Page 6 of Sanguine
“What do you say we skip dinner?” Bastien asks, interrupting my panicked self-recriminations. “I’ll feed you at my house.”
I blink at him. “What?”
He leans forward, a lock of hair tumbling over his forehead and his dark eyes flashing with some strong emotion I can’t identify. “Aaron, I’m sitting across from a strapping ex-priest who’s been flaunting his naked throat at me all evening, and now he tells me he’s a virgin. The reins of my control are understandably snapping.” He digs out some cash for the wine and tosses it on the table, and before I can say anything, he’s taking my hand and hauling me easily to my feet and tugging me out the door.
Confused but also flattered and also hoping this means what I think it does, I follow Bastien, trying not to look like I’m getting dragged off to slake a vampire’s obscene needs. My dick gives a heavy twitch at the thought, stirring and lengthening until I’m swollen enough that I have to adjust myself so I don’t look like a walking teen-movie gag.
“When did you leave the priesthood?” Bastien asks once we’re on the footpath back to his house. He’s in a white button-down shirt, and the setting sun outlines all those flat, dense muscles underneath the fabric. He’s built lithe and lean and graceful, and I have the sudden image of him crawling over me like a huge cat, eyes hot with hunger.
I’m too distracted to answer him. “I—what?”
Bastien sighs. “Look, I know learning you’re virginal in the extreme should make memorecareful with you, and probably we should have, like, five more dinner dates and some long talks about intimacy before I even think about touching you, but I’m a vampire, okay? I’m sorry, but I’m one of your sexy grunts away from taking your virginity in between some shrubs while the wallabies watch, and it’s been a century or two since I’ve needed to fuck like this, and I’m barely hanging on, so what I need to happen right now is I need you to help distract me until we get back to my house and I can at least give you some privacy before I put my mouth all over you. Got it? Good. Now talk to me. When did you leave the priesthood?”
Too many feelings for me to process are crowding my chest and stomach. Lust and shyness and gratitude and fear and more fear.
So I just try not to think about all that and give him what he wants instead. It’s easy, in a thrilling kind of way, to surrender to his bossiness. “I was officially dismissed from the clerical state four months ago. The Church was … reluctant, I guess. There are not so many of us left now that they can easily let even one go.”
“Not so many priests?” Bastien asks.
“Not so many priests who are trained as I was,” I clarify.
“Ah, in the Order of Saint Marcellus, you mean,” Bastien says, and I’m surprised.
“You’re not supposed to know that name,” I tell him.
Bastien makes a scoffing noise. “Vampires aren’t supposed to know the name of the ancient order sworn to hunt them down?”
“It’s supposed to be secret; we’re forbidden to whisper it to anyone outside the order, even in the throes of death. Who did you learn it from?” I frown, thinking of all the reasons a priest of the Order might break his vow. “Did he tell you under duress?”
“You mean, did I torture it out of someone?” Bastien asks dryly. “No. I earned that knowledge honestly. How long were you a priest?”
“Ten years. What do you mean you earned it honestly?”
A wallaby hops across the road, stopping to look blankly at us and then moving along after a moment. Bastien watches it, his face growing distant. “It was a long time ago,” he says finally, which doesn’t really answer my question. “When I was mortal. Why did you become a priest?”
There it is again, that urge to do as he says. I answer him without worrying that I sound grunty or stupid or overeager, even though this is the most I’ve spoken aloud at one time in the last four months, and it feels strange. “I grew up in a small town an hour outside of Toowoomba. There’re as many churches as there are houses, or so it felt like. Praying was in my blood, but so was fighting, and it felt like there was nowhere good a big, hot-blooded boy like me would end up, but my childhood priest wanted to help. He sent me to his mentor in Brisbane, and they promised if I went to seminary and was ordained, they’d find the right place for me. And that’s how I ended up in Rome, inducted into the Order.”
“Hmm,” Bastien says. A warm breeze ruffles up the road, and when I look over, his shirt is clinging to every contour of his torso and chest. And his trousers are clinging too, and I see the distinct outline of a large erection—the same one I did my best not to gawk at this morning. Bastien wasn’t lying about wanting me. And I want this vampire to want me. I want him to touch me and make me bleed and make me come. I want it so much my body hurts trying to hold all the wanting—and the terror ofwhoI want—inside it.
“I think,” Bastien says, “you’ve just explained thehow. And not the why. Don’t forget I can taste your belief, Aaron. You became a priest because you wanted to, not because it was the only choice you had, and I want to know why.”
I grunt a little, not sure how to answer this. Somehow I know he won’t settle for the short and easy answers I gave when I was in the process of ordination—theI feel calledandI want to serve God as much as I can, the kinds of answers that are as expected as they are reductive. And I can’t make a fool out of myself more than I already have.
I decide to give him the truth, as intimate and ephemeral as it is.
“I always knew I loved God,” I explain, “because I always knew He loved me. When I was a boy, I would go out to my family’s fields and watch the sky at night. We were way out in the bush, and there weren’t any lights, and the sky was dripping with stars. So many stars that it felt like I could hold out my hand and they’d fall into my palm like rain. Like all I had to do was ask and God would fill my heart with stars like He filled the cisterns and wells and lakes with water, and who wouldn’t want to serve a God like that?”
“Who indeed,” Bastien murmurs, something tender curling into his words. “Do you still believe that? That God will fill your heart with stars if you ask?”
“Yes.”
“So the boy on the farm became a priest because he grew up with stars raining light on him night after night, and it felt like God Himself was covering him in a net of pure love.” Bastien’s voice is still tender, but it’s tight too, as if he’s upset. “There are many worse, and cheaper, reasons to become a priest, Aaron. My hat is off to you.”
We turn onto the narrow road that leads to the expensive houses celebrities like to rent—a road I’ve patrolled a few times since starting my job here. Bastien doesn’t say anything as we approach the discreet gates of his home, and I’m starting to feel like I’ve said something wrong.
“Bastien,” I say, feeling clumsy with my words, as usual, “did I make you angry with me? By talking about God?”
Bastien lets out an indignant huff, and I almost smile. He’s sofunny, this bloodthirsty painting of a man, he’s so open. It only took ten years of vampires and death to become a silent gargoyle, but that he’s managed to live lifetimes and still be funny and honest and adorable—it’s astonishing, really.
