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Out of the corner of your eye, you notice him.
In the garden, between the trees, two pin pricks of light in the darkness.
It could be anything; a cat, a fox, a ditchling. But you know.
When he sees you see him, he vanishes as quickly as if he were never there at all, and you could believe that if you wanted to. That it was a trick of the light, that you’re just tired from all the insanity of the past evening and your mind’s playing tricks on you.
As it stands, you don’t even believe he’s really gone.
And there’s something about that. About being watched. You know nothing about this man (and already that word is starting to feel insufficient, or at least not quite accurate), only caught the haziest of glimpses of him in your cousin’s headlights in a moment of sheer baffled terror, but you can still hear the way he spoke.
“Welcome home.”
His words weren’t like words at all, were something altogether different, starting as a shimmering over your skin, soft and luring and warm-bright, and then burying themselves deep and squirming beneath, like maggots, like something wrong.
So maybe you’re still addled by them when you decide to put on a show.
You fell asleep in your clothes last night, the all black ensemble you put together because you had some strange Victorian inclination that you were supposed to show up to your cousin’s house already pre-dressed for mourning. Your outfit is mussed from sleep and spattered with dirt from the woods, but when you unbutton your shirt just enough to let it fall softly down and expose your shoulders, to cling gauzily over your breasts just enough to stop them from spilling out, you know well enough how you look.
Back in the city, this sort of thing got you your reputation.
There’s a shift in the treeline. Just barely. You smile.
It’s encouragement enough to let the shirt fall entirely, to let him look, and the idea of him drinking you in makes you dizzy, bold, even if you’re half-certain you’re imagining it.
There’s just something about him. Rot and decay and grave-dirt. A being like that would surely be tantalised by the life thrumming beneath your flesh, should crave it as naturally as any drowned man would crave air.
You drop your skirt with very few theatrics, far too excited now, desperate only to be seen by him, and when your shaking fingers go to your underwear you catch sight of him again. Glowing eyes, (you notice they’re veiled now, as if he’s ashamed to show his face) dragged forward beyond the treeline as if by an invisible leash gripped in your hands.
It brings you to a stop. You know well enough that you should never give somebody everything they want right away, and you pull back from the waistband of your underwear in light, dancing movements, feeling his eyes on every shift of your fingers. Even as you do so, there’s a sensation of loss, an aching hunger for him to bear witness to all that you are, but you press on, control yourself even as you ache to control him.
You catch his eye, and smile again, the teasing kind you figured out could get you anything you wanted back in high school, and turn from the window with a careless toss of your hair, heading for the shower.
The slightest tug of guilt churns inside you. You saw a man die last night, yet all you can think of as the water hits you is the white hot glow of those eyes.
Oscar’s house is monstrous and awful and the worst experience of your life and Wayne is by your side for as much of it as he is able to be.
He says a lot of things you don’t understand, not logically, but that twist somewhere in the depth of your psyche as wrong and frightening. The part of you that knows things learns ravenously and it scares you far more than any mine collapse, any creature lurking in the woods.
In the end, he’s the one who gets you out. The one who saves everyone. As you stumble your way to the exit, you are vaguely aware of his steadying hand on your shoulder. It’s the first time he has touched you, and something in you aches at the sensation.
Your friends are safe and sound, brushing off their shirts and pants and, in some cases, staring dazedly into the middle distance. Once he’s said his piece, Wayne makes to leave, but you stop him briefly, the softest grasp on the solid mass of his upper arm.
“Will I see you tonight?” You speak quietly, but not so quiet that Avery and Kaneeka don’t share alarmed glances in your periphery.
Wayne makes that choking noise you’ve decided is laughter, and his tone is decidedly amused when he replies, “I’ll see you.”
With that, he leaves, and you’re left to turn back to your friends with all the shame and horror of the deal you didn’t take on your shoulders, and nobody who could forgive you for what you refused to give up in any way that you could possibly believe.
“Okay,” Kaneeka starts, glancing between you and the space where Wayne just stood, “what was that about?”
You swallow, scratch the back of your neck, smile sheepishly, and for a moment the simple act of being embarrassed about your crush on a walking putrefied corpse is enough to shield you from the hell of your night. Kaneeka’s eyes widen, Avery smirks in a way that suggests they might actually get it and the tender fragment of peace is bulldozed entirely by Oscar’s shaky, forgiving approach.
His kindness is infinite, and far beyond what you could ever deserve.
It makes you want to escape while you still have chance.
In the guest bedroom of the Estate, you and Wayne’s eyes are all that exist.
You shed your clothes like you can somehow rip the past hours away along with the fabric, and there’s no artifice, no seduction to any of it. Your hunger has grown, and you are bruised and battered, and you must have his eyes on you or you might actually die.
Pressing your naked body against the window, you search the garden for any sign of him, but deep down you know he’s looking whether you catch him or not. The thought thrills you, drags a soft whine from your throat, and you lower your hand painfully slowly, teasing yourself as much as you’re teasing him.
From the first slight touch, your head falls back, a sigh of relief pouring out of you. You press into your own wetness and imagine his eyes raking over you.
More than that—you think of his hands, blood-swollen and purpled, bruised and dripping viscera, trailing over your body, searching, groping at the thrumming life underneath. How would it feel? What kind of pleasure is he capable of giving to you? The thoughts send you into a bonelessness that has you clutching at the window pane, lost in pleasure, giving yourself to it completely, thoughtless, finally free, until—
Scrape.
The sound of the door opening horrifies you, and you stop in an instant, whirling to face the intruder. Your first, ridiculous thought is that your cousin has come to check on you, has caught you in the most compromising position you could possibly fathom.
But it isn’t Tabitha.
Glowing eyes peer at you through a slither of darkness. The door is barely ajar, opened just enough for him to watch you. Which is, of course, enough. You can hear the sick rattle of his breathing from where you stand. It takes everything in you not to invite him in.
Instead, you move to the bed. You go slower now. The sight of him has eased your hunger somewhat, and to feel his gaze is almost as nourishing as his touch, or at least your own simulacrum of it. You meet his eyes as you fall breezily into the sheets, posing in a way that anyone else would have to pass off as joking.
His eyes shift along your body and his breath hitches as your hand falls once more in between your legs. Even you find yourself surprised by how wet you are, how his presence in the room has you dripping down your thighs, and you dip a finger inside yourself just so he can watch you taste it.
It’s giddying, electrifying, having only the faint sound of his breathing and the twitching of his white hot eyes to go off, yet knowing you have his rapt attention. You can’t help but perform, moaning prettily at the slightest touch, arching your back, fucking yourself on your fingers to show him how you’d take him if such a thing was medically possible.
But it’s also a little too hot, and once you begin to rub your cunt in earnest you know you aren’t going to last long at all. When you groan and whimper now, there is no performance to it, only desperation, and your whole body trembles as the feeling closes in on you. Your gaze doesn’t leave his eyes even once.
“Wayne,” you whine, the name half smothered by your fist, and you hear a noise from the doorway halfway between a gasp and a grunt, and it’s this that sends you spilling over the edge, shaking your way through your orgasm, your thighs gripping around your own hand.
You’re spent, breathless, and there’s a long moment in which everything seems like it might just stay black forever. You struggle, fruitlessly, to remember the last time anyone made you come this hard.
By the time you come back to yourself, he’s gone.
You’re still shaking on the walk back from Reese’s house. Wayne is silent beside you.
Scarlet Hollow has shown you a whole lot of absurd, terrifying shit, but even after several days of insane nonsense, a creature like that has you more rattled than you’ve ever been in your life. The anger that radiated from him, the creaking of bones that hailed his transformation, the bald violence of his every move—all of it feels branded into your memories, already there every time you close your eyes or let your mind go even briefly quiet.
And you set him free. Perhaps simply because you liked the idea that you could.
You look at Wayne from the corner of your eye. His ripped shirt, the thin scratches just visible on the swollen, purpling skin beneath. The scent of paint splatter mixes with the wounded stink of him in a mix of chemicals and earthy rot that should under no circumstances be heady, but to you it somehow is.
It’s difficult to express how relieved you are that he’s okay. He laughs when you try, like the idea of him being hurt is the most ridiculous thing you could possibly suggest. But still. It’s the first time you’ve ever seen him come close to danger. Until now, he’s seemed impenetrable, something so separate from the fabric of this world that it was natural to assume it could never touch him. You did not like to see him damaged.
As you crest the hill towards the Scarlet Estate, you reach for his hand.
He pulls back, as if on instinct, and you turn to him, look him forcefully in the eye. “I’m not afraid of you.”
There is a long moment of what feels like hesitation before he seems to collect himself. You’ve made him nervous. You’ve done that enough to people for the fact to be immediately obvious, and you realise that maybe you do like to see him like this after all. Vulnerable. Thrown off his pre-planned little game. Maybe it’s fine if you’re the one who does it to him.
He allows his fingers, infection-stiff, fever-hot, to brush against your own for a few moments. You can hear his breathing, rough and fast in the too-quiet night. Your heart hammers in your chest. This brief touch feels somehow a thousand times more intimate than what you did last night.
Then he pulls away, fast and fumbling, and the loss is both an ache and a relief.
“It seems I’m not the only one affected,” you tease.
He folds his arms over his chest protectively, glancing away from you. “I’m glad it makes you so happy to notice that.”
The two of you spend the rest of the walk in silence, but there’s a new feeling thrilling over your skin now, newly distracting you from the hellish memories of tonight. You can’t stop sneaking stupid glances at him, as if there’s anything there to see but a stained and torn veil shifting over an unknowably destroyed face. It doesn’t stop you, convinced you can catch some evidence of how you’ve flustered him from the bright empty glow of his eyes.
When you reach the edge of the Estate, you can imagine so vividly what it’d be like to pull back his veil and force a kiss upon the ruin of his mouth. You wonder if he’d let you. You wonder how much of a health hazard it would be. You wonder if you even care.
There’s no kiss. He leaves you only with some cryptic words and a single glance over his shoulder before he vanishes into the dark copse of trees.
It takes you longer than you’d ever admit to tear your gaze away from the forest and drag yourself to your room.
When you wake up in the Forbidden Wing, you know Wayne must have carried you there. Even with a pair of possums clinging to your nightgown, you find yourself dizzy with want for him. You wonder briefly, not for the first time, if you’re going insane.
But it’s obvious, has been obvious, the bond between you, the myriad strings that bind you to him and him to you. So it’s only natural, surely, to want to make that bond a little more physical.
You’re only surprised that he’s the one that makes it happen.
After the kiss, it takes you a long time to peel yourself from the floor. Every nerve in your body feels alive and shining with ecstatic pleasure, like pinpricks running across the shell of your skin. He was gentle, tender, and, you begin to realise, overcome far too fast.
As the feeling fades, you are frustrated to the point of distraction. He knows you want him, has no qualms about holding your sleeping body against his chest and setting you gently to rest in a secret room beyond your closet, but still refuses to take you entirely.
It is maddening.
The moon hangs low over the Scarlet Estate. You have had a horrible couple of days. Your clothes are damp and stink of mildew, your mind is in tatters, but when you slink into the guestroom to find Wayne waiting for you, none of it seems to matter all that much.
“I’ve missed you,” you breathe, like it's been weeks.
He stands on ceremony and the choking scent of him fills the room, wet and foul and evil. There’s that saccharine sweetness of decay, the sour stink of a wound unhealing. You approach him until it envelopes you entirely, until he takes you into his arms and you press your face into the sticky mass of his broad chest.
“Do it again,” you demand. When you open your mouth, you breathe him in. It doesn’t repulse you at all, proof, you suppose, of the intensity of the bond between you. Or the fact you’ve completely lost your mind.
You feel, rather than hear, the half-chuckle that rumbles in his chest. “What do you want me to do?”
“Kiss me.” The words come out far more petulant than intended. Whiny, some might say.
He doesn’t seem to mind. “I think you can take more now,” he says, lifting you easily, lowering you gently into the dusty sheets of the guest bed.
He looms over you, arms caging you in on each side of your pillows, the pure size of him blotting out the rest of the room. It is easy enough to believe that you and he are all that exist.
“Give me all of it.” You meet his eye, brows furrowed, but for all your bravado it still feels like begging. “I can take it, Wayne. I want all of you.”
The veil over his face flutters with each breath, and part of you longs to rip it off to see the horror beneath, to prove him wrong in his belief that you couldn’t handle seeing it. It feels impossible to imagine anything about this being that could frighten you now, as close as you are.
“It’s too early for… everything,” he says. You move to sit up in riled indignation, but he presses you down with a gentle push of his hand on your chest. “That isn’t to say I can’t give you more. I can give you a lot more, just not yet.”
You bite your cheek in frustration, but your ache for him is stronger than any irritation you might feel. “Do it.”
A few more shuddering breaths, and then he’s reaching for your neck the same way he did in the wreck of the ballroom. His fingers are blood-swollen and calloused and gentle on your throat. There’s that same sharp feeling of pain, like the quick slip of a needle beneath your skin, and then it is only pleasure beyond imagining.
Somewhere, there comes a soft keening sound, half-moan, half-death rattle. Lost in the sensation of his touch, you can’t even tell which one of you is making it. Perhaps it’s both of you. All you know is that you are slumped against him, one of his arms making soothing motions through your hair, and that he is leading you through realms of feeling you never knew could exist.
It is endless, this new sensitivity, and it is deep within you, and it makes you writhe and whimper and cling to the blood-stained cotton of his t-shirt. It’s as if his soul is touching yours, softly, so softly, and every slight brush of the essence of yourself against him shoots sparks of bliss through every inch of you.
Your vision is lost in black iridescence. You move against him without meaning to, purely because such vivid sensations are too overwhelming to just lie still and take. You notice that he is trembling against you, and you understand now, with the connection between your souls so vividly clear to you, that he is holding back.
You wish he wouldn’t.
“I need… more…” He is holding you closer now, up off the bed, so there is no more space between his body on your own. It is as if you are one, or soon to be. It’s as if he’s drinking from you all that you are and taking you into himself. “Need you… inside of me…”
“I am inside of you,” he murmurs against your cheek. The veil feels uselessly thin, superfluous when you have experienced the endlessness of what he is. There should be no barriers between you now, nothing but this sensuous connection. You and Wayne and Wayne and You and the complete rightness of the two of you as one soul.
But he won’t give it to you. He insists on this pointless distance, however infinitesimal it might be, and so you fall just short of total fulfilment. It’s this that makes you aware once more of the ache between your legs. Suddenly, desperately aware. If he will hold back pleasure from within this ritual, then you can chase more of it in your own vulgar way.
You cant your hips up from the mattress, searching for any part of him to grind against, and he reacts with a soft hiss of surprise, the kind of noise he might make if you caught him off guard and slid a knife between his ribs.
“Insatiable,” he mutters, and if it’s meant to be a rebuke you certainly can’t tell by the way he pushes a leg between your thighs and holds your ass up to allow you to more easily rut against him.
This. This could be enough. Almost, almost. You ride his thigh with the last of your feeble strength, even as your whole body shakes from the exertion. Moans spill from your lips, and as you get closer it feels as if the bond between you is growing, tendrils spreading within your body, touching you in new, unfound spots. It’s like Wayne is struggling to keep himself contained. It feels a little bit like being eaten alive.
He’s shuddering against you. “We have to—stop—” The words come through gritted teeth. His voice sounds broken in a way you’ve never heard it. You want to learn how to make it sound like that as much as possible.
But Wayne is kind to you, always. Before he severs your connection, he pulls you tighter into the unyielding mass of himself and grinds his thigh against you in fast, trembling circles. His movements are rough, amateurish, and the sensation of his viscera-crisped jeans rubbing against your underwear is scratchy and uncomfortable and would probably disgust you if you thought about it for even a moment.
Even so, it takes only a few moments of his efforts for you to reach your orgasm, purely because you find it pretty all-consumingly hot that he’s taking such good care of you.
You cry out, quivering in his arms, and through the tender thread of connection between your souls, you can tell he feels it too. He slumps against you, the heavy weight of his body crushing into your shoulder, and even in your delirium you put all your focus into hearing the soft, drawn out grunt that passes through his lips against your collarbone. You feel, in this moment, that the most important thing in the entire world is memorising the sound he makes when he comes.
The two of you share a few breaths, still united. Your chest constricts against the suffocating weight of his body, of the new fresh hell of his scent, but you ignore it, desperate only for more of this closeness. But then he’s pulling out, away, stumbling backwards, mussed and panting and grasping at his veil to keep it in place.
Through glazed over eyes, you watch vaguely as he adjusts his sleeve and works shakily to compose himself. He looks oddly vulnerable, alone in the centre of your room. Visibly panicked. It feels like his eyes are a little wider than usual, though you have no idea how you’d be able to tell.
Your head is spinning. It is impossible to think about anything but him and the bliss he has given to you. Your body feels somehow both light as air and so heavy you struggle to imagine leaving bed for the next month.
“That was good,” you say, articulately.
He stares at you, chest still heaving. After a few long moments, he replies, “Yes.”
You smile, compelled by stupid delirium. It seems to you that he might just be everything you need and crave in the entire universe and that if you just let him consume you in every way possible, things will probably work out fine. You know well enough that the crazy sex he just did to you is, like, ninety-percent of the reason you feel that way. It doesn’t seem to make it any less true.
“Y’know, I don’t usually offer this to people… But, uh, you can stay.” You pat the bed next to you, and do your best to ignore the fact that your hand comes back sticky with a mysterious substance. “If you want.”
He eyes the space for a long while. “You always manage to surprise me,” he says.
“Is that bad?” You already know the answer, grinning lazily up at him.
“No.” He approaches with some trepidation, as if he’s considering changing his mind, but in the end settles into the bed next to you.
The two of you stare up at the canopy. “Do you… actually sleep?” You realise the question should have perhaps come before offering him a night in your bed.
He turns on his side, peering at you in the darkness. Everything smells of him. Probably a few decades of cleaning couldn’t bleach his presence out of this room now, out of your skin, your soul. “What do you think?”
Sleep is already dragging you away, even as you squint back at him. “‘m fine with a Twilight-type situation,” you murmur. You tug the pillow onto his chest so you can sleep on him without waking up to a cheek covered in toxic medical waste and curl up against him. “Goodnight, Wayne.”
You’re not sure how much time has passed, but you are shifted out of the blanket of sleep only briefly by the feeling of his hand resting in your hair.
“Goodnight," he says.