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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