Julien’s hands smoothed up his thighs under the water. “Think you could eat for me?”
Luis made a sound of discontent. His eyes had fallen closed and he didn’t want to move.
The hands slipped away and he felt Julien shifting. Then, “Come on sweetness, open for me?”
His eyes fluttered open. Julien had a cut bit of strawberry in hand. “Are you–are you really going to handfeed me?” He asked incredulously.
“Unless you’d prefer Karim.”
“Prefer me for what?” Karim said as he strode into the room. He’d put on a pair of pants but was still shirtless. He had a juice in hand and set it down on the tray.
“I already have juice,” Luis said, nodding at the tray where two other bottles were.
“Those aren’t cold anymore so I brought another,” Karim said. Then he was pulling the tie on his pants loose and letting them fall. “Room for one more?”
“Mm, would you like to take over food? I’d like to work on these tangled curls,” Julien said.
“Sure,” Karim said, stepping into the tub at the opposite end. The water rose as he took his own seat, his legs tanglingwith theirs. The water didn’t overflow but rose right to the top, and Luis sighed at being sunk further in all that heat.
The strawberry was passed from Julien to Karim, and then brought back up to Luis’s mouth.
Luis was too tired to fight it, and opened his mouth to let Karim feed him. Behind him, Julien reached for one of the shampoo bottles.
They worked as a team, Karim plying him with fruits and cheese and juice until he felt steadier while Julien detangled his hair and then transitioned into a massage that had Luis groaning as he worked tension out of his shoulders. It felt unspeakably decadent, like the kind of treatment reserved for kings.
“I don’t really understand how I got here,” Luis confessed after a long while. His head was tilted back against Julien, his feet in Karim’s lap. He felt relaxed enough to be liquid. “It feels too good to be true.”
“Open your eyes,” Karim said.
Luis did and the man sat forward, drawing him in for a kiss. “None of this is too good for you. You’re here because we love you, and we want you, and it’s as simple and plain as that. If anything, it’s the most common thing there is, falling in love.”
Luis’s heart thumped hard.
“It’s true,” Julien coaxed him back to kiss his cheek. “No magic involved, it’s just you. And you ended up here because you wanted to be. Because you were brave enough to be,” Julien said with an affectionate squeeze.
His eyes burned. Luis wanted to say that he didn’t know what he’d done to deserve them, but hadn’t they just told him?
He’d been himself, he’d taken a chance. It wasn’t magic, it was effort. It was courage.
It was changing your life, even when it was hard, even when there were consequences.
“I want to be with you both. Is it really that easy?” Luis asked.
Karim snorted. “You think what you’ve gone through the last few months was easy?”
But Julien just kissed his cheek again, turning to whisper the words into his ear. “It’s that easy and that hard. The choice is always yours.”
Luis found both of their hands and threaded their fingers together. “Okay,” he said, feeling brave even as his voice wobbled with emotion, “then I’m choosing this.”
Epilogue
Luis wasn’t ready to talk about it, let alone discuss it as a real option, so when Karim walked into the room, he slammed his laptop shut.
Vampire eyesight was very good, and Karim would’ve clocked the twelve open tabs of information about the Change in a second.
They’d been officially dating for over three months now, and it was way, way too soon for an even bigger shift in his life.
But ever since it had been brought to his attention, Luis couldn’t stop thinking about it. Couldn’t stop wondering what his life would be like without this albatross hanging around his neck.
