The Green's Hill Novellas (17 page)

He liked many things about her—enough to maybe be mated to her for many years.

But she wasn’t Phillip, and that wasn’t anything they could fix.

“I was….” He floundered for words. “Imprudent. I was imprudent, and I got… I don’t know. Supernaturally attached.”

“Bullshit,” Gina said flatly.

“I’m sorry?” Gina was not usually that forthright. She’d been timid as a human and was quiet as a vampire.

“Adrian says he’s got the maker’s connection. The fact is, you were attached to the guy before he was changed. It’s not ‘supernatural attachment,’ you moron—it’s love!”

Marcus shook his head and shrugged. “It’s going to go away,” he insisted. “It’s not….” He couldn’t make himself say it.

Gina came and sat down next to him as he struggled to sit up in bed and find his jeans and boxers. “We’re not the elves, you know,” she said gently. “We’re perfectly capable of lying, even to ourselves.”

Marcus swallowed and for some reason remembered that moment outside his family’s house, right after he’d been turned. How easy would it have been to tell himself that he just wanted to go visit them to say hello? That he wasn’t dying to taste their lifeblood as it flowed hot over his mouth?

“Goddess,” he swore, resting his forehead on his knees. “It
is
real.”

“You guys are roommates,” Gina told him unnecessarily. “Something is bound to happen. Don’t lose hope, baby.”

“What am I going to do in the meantime?”

Gina shrugged, the gesture surprisingly grown-up for someone who would never age past twenty-three. “Do what you’ve been doing. Date other people. Just not….” Her voice caught sharply, and Marcus looked up.

One crimson tear trickled down past her nose to hover on her lip. Her tongue darted out to taste it before it dropped, and he reached out a fingertip to wipe the track of it. He brought the fingertip to his lips and sucked gently.

“Just not you,” he said, feeling like complete shit.

“If that would be okay, baby?” she said, her voice rough. “You—do you know I loved you back when you were my adult-ed teacher?”

Marcus shook his head. “I’m a man,” he told her. “And I was human for a long time. We’re not that bright, you know.”

Gina nodded and stood up abruptly. “I’m gonna go shower. If you could, you know….”

“Yeah.”

Marcus put on his jeans as soon as she disappeared, and was back in his own bed before dawn.

There was a
whoosh
from the doorway just as the sun rose, and when he awakened, he wasn’t alone.

“DON’T YOU
have your own bed?” Marcus snapped, pretty much the minute his eyes jolted open.

“Yeah, but I didn’t want to sleep in it,” Phillip replied. He was all that was casual, there in his blue jeans and black sweater. God, the jeans were designer, and the sweater was cashmere. Did he do
nothing
that wasn’t slicker than lube on a glass sex toy?

Goddammit, Marcus, you have a literature minor. Find another fucking metaphor!

“Sprite invasion?” It was a legitimate question. The tiniest of Green’s faerie kingdom tended to set up shop in inexplicable places. Once, an entire dorm full of nyads had to relocate because the pixies, nixies, sprites, and brownies just showed up in every corner of their room and started fucking like lemmings for over two months. Green had no idea what had set them off, but the subsequent boom in nixies, pixies, sprites, and brownies practically doubled Green’s power base and allowed Green’s power over the weather to extend for a fifteen-mile radius surrounding the house. Everyone was pleased, and there was more construction in the hill. Maybe if there was a sprite invasion, Marcus wouldn’t be stuck with a roommate who looked damned good in a designer cashmere sweater. It was a promising thought, but Marcus, looking at Phillip’s perfectly made bed, was not optimistic.

Phillip’s expression at the question, though, was priceless. “Where would they invade? And isn’t that a little bit personal for a fey to venture without permission?”

It took Marcus a minute, but by the time he figured out what Phillip meant—that, coupled with the stray thought about lubricant—well, he was pretty much convulsing with laughter.

He calmed himself down a bit and looked up to find that Phillip was looking at him with an expression that Marcus could only term “soft.”

“What?” he asked, and Phillip shrugged.

“You are one of the quietest people I’ve ever met. I had no idea you could laugh like that.”

Marcus blinked at him, and the full weight of his crush came slamming down on his chest. In a moment, he didn’t feel like laughing at all.

“I still don’t know what you’re doing here,” he said.

Phillip looked away. “There’s a woman named Grace downstairs in the vault. She was dying of cancer, and Adrian—he was all the way out in Redding, man, you know that?—and he sees her, sitting outside on her porch and he—the thing is, he had to talk her into it. She loved her husband so much she was willing to die, just to spend her last two months with him. And Adrian, he loved her so much, and not just as… I mean, man, she’s not even pretty. But Adrian, the way he talked about her in my head as he was asking for help to go get her—”

“He didn’t ask me!” Marcus was hurt. Getting the new vampires, helping the novices, wasn’t that his job?

“He said you were doing something important,” Phillip said, surprised.

The only important thing he’d been doing the night before had been… breaking up with Gina. Christ. Half the hill was telepathic, and three-quarters of it had supersonic ultraspifty hearing, but this was the first time in ten years Marcus had ever bemoaned the loss of his privacy quite so acutely.

“I was, sort of,” Marcus muttered. Well, no matter who he slept with after this, the truth was he couldn’t bullshit
anyone
about it anymore, could he? “So why does a new vampire mean you get to sleep in my bed, jerkoff? The last time you did this, you kissed me and then blithely announced that you were going to continue fucking someone else for a while.”

Phillip shrugged, and damn him, it really
didn’t
occur to him that he’d done anything wrong. “Well, you know. Fucking isn’t kissing. What we did in the vault was one thing. I just wanted to, you know. Think about doing it outside the vault—”

“Didn’t you do it with Green?”

Again that shrug. “Green’s different, and you know it. Being with Green isn’t fucking. It’s like… like being rolled by the love god or something. He does that to everybody. It’s like his job, and he’s employee of the goddamned millennium.”

Marcus blinked, still lying on his side because, in spite of his irritation and his rather wounded feeling of being Phillip’s guinea pig, you could
not
have a conversation with someone lying side by side in bed that wasn’t unequivocally intimate. Phillip’s lean Dracula face looked almost boyish when he was lying there, and his eyes were half-hooded and sweet and not burning out with some sort of repressed fury. This was the face that Marcus saw when they were hanging out in their room, reading or listening to music or watching television. This was the face that you could catch a glimpse of right before or after he dared you to race, or after he won. (Now that they were both vampires, Phillip won any race, any contest of strength, any competition hands down. For Marcus, it was all about the experience. For Phillip, it was all about crowing like Peter Pan on steroids.)

“But you’re not hearing me,” Phillip was saying, pulling Marcus away from dwelling on his crush. “Adrian brought Grace back, and she was really in love. And she’s got this whole mother thing going, so, like, it’s going to be all girls in her room, all the time, because she’s totally freaked out by Adrian—because, you know, he looks, like, sixteen—so he wants us available.”

“Available?”

“We were in our thirties—”

“You still are!” He’d only been brought over six months ago!

“You know what I mean. We don’t look twelve.”

“You said he looked sixteen!”

“Why are you being suck a complete dick?”

They froze, and Phillip’s fangs shot out. He used one of them to worry his lower lip, while what should have been a simple flub in his speech, half a spoonerism, really, hung between the two of them like the blow job of Damocles.

“Such,” he said unnecessarily. “I meant ‘such.’”

“I know,” Marcus said, his mouth feeling like talcum powder and baking soda. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a dick.”

And there. It should have been gone between them, but it wasn’t.

“Why were you?” Goddess. Nothing about Phillip invited confidences. He was slick, and he was cavalier about all the shit that Marcus really loved, and he was bold and confident when Marcus was laid-back and observant. How was Marcus supposed to tell him anything, when a kiss was a test and fucking didn’t mean kissing either?

“You’re in my bed,” Marcus said, wondering if that would be enough of an explanation.

“You like me here.”

If Marcus had fed recently, he would have blushed. As it was, he had to look away. “How would you know that?” he asked his dresser bureau. It was pretty, he realized, not for the first time. Green and some of the other sidhe tended to carve the furniture here. The furniture in this room was hand carved, hand finished with linseed oil, and generally felt like a living extension of the hill itself.

And it was a hell of a lot more comfortable to look at than Phillip’s intense brown-eyed scrutiny.

The hand on his crotch was a surprise, and he was hard, swollen, and aroused against his jeans. He didn’t have a shirt on, and that invading hand traveled confidently up his chest—which was pretty muscular, with all the working out he’d been doing since Phillip had moved in—and pinched his flat, rose-colored male nipple.

Marcus gasped, undulated his hips helplessly, and tried not to thrust his fangs through his lip with the twin emotions of shyness and irritability.

“What in the fuck are you doing?” he asked—but there was a whine in his voice, and when Phillip’s hand went back to his cock, he thrust toward it and not away from it.

“Why don’t you just—I don’t know—do what you did in the vault? Grab me by the hair and… just….”

Marcus finished Phillip’s thought with action. His hand knotted in Phillip’s slicked-back hair, and he pushed. Phillip didn’t even put up a show of reluctance. Phillip’s hands were fumbling with Marcus’s fly almost before Marcus had a good grip, and Marcus almost came in his jeans right there. He growled instead, irritated, aroused, and strangely hurt.

This was okay, as long as Marcus made him want it. It wasn’t how Marcus had imagined love with either sex. But his jeans were unbuttoned and his boxers pushed down, and he was aware that Phillip was breathing, on purpose—knowing his rough, forced air was brushing Marcus’s cock as it throbbed and quivered against his lower belly.

“You gonna just sit there?” Marcus snarled.

“You gonna make me do more?” Phillip snarled back. It sounded a lot like begging.

“Lick me, dammit, base to crown. Open your mouth and…. Ahhhhhhh, good. Like that.”

Phillip was inexpert, but he was trying. When he opened his mouth and popped the crown of Marcus’s cock inside, he wrapped his lips around it carefully, fangs too, and pulled in his cheeks. Then, with hardly more than guidance from Marcus’s hand cupping the back of his skull, he took Marcus all the way down to the back of his throat.

Marcus almost came—again. His hand clenched in Phillip’s hair, and he made an effort to get himself together. “Phillip, I’m going to give you a choice. I can either come in your mouth or come in your ass…. Fuck!” Phillip had swallowed convulsively, and he knew he spurted a little into the back of Phillip’s mouth. His whole body was shaking, buzzing, high and tingly with the need to
just fucking come….

Then Phillip stopped for a second and whined, obviously in an agony of indecision. Marcus closed his eyes, thought past the damned painful aching throb of his groin, and said, “Look, man. If you want to suck me until I come, I won’t leave you high and dry, okay? I’ll take care of—”

Phillip growled, swallowed some more, and grasped Marcus’s base with a strong, cruel fist, and every nerve ending Marcus had went flying out his skin—and spurting through the base of his cock and into Phillip’s gulping throat.

The sounds Phillip made as he guzzled Marcus’s spend were sexy enough to make Marcus hard again, but by then he was tender. When he couldn’t stand the tenderness anymore, he dragged Phillip’s head away from his groin and pulled him back up so they were face-to-face. Phillip’s eyes were whirling and his fangs were
very
prominent, and Marcus had a moment to count himself lucky before he hauled that sexy, lean, come-covered mouth to his own and devoured. If he was going to be in control, Goddess fuck it all, he wanted a goddamned kiss!

Phillip whimpered and opened his mouth, allowed Marcus in, and…
Oh….
Marcus had forgotten, from his vault days, what a man’s come tasted like to a vampire. It was steak and strawberries and champagne and chocolate and…. Goddess…. He shuddered and plundered some more, and Phillip groaned, grinding up against Marcus’s hip, reminding Marcus that his friend was in need.

He licked one more time at Phillip’s tongue and pulled away.

“I promised,” he whispered. “Now let me take care of you.”

The jeans were gone in short order, and he already knew that Phillip didn’t wear underwear. For the first time that knowledge was good to have and didn’t make him ache and pine and yearn. Phillip’s cock leaped out, straining against Marcus’s palm. It was longer than Marcus’s, not quite as thick, but with that sexy curve near the top, and Marcus took a moment to stroke it firmly while Phillip, arms still at his sides, went quietly berserk above him.

The end of Phillip’s cock was thick and wider than the rest, and it started drooling thin white precome over the fat purple head, and Marcus couldn’t torture him for long.

The first taste of that spend on Marcus’s tongue almost made him come, when he’d assumed the second erection was just for show.