“Too well. And that is exactly why I am not having sex with you. I would feel like a pedophile.”
“A pedophile is someone who has sex with an individual who has not yet gone through puberty. I left puberty a few exits back. So feel free to lust away for this body.” Stephen gestured toward himself with an expansive wave of his hands.
“Or not,” Kilian said. His vampiric instincts were itching a little too much at the thought of indulging. Feeding on the blood and magic of other creatures was not the only vice that he had inherited with the red eyes and fangs.
“Now you're hurting my feelings.”
Kilian sighed. He never thought he would hate fifteen feet quite so much, but being unable to escape Stephen’s hyperactivity was difficult.
“Do you have any idea how much of a crush I had on you when I was a teenager?”
Kilian crossed his arms. “By the time you were a teenager, I had joined the Army.”
“Exactly,” Stephen said triumphantly. “To be fair, I totally had a crush on you before you joined the Army, but after you left, I was this pimply-faced thirteen-year-old with wild fantasies about you coming back on leave and nailing me so hard that my headboard left dents in the drywall.”
Kilian’s eyebrows went up. “That is disturbing on a level that I don't want to consider.”
Stephen rolled his eyes. “I’m not thirteen now, so you are allowed to nail me wherever and whenever I agree to get nailed, and here and now would be awesome answers.”
Kilian suspected the lust he felt was part of his supernatural heritage. Mythology might have gotten it wrong about vampires and food; however, the stories of vamps and sex being linked was true in the case of his lineage. But his impulses were already raging out of control; he couldn’t afford to indulge his id.
Stephen grinned. “The sad thing is, most people have this weird idea that every freaky thing I do is the demon. Not so much. Hell, maybe the demon jumped into me because I am the original bad seed.”
“You're not a bad seed,” Kilian said firmly. Stephen had been hard to handle and had special needs, but he wasn’t bad. “You’re a young man who loved your mom too much. What your mom did was unforgivable, but that has nothing to do with you.”
Stephen pursed his lips. “I don't know. I'm kind of the one who made the decision to try to kill myself. So I'm pretty sure I was decision-involved.” His features twisted for a second, but then his expression turned salacious. “But come on. I'm bored. You’re bored. There's nothing to read. Why not have sex?” He broke out into a pleasant baritone and sang, “Sex is natural, sex is good. Not everybody does it, but everyone should.” He ran his tongue along his bottom lip.
Gob smacked. One of the team members used that term, and Kilian had never understood the idea of being shocked out of reason, but he got it now. He was gob smacked. “Why not request something to read,” Kilian retorted.
Stephen dramatically threw himself backwards on the couch. “Because they have to have people screen all of my reading materials and entirely too many books have demons as the romantic lead. What part of the whole bad boy fantasy do you not get? I may have to stop lusting after you if you don’t have viable brain cells capable of learning such a simple concept.”
Kilian flashed a fang at Stephen, and that made Stephen cackle like a stereotype of an old witch.
“I don't sleep with people.” Kilian said. “It’s dangerous.”
“Sleeping is optional. I’m more interested in the wild monkey sex.”
“I don't have sex, wild monkey or otherwise,” Kilian snapped. “Not since I was turned. Not really.”
“I... uh...” Stephen blew out a long breath. “Okay, I totally jammed both my feet in my mouth. Asexuality is cool. Well, not for me, and I’m sorry if all my jacking off makes you uncomfortable because I was a hedonist even before the demon upgrade, and now I am crazy-sexual.”
“It won’t make me uncomfortable,” Kilian lied. “I’m not asexual.”
Stephen frowned. “So, do you not want sex, or just not want sex with me?” He sounded wounded and small, but then his secretive smile returned. The little bastard was playing him, but the confession of the smile robbed the ploy of any teeth. Kilian couldn’t get too angry.
“My sire signed a mentorship contract with the Army. He agreed to make sure that I would have control in all situations and they agreed to pay him an obscene amount of money to help them develop a supernatural talent. It’s left me with a lack of interest.”
“Shouldn’t they pay you an obscene amount of money?” Stephen asked.
Kilian shrugged. “I had a nice bonus for reenlisting, but if my sire hadn't agreed to turn me, I still would've been human.” And the Army would have tossed him out with an honorable discharge. Kilian could have lived with the discharge, but he had traded his humanity to avoid other consequences. “It's his venom and his DNA they paid for.”
“Are you trying to distract me from sex?” Without giving Kilian a chance to answer, Stephen grimaced. “Oh God. Please don't tell me that the Army required you have sex on the clock so they could test your control. Because if the Army has regulations for how supernaturals have sex, they are definitely not paying you enough. I don’t even care how much they're paying you, it's not enough.”
Of course Stephen had figured it out. His brain might take weird detours that no one could follow, but generally those ended up at the right conclusions. “It's not like my commanding officer watched me have sex. They had my sire sign a report saying he watched it, and he knew that I could have sex without losing control and eating my partner.” And that was enough to kill Kilian’s libido. Kilian had tried arguing that he would rather sign a contract of celibacy, but the Army didn’t have paperwork for that. And more to the point, no one believed a soldier would give up sex.
Stephen made an exaggerated grimace. “You do realize that the creep level on that story is so much higher than my thirteen-year-old self having a wild crush on you.”
“At least my story doesn't include pedophilia.”
