Deep Desire: The Deep Series, Book 1 (5 page)

“Bonaventure Hotel,” Donte said, and the man started the car, the sound of his radio talk show puncturing the silence in back.

When they reached the hotel, Donte only went as far as the elevators. He caught Adin’s hand again and tugged him closer. “I don’t suppose—”

“No.” Adin cut him off. “Please don’t ask. Not after—”

“I see.” Donte nodded. He glanced guiltily at the placket of Adin’s trousers and back up to meet his gaze.

Finding no one waiting near their elevator tower, Adin pulled Donte to him. One kiss. He wanted one last kiss to end the evening with this attractive, enigmatic stranger.

The bell chimed, signaling the elevator car had arrived on the lobby floor.

Donte pulled away. “I wish things could be different. Do you?”

“Is that a trick question?” Adin asked, stepping into the glass car by himself. Before Donte could frame a reply, the doors closed. He caught one last look of frustration in the vampire’s beautiful, dark eyes, and then he was being lifted, up to his room, his Bushmills, his bed, and his amazing literary find, and he wished…

Yes, he definitely wished.

Chapter Four

The doors opened on Adin’s floor, and he got out his key card, then slid it in the mechanism and waited for the green light. Walking into his room by himself seemed almost an anticlimax. He’d expected an argument at least.

He changed into a pair of comfortable jeans and a T-shirt and rather petulantly took
Notturno
out of the safe, deciding, in an uncharacteristically daring frame of mind, to read the damn thing right there in his hotel room. He put on his white gloves, but as far as exercising more care than that? He merely left his drink on a different table. If the president of his university could see him, he’d be fired on the spot. He would do the work on his laptop, but somehow, having the manuscript open, its yellowed pages worn with time and use, made Adin feel the connection to Donte more strongly. Adin got out his Mac, a number of mechanical pencils, and a yellow legal tablet, preparing to translate.

Page one comprised several small drawings of what Adin thought must be the young Auselmo. He was striking, as depicted by his lover, ethereally and angelically beautiful. He had the round face and sensuous mouth characterized as the ideal of the time, and the sketches made him look innocent and vibrantly alive. In one of them, a shy smile touched his lips like a caress, and his hair fell onto his forehead, spilling over one eye in what had to be the most unconsciously provocative pose. No wonder Donte burned for him still. Adin resized the corresponding page on his laptop so he could read it better, and went to work.

Today, I draw Auselmo, not as he is now, but as he was when I first laid eyes on him, so lovely, like an angel fallen to earth to tease and mock me with his beauty. Even though we have not been together this whole month, I have held him in my heart and keep our vow.

Renata burns me with her eyes. She has enough. She has wealth and sons by me—or so I believe—and I have nothing more to give to her.

Ah, Auselmo! I keep your letters with me always. I have your love. I need nothing more to fill my heart, yet I am greedy, for my body cries out for yours. When the weather warms, beloved, my very life will thaw in your arms, and you may catch me in the kitchen gardens, once again among the herbs, where I promise to delight you until you can bear it no more.

Adin walked to the hotel window with his drink, wondering if he’d ever been in love.

If he had to wonder, the answer was probably no. At the very least, he’d never felt the kind of love and loyalty that Donte apparently still felt for Auselmo. Adin was cool and distant with his lovers, unable to feel for them everything they might have liked. He imagined he was fundamentally unable to form a bond because he’d been unwilling to commit. His friends teased him that he was elusive, but he worried that he was more likely self-absorbed and thoughtless.

If nothing else, his inability to form deep and lasting attachments had hurt people he’d cared about. At least Donte had his one true love. Adin wanted to imagine it. He wanted to know what it felt like, to hold a real
lover
in his arms. Someone with whom he forged a connection, someone for whom he would make the kind of sacrifices that he sensed Donte had made for his Auselmo.

Adin shook his head a little. That kind of thinking—longing for love for the first time in his life as the result of a brush with Donte Fedeltà, an emotionally void vampire—had to be an event in the Irony Olympics.

Of all the sophisticated academics, the handsome athletes, the freshly scrubbed and earthy men Adin had been with—out of all the men he’d dated—Donte was the only one who made him feel like what he had was
not enough
.

He sighed, going back to the manuscript. Translating would take the place of sleep for whatever remained of the night, because he felt restless. Anxious and something else entirely. Something he couldn’t quite define even given his ability with language and his penchant for relentless introspection.

Adin stood on the precipice of something so new and huge it both frightened him and held him on the sharpest edge of arousal. Nietzsche was right. Adin had looked into the abyss, and he was very much afraid the abyss looked back through Donte’s brown eyes.

The next page in the journal depicted the two boys on horseback, traveling somewhere in a retinue with a number of pack animals and several older nobles, along with women and children. Donte had drawn the two of them as if they were separated from the rest, in their own world, looking shyly at each other. He’d rendered himself as a nondescript teenager who gazed hungrily at the angelic Auselmo, and how Adin wished he had some way to see what Donte really was in those days.

Just as he had played up the perceived beauty of his lover, Donte must have given himself an equally transformative makeover. Adin could find none of the man in the boy, and yet surely, the way they looked at each other, it had to be Niccolo in the drawing.

I am in the snow today, my Auselmo, its whiteness and silence like the death I feel when you are not within my reach. Today I have chosen to draw the journey home to take my place after my brothers died. Do you recall? I know you must. We endured the ride and the endless chattering of the women, playing word games and kissing with our eyes. I remember seeing you ride your horse, the stubborn one I always called Affligere for the way it chased you and stole your hats. We slipped away in the night and clumsily tugged each other into spending.

The way you kissed me…

There were more stars in the sky that summer, Auselmo, because you placed them there for me every time you smiled. The closer we got to San Sepolcro, and home, the sicker I felt in the pit of my stomach.

I knew then, as you know now, that our life together—those pleasant idylls in the herb gardens of the monastery—was over. My family had a woman waiting for me. She was older, promised originally to my brother, who passed. I couldn’t bear to tell you, to see the stars in the sky wink out one by one with your unhappiness. Forgive me, Auselmo.

That was when I noticed the guard, the dark one with the scar over his eye, watching us. In return, I watched him, and one night got an eyeful of the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I never told you, love, but I paid him for information, and he let me watch him with his lover. The things they did with their bodies both appalled and inflamed me, and I knew—I thought I knew—that if I could have one night like that with you, I would go to Renata and my family uncomplaining.

Was I ever that foolish? Please, my lover, never answer that, for you, with your beauty and your innocence, could never have understood my dark desire for you in those days.

Auselmo, as I write this I am reading the entry in my journal from our procession to my home in San Sepolcro. It has been much on my mind this winter, although I cannot say why. Can you remember the impossible madness of that? My heart never beats that it isn’t filled with thoughts of you. I wrote:

“At last, I have had my wedding night! Auselmo and I slipped away from the retinue and made our way to the soft earth together. I believe Auselmo’s beautiful brown eyes have never been larger than when I explained what I’d seen, and yet he held me to him and let me love him as I wished, risking all for me. He cried when I took him; I am such a foul thing sometimes.

Yet after, when I loved him with my mouth, he cried again and said how much he loved me!”

And oh, how the night progressed from there. The promises I made to you that night, with my words and my body, have been kept, my beloved. And you…you give me more joy still, even in your absence, than I have gotten from another thing in my life.

By dawn I was ready for Renata, thinking stupidly, “Bring her to me, this bitch who must bear my children. I have had my wedding night, and my life will play out as it must from this moment on.” And yet later, when riding with you, Auselmo, I became aware that there would never be a time when I did not curse the day I finally had you, for I would never give you up completely. You knew that; I could see it in your eyes. And how unfair it is of me to have taken from you the refuge of innocence…

Auselmo, my love, my lover, I pray that you are well where you are, and that I will see you soon. Thoughts of your sweet countenance are the only ones that I entertain willingly anymore. Please, please, be well, my love, be happy and cling to thoughts of me.

Auselmo, it has been a year and still your sweet face is the first image in my mind every morning and the last I think about at night. Being parted from you is unbearable. If not for your letters, I would surely have lost all desire to live. But live I do yet, my love, if only for the faintest hope that I shall see your face again.

My wife has given birth, beloved, to a son, and for this, if for nothing else, I will esteem her. She is such a vile woman; I have constantly to make amends to guests and servants alike. She goes about complaining from morning until evening, and while she was with child, I thought I would go mad and kill her myself. Yet the boy is perfect, his tiny face the image of my mother. He does nothing at all but bawl and spit back food, but he holds my heart in his fisted hands, and I am well and truly enraptured by his every squawk.

I have been given to understand that you too will make a marriage in the spring. Please forgive my presumption, but I know you. I know your innocent heart better than my own face in the mirror. Go to her and let her give you pleasure and fine sons. This takes nothing from me, you know that, and God willing, you will believe me also when I say that nothing I do, nothing I engage in with my wife, could ever even begin to fade the color you bring to my life.

Speaking of which, yesterday the snow fell and the lack of light sucked all the color from the world at once, as though my eyes had simply failed me and refused to register anything but gray. This, Auselmo, has been my world without you and will continue to be until I hold you in my arms again and love you until you give me the sweet cries I crave. I will wait for you, and the color and warmth that only you can bring to me, as long as my life allows it.

Adin sipped his drink with shaking hands. Still fully dark, the night sky held so few stars that it wasn’t hard to believe that what little sky Adin could see from his hotel was blank, as the young Niccolo imagined, because of Auselmo’s despair. Adin closed the journal. It was four in the morning and he was exhausted and ashamed. Had he made light of this? Had he really trivialized the man and his journal, calling it porn? He threw his reading glasses down on the desk, put the manuscript back into its protective housing, and restored it to the room safe. He grabbed his key card, intending to go for coffee somewhere, anywhere, where that manuscript wasn’t making him think things,
feel
things, he’d never contemplated before.

“Donte,” he whispered as he closed his hotel door behind him.
Donte, forgive me…
It was so easy to look at those drawings and make assumptions about the artist and the book. Now that he knew. Now that he’d read even a little piece of it, he didn’t want to fight anymore. He wished he’d never seen the damn thing.

He punched the elevator Down button, and when the doors opened, Donte was there, inside, still in his suit, looking as fresh as if he’d been on ice for the night.

“Donte?” Disbelief and not a little fear colored the question.

“Adin.” Donte wore a small and slightly bemused smile. “Did you know you could call to me?”

“What, me?”

“Yes, apparently—only with you—it works both ways.”

“Why should that be?”

“I don’t know. But I was called here, to this place, by you.”

“I was thinking about you. I said your name.” Adin got into the elevator. “You’re not playing some kind of twisted vampire game?”

“Not at the moment, no,” Donte murmured dryly. “Although I reserve the right, if I should choose to do just that.”

“I see.” Adin paused. “Fair enough.”

“What were you thinking, caro, that brought me here?” The elevator slowed down considerably, and Adin had the sensation of hovering above L.A. in a clear glass Christmas ball.

Adin chewed his lip. “You didn’t eat last night when we were out.”

“No, I didn’t,” said Donte.

“Have you…since then?”

Donte raised his eyebrows.

“How often do you need—”

“Often, if I don’t want to take too much from someone. What are you really asking me?”

“I—” Adin stepped closer to Donte in one easy move, kicking his legs apart and sliding between them. He put one arm around Donte’s waist along his spine, and one on his neck, pressing Donte’s beautiful face into the junction of his own neck and shoulder. “Here,” Adin whispered into Donte’s ear. “Take what you need.”

Donte froze. “Why are you doing this?”

“Donte.” Adin pulled him in.

“No, I need to understand why you would offer yourself to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Adin said into the skin on the side of Donte’s face. “I didn’t understand. I decided to read a little of—”

“Christus, Adin.” Donte put his forehead against Adin’s. “You decide to offer your neck to a hungry vampire out of pity? How
does
the race survive?”

“Not pity.”

“What then, caro? What, if not pity?”

“Regret? Compassion? I don’t know, Donte. I just wanted to—” Adin pursed his lips. “I
want
to. Take it or leave it. Your food’s getting cold.”

Donte laughed. “Of course I’ll take it. Don’t be afraid, più amato.” Donte wound his arms around Adin’s body to clutch at his ass cheeks as he lifted him up. Adin wound his legs around Donte’s waist as he struck.

Adin groaned as searing pain and pleasure burrowed deep within his skin. There it was again—the erotic thrill of being devoured by this man. Adin hadn’t mistaken it. Donte was suckling at the wound on his neck, lapping at the blood as he crushed Adin’s smaller body into the window. For the second time in twenty-four hours, Adin came in his trousers, completely taken by surprise.