“I can do that,” I offered, watching him fiddle with the zipper, unable to make it work.
“I’ve got it,” he grumbled, before he drew it quickly to my chin.
I pulled it down a bit, to my collarbone. “I need to say something.” He waited, and I saw how nervous he looked, gaze locked with mine. “I love being in bed with you,” I admitted, “and you know that.”
Quick nod from him.
“I love not being in bed with you and us doing what we just did.”
I got a head tip of agreement.
“But if you use sex to put me off, or not talk to me, or think you can just fuck me to shut me up and––”
“No!” he barked, stepping forward, taking hold of the side of my neck. “I would never do that. I would never cheapen our exchanges in that way.”
“But I’m gonna start feeling like that if there’s no balance.”
His brows furrowed as he stared at me.
“I’m not someone that you forget about during the day and just come home at night and fuck. That’s not me. We need to be partners or we’re not going to be anything at all.”
His eyes scrunched up then, and I watched his throat work as he swallowed.
“I need to make it clear that right now my plan is to visit court with you and then come back here,” I said firmly. “Is that your intention?”
“Yes,” he said quickly, hoarsely, his voice rough.
“If something changes and we need to stay, I expect to have a conversation with you about that, because my life, my freedoms, my friends—I want you to be part of that, but I’ve worked hard to make things good for me and I need balance. There has to be a compromise between being part of your world and living in mine.”
I was swallowed in his dark, heated gaze.
“Are we in agreement?”
“Yes,” he affirmed, taking a breath, leaning in close to press his forehead to mine.
“Good,” I replied, choked up just looking at him, seeing him close his eyes and breathe, calming, grounding himself.
We stood there for several minutes, and when he finally leaned back and smiled at me, I felt better, stronger, like I wasn’t going to pitch forward face-first.
“You need food and water,” he stated, taking my hand and leading me around the side of the building, and instead of going right, back the way we came, he turned left to cross another small courtyard.
“I could eat,” I said softly, enjoying him back in protective mode. It was actually very sweet that he worried. “But tell me what you meant about not wanting to endanger me.”
He sighed deeply and threw my shredded shirt and the foil packets into a rusted metal drum packed with trash that clearly someone was planning to burn. “If I didn’t increase your blood supply at the same time I changed your blood, then I would have put you in danger. There wouldn’t be enough to sustain your body if I drank from you.”
“But you did.”
“Yes.”
“So now I can feed you, and have the normal supply of blood in my system that I always have,” I said, looking at him for confirmation.
“Yes.”
“And what else?”
He coughed again. “To create the new supply, your heart has to work much harder, and the strain of pumping thicker blood, as well as a greater amount, not just for you, would have been a strain.”
“Okay,” I said, glancing down at his fingers intertwined with mine. I’d never had a lover who held my hand before, and it was something I found I really enjoyed. “So what you’re telling me is, you’ve also done something to my heart.”
“I have,” he admitted, squeezing my hand.
“What did you do?”
He drew me close, letting my hand go before he draped his arm over my shoulder, holding me close, kissing my temple and then behind my ear. “You drank my blood last night,” he reminded me.
We’d been in bed and he’d drunk from my chest, and then when he kissed me, there was still blood in his mouth that I’d swallowed without thinking. “That was my blood.” I corrected him, because obviously he’d forgotten the sequence of events.
“No,” he countered, his breath hot down the side of my neck before he nibbled on my earlobe. “It was mine. I bit my wrist and filled my mouth and fed that to you.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He coughed and arched an eyebrow at me. “You were a bit out of it at that point.”
“Yeah, well, you’re very gifted in bed.”
His low chuckle made me smile, even though I was trying to keep a straight face.
“Anyway, go on,” I groused at him.
“You like it when I bite you,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, that’s not some big revelation,” I grumbled, following him down an alley that opened up onto a sidewalk.
He turned into me, bumping my cheek with his nose before he kissed right below my ear. I loved that he couldn’t keep his mouth or hands off me. He was insatiable, and since I’d never in my life had anyone want me the way he did, I found myself savoring every moment with him.
“I fed you my blood, and much like I did when I made you able to feed a royal, I altered your heart, which in turn speeds your healing, allows you to give me an endless supply of blood and prolongs your life.”
“How can your blood do that?”
“My blood is, as my father’s is, an actual fountain of youth.”
I froze on the sidewalk, and he stopped as well, turning to face me.
“You made me a vampyr.”
“You already are a vampyr, albeit a human one. A matan.”
“You’re stalling. Confess.”
He exhaled sharply. “I extended your life.”
“And you can just do that?”
“Yes.”
“Have you done it for anyone else?”
He stared into my eyes. “Are you jealous?”
“I dunno yet. Tell me who.”
“Tiago. And Hadrian.”
I smiled instantly. “I think that’s awesome.”
“I suspected you would.”
“But they’re both so strong already.”
“Yes, but still,” he said, sighing, “I don’t know where the end would have been, and I don’t plan to find out.”
“What about your mother?”
“My father gave my mother his blood, which is ancient, and hers was nothing to scoff at, as her family were druids.”
I huffed out a breath. “I can’t wait to talk to her.”
“And I’ll be lucky, as I’ve said before, if I get you back,” he said with a sigh. “She always wanted someone to sit and talk to her and learn all her healing arts.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I grew up in the time when that wasn’t what boys did.”
I scowled at him. “Did your brother study under her?”
He scoffed.
“She needed a third child,” I told him. “A scholar, not a warrior like you and Cassius.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “she did.”