He lifts his hand slowly, giving me time to move away. I don't. His fingers touch my jaw, and the silence deepens until the apartment feels submerged. The world outside the kitchen thins. The cross in the drawer, Ezra's face, the seminary, the dead, all of it slips beyond the reach of sound. There's only the pressure of Cain's thumb against my skin and the violent relief of being held inside a quiet I didn't have to beg God for.
"Is this what you want?" he asks.
"I need it," I whisper, and the honesty breaks something open in my chest. "Please."
He leans in, but even then, he gives me time. His mouth meets mine slowly, almost carefully, and that restraint is what ruins me. I expected violence from something with fangs. I expected hunger I could condemn after. Instead, his kiss is controlled and dark and devastating, tasting of scotch, blood, and the silence he carries in his skin.
I grab the front of his shirt because I need something to do with my hands that isn't prayer. The fabric's torn and stiff with drying blood beneath my fingers. He makes a low sound against my mouth, more pain than pleasure for half a second, and I pull back just enough to see the tightness in his face.
"You're hurt."
"Yes."
"That wasn't an invitation to be dramatic."
"I'm not being dramatic." His thumb moves once along my jaw. "I'm deciding whether I can survive wanting you before I've fed properly."
That should sober me. It does. It also sends heat through me so sharp I have to close my eyes. "Are you going to hurt me?"
"No," he says, and there's no hesitation in it. "If I think I might, I stop. If you tell me to stop, I stop. If the silence makes it hard for you to tell me, you push me away once and I stop. Do you understand?"
I nod, but he doesn't move.
"Aven."
"I understand," I say, my voice raw. "I can push you away. I can tell you no. I'm not saying yes because I'm grateful. I'm saying yes because I want you, and I hate that I want you, and I want you anyway."
His eyes close for one breath. When they open again, the restraint in them is thinner, but it's still there.
The second kiss is harder and less careful around the edges. He backs me against the counter, his hands settling at my waist, holding me with enough pressure to make my body understand I'm not floating away. The silence thickens where he touches me. My hands move to his shoulders, then hesitate near the wound, and he shifts so I grip his uninjured side instead.
The apartment around us becomes absurdly intimate in flashes: the toaster oven behind my hip, the sink dripping once into a coffee mug, the overhead bulb humming above us. Cain's mouth moves down my jaw, then to the side of my throat, where my pulse is doing its best to leave my body. His breath ghosts over the skin there. His fangs don't touch me.
"Bed," I say, because if I have to be damned, I refuse to be damned in front of my dishes.
He pauses, forehead briefly against my temple. "You're sure?"
"No," I say, because lying feels impossible inside the quiet. "But I'm choosing it."
That's enough for him to kiss me again, slower this time, as if the choice matters more than the need. We make it to the bedroom badly, in uneven steps and interrupted kisses, my hands catching on the doorframe, his shoulder hitting the wall hard enough to make him hiss. I almost laugh, but it turns into a breathless sound when he sits on the edge of the bed and draws me between his knees instead of throwing me down like the monster in every sermon would have.
My room's too small for him. The bed's unmade, the nightstand crowded with books, a dead phone charger, a glass of water gone warm, and the locked drawer I refuse to look at. Cain does look at it. Then he looks back at me.
"Do you have what we need?" he asks.
The question's so practical that my face burns. It also grounds me more than any prayer ever has. No ancient vial. No convenient magic. No theatrical inevitability. Just my stupid bedroom, my shaking hands, and the fact that if I say yes, I have to open the drawer beside the cross.
"In the nightstand," I say.
His gaze doesn't leave mine. "Can you get it?"
I want to make a joke. I want to say something awful and clever and sharp enough to cut the heat out of the room. Instead, I turn, crouch beside the nightstand, and unlock the drawer. The silver cross lies wrapped in cloth at the back, exactly where I left it. Beside it, half-hidden under a receipt and an old bottle of aspirin, is the small bottle of lube I haven't touched in months.
I take the lube and shut the drawer before the cross can become a witness.
Cain sees all of it. He says nothing.
That silence might be the kindest thing he's done all night.
