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“I’m doing terribly. “

“You are doing it at exactly the correct pace.”

I kissed him. Because there was nothing else to do.

I’m going to tell you what happened next, and I’m going to be honest about it, because I promised myself I’d be honest about everything in this story, including the parts that make me blush.

We didn’t rush. That stunned me every time. He could have had me against the door in ten seconds, because he’s a vampire and he could have thrown me across the room, but instead he unbuttoned my shirt one button at a time and kissed each inch of skin as it appeared. When he reached the bruise on my ribs from the fight, he laid his mouth against it so gently that the ache seemed to dissolve. I stood there with my hands in his hair, shivering. The lamplight was low and the curtains were drawn, and outside the wind was dragging snow across the glass.

“Bed,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I want you to lie down on your back.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve wanted to do something for two weeks,” I said, and my face went hot to the roots of my hair, “and I’ve been too chicken.”

“What is it?”

“Just lie down, Maksim.”

He lay down in the middle of the big carved bed with his hands folded on his stomach like a man about to be embalmed, and I nearly lost it laughing. Then I climbed over him and kissed him until he stopped looking so much like a corpse.

It took forever to undress him. I took off his shirt, and then the undershirt, and then his belt, and revealed the long pale line of him inch by inch in the gold light. I had seen him naked before, but I never got used to it, and every time it hit me like a hand at the base of my throat. His cock was already hard and straining, long and pale and flushed at the tip, and when I wrapped my hand around it he exhaled sharply through his nose and his hips twitched.

“You are staring again,” he murmured.

“I’m allowed.”

“You are.”

I kissed my way down his chest and over the sharp muscles of his stomach and across the hollow of his hip, and he made a low sound, and one hand shot up and gripped the headboard. I stopped with my mouth against his thigh and looked up. “Okay?”

“Yes,” he said hoarsely. “Please.”

I had never done it to a man. I’d received it plenty of times, from women, and my theory was that if I paid attention to what they’d done to me and did the same thing back, it would be fine. So I licked a slow, wet stripe from the base of his cock to the tip, tasting salt and heat, and then I closed my lips around the head and took him into my mouth.

I want to say that I did it beautifully, but I didn’t. I took too much too fast and choked, and I made an undignified noise and pulled back coughing, and he said, “Lex, you do not have to—” and I said, “Shut up, I’m learning,” and went back down.

The second time was better. I found a rhythm. I used my hand where I couldn’t fit him and my tongue where I could, swirling it around the head and dragging it along the underside, and I watched his face while I did it. He had his head thrown back and his throat bare and his eyes shut, and his mouth was moving in soundless Russian. His hand had come down, shaking, into my hair, with his knuckles white. When I took him deeper, he made a sound I would happily listen to on my deathbed, and his hips lifted off the mattress in one small, helpless surge that pushed his cock to the back of my throat. I moaned around him, and he swore.

“Lex, stop, I am going to—”

I didn’t stop. I looked up at him and held his eyes, and he came with a low broken cry and my name in it, shuddering from head to foot, hot and bitter and salty on my tongue. I swallowed and stayed there until the last tremor had passed. Then I crawled up his body and lay on top of him and wiped my mouth on his shoulder, and he pulled me down with a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob.

“You are,” he said, “the most extraordinary person.”

“I choked.”

“You conquered.”

“I choked and then I conquered.”

“That is the best kind.”

“Shut up and kiss me.”