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Desire.

It was desire, but not for a woman, and not for a stranger in a bar. It was old and specific, and it had my name in it. I stood with my key card in my hand and my whole body gone rigid, and I thought, very clearly: Leave. Go back down the stairs. Sit in the car. Come back in an hour.

I opened the door.

He was in the big bed, tangled in the sheets, knees drawn up, blanket bunched around his waist. His hair was a wreck. His face was scarlet from collarbone to hairline. He was staring at me with the wide, wild, hunted look of a man who has been caught doing something he didn’t know was possible.

The scent hit me in the chest like a fist.

I felt my gums ache. I felt my vision narrow and sharpen, colors flaring, the edge of the curtain suddenly bright as a blade. The room was very small and very warm and I could hear his heart, fast, so fast, hammering like a bird against a window. I could smell every inch of him. The sleep-heat on his skin. The salt of a night’s sweat. And the unmistakable, unashamed heat pooled beneath the blanket, in the place where he was so plainly, so helplessly, hard.

“Don’t,” said Lex.

His voice cracked in the middle.

I didn’t move. I stood in the doorway with one hand still on the frame.

“Don’t look at me like that. Don’t— I know what you can smell. Don’t you dare say a word.”

“I will not,” I said.

“You can smell it.”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God.” He dragged the blanket up over his lap and clutched it with both fists. “I’m going to die. I’m going to actually die in this bed. Put it on my headstone: he died of embarrassment in a guest house. “

I found I could not answer, because in the next second I was no longer standing in the doorway.

I do not remember crossing the room. There is a part of my kind that decides to move before the rest of us have finished thinking, and it is the part that has kept me alive in every war, and every winter, and every bad street in every bad century. It had looked at a frightened young man on a bed, and smelled what he was, and taken one step, and then another, and then I was on the mattress with one knee beside his hip and my hand around his wrist, pressing it against the pillow.

Three seconds.

I want to be clear that it was only three.

His eyes went huge. Hazel, with the green in them showing, and the black of the pupil gone wide and soft. I felt him tremble under my hand. I felt his pulse leap in his wrist against my thumb, and the heat of him along the whole length of my side. My fangs came down. I felt them slide, sharp and slick, over my lower lip, and I saw him see them, and I saw the exact moment when his throat moved as he swallowed.

Do not bite him. Do not bite him. Do not—

“Let go,” said Lex.

He said it quietly, without fear and without fury, the way you tell a man that his shoe is untied.

I let go.

I let go so fast I nearly fell off the bed. I was on my feet across the room with my back against the wall, my hand pressed to my own mouth, my heart, which does not beat, doing something violent and cold and irregular in my chest.

“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice was a wreck. “I am sorry. I am— that was— I did not—”

Lex sat up. He didn’t reach for the sheet. He looked at me for a long moment, rubbing his wrist, breathing hard.

“You let go,” he said.

“You said—”

“I know what I said.” He blinked. “You let go. “

“Of course I let go.”