Harvest VI
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He's not quite sure how to answer that without complicating everything, and she's looking at him as if expecting a response.
"Don't tell me you need an invitation before you can you cross the thress..," she stops, blinks, concentrates, "thresh-hold!"
"I certainly do."
Her pretty mouth forms an 'O' of surprise. "Because you're a vampire?"
"Because I'm a gentleman."
Although his face is positively still, the warmth in his eyes makes her smile. She lifts an index finger and waves it in an imperious, not-quite symmetrical circle.
"Then tally-ho my good … vampire-type person."
The alcohol really has hit her hard in the last ten minutes.
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She seems to have fallen asleep in the few seconds it's taken him to cross her floor. Just as well. He flips back the coverlet and lowers her to the bed, pushes a stray hair off her face and turns to leave, but she catches his wrist, pulls him in close, raises a hand to his head. He's startled, almost pulls back when her fingers comb through his hair.
"Straw," she whispered sleepily, "from your crate of Moulin Rouge."
He's really got to leave now, but her hand slides down his wrist and she laces her fingers between his like a little girl and she yawns, her eyelids heavy and says,
"You know, you're really a very nice man underneath all that vampire. You need a girlfriend. Someone to take care of you for a change."
It had gotten to the Dear Abby part of the evening. He hated it when that happened.
"You really have been very good to me. Oh, don't get me wrong, you can be a mean and ruthless and you always try to scare me with that Josef-look you do. Yes you do," she said firmly as he raised his eyebrows in mock objection, "and I've tried hard not to like you, I really have, but it's just not working. You do you like me don't you, Josef? Enough to be friends? Real friends, I mean. Friends like you and Mick."
A friend? She wanted to be friends? Even if friendship was the type of 'ship' he wanted, vampires did human friends the way heiresses do the poor. As good PR.
"You do, don't you?" She was smiling up at him. "Even though I mess up."
"You are a hellion," he said mildly.
" - a headache.. ", she nodded.
" - a pest.."
".. a plague.."
He was shaking his head. "You my dear, are a complete vexation."
He'd totally forgotten the liquor, because her smile only held for a moment, her voice wobbling in the unique tone of remorse that only the intoxicated can manage.
"Oh, I really am just a nuisance to you, aren't I?"
"Beth, Beth," Josef interrupted, trying to keep a straight face. "Your kind of trouble is nothing I can't handle. Been doing it for centuries."
"So I am trouble," she wailed.
He winced. Living with tame refreshment meant he sometimes forgot a few of the hidden traps of female communication.
"No you're not, you're a delight," he disagreed, knowing the sarcasm was too light to penetrate her haze.
"No," she sniffed, and said with perfect accuracy, "I'm trouble."
And then her head tilted back to look up at the long, long length of him standing there by her bedside and her eyes narrowed and she regarded him with what looked suspiciously like 'a purpose' on her face.
"You know, Josef, it's time I gave something back," she ordered, pulling at his wrist. "Sit down. Sit. Down."
She wobbled to her feet on the springy king-size mattress and pressed down with both hands on his shoulders. "You. Are the most uptight individual I know."
This couldn't possibly end well. To stop this he'd have to put his arms around her and given the circumstances, he really didn't think that would make the top ten in the history of good ideas. Or even the top one thousand. He took the path of least resistance and sat on the very edge of her bed. She shimmied in close, her fingers tightening around his neck. He flinched.
"Relax Josef, I'm not going to cut your throat," She unfastened the topmost of his buttons, "just work out some of the knots in your neck. Now stop fighting me and let me loosen your collar."
The first four buttons popped open and she began to ease the shirt down and off his shoulders. His hand caught her fingers as she reached around his abdomen for the fifth.
"Beth, when I'm with a lady, Mr Shirt only comes off if Mr Trousers is going to keep him company on the floor. They're close that way. They get lonely."
"Lucky, I'm no lady," she grinned. "And you can tell Mr Trousers to relax. This is just a trial separation. Mr Shirt will be tucked back under his waistband before he knows it." She lay his shirt across the bed. "I only want to ease the knots out of your shoulders not put a rocket in your pocket, so shut up and stay still. There's an artiste at work here."
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"Ohhhhhhmmmm… "
She wasn't wrong. Her thumbs were pressing into the junction of his neck and shoulder and rotating in lazy circles. He stifled another groan and his eyes rolled back into his head. She was good. She was very good.
She'd been massaging him in silent concentration for ten minutes now, her warm breath blowing across his ear like a midnight breeze. Odd random tingles fluttered in his belly every time her hair brushed the bare skin of his back and he felt a languid stirring in his groin. He steeled himself against the growing temptation to lean back into her.
"So you want to know how to please a vampire."
The sentence was out before he'd even realised he'd been thinking about it. Shit. Oh well, in for a penny…
"Does that mean vampires in general or just the specifics of what gets ah, a rise, out of Mick, because if it's the latter, I have to tell you, it's not like your boy Mick and I have sleepovers and braid each other's hair."
He'd seen enough of Mick in action a couple of decades ago to have a fairly good idea of what stoked his friend's fire, but that wasn't his information to share. Her fingers had stopped, even her breathing had stopped. She was listening.
"Ok Blondie, I get it. It's kind of hard to know exactly where to start. How about you tell me what's been happening, then maybe I can tell you what's going wrong."
Her blush warmed the back of his neck.
"Ok," she said slowly. Then bit her lip, looked over his head, at the door, at the silk throw under her knees. She took a breath.
"It wasn't like the relationships I've had with other men. No, not because he was a vampire," she said, cutting off Josef's retort, "but because he was, well, sweet. Old-fashioned. At first he'd only hold my hand, kiss me, touch me above the waist, you know, that kind of thing. Said that anything else wasn't proper in the early stage of our courting." She rolled her eyes. "He said he wanted to be sure I wanted to, before we took the next step."
"Go on."
"After about a couple of months he started to relax a bit more, lie on the sofa with me," she paused, "undo all the buttons on my blouse."
He turned to look at her. Her eyes had glazed. He could see they were happy memories.
"The first few times it was all very normal. Like the boys I'd been with in college. You know, both of us a little nervous, a little excited. Gentle with each other. He seemed to like what was happening."
"Ok, nice big tick for the petting stage. So where's the problem?"
Her face was really red now. The heat of her embarrassment was like a blast furnace at this range.
"We argued about it. I wanted to go further. He said that sort of intimacy was for marriage. I called him a prude, he called me impatient." She smiled a grim, private little smile. "I won."
"Of course you did, Buzzwire, of course you did." Josef drawled. "So what happened?"
"The first time he let me touch his.. let me touch him," she grimaced, closed her eyes. "The sound. I thought he was in pain."
Josef sat up. After all that time, the waiting, the self-denial, all that unrequited stalking… The feel of her hand on his cock must have been exquisite.
"But you didn't stop." Not a question, a slightly accusatory statement.
She blushed. "No, ..I was..," she looked at him defiantly, "I wanted him."
She could hear each movement as the second hand of the clock in the corner ticked away the hour.
"What happened then," he said at last.
She looked away, the edges of her mouth turned down. "Nothing happened then."
Josef frowned, gave the universal palms up sign of incomprehension.
"He told me it wasn't me. That he was just tired." She sighed and when she spoke her voice sounded sad. "He couldn't… He couldn't come, ok."
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