THIRTEEN

Qhuinn entered the mansion through the vestibule. Which was a mistake.

He should have gone into the mansion through the garage, but the truth was, those coffins stacked up in the corner freaked him out. He always expected their lids to open and some kind of Night of the Living Dead to whassup the ever living crap out of him.

He so needed to get over being a pussy, however.

Courtesy of his case of the nancys, the instant he pushed his way into the foyer, he got a clear shot at Blaylock and Saxton coming down the grand staircase, the two of them all GQ'd up for Last Meal. Both wore slacks, not jeans, and sweaters, not sweatshirts, and loafers, not shitkickers. They were clean-shaven, cologned, and coiffed, but they were not she-males in the slightest.

Frankly, that would have made things a lot easier.

For fuck's sake, he wished one of the SOBs would RuPaul their shit and go all feather boa and fingernail polish. But no. They just kept looking like two too-hot males who knew how to spend their money at Saks ... while he, on the other hand, gutter-snaked it up in his leathers and his muscle shirts - and in the case of tonight, sported hair styled by rough sex, and cologne, if you could call it that, from the same line of slut-care products.

Then again, he was willing to bet all that separated them from the state he was in was a hot, soapy shower and a visit to the ol' closet: Dollars to licks they'd been in a clinch all night. They were looking far too satisfied as they headed for a meal they were no doubt starved for.

As they hit the mosaic depiction of an apple tree in full bloom, Blay's set of blues shifted over and pulled a head-to-heel on Qhuinn. The guy's face didn't show any reaction. Not anymore.

That old flare of pain was nowhere in sight - and not because Qhuinn's recreations weren't perfectly frickin' obvi.

Saxton said something and Blay looked away ... and there it was. A blush on that lovely pale skin as blue eyes met gray ones.

I can't do this, Qhuinn thought. Not tonight.

Avoiding the whole dining room scene, he headed for the door beneath the stairs and put the thing to good use. The instant it closed behind him, the chatty patter of people talking was cut off and silent darkness rushed up to greet him. Which was more like it.

Down the shallow stairs. Through another coded door. Into the underground tunnel that ran from the main house to the training center. And now that he was alone, he ran out of gas, making it only about two feet before his legs stopped working and he had to lean against the smooth wall. Letting his head fall back, he closed his eyes ... and wanted to put a gun to his temple.

He'd had that redhead back at the Iron Mask.

Had that hetero good and hard.

And it had happened exactly the way he'd predicted, starting with the pair of them yakking it up at the bar and checking out the chicks. Not long after, a set of double-Ds had gone trolling by on black platform boots. Talked to her. Drank with her ... and her friend. Hour later? The four of them were in a bathroom, squeezed in tight.

Which had been part two of the plan. Hands were hands in cramped spaces, and when there was a lot of moving and pawing going down, you could never be sure who was touching you. Stroking you. Feeling you up.

The whole time they'd been with the chippies, Qhuinn had been strategizing on how to get rid of the females, and it had taken waaay longer than he'd wanted. After the sex, the girls had wanted to hang out some more - trade numbers, kibitz, ask if they wanted to go out for a bite.

Yeah, right. He didn't need no digits, because he was never going to call them; he wasn't into kibitzing even with people he liked; and the sort of bite he could offer them had nothing to do with greasy-ass diner food.

After filing the requests under Bitch, Please in his head, he'd been forced to brainwash them into leaving - which had led him to a rare moment of pity for human males who didn't have that luxury.

And then he and his prey had been alone, the human male recovering against the sink; Qhuinn pretending to do likewise against the door. Eventually there had been eye contact, casual on the human's side, very serious on Qhuinn's.

"What?" the man had asked. But he'd known ... because his eyelids had grown heavy.

Qhuinn had reached behind himself and turned the lock so they wouldn't be disturbed. "I'm still hungry."

Abruptly, the redhead had stared at the door like he'd wanted to leave ... but his cock had told a different story. Behind the button fly of those jeans ... he got hard.

"No one will ever know," Qhuinn had said darkly. Hell, he could have made it so the redhead didn't remember - although as long as the guy hadn't tweaked to the whole vampire thing, there'd been no reason to pull out the skull Swiffer and clean things up.

"I thought you said you weren't gay...." The tone had been on the plaintive side, as if the man hadn't felt entirely comfortable with what his body wanted.

Qhuinn had closed the distance between them, putting his chest against the redhead's. And then he'd grabbed the back of the guy's neck and yanked him over to his mouth. The kiss had done what it was designed to do: get all that thinking out of the bathroom and leave nothing but sensation behind.

Shit had gone from there. Twice.

When it was over, the guy hadn't offered his number. He'd gotten off spectacularly, but it was clear that it had been a first-and-only experimental thing on his end - which was just fine with Qhuinn. They'd parted without a word, each going on about his life, with the redhead heading back to the bar ... and Qhuinn leaving to go wander the streets of Caldwell alone.

Only dawn's imminent arrival had made him return here.

"Fucking hell ..." he said to himself.

The whole night had been a lesson in scratching poison ivy - yes, there were times in life when proxies worked: at a council meeting, for example, when you sent someone else to give your vote. Or when you needed something from a supermarket and you gave your list to a doggen. Or when you'd promised to play pool, but were too drunk to hold your stick, so you got someone else to snap your balls.

Unfortunately, the proxy theory most certainly did not work when you wished you had been the one to take someone's virginity, but you hadn't, and your best follow-up idea was to go to a club, find someone with a similar physical trait, like ... oh, say ... hair color ... and fuck them instead.

In that proxy situation, you ended up feeling hollow, and not because you'd come your brains out and were floating on a little postcoital cloud of ahhhhh, yeah.

Standing in this tunnel, all by himself, Qhuinn was utterly empty in his own skin. Ghost-towned from the inside out.

Too bad his libido was far from out of bright ideas. In the quiet solitude, he started to imagine what it would be like if it were him instead of his cousin coming down with Blay for dinner. If he was the one sharing not just a bed, but a bedroom with the guy. If he stood up to everyone and said, Hey, this is my mate -

The mental lockdown that followed that little ditty was so complete, he felt like he'd been punched in the head.

And that was the problem, wasn't it.

As he rubbed his mismatched eyes, he thought back on how much his family had hated him: He'd been raised to believe his genetic defect of having one blue and one green iris meant he was an abnormal freak, and they'd treated him as an embarrassment to the bloodline.

Well, actually it had been worse than that. They'd ended up kicking him out of house and sending an honor guard to teach him a lesson. Which was how he'd ended up a wahlker.

To think they'd never known about the other "abnormalities" he harbored.

Like wanting to be with his best friend.

Christ, he so didn't need a mirror to see himself for the coward and the fraud he was ... but there was nothing he could do about it. He was locked in a cage with no key that he could find, years of his family's derision boxing him in and cramping him: The truth behind his wild side was that he was a straight-up pussy. Blay, on the other hand, was the strong one. Tired of waiting around, he'd declared who he was and found somebody to be with.

Fucking hell, this hurt ...

With a curse, he cut off the premenstrual monologue and forced himself to get walking. With each footfall, he tightened himself up, duct-taping his messy inner workings together and fortifying his leaky pipes.

Life was about change. Blay had changed. John had changed.

And he was next on the list, apparently, because he couldn't keep going like this.

As he entered the training center through the back of the office, he decided that if Blay could turn over a new leaf, so could he. Life was what you determined it to be; regardless of where fate put you, logic and free will meant you could make your cabbage patch anything the fuck you wanted.

And he didn't want where he was: Not the anonymous sex. Not the desperate stupidity. Not the burning jealousy and nagging regrets that got him nowhere.

The locker room was empty, as there were no training classes going on, and he changed by himself, getting naked before pulling on black running shorts and a pair of black Nikes. The workout room was likewise an echo chamber, and that was just as well.

Firing up the sound system, he flipped through the shit with the remote. When Gorillaz's "Clint Eastwood" came on, he went over to a treadmill and got on the thing. He hated working out ... just despised the mindless gerbil nature of it all. Better to fuck or fight, he'd always said.

However, when you were stuck indoors because of the dawn, and were determined to try to give celibacy a shot, running to get nowhere seemed pretty frickin' viable as an energy suck.

Juicing up the machine, he hopped on and sang along.

Focusing on the white-painted concrete across the way, he pounded one foot after another, again and again and again, until there was nothing to his mind or his body except the repetitive footfalls and the beat of his heart and the sweat that formed on his bare chest and stomach and back.

For once in his life, he did not go for breakneck: The speed was calibrated so that his pace was a steady churn, the kind of thing he could sustain for hours.

When you were trying to get away from yourself, you gravitated to the loud and obnoxious, to the extremes, to the reckless, because it forced you to scramble and hang on with your clawing nails to cliffs of your own self-invention.

Just as Blay was who he was, Qhuinn was the same: Even though he wished he could be out and with the ... male ... he loved, he couldn't make himself go there.

But by God, he was going to stop running from his cowardice. He had to own his shit - even if it made him hate himself to the core. Because maybe if he did, he'd stop trying to distract himself with sex and drinking, and figure out what he did want.

Apart from Blay, that was.

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