by Kara Sharpe
“I was just—”
“Stick to playing music and let the guards take care of the crowd. Stop drawing attention to the issue. I trust we won’t have to talk about this again, hm?”
Finn felt like a bratty child, scolded and belittled, and had to resist an almost overwhelming urge to scowl mutinously at Piotr.
“I also think it’s in your best interests to tone down your whole ‘bisexuality thing.’” Piotr made air quotes around the words. “It plays great with impressions and engagements, but your tour’s moving into some more conservative areas soon and parents don’t love it when they hear about that kind of thing, you know? Comments sections can be nasty places.”
“I don’t see what—”
“It’s a delicate time to be in an up and coming band,” Piotr interrupted before Finn could say anything further. “People like to play it safe, and stick to acts they’re already familiar with. They’re less likely to check out a bunch of relatively new upstarts like Crystal Pulse. You’re very lucky to have company backing, and you’d be wise to remember it. Things can go very poorly for bands who lose corporate support.”
18
ELIJAH
Finn’s mood that evening was dark and stormy, and the noise his blood made was an angry thunder.
Elijah had always been able to resist the sound of blood, even when hunger gripped him like an iron first. But now he began to feel his mouth water.
He wanted Finn. Wanted him desperately.
It was another hotel night, and as soon as they were alone Elijah shoved Finn down on the edge of the bed and climbed on his lap and kissed him, the actions hard and ravenous.
Soon enough Finn took the lead and guided Elijah’s movements, the commanding force of him making Elijah’s heart flip over in his chest.
Finn’s pulse, while still wild, had shifted from irritation to something darker and hotter as his mouth kissed over Elijah’s jaw and neck, sucking hickeys there.
“It’s not going to do much if you try to raise a bruise on me,” Elijah teased. “My blood is pretty good at staying put in my veins.”
“Maybe you should make some bruises of your own,” Finn growled, and Elijah was gripped by another throb of want.
“Okay, but I’m not taking much,” he warned, cautioning himself with the statement as much as informing Finn. Then he opened his jaw wide and pressed his fangs into Finn without further preamble, feeling Finn jerk against him at the suddenness of the strike.
A deep draught and Finn was moaning, fisting a hand in Elijah’s hair.
Finn swore and bucked, his dick hard against Elijah’s thigh, but Elijah was too caught up in the blood to do anything about that.
He kept his word and didn’t take much, just enough that it left them both heightened and overwhelmed.
“Let me blow you,” Elijah begged breathlessly. “I need the taste of you in my mouth again or I don’t know what I’ll do.”
He meant that he’d go crazy, not homicidal, but Finn’s eyes flashed with a dark light at the almost-threat.
Elijah got down on his knees, shoving Finn’s jeans open and easing his dick out of the black boxers inside, precome already slicking the head.
Elijah licked it greedily. The taste was different to that of Finn’s blood, but no more or less pleasant — vampire reactions to the scent and flavor of human bodily fluids all fell along the spectrum of appreciation, from mildly pleased indifference to ravening hunger.
Elijah didn’t thirst for Finn’s come the way he did for his blood, but a different want — a needy dark desire — was there for it. He needed to stay overwhelmed by the taste of this man, to let him fill all of Elijah’s senses.
Elijah relaxed his throat and jaw and swallowed down to the root of Finn’s dick immediately, enjoying the surprised moan the action elicited. After that he backed up and took things slower, teasing, letting his tongue press against the alluring throb of the thick vein on the underside.
“Yeah baby, like that,” Finn whispered hotly. “You’re so fucking good at this. You’ve got no right to be this perfect. All I wanted was someone who’d hate me for fucking up their life, and I got you instead.”
Elijah sucked hard, redoubling his attention on Finn’s cock so he didn’t have to think about his words, didn’t have to address the guilt he felt about preying on this vulnerable fucked-up man in order to sate his own desires.
It was unconscionable, but he couldn’t help himself. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he wanted desperately: this flesh, these sounds, this overwhelming sensation.
Elijah let himself drown in them, let himself stop thinking, if only for a little while.
19
FINN
Much later in the night, a loud pounding thudded against their hotel room door.
Finn and Elijah hadn’t been asleep but they hadn’t been fucking, either. Just lying together in the quiet ordinary intimacy they occasionally fell into, that let them exist side by side and talk with one another about pointless things, as if life could ever really be that simple.
Finn climbed out of bed and pulled on a pair of boxers to go answer the door, leaving Elijah to do the same somewhere behind him.
It was Jessica, looking like a wreck. Not the artful disaster she made herself onstage, but a genuine mess. Finn could tell instantly that that she’d drunk way too much yet again.
“Have you taken anything else?” he asked her, ushering her inside the room. Selfishly, he wanted to slam the door in her face and go back to bed with Elijah, but he’d never be able to do that to Jess, no matter how badly their friendship had fallen apart recently.
“Can’t remember,” she answered, stumbling inside and collapsing into a chair in pale, clammy heap of uncoordinated limbs. Her breathing was irregular, slower than Finn would have liked, as if every inhale was a new effort for her to manage.
Elijah handed her a glass of water. “Have you thrown up?” he asked her, before turning to address Finn. “We should keep her awake and sitting up.”
Jessica made a mournful noise. “I feel like all I do anymore is throw up.” She made an abrupt movement with her arm and some of the water spilled down the front of her dress, so Elijah took the glass back off her and held it instead. “I purge and purge but I feel like there’s this evil oily blackness inside me that never goes away.”
Finn could strongly relate to that feeling. It made him feel like an asshole; she’d tried to talk about it so many times and he’d always pushed her away. He’d let her go through this alone.
Finn was dealing with the same shit, but at least he had Elijah.
Elijah helped Jessica take a sip of the water. “You should stay awake, okay? Being this drunk is dangerous for your body.” He turned to Finn again. “You get dressed first, and then sit with her while I get dressed.”
Finn followed the suggestion. When it was his turn to sit with Jessica, she didn’t say anything to him. She just sat, looking small and sad and alone. Her vulnerability made his heart hurt.
Finn could remember the first time he’d met her, in the courtyard garden of the hotel that Crystal Pulse had been staying at. They’d been a three-person band then, and Finn had been the scruffy music journalist assigned to interview her.
She’d been so energetic, like a firecracker, and now she seemed so wilted and fizzled out. It felt like everything good in the world had faded away.
Elijah came back over to where they were sitting, ending a call on his phone as he did so. He had the comforter from the hotel room’s second, unused bed under one arm. Pocketing his phone, he picked up Jessica as if she weighed nothing, wrapping her in the comforter.
“I promise to keep you still, so you won’t get motion sick like you would in a car. We’re gonna go for a walk, okay?”
“I don’t… I don’t… you don’t need to carry me,” she protested. “I c’n walk.”
“I’d worry about you falling over,” answered Elijah. “Anyway, I can move a lot faster tha
n you can.”
“I was on my track team at high school, what makes you think you faster’n me?”
Elijah winked. “I’m a vampire, remember?”
That sent Jessica off into peals of fractured laughter.
“I’m not kidding about going fast,” Elijah told Finn quietly. “You should get an Uber and meet us there. I’ll send you the address; it just looks like a house outside but it’s a private clinic. They’ll know who you are since I called ahead about bringing her in. Nobody will leak her identity or anything else to the press. It’s very discreet.”
Finn wished he could say that the ride to Elijah’s secret clinic for washed-up drunken rock stars was the most nerve-racking experience he’d had in recent memory, but Finn’s nerves were pretty racked pretty much all of the time. He couldn’t remember the last time his anxiety wasn’t forming a tense knot in his stomach.
Inside its nondescript exterior, the clinic was fancier than any hotel Finn had ever stayed in, gleaming new and beautifully appointed.
He wondered if it mostly treated injuries related to vampire attacks and things like that. It wasn’t like vampires could rock up to emergency departments with their victims and say ‘oops, I got a little over excited, transfusion please’ or whatever. They had to have planned for contingencies like that, right? It would make sense if they did.
Before he had time to wonder any more deeply into the usual clientele of the place, Elijah arrived with Jessica in his arms. The clinic staff transferred her to a stretcher and whisked her away to be assessed, leaving Elijah to sit down beside Finn in the way-too-fancy waiting area.
“It’s going to be fine. I can hear what they’re saying,” Elijah assured Finn. “She just needs an IV to top up her fluids and blood sugar, and then to be kept for observation. No stomach pumps or anything like that.”
“Thank Christ for that,” Finn muttered, slumping down in his seat with relief. “If we’d had to cancel shows because her voice was screwed then the label would have gone crazy at us. We’re already on thin fucking ice with them lately.” He gave a humorless snort. “Though it would make a refreshing fucking change for them to have to acknowledge what Jess is doing to herself. They don’t give a damn as long as she keeps performing like a good little… fuck, I don’t even know what I’m saying. It’s not like I was there for her either.”
“I don’t think a guy desperate for a vampire to kill him is really in a position to be providing moral support for anyone, Finn. Don’t beat yourself up for being in too much pain to help Jessica with hers.”
When Finn was a kid, he’d always been puzzled that adults always said stuff like ‘I hate hospitals.’
Finn had gone to hospital for short stays a bunch of times when he was young, for lung infections or broken bones or minor surgery, and he’d always liked it: the orderly uniformity of the bedding; the small playroom at the end of the hall with its soft, bright, simple toys; the plain food that arrived like clockwork.
As an adult, Finn hated hospitals just the same as everyone else did, and recognized the childhood fondness he’d had for them as having been a love of the stability he naively thought they represented.
He’d thought hospitals were where people went to get better, to rest and recover, places of healing and gentleness. That’s how they’d felt when he’d been a dumb kid who didn’t know any better.
After what felt like a long time, an orderly approached where the two of them sat. “You can see her now.”
“You should go,” Elijah told Finn. “I’ll stay out here.”
That was the absolute opposite of what Finn wanted, but he went anyway.
Jessica was propped up in bed in a private room, one of her arms attached to a drip.
“You look like shit,” Finn said, coming over and holding her hand.
“Feel like it, too,” she agreed. “I fucked up, huh?”
“I think we’ve both been doing that for a while. This time you just got more people involved than usual.”
“Mm.” She sighed, looking away. “Sorry.”
“Do you remember when we met?” he asked.
“Yeah. I was so glad that you clearly knew your shit about guitar, and could take over doing it for me. I never liked playing it as much as I liked singing.” Jessica gave another tired little sigh. “I couldn’t do two things at once onstage, what a dummy I am, huh?”
Finn squeezed her hand. “Lucky you’ve got me there to help you out, I guess.”
Leaving Jessica to a few more hours of observation before release, Finn and Elijah headed back to the hotel shortly before dawn. As they approached the front entrance, a man clutching a fancy-looking camera strode towards them.
Fuck. Paparazzi. The band didn’t get it often, but they were an occasional occurrence. Perfect fucking timing.
“Where’s Jessica, Finn?” the man demanded. “Has she been admitted to hospital under a fake name? People deserve to know what’s going on.”
Before Finn could tell the guy to fuck off, and maybe throw in a punch or a broken camera free of charge, Elijah stepped forward.
“This doesn’t have to escalate. Walk away.”
His voice was even and cold, and made the hair on the back of Finn’s neck stand up. He’d never heard Elijah sound like that.
“Where’s—” the man began again.
“Walk. Away,” Elijah repeated. “Leave Jessica alone.”
The man’s face went slack, as if he’d been suddenly stunned by something, and he swayed a little off-balance. Then he turned and walked away without another word.
Even when Finn had begged and pushed and blackmailed, Elijah had never reacted like that, never been terrifying. But he’d done it in an instant in order to protect Jess. Finn felt dizzy with gratitude.
20
ELIJAH
They were both too wrung out with exhaustion from the night’s events to even think about sex or biting.
Once they made it back into the hotel room, Elijah indulged in the height of hedonism: he set the air conditioner to run just cold enough that the two of them could curl up together and enjoy comfortable warmth underneath the soft blanket.
Finn drifted off to sleep first and Elijah ran his fingers through the man’s hair, enjoying the simple tactile sensation of another being’s presence tangled up with his own.
“I’m so tired of worrying about her,” Finn muttered, shifting to be closer against Elijah’s body.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“Getting there,” Finn agreed. “That’s one of the reasons I talk so much shit in interviews, you know? So they’ll focus on me instead of her. I don’t want her to have to deal with questions about how she’s going.”
“One of the reasons? Are there others?”
Finn made a rather obvious deflection away from the question with a yawn.
“Do you know how I wound up in the band?” he asked instead of answering Elijah’s question. “I was a music journalist, and Jess was so impressed with the questions I asked about their songs that she asked me to try out as a guitarist for them. Before that she’d been doing double duty as guitarist and singer, but she didn’t really like it. I guess she liked what she heard, because they invited me to join.
“Being in a band was incredible.” Finn smiled, the memory clearly making him happy even now. “I’d already worked really hard to contribute to the scene in little ways where I could, you know? I did music journalism for any street press or website I could convince to let me write for them, and worked at merch tables for local bands that needed the help.
“Being an active participant was really important to how I enjoyed live music, but I’d never dreamed of being one of the ones on the stage, making the sounds. I guess that makes me a bit of an outlier — I think it’s pretty common for kids who learn guitar to spend more time daydreaming about their future stardom than actually practicing their basic chords.
“But I was always on the introvert side — I was, honestly! I know it
’s hard to believe now, but before Crystal Pulse I was too anxious to be in the spotlight all that much. I loved learning music because I loved everything music, but I didn’t fantasize about doing anything with my knowledge.
“But then Jess gave me the chance to try it, and it was like… man, I don’t know what going from being a human to being a vampire was like, but I can’t imagine that the change was much bigger than going from ordinary dude to rock star. It was straight up like the beginning of The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out from her black-and-white world into all that color. Like, how do you even describe that to someone who still lives in monochrome, you know?
“I’ll follow Jessica to hell and back for giving me that. For taking a chance on me.”
21
FINN
In the late afternoon, the need for coffee managed to override the need for sleep for Finn. He sat up with a groan.
“I’m gonna go get a Starbucks, do you want a tea?”
“Yes please,” Elijah mumbled, face half-buried in the pillow.
“I’ll meet you on the bus when I get back. It’s nearly nightfall,” Finn told him, planting a kiss on his cheek before leaving.
While he waited for his order, Finn noticed that two kids on the other side of the Starbucks were whispering together and glancing over at him, and he gave them a small wave. He didn’t get recognized like that in public very often, but it happened occasionally and he could recognize the signs.
“Hi,” one of them said shyly as they approached him. “We didn’t want to bother you, we just wanted to say that Crystal Pulse got us through some really rough times. Thank you.”
