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“Stay,” says Jasper.
Once you’ve met a vampire, Guy finds, it’s remarkably easy to tell them apart from the common folk. It’s in the eyes. Jasper’s are the same shade as ice chips, sharp and crisp. All vampires have too-wide eyes, too-vivid, like some brilliant predator evolutionary trait that distracts their prey from their fangs. But before you really notice that they’re not, vampires seem very human, in the same kind of way that a celebrity might seem touchable. Almost relatable, almost personable, but not quite there.
In any case, he’s not going to stay. Jasper is charismatic and handsome in a strange, unearthly way; Guy remembers belatedly that he can also read Guy’s thoughts and attempts to brick-wall them, but the curve of Jasper’s mouth tells him he hasn’t been entirely successful. His head hurts. The alprazolam in his back pocket feels like it’s burning through the denim. Guy takes a step back, then reaches for his pills once Jasper doesn’t follow. Takes one. Swallows it dry, trying to ignore the pointed way Jasper is staring at his bobbing throat. “I need to get back,” he says. Guy glances at where Jasper’s elbow is currently pushing the door closed. He grimaces. “Please.”
“Sure, man,” Jasper agrees. The way he talks is very unconventional for a man who looks to be in his sixties, and perhaps even more unconventional for a vampire. He seems like one of those rock stars who fizzled out in the nineties and have spent the remainder of their years snorting coke and hooking up with the fifty-somethings that hadn’t gotten into their pants a couple decades ago. Jasper chuckles—fuck, Guy really needs to work on that. As soon as he forgets to consciously block him, Jasper wheedles his way back into his mind.
“Thanks,” says Guy, slipping out the door as Jasper holds it open for him. He starts down the hallway, then takes a half-assed crack at Jasper’s own thoughts. Nice try, thinks Jasper, and Guy turns around just in time to see the ivory crook of his grin before the door shuts.
He wonders, on the walk home, why Jasper had let him go. Guy won’t pretend to understand the schemes of vampires or the Talamasca, but even he finds it strange. Helen must be scraping at the walls trying to figure out where he’d gone, why he’d missed a drop, and when he gets back to his apartment she’ll no doubt round him up, question him, then probably inject a tracker under his skin for his troubles.
Guy stops walking. Around him, the London night is quiet and still. It’s that odd time between the death of the nightlife and the start of the work day. A car drives past him up the road and he watches until its taillights vanish into the fog. He doesn’t really want a tracker under his skin. Would Jasper put a tracker on him? He may have already. He doesn’t think he’d have been allowed to leave without something tethering him to Jasper, whether his location or something else.
The thought, oddly enough, brings him some comfort. About Jasper specifically; both he and the Talamasca behave the same way, as though they know what’s best for him. Out of the two of them, he figures Jasper actually might. Maybe it’s the novelty or maybe it’s just that he’d appeared when Guy was at his last thread, when he’d been begging for some semblance of a path forward, and there was Jasper, sliding into the room in his immaculately tailored suit and that thin, uneven lilt of his mouth.
He hadn’t expected Jasper to let him leave. Figured he was too useful, or figured Jasper would have drained him if he hadn’t been what he’d expected. But he’d been unceremoniously let go, dumped on the street just outside the motherhouse with the last vestiges of his confidence slowly fizzing away like a sip of champagne on the tongue. Now he trudges through the streets to his apartment, mouth bitten raw. He runs his teeth over his bottom lip, cracking open the scab that’d just started forming.
Guy checks the phone booth, just cursory, and finds another X there. He thinks of the phone underneath the trash bin in the park and decides he’ll figure it out tomorrow. His apartment is cold and empty—he checks, looking in the bathroom behind the curtain, near the fridge, and under his bed—and he crawls into bed buzzed all over. Jasper. He turns on his side, staring at the faint shadows of the people walking on the street above him, and falls asleep to the sound of their laughter.
He doesn’t go to the park the next morning. He’d meant to, but then he wakes up and finds Jasper in his kitchen, puttering around. “Morning,” he says in his funny American accent. Guy is from New York, but where his vowels are short, Jasper’s are long, languid. A drawl, he thinks.
“Texas,” Jasper supplies.
Guy startles a bit. “I was going to ask,” he says wearily.
“I’m making it easy for you,” says Jasper. He smiles at him. “Coffee?”
“Sure.” Guy sits at the table and watches as Jasper sets a chipped mug in front of him. It’s not a hotel he’s living in, it was furnished when he arrived, but the chip on the mug tells him someone used it before. Maybe this is where the Talamasca put all their agents. He peers inside and finds the coffee black. “Thanks.”
“Uh-huh.” Jasper sits next to him. There’s a chair across the table too, but this is better, mainly because Guy doesn’t have to look at him. He takes a sip. Jasper is rifling through his brain again—he recognizes the feeling now, like a cold hand sliding up his neck.
He’s angry about it, he finds. “What are you looking for?” asks Guy, voice sharp, and the hand on his neck vanishes.
“I forgot I can’t do that with you,” says Jasper languidly, even though he’s been doing it since he stepped into Guy’s apartment, probably. He just means he can’t do it without Guy noticing. “The Talamasca didn’t teach you anything, huh.”
The coffee scalds his throat on the way down. No, of course not. He’s their good lapdog, their boy. He remembers vehemently denying that last night—I’m not their fucking boy—but he’d been ready to find the phone they’d left for him this morning. If Jasper hadn’t ambushed him, he’d probably be figuring out what they wanted from him next. This, he realizes, is why Jasper had let him go. He’d wanted to see what Guy would choose. Then Guy had made his choice, however unconsciously, and Jasper had come down to his apartment to—to what? Scold him? Argue with him? Watch him drink his coffee?
He can feel Jasper start to poke at his mind again, mouth twitching, and he slams it shut before he can taste Guy’s horror. He swishes his next sip around in his mouth. Jasper had come for him. He was useful, or he was going to be, at least. Okay, he thinks, whatever. Let’s just see where this goes.
Beside him, Jasper’s face stretches in a wide smile.
The first matter of business is apparently fixing Guy’s abysmal mind shields. This is, Guy surmises, not what Jasper ultimately wants from him, but it’s a start, it’s something other than figure it out. God, he’s so tired of figuring it out.
Jasper cannot take him back to the motherhouse on account of it being morning. If they’d gone, Guy wonders if they’d have taken the tube. He imagines Jasper in his fancy scarf and ruffled button-up standing with his hand gripping one of the red poles, ignoring the giggling schoolgirls sitting behind him.
“That’s quite an imagination you have,” says Jasper. He’s dragged a chair from the table to be in front of the couch, where Guy is slumped over. It feels very much like meeting with a shrink.
“Do you?” asks Guy, smiling a bit. He turns his head to find Jasper already watching him. “Take the tube, I mean.”
“Not often,” Jasper admits. “It stops running at midnight.” The thought of a subway closing is an odd one; in New York, Guy sometimes takes the metro all the way out of Queens and spends the night schlumping up and down cracked sidewalks.
Jasper is already reading his mind, but he, charitably, does not offer his thoughts. He stares at Guy, ice-chip eyes dragging across his face. That’s worse than actually reading his mind, Guy decides. Just looking at him.
He looks back, if only because he’s helpless to do otherwise. Again, Jasper is handsome in that distinguished-yet-rumpled way, like he just rolled out of bed with a hangover the morning after a fundraising event. Guy hadn’t considered that vampires could be old—not that Jasper is old, really, just that he was definitely in his sixties when he was turned.
“Thanks, kid,” says Jasper, all exasperated, and his stomach swoops. Kid, boy. He must seem so very young to him. So very stupid. “At least try to block me out,” Jasper mutters. Scoots his chair closer so that his knee is only a few inches away from Guy’s elbow, curled up under his head. “Come on, kid.”
Guy throws up a wall before his embarrassment can seep through. It must show on his face because Jasper laughs, charmed, and prods at the wall. Fingers up his neck again. They wriggle between the cracks in each brick. Guy reinforces the wall, over and over, for what seems like several minutes before Jasper stops. It’s hard—he can’t focus on reading Jasper’s mind when he’s trying to keep his locked away.
“Good,” says Jasper with some measure of surprise. He looks like he might say more, but then he glances down at Guy, coiled up on the sofa with his eyes blinking back furious tears, and sighs. “Good.” Again, thinks Guy. He isn’t sure if Jasper hears it.
Fingers on his face. He almost thinks it’s Jasper trying to get into his mind again, but then they’re twisting through his hair, clenching around a thick section of dirty brown curls. “You’re a natural,” Jasper murmurs, turning his head so that Guy has to look at him again.
“I’m not,” says Guy helplessly. His mouth is dry. It’s been months, years since someone last touched him like this. Comforting him. He thinks of Keves, with her wild blonde ringlets and the dark mascara smudged under her eyes when she’d rolled him over and kissed him, laughing. It’s different, he thinks. Jasper is different.
Jasper’s eyebrows pinch together. The look in his eyes is stormy, glacial, and then gone just as quickly. “Yes,” he promises, “I’m different.”
When nightfall comes, Jasper starts to get up to leave. Guy stares after him, watching as he slips on fancy leather boots and winds his scarf around his neck once, twice. He isn’t sure how he feels about being left here. Whatever thoughts he has on it, he keeps behind his shields, but it doesn’t matter anyways as Jasper is occupied with shuffling through the coat closet.
“What are you looking for?” he asks, a mockery of this morning.
“Here,” says Jasper instead, and tosses something at him. It lands on his face and Guy peels it off. His coat. “C’mon. Let’s take the tube.”
Guy feels like a little kid being humored, but the feeling quickly dissipates by the time they get on the tube and he gets to witness Jasper, surrounded by a million different girls in sparkly tops giggling at him as he grips the red pole in the center of the carriage. Guy’s hand is just under his. Not touching. He glances up at Jasper. The train car smells like some mixture of every different girl’s perfume, lavender and vanilla and bergamot. Jasper is close enough for him to pick out his smell.
Having fun? asks Jasper, mouth unmoving.
I think so, Guy answers. Jasper’s mouth curves a bit, just to the side, like his smile is a secret thing between the two of them.
Paralyzed, he smiles back.