Page 90 of Flames and Blood

“Kalli,” I choke out, not quite sure what I’m looking at.

She’s not listening to me. Her whole body clamps down hard enough to hold me pinned inside her. A shudder runs up through her from her hips to her shoulders.

She’s quiet through the first half of it. Then, “Ahh—” and it comes out of her rough and long. Watching it nearly finishes me. I dig my fingers into her hip and hold on and don’t let myself go. I want to watch it again someday, and some part of me is already wondering how to make that happen.

She comes down slow, breathing hard, hair stuck to her face.

I sit up under her. I get an arm across her back and bring us chest to chest, her knees still bracketing my hips, all that heat pressed against me from stomach to shoulder. She loops her arms around my neck.

Then she takes a fistful of my hair and pulls my face down to the side of her throat.

“Now.”

“Kalli—”

“Drink.”

My mouth is an inch off her skin. I can smell her blood through it.

I can’t do it.

They drew her twice a week for over a year. I’ve read the log sheets. I’ve put men in the ground for less than what’s written in them.

“No,” I say into her neck.

Her hand tightens in my hair. “It’s yours. Take it.”

“I’ve seen what they took out of you.”

“They took it. I am giving it.” Her hand doesn’t move. “Those are not the same, and you know they are not the same.”

She’s right. That’s the trouble with her. My fangs are already down. I’ve been drinking cold bagged blood out of an icebox with her asleep three feet away.

“Say it again.”

“Take it.”

I set my mouth against her throat. Her pulse is right there under the skin, hard and quick.

I bite.

Her blood comes into my mouth, and it’s hot enough to burn. Not pain—heat. It floods my mouth. It goes down my throat, and then it keeps going, out from my chest into my arms, into my hands, into my face. My skin comes alive along its whole surface.

I can feel the stove on my bare back. I can feel it.

I haven’t felt heat as anything but information since 1965. Now the room has a temperature in it. Her body against mine is putting out warmth I can measure on my own skin. My hands on her back are warming, actually warming. She locks her legs around my hips and starts rocking against me, and something sparks in me that’s been deep for sixty years. I bury myself in her lush heat, rocking up to meet her, the friction almost unbearable.

“Come,” she says into my hair. “Come for me.”

It’s impossible not to. I finish inside her with her blood still moving through me. Her arms lock around my head. She holds my mouth against her throat through all of it.

“Hnn—” It comes out of me into her skin, muffled, and goes on too long, and I’ve never heard it before.

I stop drinking. I make myself stop.

The punctures don’t close. I lift my head, and they’re still there, two of them, dark and welling slow. A year of bad food and worse handling and her body doesn’t seal fast anymore. And I’m not an ancient. I can’t heal the bites I make.

I get my thumb under the lower puncture and catch it before it runs.