jcipres (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jcipres) wrote,@ 2007-11-01 00:39:00 |
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Halloween
Vale made cookies that were only harder than rocks instead of burned, so, emboldened by his imagined success, he decided to cook dinner for me. I'm not sure why he thought it was necessary. I'm also not sure why he thought he could manage it. What the hell does a vampire know about food? It's not like he can sample it for taste. Watching him attempt it was rather amusing, at first... until I caught the distinct odor of burning from the red sauce in my All-Clad frying pan. Don't look for Vale on FoodTV anytime soon.
I did manage to save the red sauce, mostly by the simple act of transferring it into the correct pot and bringing the heat down from the maximum setting. How I managed to bring two men into my house who can't cook worth a damn (but are determined to ruin every pot I own in the process of proving it), in the space of as many months, I don't know. I don't think I look as though I'm underfed. There must be something about my kitchen that temporarily deranges them. Yes, that must be it - I can see the same effect on Red whenever she steps into my kitchen. "Hm, a stocked refrigerator and cookware worth more than I earn in a month. Must... feed... man!" It's inevitable, I suppose. Except Red actually can cook, and I can trust her with roughly $1000's worth of copper core.
Vale is far more tactile than I would have suspected him of being. I had most of my attention on the sauce when his arms came around my waist and I could feel the side of his face pressing against my back, into the hollow between my shoulder blades. "Are we going to have to call it a DOA?" he joked. I was a bit preoccupied, so instead of responding, I picked up one of his hands, pressed his knuckles to my mouth, and returned his hand to its previous position. He was quiet for a moment, then his hand came up, stroked down my chest briefly, and he turned away and took a seat in the atrium, leaving me to it.
The manicotti turned out fine, even if I was the only one eating it.
Long after dinner was over, after all the children were bribed with sweets, the doorbell had stopped buzzing, and I was checking the house to make sure everything was locked, I turned around and found him right behind me. He lifted himself onto his toes, reached his arms around my neck, and pulled my head down until I was nose-to-nose with him.
"You avoided it last night," he told me, "but I don't see why I should let you get away with it." He did sultry at least as well as he did polite, which was to say, very well indeed.
"I have no intention of taking advantage of you," I said bluntly.
"Wonderful, because you're not."
I wasn't too sure about that. He'd come to me from a bad situation, a sickeningly ugly experience, and I didn't want to hurt him further. I remembered everything he'd said on his blog, every word he mentioned about sex, and submission, the men who didn't really care about him and the men who took without giving. I didn't want it to be like that. I also couldn't rid myself of the nagging suspicion that he was still trying to "pay" me, still trying to use his body as a means of assuring his safety. My hesitation wasn't a matter of pride... or at least, not my own pride. I like Vale. He deserves better than what he's accustomed to recieving. I tried again. "This isn't necessary - "
"Forgive me for interrupting, but it is, in fact, necessary," he said. Light as a cat, he hopped up and I found myself cradling his ass in my hands, his legs wrapped around my waist. "Or are you all talk, no action?" he continued, a little smirk touching his mouth.
Oh, no, he didn't.
I carried him up the stairs, with his legs still wrapped around my waist and my mouth busy in the soft hollow at the base of his throat. I managed to get our clothes off; he wasn't much help with this, too fascinated with my skin to worry about baring his own. Unwrapping him, piece by piece, revealed exactly how small he really is. Tiny. It's not just a matter of our respective heights; I'm accustomed to that, and I know how to work around it. It was the fineness of him that surprised me. He has a tender, delicate throat, exquisite collarbones, smooth lines. The fragile bones in his hands and wrists, and his little pink nipples, the curve of his hipbones just under the flesh, the arch of his elegant little feet, and the skin over all of it, that looked so soft and thin that it could be torn like tissue. And all of it deceptive. The muscles overlaying those little bones were sleek and strong, with skin that was firm and resilient. I didn't have to worry about touching him freely. If I pushed, he had the strength to push back. Touching, as opposed to grabbing, wouldn't bruise him. It took a minute to realize this, but then I did figure it out, and after that, it was all very easy.
He doesn't smell of dust, and only faintly, very faintly, of old blood. And even that scent was buried under the layers of scents that his hair and skin had picked up merely from living in this house: my body wash and his own shampoo and cologne, manicotti, Brenda, the night air, and the cigar I was smoking earlier on the porch. Everything familiar, and yet different.
Some comparison was inevitable, of course, for him as well for me; it always is. There were nameless, greedy monsters hovering in the shadows. He was waiting for me to act in the way he was accustomed to, to do the same things they did; I could feel it in his pauses, in his surprise whenever I managed to give him what he wanted instead of what he expected. And if he was trying to banish his own ghosts, I couldn't blame him. After all, so was I.
There's a kind of comfort in allowing yourself to forget, to deliberately forsake what was for the heat of what is.
For awhile, it was mouths and hands and breathy moans, the scent and taste of skin and the feel of it under my palms, and his little hips wiggling under my hands. It was a bit of a shock when he pulled away, knelt between my legs, and took my dick into his mouth.
He didn't try to take all of it, and that was a pleasant surprise. Too many men in the past have tried, either to impress me, or maybe just to please me, and failed spectacularly. And it never did please or impress me. I would rather have had exactly what Vale was doing - a tease, a moment of exploration and mutual pleasure. And then he did something and it was too much, it had to stop or both of us would be disappointed. I brought him back up to cradle him in my arms and, ignoring the fact that I normally didn't like to do such a thing, kissed him.
It was meant to be a pause, a moment to keep him occupied while I regained my control, but damned if he wasn't a better kisser than any white boy I'd known. So when he pulled back and took my bottom lip in his teeth, playing and teasing, I nearly lost it. I threw out an arm and scrabbled for the lube and condom.
He mentioned that the condom wasn't necessary, and I understood what he was saying, but I didn't believe it. I'd been a teenager in the 80's, after all; I don't think that any man my age, unless he's just terminally stupid, could believe that he was safe barebacking, under any circumstance. Theoretically, it was fine to suppose that a vampire and a werewolf wouldn't have to worry about dying of a mere virus. But it still felt like a losing gamble, and I wasn't comfortable with the stakes.
It was as I was preparing him that we ran into the worst of the ghosts; he tried to hide it immediately, but it wasn't exactly rocket science to understand the look on his face, the sound he made. I could have wished that he would make it just a little easier on me to second-guess the ghosts, that he'd stop pretending so thoroughly, but after a moment, I shrugged off the irritation. What we were giving each other wasn't an excorism - we couldn't give each other that, we could only give each other a moment's oblivion. So when he moved in such a way that my fingers slid deeper inside him, and whispered to me what he wanted, I let it go.
Only to run smack into yet another ghost. My dick is big, but not that big, I'd prepared him well, he knew how to work his body. He shouldn't have had so much difficulty taking me into his body. Yet there was a split second, a moment's pause, when I thought I saw the wild light of panic in his eyes just before he screwed them shut, took a deep breath, and impaled himself. I was expecting to see blood on his lip, he bit it so viciously. He recovered quickly, pushed the panic away, and opened his eyes again.
I rapidly discovered one of those "benefits" that Vale liked to talk about. He rode me like an expert, but his body was as tight as any virgin's, the inner muscles rippling around me in a way that shot straight up my spine. It was a heady combination. It wasn't just that he knew how to move his hips, although he certainly did. He also knew how to move so that it felt as though the foreplay was being extended. I struggled to hold onto my self-control, tooth and nail. He wasn't ready yet. I had to wait until he was. That didn't keep me from enjoying it while it lasted, watching him throw his head back, open his body for display. Then he fell forward, and the foreplay was over.
"More. Please. I want it."
That was all I'd been waiting to hear.
And that's when I ran into my own ghost. I'd shut my eyes when I kissed him, rolled him over and underneath me, and in the dark behind my eyelids, his golden hair grew past his shoulders and darkened to black, his wide blue eyes slanted, and turned brown, and his milk-pale skin took on the hue of honeyed gold. Julian, memory whispered. I want it.
I opened my eyes, and it was still Vale. Yet the shadow still lay over him. There was an ache in my chest, and I couldn't hold it back. When I leaned down and kissed him, all the sad in me was poured into the kiss.
"Alpha wolf. Show me what you got."
So I did.
When I came back to myself, Vale was back in my bed and the shadow was gone, and I'd never felt as ashamed of myself in my life as I did in that moment. Vale infuriates me, makes me worry, makes me laugh. And damned if it didn't burn, to realize that I wasn't any better than the other selfish bastards he'd ever known. I couldn't give him any more than they could.
Vale made cookies that were only harder than rocks instead of burned, so, emboldened by his imagined success, he decided to cook dinner for me. I'm not sure why he thought it was necessary. I'm also not sure why he thought he could manage it. What the hell does a vampire know about food? It's not like he can sample it for taste. Watching him attempt it was rather amusing, at first... until I caught the distinct odor of burning from the red sauce in my All-Clad frying pan. Don't look for Vale on FoodTV anytime soon.
I did manage to save the red sauce, mostly by the simple act of transferring it into the correct pot and bringing the heat down from the maximum setting. How I managed to bring two men into my house who can't cook worth a damn (but are determined to ruin every pot I own in the process of proving it), in the space of as many months, I don't know. I don't think I look as though I'm underfed. There must be something about my kitchen that temporarily deranges them. Yes, that must be it - I can see the same effect on Red whenever she steps into my kitchen. "Hm, a stocked refrigerator and cookware worth more than I earn in a month. Must... feed... man!" It's inevitable, I suppose. Except Red actually can cook, and I can trust her with roughly $1000's worth of copper core.
Vale is far more tactile than I would have suspected him of being. I had most of my attention on the sauce when his arms came around my waist and I could feel the side of his face pressing against my back, into the hollow between my shoulder blades. "Are we going to have to call it a DOA?" he joked. I was a bit preoccupied, so instead of responding, I picked up one of his hands, pressed his knuckles to my mouth, and returned his hand to its previous position. He was quiet for a moment, then his hand came up, stroked down my chest briefly, and he turned away and took a seat in the atrium, leaving me to it.
The manicotti turned out fine, even if I was the only one eating it.
Long after dinner was over, after all the children were bribed with sweets, the doorbell had stopped buzzing, and I was checking the house to make sure everything was locked, I turned around and found him right behind me. He lifted himself onto his toes, reached his arms around my neck, and pulled my head down until I was nose-to-nose with him.
"You avoided it last night," he told me, "but I don't see why I should let you get away with it." He did sultry at least as well as he did polite, which was to say, very well indeed.
"I have no intention of taking advantage of you," I said bluntly.
"Wonderful, because you're not."
I wasn't too sure about that. He'd come to me from a bad situation, a sickeningly ugly experience, and I didn't want to hurt him further. I remembered everything he'd said on his blog, every word he mentioned about sex, and submission, the men who didn't really care about him and the men who took without giving. I didn't want it to be like that. I also couldn't rid myself of the nagging suspicion that he was still trying to "pay" me, still trying to use his body as a means of assuring his safety. My hesitation wasn't a matter of pride... or at least, not my own pride. I like Vale. He deserves better than what he's accustomed to recieving. I tried again. "This isn't necessary - "
"Forgive me for interrupting, but it is, in fact, necessary," he said. Light as a cat, he hopped up and I found myself cradling his ass in my hands, his legs wrapped around my waist. "Or are you all talk, no action?" he continued, a little smirk touching his mouth.
Oh, no, he didn't.
I carried him up the stairs, with his legs still wrapped around my waist and my mouth busy in the soft hollow at the base of his throat. I managed to get our clothes off; he wasn't much help with this, too fascinated with my skin to worry about baring his own. Unwrapping him, piece by piece, revealed exactly how small he really is. Tiny. It's not just a matter of our respective heights; I'm accustomed to that, and I know how to work around it. It was the fineness of him that surprised me. He has a tender, delicate throat, exquisite collarbones, smooth lines. The fragile bones in his hands and wrists, and his little pink nipples, the curve of his hipbones just under the flesh, the arch of his elegant little feet, and the skin over all of it, that looked so soft and thin that it could be torn like tissue. And all of it deceptive. The muscles overlaying those little bones were sleek and strong, with skin that was firm and resilient. I didn't have to worry about touching him freely. If I pushed, he had the strength to push back. Touching, as opposed to grabbing, wouldn't bruise him. It took a minute to realize this, but then I did figure it out, and after that, it was all very easy.
He doesn't smell of dust, and only faintly, very faintly, of old blood. And even that scent was buried under the layers of scents that his hair and skin had picked up merely from living in this house: my body wash and his own shampoo and cologne, manicotti, Brenda, the night air, and the cigar I was smoking earlier on the porch. Everything familiar, and yet different.
Some comparison was inevitable, of course, for him as well for me; it always is. There were nameless, greedy monsters hovering in the shadows. He was waiting for me to act in the way he was accustomed to, to do the same things they did; I could feel it in his pauses, in his surprise whenever I managed to give him what he wanted instead of what he expected. And if he was trying to banish his own ghosts, I couldn't blame him. After all, so was I.
There's a kind of comfort in allowing yourself to forget, to deliberately forsake what was for the heat of what is.
For awhile, it was mouths and hands and breathy moans, the scent and taste of skin and the feel of it under my palms, and his little hips wiggling under my hands. It was a bit of a shock when he pulled away, knelt between my legs, and took my dick into his mouth.
He didn't try to take all of it, and that was a pleasant surprise. Too many men in the past have tried, either to impress me, or maybe just to please me, and failed spectacularly. And it never did please or impress me. I would rather have had exactly what Vale was doing - a tease, a moment of exploration and mutual pleasure. And then he did something and it was too much, it had to stop or both of us would be disappointed. I brought him back up to cradle him in my arms and, ignoring the fact that I normally didn't like to do such a thing, kissed him.
It was meant to be a pause, a moment to keep him occupied while I regained my control, but damned if he wasn't a better kisser than any white boy I'd known. So when he pulled back and took my bottom lip in his teeth, playing and teasing, I nearly lost it. I threw out an arm and scrabbled for the lube and condom.
He mentioned that the condom wasn't necessary, and I understood what he was saying, but I didn't believe it. I'd been a teenager in the 80's, after all; I don't think that any man my age, unless he's just terminally stupid, could believe that he was safe barebacking, under any circumstance. Theoretically, it was fine to suppose that a vampire and a werewolf wouldn't have to worry about dying of a mere virus. But it still felt like a losing gamble, and I wasn't comfortable with the stakes.
It was as I was preparing him that we ran into the worst of the ghosts; he tried to hide it immediately, but it wasn't exactly rocket science to understand the look on his face, the sound he made. I could have wished that he would make it just a little easier on me to second-guess the ghosts, that he'd stop pretending so thoroughly, but after a moment, I shrugged off the irritation. What we were giving each other wasn't an excorism - we couldn't give each other that, we could only give each other a moment's oblivion. So when he moved in such a way that my fingers slid deeper inside him, and whispered to me what he wanted, I let it go.
Only to run smack into yet another ghost. My dick is big, but not that big, I'd prepared him well, he knew how to work his body. He shouldn't have had so much difficulty taking me into his body. Yet there was a split second, a moment's pause, when I thought I saw the wild light of panic in his eyes just before he screwed them shut, took a deep breath, and impaled himself. I was expecting to see blood on his lip, he bit it so viciously. He recovered quickly, pushed the panic away, and opened his eyes again.
I rapidly discovered one of those "benefits" that Vale liked to talk about. He rode me like an expert, but his body was as tight as any virgin's, the inner muscles rippling around me in a way that shot straight up my spine. It was a heady combination. It wasn't just that he knew how to move his hips, although he certainly did. He also knew how to move so that it felt as though the foreplay was being extended. I struggled to hold onto my self-control, tooth and nail. He wasn't ready yet. I had to wait until he was. That didn't keep me from enjoying it while it lasted, watching him throw his head back, open his body for display. Then he fell forward, and the foreplay was over.
"More. Please. I want it."
That was all I'd been waiting to hear.
And that's when I ran into my own ghost. I'd shut my eyes when I kissed him, rolled him over and underneath me, and in the dark behind my eyelids, his golden hair grew past his shoulders and darkened to black, his wide blue eyes slanted, and turned brown, and his milk-pale skin took on the hue of honeyed gold. Julian, memory whispered. I want it.
I opened my eyes, and it was still Vale. Yet the shadow still lay over him. There was an ache in my chest, and I couldn't hold it back. When I leaned down and kissed him, all the sad in me was poured into the kiss.
"Alpha wolf. Show me what you got."
So I did.
When I came back to myself, Vale was back in my bed and the shadow was gone, and I'd never felt as ashamed of myself in my life as I did in that moment. Vale infuriates me, makes me worry, makes me laugh. And damned if it didn't burn, to realize that I wasn't any better than the other selfish bastards he'd ever known. I couldn't give him any more than they could.