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“It was the only thing I knew how to do.”

“It’s the only thing anyone’s ever done.” He looked up. His eyes were full. “Maksim. I love you.”

I closed my eyes.

I have heard the word in a hundred languages. I have heard it whispered in a bed, and shouted across a battlefield, and carved into the stones of graves. I had never heard it as it sounded in that plain white room: clumsy, hoarse, unpolished, a boy’s voice saying it for the first time in his life, and meaning every syllable.

“I love you,” he said again. “I’m not scared to say it. I’m not scared of what it does. I’m scared of a lot of stuff, but not that. And I want to—you said, in daylight. With a clear head. I have a clear head. I’ve had coffee. I’ve had a shower. I’ve had a whole week to be sure.” He took my hand. “So ask me.”

I opened my eyes.

“Are you certain?” I said. My voice was not steady.

“Yes.”

“You understand what it is. That it cannot be undone. That I will be in your blood, and you will be in mine. That I will feel you when you are afraid, and you will feel me. That you will outlive your natural years, if I have anything to say about it, and that you may not wish to.”

“I understand.”

“That it may hurt.”

“I know.”

“That it can turn to poison, if it is not freely—”

“Maksim.” He put his other hand over mine. “It’s freely. It’s the most free thing I’ve ever done.”

I looked at him.

He was so beautiful. He had a scar through his eyebrow and a bruise on his jaw and the wild dark hair of a man who never sat still, and his eyes were on mine, steady and clear and shining. There was not one shadow of fear in them. There was not one flicker of doubt. There was only a plain, tremendous, blazing yes.

“Alexander Pendleton,” I said. My voice broke. “May I mark you?”

“Yes.”

“Say it plainly.”

“Yes.” He was laughing, and crying. “Yes, Maksim. Yes. You can bite me. I want you to. I’m asking you to. Please. “

The old word rose in me like a sunrise.

We did not hurry, and I want that written down, because it matters. I have read the old accounts, the ones that describe the bite as a fever or a frenzy, a seizure of hunger that overtakes the pair. I do not know who wrote those accounts, but it was not like that at all. We had the whole of the morning, and a bed with white sheets, and the sun coming through the window, and a red tulip in a jelly glass.

He kissed me first. He set the tray on the floor and climbed into my lap and took my face in his hands, and he kissed me slowly and deeply, with his mouth open and trembling against mine. He tasted of coffee. His skin was still warm from the shower, and I ran my hands down his bare back and over the curve of his ass and felt him arch into them and make a small happy sound, and I thought: this is what a home feels like.

“Take this off,” he said, tugging at my shirt.

I took it off, and then he rose up on his knees and pushed down his sweatpants and kicked them away, and he knelt naked in front of me in the full light of morning. He was already hard, his cock flushed and curving up toward his navel, with a glistening drop at the tip, and he looked at me with a kind of shy defiance. Then he did the same for me, sliding my trousers down my hips and taking my cock in his hand. He stroked me once, slowly, from the root to the tip, and I felt the breath leave my chest.

“I want to be on top,” he said against my hip.

“Very well.”

“I want to see your face.”

“You may.”

“And I want you to bite me while we’re—” He swallowed. “You’ll know when.”