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“ You pulled me in here!”

“You made a sound.”

“I did not make a sound.”

“You made two.”

I started to laugh, and he put a finger to my lips, and I bit it, gently, and he closed his eyes.

“Come on,” I said. I grabbed his hand. It was cool again, and I laced my fingers through his without thinking about it. “Come on. Before I change my mind.”

“Where?”

“Your room.”

I didn’t look at him. I could feel him looking at me.

I towed him out from behind the lockers and across the empty equipment room and out the back door into the corridor. Nobody was there. The lights were low. My footsteps were too loud. I took the stairs two at a time with a vampire trailing behind me like a very large, very confused cat on a leash. At 214, I fumbled for the key card I hadn’t given back, swiped it, and shoved the door open with my shoulder.

The room was dark and smelled of him. I dragged him in and shut the door and leaned against it, breathing hard.

He stood in the middle of the floor, in the gray light from the window, looking at me. His hair was mussed. His mouth was red. His hands hung open at his sides. I had never seen anyone look so uncertain and so ready all at once.

“What are you doing, Lex?” he said softly.

And I realized I didn’t know.

I’d dragged him up the stairs on pure instinct, with my body running the show, and now that we were here, alone, with the door locked and his scent all over the air, my brain caught up. It said: You are a straight man. You’ve known him ten days. He is a vampire. He is a thousand years old. You are twenty-six and you have never done this.

My body said: Shut up.

I licked my dry lips. I looked at him.

“I want you,” I said.

Chapter 15

MAKSIM

The Dare

Iwant you.

There are a great many things that can happen to a man who has lived for eleven hundred years. He can be shot, hanged, burned, and buried. He can be starved by a winter, betrayed by a friend, and forgotten by a country. I have survived all of these. I had believed there was nothing left that could make me stand in the middle of a room with my hands open and my mind entirely empty.

Lex Pendleton, back against the door, mouth swollen from my kiss, said three words in a cracked voice, and I could not remember my own name.

“Say that again,” I heard myself say.

“Don’t be a jerk.”

“I am not being a jerk. I want to be certain I did not imagine it.”

“You don’t imagine things. You’re an old man. You hear things.” His voice wobbled on the last word, and his face went red to the ears. “I said I want you. I want you to touch me. Okay? I’ve been thinking about it for like nine days and I’m sick of it.”

I should have been glad. I was glad. I was also, and this is the truth, deeply afraid.

I was afraid, not of him but of myself. I had been waiting for this since a boy in a Kings jersey put me against a locker and smelled of my mother’s kitchen, and what I felt was not simple desire, though that was there, curling low and hot in my stomach. It was something enormous and old and clumsy, a thing with too many arms. I did not know what I would do with it, and I did not know what it would do to him.