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As Keith stepped into the light, he pulled off his red jacket, like he was shedding the armor surrounding his dark, tortured soul. Lance almost expected him to rip off his shirt, revealing what would no doubt be a rock-hard porcelain set of 8-pack abs, but he had no such luck.
Then Keith turned around to face him, and Lance could practically hear the tinkling of a cimbelstern; it was the sound of sparkling. It was unmistakable. Keith’s skin glittered as if encrusted with thousands of miniscule gems, dazzling in their splendor.
“This is what I am,” he said, his dark eyes mournful with years of inner torment.
“It looks like diamonds,” Lance whispered breathlessly.
“This is the skin of a killer, Lance,” Keith snarled, but Lance knew that the loathing in his voice was only directed at himself.
“You could say your skin is literally worth a million bucks.” Lance winked in Spanish, trying to lighten the mood with a winning pick-up line.
“I’m a killer, Lance. No amount of pick-up lines can change my true nature.”
“I don’t believe that,” he argued.
Keith narrowed his beautiful eyes; his dark eyebrows descending elegantly like the wings of a jet-black raven. “That’s because you believe the lie.” He tried to walk away, but Lance followed him. No boy that hot was going to avoid him. “I’m the world’s most dangerous predator. Everything about me draws you in.”
Lance whistled. “You’re not wrong.”
Keith glared at him. “You’re making this very hard.”
“Baby, this isn’t the only thing I can make hard.” Keith’s eye twitched in annoyance. “Don’t you see? It’s camouflage! My voice, my face, my hair–”
“I don’t know about that one,” Lance butted in, but it was a lie. No matter how much shit he gave Keith over his mullet, he could never get rid of the urge to stroke those luscious locks.
“–Even my smell. As if I would need any of that.” His voice wasn’t a shout, but it had intensity to it that Lance couldn’t describe. Its deep reverberations seemed to reach into his very soul and take hold.
Keith started to move, and in the blink of an eye he was at the top of a rock. He was inhumanely fast, and it took Lance’s breath away and flushed it down a garbage disposal.
“As if you could outrun me!” Keith parkoured his way around the foliage. He was like a graceful, deadly cantaloupe. As he moved, gusts of wind fabricated by his movement buffeted against Lance’s Cuban skin like the breath of an invisible divinity.
“As if you could fight me off.” Keith picked up an enormous branch and hurled it like it weighed nothing at all. I bet he could carry me across the threshold of our house on our wedding day with no problem, Lance thought.
“I’m designed to kill,” he whispered miserably.
“I don’t care,” Lance said. Because it’s hot as hell, he did not say.
“What if I’ve killed people before?”
Lance stared at him, totally not buying this emo bullshit. “Have you?” “I mean, no, but I–” his face contorted as if he were in physical pain. “I wanted to kill you. I’ve never wanted a human’s blood so much in my life.”
“It’s that tropical Cuban flavor, I bet.”
“I’ve learned to control my thirst. But it’s you, your scent.”
“I have been told on many occasions that I smell like a flawless blend of cinnamon and summer.”
“It’s like a drug to me. You’re like my own personal brand of heroin.”
It was because of that comment that Lance had “Your Love is my Drug” by Ke$ha stuck in his head for the following three hours.
As he spoke, Keith climbed into the lower branches of a tree as skillfully as a spider monkey. He leaned over Lance; their faces almost close enough to touch. If Keith breathed, Lance would have been able to feel it. But Keith didn’t breath. Because he was a vampire. His face was lit from behind as he leaned over, and to Lance it made him look like a handsome, brooding angel.
But there was something that had been gnawing away at Lance for ages, and he just had to ask. “Why did you hate me so much when we first met?”
“Everything about you just made me want you so badly. I still don’t know if I can control myself.”
Lance paused. He breathed in. He breathed out. He blinked. “What if I don’t want you to?”
Keith fell out of the tree.
He landed in from of Lance, face-planting into the dirt. Lance almost laughed, but instead he just snorted. The angel Lance compared him to earlier had fallen.
Keith looked up, his perfect, sexy face smeared with dark soil. It was the color of his soul. “I don’t understand you. You should be afraid of me.”
“Look, you just fell out of a tree. I don’t know what to tell you about your intimidation factor.” I would know what to tell you about your sexiness factor, Lance thought. Don’t say that out loud. It sounds stupid. “Besides, I’ve never been afraid of you. Only afraid of losing you. I feel like you’re going to disappear.”
Keith was so moved by Lance’s eloquent words that his dark eyes started to fill with bloody tears, the poetically gruesome liquid that emerged from the eyes of a vampire when it was very sad. It made his eyes look bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept in days. If he was human. He hadn’t slept in about a hundred years.
“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you,” Keith whispered, his voice hardly more than a millimeter above the sound of Lance’s heartbeat, the only heart still beating between the two of them. Lance couldn’t imagine anyone ever waiting for someone like him. It seemed ludicrous that some like Keith, beautiful, exquisite, emo-as-hell-but-makes-it-hot Keith, would give more than a flying fuck about Lance.
A finger of light found its way through the canopy of trees, illuminating Keith like God was a theater technician and Keith was the heavenly blessed star of the show. His inky black hair shone in the light, so dark that it almost looked blue. It was a sharp contrast against the paleness of his skin, which began to sparkle again, but then the light disappeared behind a malicious cloud as if nothing had happened. Lance wondered if Keith had even noticed. But, that must have been a sign. A sign indicating something that Lance was far from able to comprehend, but a sign from the heavens nonetheless. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Keith walked home with Lance. The journey was spent in silence, but it wasn’t the kind of awkward silence that would kill a unicorn if it lasted more than five seconds. It was warm like a red electric blanket being wrapped around his shoulders; it was warm and relaxing in the chilled air surrounding them. Lance had never known that a silence could feel so much like a sentence before; there was something unsaid that he heard in every breath, in every step, in every movement, something murmured through the air about their relationship without either of them having to say anything at all.
Keith didn’t kiss Lance goodnight before he left. Instead, he just nodded goodbye in a way that would seem normal and indifferent to most people, but Lance felt that there was another, deeper aspect to it, just like the silence. Keith made him feel like that, like there was something there even if no words were exchanged. And then Keith turned, and he was off into the dark night.
But that was still no excuse. Lance wanted to make out with the sexy vampire version of Nico di Angelo. That should come before late night angst fests in the woods, and he had no doubt that that was what Keith was getting up to during his alone time under the stars while the world lay sleeping around him. As Lance stared up at the ceiling of his bedroom, the colors all cool, muted blues like someone had taken the colors of the sky, lowered the saturation, printed out the photograph, and put it in a badly lit room, he started to realize…things.
About three things he was absolutely positive. First, Keith was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him, and he didn’t know how dominant that part of him might be, that thirsted for Lance’s Cuban blood. And third, Keith was an out-of-this-world babealicious smoking hot hunk of man meat.