Death is Only a Theoretical Concept (5 page)

Cute. Not
handsome, no, but, despite the excess of hair gel holding a forest
of spikes in place and a smile too broad to be truly attractive, he
knows how to rock a blazer and a red T-shirt tight enough that when
he turns towards the bar Abe can see the outline of a ring through
his right nipple. He sits, legs swinging, head nodding in time to
the music, entirely unselfconscious about either, and it’s so hard
for Abe not to wonder what that seeming of relaxed ease might look
like in bed—or if he’ll still look as relaxed once Abe mentions
what cis male vampires do to enable sex in the first
place.

Great-Aunt-Never-Aunty Lizzie would be screaming, if she
weren’t on the other side of the country plaguing her breathing
relatives. What if Steve doesn’t want to be turned, like most
sensible humans? What if he waited until he was near death to turn,
and Abe was stuck with a partner of eighty until the world ended?
Most sensible humans and vampires are quick to argue against any
seeming benefit of becoming undead, and that is if one has a
choice. How can it not end but badly?

When Steve tells
a story about a series of dares, a sound system and Steve’s
heterosexuality, Abe tries to tell himself that it’s all for the
best. It really is. He’s human. Great-Aunty Lizzie will do her head
if she finds Abe dating a breather, and it’s not like it’ll stay a
secret. Valentine will find out and blab it all over Facebook,
never mind that Valentine himself has dated a score of vampires,
fae and merfolk of all genders—but Valentine is a breather. Does
Abe really want to deal with a vengeful matriarch, his sire, coming
down to Port Carmila to teach him the error of his ways?

It took him
three months to talk her into leaving the last time she came
visiting.

“
I’m
sorry,” Steve says, and his button nose and dark brown eyes lend
the expression so much genuine sorrow Abe can’t help but believe
him. “I’ve been kind of leading you on, and that whole dare is a
shitty thing to do anyway.” He slides off the bar stool and stands
up. “I’ll go. Home, I mean. I’m not feeling comfortable doing this
anymore.”

Steve glances
over at the two awkward-looking guys sitting at a table by the
door, shuffling a little closer to each other every time someone
looks as if they are going to approach. A few do: anyone with even
half a brain—for some of the zombies, literally—knows that they are
as straight as they come, but the fun lies in listening to them try
and explain that they aren’t interested. How much longer they can
stand? Not long. Well, Steve doesn’t actually have to sleep with a
gay vampire if he doesn’t want; he really just has to be seen
getting close enough to one that the sex is a believable lie. A bit
of kissing, a bit of dancing, done. His friends can go to the
Broken Post, and Steve can go home and, in the morning, claim his
birthday present. Isn’t it a whole bit wrong he has to jump through
so many hoops just to get something anyone, anywhere else in
Australia, would get just by waking up in the morning?

“
Wait.” Abe’s not sure why the words spill from his mouth
given what Steve just said. He’s not wrong. Fucking a vampire for a
dare? It sounds the reverse of all the horrible things Great-Aunty
Lizzie says, in point of fact, yet given everything Abe has just
been thinking, it’s hard to get truly angry at someone flung into a
most uncomfortable situation by his best friend—especially when
vampires find it hard to resist breathers for
similarly-objectifying reasons. Steve came over here and started
talking like someone who wanted to chat a guy up and got
side-tracked: there’s nothing in his manner that suggests a
straight guy stranded in a gay bar. If he is prepared to go through
with the dare, or was until he started feeling guilty about the
notion, that means a tiny, slight chance he’ll think about it,
right? “It’s okay. I’ll do it for you, if you want. We can kiss and
dance for a bit. Then you can go home. They won’t know
differently.”

Great-Aunty
Lizzie would be screeching, but so would every gay and bisexual man
Abe has ever known: what good is it to dance with a straight guy?
Because he’s hoping that Steve isn’t quite as straight as he
thinks, and doesn’t Abe know that’s a desperate, delusional
hope?

Maybe it doesn’t
have to be about romance. Abe doesn’t have so many friends in Port
Carmila—even his co-workers abandon him at the bar to drool over a
fae, and he doesn’t even like Swanston as much as they’re both gay
in a straight-leaning town. Steve seems to be more than capable of
interesting conversations. Why not?

Steve sits down
and stares at him, his eyebrows raised, his lips parted.

“
You
seem interesting and I don’t have many friends,” Abe says, well
aware of just how damn pathetic he sounds. “I’d like to be your
friend, and friends should help each other out. Not
dares.”

For a moment
something tense and otherwise indecipherable flickers across
Steve’s face, and Abe thinks he’s about to hear a straight guy tell
him he’d really rather not—but then Steve flashes Abe a beaming,
adorable grin. “You’re willing to do that?”

Abe’s thoughts
about friendship fly straight out of his head: no, Abe doesn’t want
to befriend him. Abe wants to nail him, even if the wanting,
post-turning, is more of an intellectual exercise than a hormonal
one. He just nods, though, and tries so very hard to not think
about nailing the short, cute man swinging his legs on the bar
stool.

“
Mate. You bloody rock!” Steve pauses and shakes his head.
“It’s not like you think. When Jack spent his days doing nothing
but fish I dragged him home to his dad and yelled at them both
until Jack agreed to go his GP. He did the same to me almost a year
later, after I got bitten. It’s just … well, Port Carmila’s a weird
fucking place.” He stops, looks across at Adam Swanston, grimaces,
draws a breath. “Ready?”

 
He’s still not sure that a good friend would dare another
friend to do something like fuck a gay vampire, but Abe nods. “If
you’re not comfortable, we don’t have to.”

He called me
a fag and a cocksucker
, Steve said. Abe missed the horrors of
being gay in high school largely thanks to cancer and the hours in
hospital or off school at home, and now nobody is going to say
anything about Abe’s sexuality to a vampire’s face if indeed there
is anything to say that is not overshadowed by his new-found blood
requirement. In that small respect Abe may have gotten off lightly,
but Steve could have good reasons to not add fuel to the dying
embers.

Steve shrugs in
a short dip of the shoulders. He has that comfortable sense of
ordinariness about him, cute in the way of a next-door-neighbour,
but not so handsome that Abe feels way out his league.
Approachable. While Abe has the feeling Steve would prefer not to
hear it, the fact he looks like a Tokyo schoolboy only helps his
case.

He must have had
men approach him before?

“
If
we don’t do anything more interesting than talk soon, we’re going
to have those two fucks come over, attempt some ear-burning
witticism, try to get us dancing, and then bore us all by talking
about snapper or something. I reckon you’re more comfortable than
that.” Steve turns in his chair, one hand drifting across the space
between them to rest on Abe’s thigh. As if he knows just what kind
of effect that gesture has, Steve runs his fingernails over the
inner seam of Abe’s jeans, drifting up towards Abe’s groin, and for
all that Abe has lost a fair amount of sensation to death, his skin
tingles when Steve stops just short of Abe’s balls. “Do your lips
taste like blood? Or just cherry chap stick?”

“
What are you—what?” The incredulity isn’t helped by the fact
that Steve leaves his hand—his burning, hot-blooded hand—one wrong
move from contact. Abe just has to slide forwards, and then Steve’s
hand will brush his cock, and how glorious will that feel?
Sometimes the decreased level of hormones really doesn’t matter:
the touch of a breather is as heady, just for different reasons, as
a man’s touch when Abe still breathed. He’s not physically aroused,
and can’t be, but the thought of those warm, pulsing, living
fingers touching him in any vaguely-intimate fashion leaves him
wanting almost as much as he did when alive.

Sex, with a
vampire, feels like a mockery, a mimicry lacking all the
desperation and biological drive, a child’s playacting of a concept
he can’t understand. Repetition without meaning. Sex with a
breather, a man with a beating heart and panting breaths, feels
like stepping back into the skin of a life Abe was denied at
too-young an age. It’s just as addictive and compelling as sex used
to be, which is why vampires come to Feeders, chase tourists, seek
out the living—they’re desperate, one and all, for the leeches they
laugh at. Not for their blood: their
breath
.

For a moment all
Abe wants is to bundle Steve into his car, take him home and feel
Steve’s warm exhalations on his cold skin.

He almost,
almost reaches out to grab Steve’s shoulders and pull him close;
Abe jerks his hands and grabs hold of the seat of his chair. No.
It’s not going to happen. It’s never going to happen.  Steve
is straight, and Abe doesn’t need to scare away the one interesting
person in Port Carmila by acting like an oversexed teenager. “What
the fuck are you doing?”

Steve’s eyes
never glance away from Abe’s face. “Flirting?”

“
But
you—but you’ve never done this before! You’re straight!” Straight
and inexperienced with men and possibly vampires: he should be
awkward, reluctant, shuddering at the thought of getting his hand
anywhere near Abe’s cock, not going straight for the bullseye with
a confidence that is going to drive Abe crazy because it isn’t
real! Why does a man who isn’t at all sexually interested in him
have to act like a man that
wants
Abe to take him back to
his house and fuck him—or fuck Abe—senseless?

“
I
don’t think there’s that much difference, really.” Steve shrugs and
angles his head up at Abe. “Most things a girl likes, I reckon, a
guy is probably going to like well enough, at least to start with.
Skin’s skin.”

It seems, to
Abe, to be a sure sign of the cruelty of the universe that this man
is apparently heterosexual, for all that he doesn’t sound it. What
is Abe supposed to do, then? Does he lean in and touch Steve? Is
that too much for him? How is Abe to know when Steve refuses to act
like any ordinary straight man? What is Abe supposed to do other
than sit there and desperately want someone he can’t
have?

Steve doesn’t
wait for an answer. He leans up and in, sliding his other hand
around the back of Abe’s neck, guiding his head just a little until
their lips meet in a soft, slightly-chaste kiss.

He can feel,
even not quite touching him, the blood pulsing through Steve’s neck
and throat, and just the thought is so heady and even frightening
Abe pulls his head back, afraid he’ll too-easily grab Steve, haul
him onto his lap and never let him go. Steve lets him move, but
leaves his hand on Abe’s thigh, and Abe wonders if there is
anything in the world ever so good as kissing somebody living and
breathing and warm. No, there can’t be. Can’t be. “I … I thought I
… how do you, I mean…”

Steve runs the
very tip of his tongue over his lips. If the chill of Abe’s skin
bothers him, it doesn’t seem to show, although gestures that leave
Abe wondering just what Steve would look like on his knees with
that
hot
tongue running over Abe’s cock have to be illegal.
Or, at the very least, unfair. He’s straight. Steve is straight. He
and Abe are kissing for the sake of the two fishermen in the corner
by the steps and no other reason. Steve isn’t attracted to Abe even
if Abe is half jumping out of his own skin.

“
No
offense, Abe, but I think I know a little bit more about seduction
than you do.”

He would have
said
none taken
, but Steve’s lips brush against his own and
somehow Abe finds himself with one hand resting on top of Steve’s,
kissing him back as if devouring him is a distinct possibility,
only keeping the distance between them through sheer force of will.
For a moment, as he lets his tongue trail over Steve’s and glories
in the now-strange warmth of his mouth, he wonders what Steve might
taste like, before and after sex. Will he mind if Abe makes a
little cut and sips that warm, salty blood? No biting, no fangs,
none of the horrible wounds made by the human-shaped mouth that in
no way resemble the puncture marks in stories: biting is for the
release of venom that turns a breather into a fellow walking,
blood-devouring corpse. Not that. Just a sip from a cut, a taste of
blood not tainted by plastic and anticoagulants and a day or two in
the fridge. A taste of blood cut with serotonin, dopamine and
oxytocin, the difference between the water one gulps to stay
hydrated and the fine wine one tastes of an evening.

Will he mind
that kind of sex?

“
The
fuck?” Steve jerks back onto his chair, his eyes wide, his tongue
running over his lips. “Abe, what was that?”

Shit. Shit,
shit, shit! What the hell made Abe think it is okay to kiss a
straight breather guy like that? Steve isn’t a leech who knows what
he’s getting into! “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—I
forgot. I’ll stop. Steve, I’m so sorry. I won’t do that again.
I—”