Even as a mortal, Nicolas de Brabant used his charm and good looks to entice women into his bed. Once there, his regard for them ended. If the woman who caught his eye would not be enticed, she could be forced. It was all the same, the goal was to have her. Sex was the reward of power, and once he was made a knight, an agent of the king, Nicolas used his title and its protection to wield his power at every possible opportunity. Tenderness was for virginal fantasies, and passion was irrevocably wedded to selfish entertainment. Even the willing were treated roughly, power adding to pleasure. Taking was everything.
Once LaCroix brought him across, his power was limitless and the "rewards" equally so. He perfected his skills of deception, betrayal acting as an additional aphrodisiac. Now the taking was complete, trust, sex, blood, life. The ultimate sexual satisfaction, each conquest was measured not only by orgasm but by death. The love he imagined from time to time, the counterfeit regret and conflict that grew in him as the time for killing drew near, was overcome by the moment itself. And all regret faded with the final heartbeat, as he became consumed with need to find another. By the time he was overtaken by conscience, physical passion was indistinguishable from abuse and death. When Maura first suggested that his sexual violence may have been a function of habit and not nature, he swept the notion aside because it was utterly foreign to his experience. 700 years of carnal and spiritual depravity, following upon his own mortal excesses, reinforced his belief that no mortal could survive his intimate attentions.
He knew Maura welcomed rather than endured him as a vampire lover in the only way he believed himself capable. But he had also been keenly aware of her desire for mortal pleasure. She had joined him in his world and had done it freely. And he had Janette to assuage his physical needs, where Maura had no-one. He need only have believed in himself as she knew him to have realized his mistake. Everything in its time, he had learned over the centuries, but how it must have hurt her. Not just physical longing, but his reluctance to trust her. "You never believe," she had told him over and over, in other matters as well, the words always spoken in frustration. Well, now he knew. Maura hadn't told him or taught him or argued him into submission; as always he simply tired of listening to his own doubts and gave himself up to whatever would happen. It was a small thing to separate sharing her blood from sharing their bodies, he felt, now that he knew it was possible.
Feeling very enlightened, wrapped in a reverie that was the stuff of grand romance, Nick slid closer to where Maura lay, pressing against her head to foot, kissing her soft shoulder and running his fingers along her back. "I'm so sorry, Sweet" he whispered.
Maura's face was pressed into the pillow. As always she engaged in sleep like a wanton throwing herself into a debauch, fully and without reservation, and grasping it fiercely. "Mmph," she grunted, unwilling to be pulled from her slumber.
Nick kissed her hair, tried to brush it aside, repeating, "I was wrong, I'm so sorry."
"Whathafuck?" she mumbled, barely coherent, and one red-and-green eye opened to look at him in confusion. "'Sorry' again?" Too late to sink back into sleep, she realized, and rolled back a bit to look at him with both red-and-green eyes. Well he looked wide-awake, anyway. "You got laid with no fatalities for the first time in eight hundred years, and you're sorry? Well excuse the hell out of me. Now you can wait another eight hundred, feel better?"
This wasn't quite in keeping with Nick's romantic fantasy. Seeing his expression turn from rapture to disappointment, she sighed. He was so freaking fragile sometimes.
"C'mere," and she pulled him over for a kiss. "I love you, I love you so much I can't stand it sometimes. And you have no idea what hell it's been to try to make you listen to reason, so last night I just went for broke. Really, if I couldn't convince you last night of all nights, I knew it was a lost cause. You think I knew you wouldn't go all beasty, when you were so convinced of it, and when I'd seen it before? Maybe 60 or 70 sure, but I guess I've bet my life on less and won. I mean, I know you love me and I know you didn't want to hurt me, so I pretty much counted on that. I knew you wouldn't be anybody you shouldn't be... I just hoped what you should be wouldn't do me in by accident."
Nick was lying on his back now, staring at the ceiling. Everyone he knew told him he was addicted to angst. Even Janette berated him at times for his "attachment to the Byronesque". But the rosy glow of his morning-after mood was more than a little dampened by his all-too-pragmatic doucette, and he was well on his way into a snit.
"Bats, don't be like that," and he didn't move so she went to him, leaned against his shoulder and kissed his cheek. "Nicolas, why does everything have to be so incredibly deep? I love you, I wanted you more last night than anyone I've ever known in my whole miserable hunted life. For the first time ever, I was held instead of subdued. I was with you of my own choice and desire, not as some shitty trade-off to stay alive. I'm sorry if I haven't lived long enough or haven't known enough world-class philosophers and poets to dress it all up with pretty words. I need a collaborator and a band for that, remember? Don't be 'sorry', I don't need you to be sorry, or transformed, or anything earth shattering. I just want you to love me, and live with me, and figure out this is where and who you belong. Okay? I mean, the rest is like frosting on the cake, it's real pretty but too much of it makes me queasy."
Now he turned his head to look at her. "I have known people who could define the physical act of love in phrases and couplets of such exquisite beauty that they would make you weep. You distilled it into three soulless words: 'you got laid'."
She shook her head in disbelief. "Well now I'm sorry, but not all of us have forever to express ourselves. If you're gonna regress to the Renaissance, I'm in big trouble." They stared at one another for a moment, then Nick reached out and pulled Maura into his arms.
"Sweet, you were in big trouble the first night you came here, you were just too stubborn to admit it."
"I'm sorry, but you gotta face it, I will never be the full-bore romantic type, okay? Life, or my excuse for it, has pretty much slapped all of the warm fuzzies out of me."
He squeezed her tighter and kissed her hair, her face, her hands. "Well then that's something you can learn from me. I know that inside that no-frills exterior are a whole bundle of warm fuzzies just waiting to bust loose. You just have to get out of their way."
"So I'm supposed to believe a vampire is an expert on warm fuzzies."
He smiled "that" smile. "I believed a mortal could subdue my darker instincts, didn't I?"
"Bullshit. I just worked you over until you got carried away. All you 'believed' was what you were feeling at the time. Which was all part of my master plan, bwahahahaha." She continued to snicker wickedly as she kissed and nibbled his neck and shoulders. "See how much fun you can have when you just loosen up?" She was leaning over him now, her hair tickling his skin.
"A 'master plan', huh?"
"Well it worked, didn't it?"
He shook his head and pulled her down to him. "You had me right where I wanted you..."
"Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I seduced the Great Seducer, and not a drop of blood shed. Quick, call the Enforcers." He didn't answer but occupied himself by scattering slow kisses from her elbow along the impossibly soft skin of her inner arm moving lazily toward her hand.
"Y'know," she mused as Nick ran his lips idly over her palm, "that there's a warm and fuzzy I could really get used to."
He pressed a kiss in her palm before asking, "What's that?"
"What you're doing."
"Mmm, I see," he gave her tiny pecks up the inside of her wrist, to her shoulder, ending on her cheek. Don't be fooled, I'm just tasting you for later."
"You're the only vampire I've known who did that, really. All that crap in the movies and cheesy novels about the 'vampire's kiss' and trust me, there ain't no such thing. Nobody I ever met did anything but bite and usually not too nicely either."
He leaned on an elbow, fascinated. "You're serious, aren't you? Well I never imagined I'd meet anyone who thought kisses were exotic."
Maura frowned a little, remembering. "You would if you never had any."
Now he laughed. "Oh, come on. Sweet whatever, and never been kissed?" Then he saw the look on her face, and stopped laughing.
"I never told you the story of how I got here, did I?" She was lying on her back, gazing at the ceiling as if into the past.
"Just that you'd had enough of Vancouver. Though I always suspected there was more. I figured you'd tell me when you were ready."
She smiled, still not looking at him. "That's one of the things I love about you, the world's first kissy vampire is also the world's first detective who doesn't ask too many questions. Well it was like this. I'd been living with this guy, this mortal, if you can believe it, Jerry was his name. All Goth and shit, dark and deep and all. But I was tired, you know? I wanted just once to be with somebody who had an expiration date, like me. Someone who only preferred the dark instead of needing it. He was smart, and funny, and good looking, and had oodles of money and artistic taste, and for the first time it seemed like a mortal was interested in me. I mean, he knew all about me and didn't think I was some freak. Of course looking back I know now that what he loved about me was that I was the closest he'd ever get to the real thing, if you know what I mean. He kept wanting to go out on the new moon, I guess to use me as bait. Shoulda let him, he'd have passed out cold if he really met one of you guys. The vamp community thought he was such an annoying poser they wouldn't touch him. He did love to hear the stories, and I loved to think I had someone who would listen. Some therapist, he just got off on it I guess. But I believed, how I believed I had the love of my life, who would listen and care and be there for me. And brother, what a hot pants case, he would really get put out if I didn't put out. He even pretended to bite me like you do, how sick is that? But I didn't mind, I was so in love with the notion of having a normal relationship with someone who cared about me, didn't just use me as an in-house drug supply or living party favor, that I developed very selective awareness. I moved in with him and stayed there for almost a year. Not for protection or anything, I was better at taking care of myself at that point than he was. Anyway one night when we were leaving some bleak club or other, I saw him kissing some friend goodbye, just some girl he'd known awhile, and on the way home I asked him hey, how come you never kiss me? I mean he never, not once, for all of his not being able to keep his hands off me in every other way. I just let it go all that time, figuring if that was all that was missing, who cared. But finally I needed to know, who knows why that night. And what he said, well I guess he never really lied to me but what he said put it out in plain English." She paused, her frown deepening, and didn't go on until Nick prompted quietly "What?"
"He said, as casual as you please, 'sex is fun, but kisses are for the people who really matter'. Just like that, no apology, not even any meanness, just matter of fact like I should have known all along. Maybe I should have." Nick said nothing, only paused in winding a strand of her hair through his fingers to run the back of a fingertip along her cheek, waiting for more. "But like they say in Munchkinland, I didn't need a house to fall on me, so he got his goodbye fuck that night and next morning I packed my shit and went to the airport. The flight leaving soonest was for Toronto so I got a one-way ticket and a few days later was knocking on Janette's door. And the rest is infamy." Nick was lying very close by her side now, cradling her head in his arm, tracing her cheek with the other hand. "I just wanted you to know, for all my wanting to get in your pants and everything, that the most important things I already found here. If sex came to mean violence and death to you, it came to mean selling out to me. Just so you know we both have our Dr. Ruth issues." She turned her head then to look him in the eye, and he rested his forehead against hers.
"Dr. Ruth would find this a challenge, but I'm glad you told me. And I know you didn't just want to get into my pants, or you wouldn't still be here."
She tried to deflect his seriousness again. "Oh, I dunno, I'd say it was worth hanging around for." His expression didn't change.
"You do really matter, doucette. You really matter more than anyone in my life, and if you ever wonder about that just tell me and I'll remind you again." He kissed her now, along her jaw and across her lower lip, kisses in her hair and warm nuzzles at her ear, her neck. "And there is such a thing," he insisted, knowing she'd know what he meant. She met his mouth with her own, drawing in his velvet tongue and losing herself in his arms until he drew back and kissed the tip of her nose. "So there."
Maura's story about Jerry stayed with Nick, taking such deep root he resolved, as he did for Christmas, to make up for what she'd been deprived of for so long. He showered her with kisses, kisses to wake her and send her to sleep, kisses hello and how are you, good morning and good night and 'what's shakin' Sweet?', and kisses to interrupt her as she made her dinner. He even kissed her hello on the rare occasions she came by the precinct when he was working late and Vachon dropped her off to ride home with him. No matter who he was talking to (usually Schanke) or who was around, he dropped what he was doing to touch her face and give her a kiss and a warm hug.
"You have become a real smooch hound," she told him one night after he'd impulsively pressed her to the wall outside of Raven, in full view of the departing customers.
"Just tasting you for later," he promised in the 'noir' voice he knew flipped her switches. Because now he loved to flip them, loved how she would grab him the minute they shut the loft door behind them when he'd spoken to her in just that tone of voice.
"You are an audio aphrodisiac, Bats." She was glued to his back on the way to the car, hands jammed in his jacket pockets and gripping his belt through the lining. He pulled loose to kiss her into the Caddy.
"Think of it as aural sex," he teased darkly.
Life, or the nearest they were likely to get to it, was getting very good.
