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“Can I see your fangs?”
The request comes abruptly. It shatters the dozing silence that has fallen over them after their coupling and cleanup that leaves her lying on his chest, covered by a thin sheet.
“Why?”
She doesn’t answer him.
Evan opens his eyes and sees that she’s pillowed her head on a folded arm and, after he looks down, she reaches up with her free hand to trace her fingers over his lips. She doesn’t press hard enough to reveal his teeth; however, a hint of that desire lingers in her touch.
He lets her touch him, even tilting his head to brush his lips against the tips of her fingers in the ghost of a kiss, but keeps his eyes on hers.
“What are you thinking of?” He murmurs.
He can make an educated guess. In fact, she often seems to expect him to read her mind, perhaps out of shyness or perhaps due to her environment where she learned to rely on herself because no one else would listen to her. But he likes to hear her thoughts put into words. What she says, how she says it, and what she doesn’t say are just as important. After all, words have power. It’s how she merely needs to say his name and his attention will turn to her, regardless of where she is in the world, as if he’s listening to the voice of a supplicant carried across an immeasurable distance.
“I’m thinking…” she purses her lips and deliberates over her next words before finally confessing, “that you said you wanted to hand yourself over completely to me.”
He recalls her reference. This was one of their truth and dare games where he was asked if he treated everyone with warmth and consideration. His answer had been that it was a habit, cultivated by his family, to be a gentleman to everyone; however, he added that he didn’t act by habit around her and instead he wished to hand over his complete self to her.
Evan lets his eyes gain a meaningful weight as he moves them over her body: there are slight abrasions around her wrists from where he bound her with his tie, red and purple kiss marks are scattered all over her skin, her lips are still somewhat swollen, and there are even faint handprints on her waist and thighs.
Abruptly, Eugenie’s words and that night in West Castle come to mind. Is she his prey? Should he claim her? What will her blood taste like…?
He can’t see what his eyes are like right now; however, when he hears the stutter in her breath and the way her pulse skips a beat, he can easily guess that a crimson glow is bleeding into brown irises.
“Have I not?” But his voice and hands are gentle as he tucks the bed sheets tighter around her to prevent her from catching a chill. “There’s nothing interesting about my fangs.”
It’s a tactful rejection. Unexpectedly though, she continues the topic with a stubborn jut of her chin. “I mean more unconstrained. I can feel you’re still holding back.”
He doesn’t doubt her. Not with her talent after all.
“And you believe if I show my fangs I’m releasing a constraint?”
“Aren’t you?” she asks.
But the problem is… there hasn’t been a moment where he isn’t restraining himself. His whole life has been an incessant refrain of learning to control himself, learning to regulate his questions, learning to fence in his emotions, learning to endure pain and darkness, and learning even to breathe slowly. He wonders if it’s possible at all to release himself.
He thinks of a line in a book he read. “Your encounter with the world will be a desperate wail; all you’ll be able to do at first will be to cry. Everything will make you cry: light, hunger, anger.”
He thinks of his birth. How he’s merely a continuation of a bloodline and a talented blade to be used. Here he learned that even if he wails, no one will answer. To live is to suffer.
He thinks of his childhood. How his father only gave him halfhearted responses, all too eager to leave everything behind and run to his ideal family. How his mother also chose to escape their family through death. How he was thrown into that dark forest to see if he could crawl out alive. Here he learned it’s useless to ask questions, only that he should do as told.
He thinks of his teenage years. How he was tested again and again by being made to take life after life, spilling innocent blood. How any mistake would be whipped or clawed out of his back. He screamed at first, but fell quiet soon enough after he realized it made no difference. Here he learned to endure.
He thinks of the rabbit that disappeared, of how he slashed at his own wrist in desperation, and of how hatred burned through everything in him (“If I was warped by hatred would you dislike me?”) until even that consumed itself, leaving nothing but an emptiness inside of him. Here he learned to control himself, and to even breathe slowly.
But then he thinks again of that line in the book he read and what the girl on his chest told him. “Everything will make you cry: light, hunger, anger. Weeks will go by, months, before your mouth opens in a smile. Before your throat gurgles out a laugh. But you mustn’t get discouraged. And when the smile comes, when the laugh comes, you must give it to me.”
He thinks of how she refuses to be afraid of him because she’s adamant he’s never harmed her. He thinks of how she always meets his eyes, despite knowing the danger of looking into the eyes of one of his kind. He thinks of how every time he sheds one of his layers and shows the monster lurking underneath she insists on stepping forward, on finding something for him to live for, and on giving him delicate things to keep alive, such as a plant, a future, and herself.
Evan emerges out of his thoughts to find her staring at him, with a fixed concentration that makes him wonder if she’s also trying to hear the importance of what he says, how he says it, and what he doesn’t say.
“Alright.” Even though he yields to her, he interrupts when he sees her mouth open and brings up a hand to cover her bright eyes. “However, I’m not going to let you see them. You can only feel them.”
He bends his head down and presses his lips to hers, touching lightly there for a second, before he moves to the corner of her mouth, brushes along her jaw until he’s below her ear, and then slides his lips down her throat slowly. The monstrous instincts within him aren’t another side; he is the monster and loosening his control is as simple as exhaling.
His fangs slip out, shedding their human cover, and he can feel her heartbeat pick up wildly. The rush of her blood grows louder in his ears at every passing second. All her reactions are a natural physiological response, like the bleating alarm in a lamb when it’s led to a stone slab.
It’s only when her pulse is racing faster than he’s ever heard it before that he stops on a random spot and asks gently, “May I?”
“Of course,” she says at the same time she lets her head go limp, presenting her throat to him like an offering.
But as he presses his fangs to her, feels the way her skin bends down beneath the sharp points until it tears, and beads of blood well up around his fangs, he wonders who is the real pilgrim here.
Is she his prey? Should he claim her? What will her blood taste like…?
Of course she isn’t. Naturally he won’t. And she tastes of living.