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“Lex,” he said, through his teeth. “I am going to—”

“Do it. Come inside me. Maksim, I want you to.”

“You first.” His fist tightened. “Let me see you.”

I came with a shout that shook the room, arching up off the bed as my cock pulsed in his hand and shot hot, thick ropes across my chest and stomach. My ass clamped down around him in wave after wave, and he cursed and drove deep, once, twice, and then buried himself to the root with a long, raw groan, shuddering as his cock throbbed and emptied into the condom. He collapsed forward over me, panting, and I wrapped my arms around his back and held him while the last aftershocks rolled through us both.

His teeth rested against my temple, cool and sharp and perfectly still, held there and trembling like a promise. He could have bitten me. He did not.

Afterward, we lay in a tangle. My head was on his chest. He was stroking my hair with the flat of his hand, over and over, the way you’d gentle a horse. The candle had burned down. The bread lay half-broken on the plate, sweet and dark, and he’d fed me a piece of it with his fingers, and it tasted like a house where somebody loved you.

“Was it right?” he asked, into the quiet.

“What?”

“Was it correct? I have wondered. I tried to follow the book, but the book is limited. It says nothing of the way you look at me when you—” He stopped. “I did not know if I did well.”

I lifted my head and looked at him.

He was lying on his back with his eyes on the ceiling, one arm around me, and his face was the face of a man awaiting a verdict. His hair was a wreck. His mouth was swollen. He looked twenty-eight and eleven hundred and about six years old.

“Maksim,” I said.

“Yes?”

“That was the best night of my whole life.”

Silence.

“You are not saying it to be kind.”

“I’m bad at being kind. Ask anyone.”

“Lex.”

“I mean it. I’ve had a lot of sex, and I’ve never had that. Nobody’s ever— I’ve never felt like a person. I always felt like a guy. “ My throat closed. “And you asked me. Every time. You asked me and you waited and you said thank you. What is wrong with you?”

“I am told it is a defect of the era.”

I laughed, and it broke, and I put my face into his neck and cried for a minute. He held me. He didn’t say anything. He just held my head and rocked us gently, side to side, and murmured something soft in Russian that I didn’t understand and didn’t need to.

“What does that mean?” I asked, when I could.

“It is a lullaby.”

“What’s it about?”

“A small bird who could not sleep. He was afraid of the dark. So his mother said, sleep, little one, I am here, I will not leave, I have never left. “ His hand stopped at the back of my neck. “It is a stupid song. I have not sung it in a thousand years.”

“Sing it.”

“I do not sing.”

“Please?”

And so, in the middle of a February night, in a cold country, in a creaky guest house with a broken latch on the window, a vampire who hadn’t sung since before the Norman Conquest sang a lullaby for a hockey player with a bad temper and a worse haircut. He sang it very low, and slightly off-key, and I was asleep before the second verse.

I dreamed of nothing. I dreamed of bread.