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Daniel’s hunched over the cramped motel desk, trying not to bang his knees as he feeds another ream of paper into his typewriter.
“You should let me buy you a personal computing device,” Armand says from the bed. “I tried one at the mall, and they’re really quite lovely.”
“But far less portable,” Daniel says, “and besides, this old beauty has never let me down.” He gives his Smith-Corona a fond little pat before getting back to jamming it unceremoniously with paper.
“Portable computing models are improving every year,” Armand points out. “And think of the time you’d save—”
“You know, I don’t think I asked, actually—”
“—and they’re really such elegant machines, Daniel. You must at least try—
“I said I don’t want one, okay? Jesus fucking Christ! ” He’d raised his voice to be heard over the rattling drone of the radiator, but it comes out as a near shout. There’s a long pause. Daniel scratches the back of his neck, a little embarrassed.
Then Armand says, mildly, “There’s an obsolescence point for everything, Daniel. It’s only natural,” and Daniel’s mood tanks completely.
He doesn’t want to hear about obsolescence, or replacements, or the shiny new thing that’ll wash your car and fuck your boyfriend. Daniel’s cresting the tail end of thirty-five, freshly divorced, and finding a worrying number of gray hairs creeping up from his scalp. If anything’s reaching its obsolescence point, it’s him, and he really needs this conversation to end before Armand clues into that.
As if on cue, the radiator takes that moment to make a truly horrendous grinding noise, thundering outrageously like a car backfiring, and then peters out completely.
Silence descends. Daniel looks at the thing for a moment, decides it’s not going to resurrect on its own, and turns back to his keyboard. “Babe?” he asks. “Can you fix that for me?”
“Fix it,” Armand repeats. “Yes, the radiator. Fix it…”
Daniel sighs. “Or, like, call the office or something? I need to get this story done tonight and I don’t want the keys to freeze up.”
Armand perks up at that. Telephones are much more up his alley; internal workings of heavy machinery, less so.
After nearly a decade and a half in his company, this is what Daniel has determined Armand likes: shiny things. Products from QVC. New gadgets. He’s remarkably incurious about how any of it works, and is often more desirous of possessing the item than actually using it, which is like, annoyingly emblematic of the rising tide of consumerism that Daniel just wrote an op-ed about, but whatever, it doesn’t even make the top ten list of Armand’s most annoying habits, so Daniel mostly lets it go. He accepts the food processors and walkie talkies and electric nose hair clippers when offered, thanks him without enthusiasm, and quietly makes trips to the Goodwill.
While Armand dials the rotary on the wall, Daniel absorbs back into his work. He bangs out another hundred words and is starting to actually feel pretty good about himself, and by extension the world as a whole, when he realizes Armand is nudging him gently on the shoulder. “Yeah?”
“The staff were most unhelpful,” Armand says. He has the grim air of one delivering a death sentence, which for all Daniel knows might turn out to be the case. “The local repairmen are all occupied in the Olympic Village. And this motel is full, along with everything else in the area, as they so kindly reminded me when I threatened to take our business elsewhere.”
“Shit,” Daniel says.
“Indeed. But you’ll be pleased to know they did offer a 20% discount on the night’s stay. For the inconvenience.”
“Oh, well that’s just perfect,” Daniel says, groaning hugely. Armand’s still hovering a little uncertainly beside his chair, as if caught between remaining here or returning to perch on the bed, or perhaps rushing out the door to murder the staff members. Daniel butts his head plaintively into Armand’s waist. His shirt is soft and smells like clean laundry, and Daniel tries not to inhale too obviously. “You can use that extra cash to buy my frozen corpse a real nice funeral, then.”
Armand’s fingers brush through his hair. “Always so dramatic, Daniel,” he says, and tightens his grip, pulling just enough to sting, just enough for Daniel’s dick to cautiously emerge from hibernation. “Humans have existed without artificial heating for centuries. You will endure one night.”
But even as he speaks, a shiver passes through Daniel, transmitted to Armand where they touch. Without the steady dry heat of the radiator, the room is already chilling rapidly. Large windows dominate the west-facing wall, which Daniel had first thought were the room’s only luxury, but he now recognizes are its biggest liability. The draft is hell.
Daniel remembers the TV weatherman saying it would reach -30 Celsius that night, and while he’s not quite sure what that means in Fahrenheit, he knows it must fall somewhere in freeze-your-balls-off territory. Oh god—Daniel likes his balls. He’s seen a fair amount, and his are pretty decent, objectively speaking, as balls go, and they certainly don’t deserve to go out like that. Panic starts to set in.
“You’re not going to freeze your balls off,” Armand says tiredly.
“I might.” Daniel lets his voice inflect with a note of hysteria. Armand had worked in theater for long enough that Daniel’s noticed he tends to respond better when lines are delivered with a tinge of camp, an observation which Daniel exploits shamelessly. (When your lover is an immortal demon, you have to press whatever advantages you can get.)
Another ice-cold draft blows in from the window, and Daniel looks up. Armand’s peering down at him. Their eyes lock, and Daniel says, “You know what we have to do.”
***
Five minutes later, it’s immediately clear this isn’t working.
“This isn’t working,” Daniel says, and Armand snaps, “I heard you the first time.”
They’re wrapped up together in bed. Daniel has his head pressed to Armand’s bare chest, Armand’s strong arms encircling him, their legs tangled together. It should be perfect.
The only problem: Armand is fucking freezing.
“It’s not my fault,” Armand says, miffed. “Do you know how much mortal security there is at these kinds of events? It’s immensely difficult to find somewhere to feed that won’t cause an international disturbance. I’d hate to overshadow your little doping story, after all.”
“Well, I don’t care anymore,” Daniel says, shoving Armand away from him. “Just go find something to eat and don’t come back until you’re at least lukewarm, alright? Jesus.”
“As you wish,” Armand says sullenly. He slinks off the bed, pulls on the thick coat he’d bought, and disappears out the door.
When he’s gone, Daniel sinks back into the sheets, wrapping the sparse blankets tight around his shoulders. He wonders how many guests have fucked on these blankets. He wonders who Armand is feeding on. He wonders what they taste like, and if they taste better than him. He wonders if he should feel worse about the fact that he just sentenced someone out there to death.
He wonders, if he’s very good tonight, if Armand will give him his blood.
He doesn’t mean to fall asleep, but then he’s waking up to the sound of the door opening. Fuck, his nose is freezing. The room must’ve dropped about 20 degrees in the time he’d been out. His balls are making a valiant but doomed campaign to reverse puberty, judging by the the degree to which they’re retreating, which Daniel decides to take as a sign that they have enough of an innate protection instinct to get through this intact. He remains cautiously optimistic.
And then there’s Armand, shucking off his coat—and shirt, and pants, oh, hello—and climbing back into bed next to Daniel, his body gloriously warm, his gorgeous brown skin flushed with a healthy glow. “Fucking finally,” Daniel says, and Armand rolls his eyes.
They resume their pretzel-like positions, and god, yes, the heat of Armand’s muscular chest against his face is maybe the most delicious thing he’s ever felt. He’s starting to think that the radiator breaking was all part of some divine plan to give him an excuse to press his face into Armand’s tits, when Armand says, “You know, skin-to-skin contact is proven to be the most effective therapy for raising body temperature.”
“Uh-huh,” Daniel says, voice muffled from his aforementioned spot in Armand’s tits. He’s pretty sure he’s evidencing that little fact right now.
Armand doesn’t say anything, just strokes Daniel’s hair with one hand. The other tugs lightly at the shirt that Daniel’s still wearing.
Right.
Something in Daniel goes a little colder, but he plays it off. “Fine, fine,” he grouses. “You just can’t get enough of me, I know how it is.” He sits up a little to pull off his shirt, only letting himself hesitate for a moment.
Daniel’s still narrow-hipped but not quite as slender as he was in his twenties, and between the divorce and rehab that difference has only accelerated. On its own, he wouldn’t mind so much, but combined with the gray hairs he’s discovered—a total of four so far, surely that’s abnormally premature—and the lines around his eyes that no longer go away after sleepless nights, the cumulative changes have begun to paint him in depressingly sharp contrast with that fresh young 20-year-old Armand had met all those years ago. And Armand, of course, hasn’t changed at all.
If he would just turn me, Daniel thinks, and stops. Armand hates it when he brings it up. And tonight, he’s too cold to fight.
With the shirt out of the way, Armand holds him even more tightly, arms caging him in and hands clasping over the soft rise of Daniel’s belly. Which immediately makes Daniel want to die, but then Armand’s nestling into the crook of his neck and whispering my beautiful boy into his ear, fingers stroking feather-light over the roll of his stomach, gentle, almost loving, until he relaxes, bit by bit, into the touch.
That is, until he remembers that this position puts Armand at perfect eyeline with the patch of hair where his offending grays have been cropping up, and fuck, he just can’t do this. He springs back from Armand abruptly, almost tripping over himself in his haste to get away. “I have an idea,” he says quickly, as Armand frowns, hands chasing after him. “We can warm up another way.”
***
Sucking cock, Daniel thinks, is at least one category he’s improved in with age.
He takes it under the covers, hemmed in by the warm press of Armand’s thighs. Daniel works his tongue in the way he knows Armand likes, the knowledge pulled out of him over years of careful study. Armand can sometimes have an honesty problem when it comes to sex, but Daniel had tried to shut that shit down early on, as much as he could.
If you let me embarrass myself by giving you bad head for years, and then some other vampires read your mind and start spreading gossip about your bitch boy with the lousy blowjobs, I swear to you I’ll spend the rest of my life seducing an even older, more powerful vampire until I can convince him to KILL YOU, is something like how Daniel remembers those conversations going. Anyway, the point is that he’s learned, and he thinks he’s learned well. Because Armand’s hips are lifting into his touch, eyes closed, mouth parted sweetly, and the sighs he makes are breathy, quiet, real.
Daniel wants those sounds memorized, recorded on a tape, played over and over until there’s nothing left in his brain. He thinks he’d rather die than forget this.
When they’re done, he crawls back up from the covers and kisses Armand on the mouth. “Hi,” he says, fighting a goofy grin.
Armand’s mouth twitches. “Hi,” he says. Their noses brush. God, how he loves that nose.
Now Armand sinks down against Daniel’s chest, and Daniel’s the one to hold him, to run his hands over his body, to feel the firm muscle couched in such impossibly soft skin. Armand reaches down to stroke him lazily under the sheets. “Well, they haven’t frozen off yet,” he says drily with a scrape of nails, and Daniel bites down on his lip so hard he draws blood.
For a second, Armand freezes. Then he resumes his touch, but tilts his head up to kiss Daniel, letting the blood pool between their lips.
Slowly, Armand raises one of his own wrists to his mouth. Daniel’s heartbeat thunders like the poor, doomed radiator, shaking itself ceaselessly to death. Then Armand’s teeth split open a jagged line in his skin and he presses the torn flesh to Daniel’s lips.
The blood. It flows thickly over his tongue, like syrup, like honey. He only gets a mouthful before Armand’s pulling it away, but he’s already soaring. Because the blood is Armand, pure and unadulterated, even closer to him than skin-to-skin, flowing inside Daniel, becoming part of him, inextricable, hiding nothing but warmth and safety and inimitable presence, and no high in the world could ever top this.
He’s coming into Armand’s fist with a soft cry, but that still-bleeding wrist remains out of reach. “Please,” he begs, chasing it with his mouth, but Armand shakes his head.
Fine. It’s fine. It’s not fine, but he’ll pretend, because they’re not fighting, not tonight. Instead, Daniel savors the dregs of him still lingering on his tongue, a warmth building inside him like a crackling hearth, spreading outwards to envelop him and Armand until nothing beyond them is real. Time won’t pass, Armand won’t leave, and Daniel will never replace his electric Smith-Corona with one of those atrocious new portable computers.
He can feel Armand’s chin press against his skin, the drowsy brush of his eyelashes as he rests his head on Daniel’s stomach, rising and falling with the tide of his breathing.
And it’s so much easier to lie to himself, when it’s like this.