No. Always bloodless-pale and cold, lost in thehunger.
“Perhaps.”
“Do it.” Laurie stood chest to chest with him, cheeks flushed and heart slamming into his ribs tightened with a held breath, and Decker suddenly felt he was the one being hunted.
He leaned forward, the amused smile still playing at his lips as he braced one hand on the bedpost between them. “You would let me feed from you—begme to feed—yet your thoughts of me still disgust you.”
“Thoughts of you?”
“You’ve thought of my teeth in your neck.” Decker raised a hand, brushing against Laurie’s chin as he tilted it to the side and pressed two fingers against the vein pulsing at the side of his neck. “Here. I’d wager more than once.”
His pulse throbbed under Decker’s fingers and something glimmered in Laurie’s eyes, hungry and desperate. Starving. He moistened dry lips and leaned into his touch.
“You haven’t just thought of my teeth in your neck.” Decker trailed his hand down his throat, lingering above the deadly silver cross in the hollow of his neck. Fangs pricked at his lower lip and desire intertwined with primal need until it was indistinguishable. “Laurie,” he breathed.
Laurie’s heart jumped, hammering against his ribs as he pressed into him until Decker felt his heart pounding into his chest.
“I came out West to rid myself of these thoughts,” Laurie forced out, his voice a thread stretched thin with need. “And then you were here and you saw me, and I forgot why I ever tried to run.”
His hips were hot under Decker’s hands, and he ever so slowly angled them towards himself, Laurie’s sigh ruffling his hair.
Laurie didn’t touch him. Didn’t do anything but bite back a shuddering sound as Decker mouthed against his neck and pressedagainst him, as hard and unyielding as his need to prove to Laurie he didn’t have to live like this.
“Why would you give yourself to me in that way,” he whispered, “when you refuse this?”
Laurie’s hands unclenched from his sides, skimming up his skin as softly and reverently as folding a burial shroud. Laurie finally touched him, his shoulders, his arms, his back, as if Decker was a rope of salvation dangling into a dark pit he was trapped in.
“My blood is the only part of myself I can give to you.” Laurie’s words, the whispered pinnacle of faith.
Another soul lost to a dead religion made for them and then rewritten to condemn them. Decker couldn’t lose someone else he was starting to love.
Was love the way Laurie moved against him, as if in a trance, his lips faintly grazing over Decker’s collarbone, leaving gasped breaths behind him? Or was love the way his body felt under his hands, his fevered stretch of skin and coiled muscle an oath more ancient than the Bible lying discarded in his pocket?
Decker caged him against the end post of the bed.
Laurie’s body arched into his hips and shaking fingers slipped through Decker’s damp hair. He tilted his chin back and the pulse in his neck became more prominent, begging, raging, wanting.
Just a taste.
Decker didn’t want his blood. No, he wanted all of him, wanted to consume him so thoroughly he would be Laurie’s salvation.
Was love how Laurie’s breath caught, and the stiffening of his hand on Decker’s back that told him this wasn’t what he wanted, even as he offered himself?
Decker grasped his chin, forcing him to look, as wild and panicked eyes finally fluttered open. He leaned closer, soaking in the hard lines of his body against his own.
“When I have you, I wantallof you, Laurie Lane.”
“I can’t—” Chin quivering under Decker’s hand, Laurie dragged in a shallow breath. His nails sank into the flesh of Decker’s lower back. “I can’t—it’s all I can give you.”
Decker memorized the feel of him, the pain and the untapped anger swirling in the depths of those eyes, and the catch of his hand against his hip when Decker backed away. Wind rattled against the window from outside, a harsh reminder of why they were there.
Ender’s Ridge needed them. They weren’t here so he could be another man’s secret, so foul it was never spoken in the daylight.
Decker ripped his shirt off the hook and yanked it on, buttons straining against his wrists. “You don’t want me. You want your god.”
Laurie’s face crumpled. “I didn’t choose this. You don’t understand.”
“I understand I loved a man like you, once. I laid him to rest next to hiswife. Is that what you want, Laurie?” A button snapped off in his hand and he cast it to the side. “To be a faithful husband who shields his eyes and heart so you are pure in the eyes of God?”
