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gay vampire, but Abe nods. “If
you’re not comfortable, we don’t have to.”
    He called me
a fag and a cocksucker , Steve said. Abe missed the horrors of
being gay in high school largely thanks to cancer and the hours in
hospital or off school at home, and now nobody is going to say
anything about Abe’s sexuality to a vampire’s face if indeed there
is anything to say that is not overshadowed by his new-found blood
requirement. In that small respect Abe may have gotten off lightly,
but Steve could have good reasons to not add fuel to the dying
embers.
    Steve shrugs in
a short dip of the shoulders. He has that comfortable sense of
ordinariness about him, cute in the way of a next-door-neighbour,
but not so handsome that Abe feels way out his league.
Approachable. While Abe has the feeling Steve would prefer not to
hear it, the fact he looks like a Tokyo schoolboy only helps his
case.
    He must have had
men approach him before?
    “ If
we don’t do anything more interesting than talk soon, we’re going
to have those two fucks come over, attempt some ear-burning
witticism, try to get us dancing, and then bore us all by talking
about snapper or something. I reckon you’re more comfortable than
that.” Steve turns in his chair, one hand drifting across the space
between them to rest on Abe’s thigh. As if he knows just what kind
of effect that gesture has, Steve runs his fingernails over the
inner seam of Abe’s jeans, drifting up towards Abe’s groin, and for
all that Abe has lost a fair amount of sensation to death, his skin
tingles when Steve stops just short of Abe’s balls. “Do your lips
taste like blood? Or just cherry chap stick?”
    “ What are you—what?” The incredulity isn’t helped by the fact
that Steve leaves his hand—his burning, hot-blooded hand—one wrong
move from contact. Abe just has to slide forwards, and then Steve’s
hand will brush his cock, and how glorious will that feel?
Sometimes the decreased level of hormones really doesn’t matter:
the touch of a breather is as heady, just for different reasons, as
a man’s touch when Abe still breathed. He’s not physically aroused,
and can’t be, but the thought of those warm, pulsing, living
fingers touching him in any vaguely-intimate fashion leaves him
wanting almost as much as he did when alive.
    Sex, with a
vampire, feels like a mockery, a mimicry lacking all the
desperation and biological drive, a child’s playacting of a concept
he can’t understand. Repetition without meaning. Sex with a
breather, a man with a beating heart and panting breaths, feels
like stepping back into the skin of a life Abe was denied at
too-young an age. It’s just as addictive and compelling as sex used
to be, which is why vampires come to Feeders, chase tourists, seek
out the living—they’re desperate, one and all, for the leeches they
laugh at. Not for their blood: their breath .
    For a moment all
Abe wants is to bundle Steve into his car, take him home and feel
Steve’s warm exhalations on his cold skin.
    He almost,
almost reaches out to grab Steve’s shoulders and pull him close;
Abe jerks his hands and grabs hold of the seat of his chair. No.
It’s not going to happen. It’s never going to happen.  Steve
is straight, and Abe doesn’t need to scare away the one interesting
person in Port Carmila by acting like an oversexed teenager. “What
the fuck are you doing?”
    Steve’s eyes
never glance away from Abe’s face. “Flirting?”
    “ But
you—but you’ve never done this before! You’re straight!” Straight
and inexperienced with men and possibly vampires: he should be
awkward, reluctant, shuddering at the thought of getting his hand
anywhere near Abe’s cock, not going straight for the bullseye with
a confidence that is going to drive Abe crazy because it isn’t
real! Why does a man who isn’t at all sexually interested in him
have to act like a man that wants Abe to take him back to
his house and fuck him—or fuck