive? It’s just, lately, I’ve sort of been thinking about all this stuff.”
“‘All this stuff,’” Nicky repeats questioningly.
“Like…how much power you have over me.”
Nicky’s face goes very blank, and Joe feels him stiffen.
“Not in a bad way,” he rushes to say. “I mean. Shit. I’m doing a bad job explaining this.”
“Joe, if I’ve done anything to—”
“No,” Joe insists. “You haven’t. And that’s why I never really thought about it, at the beginning? The fact that you could, you know.” The kill me goes unsaid. “Because I trust you, so much. And I feel really, really safe with you. I think that’s why I’ve started thinking about…what it would be like if I didn’t.”
Nicky relaxes a fraction. “I think I understand,” he says slowly. “But I’m not sure if I…”
“That’s okay. It’s stupid—”
“Let me think about it?”
Joe shakes his head. “You don’t have to. I don’t want to pressure you into doing anything you’re not comfortable with.”
“I want to think about it,” Nicky says.
“It might just be a phase,” Joe offers weakly.
Nicky’s lips quirk up in a smile. “Then I’ll think quickly.”
Joe sighs and buries his head in the crook of Nicky’s neck. “I love you,” he mumbles into the skin that’s been warmed by his own breath.
Nicky snuggles closer. “I love you, too.”
Two weeks and one day later, Nicky plates them each a serving of shrimp scampi with linguini. Joe considers a bottle of wine from Nicky’s fancy wine rack and glances over his shoulder.
“Should I open this?” he asks. It’s been a couple days since they’ve seen each other, and Nicky didn’t drink from Joe then, but he knows Nicky can go up to several weeks at a time without.
Still, Joe would prefer not to deprive him. Besides, these days he finds it more relaxing to be the drink than to be drunk himself.
Nicky hesitates, considering. “We can drink,” he says after a moment.
“But do you want to drink? It’s been, what, close to a week since the last time?”
Nicky shrugs a shoulder. “I can wait. But—I have been…thinking about what we talked about.”
There’s no question of what he might be referring to.
“Oh,” Joe manages. “And?”
Nicky looks almost shy. “I have some thoughts.”
Joe hastily re-shelves the wine bottle. He sits down across from Nicky and waits, trying to affect patience even though every bit of him thrums with anticipation.
Nicky twirls a forkful of linguine. “I’d like to try,” he says. “I think I just need more ideas of what you want in this—scenario.”
“Oh.” Joe spears a shrimp, thinking. “I guess—I don’t know. I think we’d still be us, you know? No…made-up names.”
Nicky nods. “What if…what if we pretended this was the first time you came here?”
The idea has legs, but something about rewriting the script of that perfect night doesn’t sit right with Joe. “Eh,” he says. “We could be ‘strangers’ at a bar?”
“All right,” Nicky agrees. “And then I bring you home?”
Joe nods as he takes a sip of water.
“Are you, ah—under my thrall then?”
“Oh god,” Joe says. “This is stupid.”
Nicky frowns. “I didn’t mean to—”
“No, you didn’t, I just. Talking about it, I realize how cringey it all is.” He shoves another bite of food in his mouth.
Nicky sighs and sets his silverware down. He stands and takes his mostly-full plate to the sink.
Joe pushes his own chair from the table, twisting to follow Nicky’s movement through the kitchen. “I’m s—”
With not-actually-preternatural-yet-still-impressive speed, Nicky crosses back to the table. His hands grip the arms of Joe’s chair, caging him in.
“There’s only one thing I’m hungry for tonight,” Nicky says, and Joe experiences about ten different emotions in the course of processing exactly what’s going on.
“Oh,” he finally says.
Nicky’s lips twitch into a quick smile, gone in a flash as he pulls Joe from the chair and pushes him until he’s bent backwards over the table.
He’s already getting hard. He squirms a little under the intensity of Nicky’s assessing gaze.
There’s a long pause, and it occurs to Joe that Nicky might be waiting for some sort of cue, so he licks his lips. “Will it—will it hurt?”
“Only if you resist me,” Nicky says, trying and failing to keep a straight face, but Joe, already letting himself get lost in the fantasy, moans.
Nicky leans over him and licks at his neck, and then it clicks—
“Nicky,” Joe gasps.
“Shh,” Nicky says, his hands coming to cradle Joe’s head. “Hold still.” There’s a note of serious concern there, but with Nicky this close, Joe finds it difficult not to writhe until their bodies are touching at every possible point.
He feels Nicky’s lips first, a kiss ghosting over his jugular, and then he feels the pressure that lets him know Nicky’s bitten down, the pulling sensation of his drinking. It still doesn’t hurt, but Joe has the feeling that if he tried to jerk away, he’d cause himself real damage, not like when Nicky bites his arm or thigh.
Too easy to scar, too easy to cause too much bleeding—that’s what Nicky told him about the neck.
Nicky drinks in long, dizzying sucks, nothing like how he normally feeds, and Joe wonders how long he can keep going at this pace without actually draining Joe dry. Everything feels slowed-down, and when Joe reaches to grasp at the back of Nicky’s shirt, it’s like he’s moving through honey.
He tugs at the fabric as urgently as he can, and Nicky somehow senses exactly what Joe wants. He shifts until they’re pressed together, chest to chest, heart to heart, and Joe can grind his hips against Nicky’s.
It takes an embarrassingly short time for Joe to come just like that.
There’s a slight pinching sensation as Nicky pulls off Joe’s neck. He licks over where he’s bitten once, twice, and Joe groans with satisfaction. “Fuck, Nicky.”
Nicky takes his wrist and kisses it while not-so-subtly checking Joe’s pulse.
“I’m good,” Joe says, though it comes out a little slurred.
“You look faint,” Nicky frets.
Joe’s about to insist that he’s fine, but when he pushes himself up to his elbows, the room spins a little. “Just give me a minute.”
“Let me help you to the couch?”
“Uh-huh.”
With half his weight supported by Nicky, Joe makes it to the living room without incident despite his lightheadedness. Nicky tucks him into a nest of pillows and blankets.
“I'm going to get your dinner—is there anything else you need?”
Joe’s becoming increasingly aware of his damp boxers. “Change of underwear?”
Nicky’s eyes widen a little. “I didn’t realize—yes,” he says.
After Nicky helps Joe squirm into fresh boxers and a pair of Nicky’s rattiest, comfiest sweats, he hurries back to the kitchen. Joe settles into the blankets and listens to the sound of Nicky reheating their food.
“Thanks, baby,” Joe says when Nicky returns with a steaming plate. He doesn’t feel particularly hungry until the smell of buttery pasta wafts beneath his nose. He sits up enough to balance the plate on his lap and proceeds to eat like he’s been fasting for days.
Nicky, tucked next to Joe’s feet, just watches him.
“This is good,” Joe says, gesturing at the meal with his fork. “And that was really good, for me. If you couldn’t tell.”
Nicky smiles, but he still looks worried. “I did my best.”
Joe swallows a bite and pauses. “Wasn’t so good for you?” he asks. Normally, he’d be a bit more anxious that his partner hadn’t enjoyed himself, but the post-bite afterglow keeps him from getting too worked up.
“I liked how much you liked it.” Nicky’s mouth quirks. “Especially despite how badly I was doing. And,” he continues, cutting off Joe’s token protest, “I like that you trust me that much.”
“I trust you implicitly,” Joe stresses. “And it’s okay if you weren’t into it. We don’t have to do anything like that again.”
Nicky’s shoulders sag a little. “I was only—I was very concerned about taking care not to hurt you. I’m worried this will scar.” He reaches out and touches his fingers to the place he bit. It already feels a little sore to the touch.
“I wouldn’t hate that,” Joe says. “I don’t mind people knowing.”
“Knowing?”
“That I’m yours.”
Finally, Nicky doesn’t look so worried. He even looks a little—
Well, the only word that comes to mind is hungry .
Joe, no longer feeling like he might faint but still utterly relaxed, sets his plate on the coffee table. He leans forward.
“Now I want to taste you,” Joe says, fingers dancing over Nicky’s fly, waiting for the go-ahead.
Nicky smiles wide and sharp, and Joe grins back.