Figuring he was about to pass out, he sank down onto his haunches and put his head between his knees. In the recesses of his mind, he prayed that the hall stayed empty. This was not the kind of thing he wanted to explain to anyone: outside of Qhuinn’s room, hard-on obvious, body shaking like he had his own personal earthquake going on.
“Jesus Christ…”
I almost died tonight—that sets a male straight. Up there in that airplane, looking over the dark night, I didn’t think I was going to make it. Everything got clear for me.
“No,” Blay said out loud. “No…”
Putting his head in his hands, he tried to breathe calmly, think rationally, act reasonably. He couldn’t afford to go any deeper in this—
Those heated, glossy, mismatched eyes had been the stuff of legend.
“No,” he hissed.
As his voice resonated inside his own skull, he resolved to listen to himself. No further. This would go no further.
He’d long ago lost his heart to that male.
There was no reason to lose his soul, too.
An hour later, maybe two, maybe six, Qhuinn lay naked between cool sheets, staring up in the dark at a ceiling he could not see.
Was this horrible, aching pain what Blay had felt? Like, after that showdown in his parents’ basement—when Qhuinn had been prepared to leave Caldwell, and made it clear that there were gonna be no ties between them anymore? Or maybe after that time they’d kissed in the clinic, and Qhuinn had refused to go any further? Or following that final collision when they had nearly come together, right before Blay’s first date with Saxton?
So damn hollow.
Like this room, really: Without illumination, and essentially empty, just four walls and a ceiling. Or a bag of skin and a skeleton, as it were.
Shifting his hand up, he put it over his beating heart just to reassure himself he still had one.
Man, fate had a way of teaching you things you needed to know, even if you weren’t aware the lesson was required until it had been served to you: He’d spent way too much time wrapped up in himself and his defect and his failure to his family and society. Such a tangled fucking mess he’d been for so long, and Blay, because he’d cared, had been sucked into the vortex.
But when had he ever supported his best friend? What had he ever really done for the guy?
Blay had been right to leave this room. Too little, too late, wasn’t that the saying? And it wasn’t like Qhuinn was offering any kind of winner. Underneath the surface, he was no more stable, really. No more at peace.
Nope, he deserved this—
The slice of light was lemon yellow, and it cut through the black field of his vision as if the blindness were cloth and the beam a sharp knife.
A figure slipped into his room silently, and shut the door.
By the scent, he knew who it was.
Qhuinn’s heart began to thunder as he shot upright off the pillows. “Blay…?”
There was the softest of rustling, a robe being dropped from the shoulders of a tall male. And then, moments later, the mattress depressed as a great, vital weight got up upon it.
Qhuinn reached through the darkness with unerring accuracy, his hands finding the sides of Blay’s neck sure as if they had been led by sight.
No talking. He was afraid that words would cheat him of this miracle.
Lifting his mouth, he pulled Blay down to his own, and when those velvet lips were in range, he kissed them with a desperation that was returned. All at once, the pent-up past was released in a fury, and as he tasted blood, he didn’t know whose fangs had scored what.
Who the fuck cared.
On a hard yank, he laid Blay down and then he rolled over on top of the other male, spreading those thighs and pushing himself between them until his hard cock came up against Blay’s….
They both groaned.
Dizzy from all the naked skin, Qhuinn began pumping his hips up and back, the friction of their sexes and their hot flesh magnifying the wet heat of their mouths. Frenzy, everywhere, hurry, hurry, hurry—holy fucking shit, there was too much hunger to make any sense of where his hands were, or what he was rubbing against, or— for fuck’s sake, there was too much skin to touch, too much hair to pull, too much…
Qhuinn came hard, his balls going tight, his erection kicking between them, his come going everywhere.
Didn’t slow him down in the slightest.
With a quick jerk, he broke away from the mouth he could have spent the next hundred years working, and shoved himself down Blay’s chest. The muscles he came across were nothing like the human guys’ he’d fucked—this was a vampire, a fighter, a soldier who had trained heavily and worked his flesh into a condition that was not just useful, but downright deadly. And holy hell was that a turn-on—but more than that, though, this was Blay; it was finally, after all these years…