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Louis’s embarrassed every time Armand comes up here.
No good reason to be. He and Claudia do their best to keep a clean house if not a tidy one, and it’s nothing Armand hasn’t seen before, but something feels vulgar about their mimicry of humanity, something he only becomes conscious of when evidence of it passes under Armand’s amber eye. He resists the urge to pick up the ashtrays from the coffee table, to brush dust off the tops of the shelves as Armand comes through the door and closes it behind him. Hard to know what to do with his hands.
When was the last time he did this? Surely not when he was still human. But then—his vampire days were immediately consumed by Lestat, and here in Paris, he keeps his fumblings and huntings to the parks. And before Lestat... well, it wasn’t as if he was bringing his guys home then either.
It couldn’t possibly be true that Armand is the first man Louis has ever brought into his home for the purpose of sex. And yet, it seems that it might be.
He clears his throat, searches for something to say that might cut the tension.
Fifteen minutes ago, Armand was going to kill him. Now he’s standing in the foyer of his apartment, eyeing Louis. Poised as ever, but a little softer. A little more fragile. Waiting for Louis to do something.
Louis clears his throat.
“Can I get you a drink?” he says, dry.
It earns him a smile.
“Not tonight. Thank you.”
Louis turns and busies himself with the record player. He puts on some Billie Holiday. Don’t know why—there’s no sun up in the sky—stormy weather—
When he looks back over his shoulder, Armand is standing in the same place he was before, watching Louis. Whatever nerve got him to kiss Louis in the middle of the street seems to have vacated him. He hasn’t even taken his coat off.
Louis flashes him a smile.
“Sure you don’t want that drink?”
Another smile. He steps up to Louis. Closer, he smells of cigarette smoke, a cologne like cloves. Olfactory traces of grease paint and floor polish cling to the fibers of his clothes. That first impression he had when Armand approached him in the park returns to him now—a little boy masquerading as a man.
—keeps rainin’ all the time—
Armand kisses him deep and pushes a hand between Louis’s legs. Just like that, any sign of that shy boy is gone; Armand kisses dirty, licking Louis’s lips apart and trying to coax his tongue into his mouth. His body rolls against his. Louis catches his hips, bites Armand’s lower lip. He hasn’t gotten to kiss someone like this in so long. To kiss a man he knows, at that, a man he knows within the walls of his own home...
A rush of terror in him, suddenly, at how fast things are moving. And the terror brings something else.
“Did you forget where everything goes, mon cher?”
Louis opens his eyes.
Lestat sits on the arm of the couch. He’s in his shirtsleeves, the first buttons of his brown herringbone vest undone, the knot of his scarlet silk tie slipping wide. He leans forward with his chin in his hand, all déshabillé, watching Louis kiss Armand with an expression that looks a lot like amused pity on his face.
“Louis?”
Armand cups his cheek and brushes their lips together. Louis pushes that coat off his shoulders at last. It drops in a heap on the floor. Armand looks from it back to Louis, and it seems like that’s how the last of the ice breaks; they’re back on each other again. Their belts are the first things to go, and then—
“Ooh, you should tell him about the tie, cherie, isn’t that the one we bought at—”
Louis steps on the tie as he kicks his shoes off. Armand has shed his clothes faster. Under them, he’s surprisingly built; Louis slides his hands down his arms, liking the solidity of the muscle there. He grins.
“And you looked like such a little thing,” he says.
“I told him that too,” Lestat says from the couch, dismissive.
Armand kisses the corner of Louis’s mouth.
“It’s just flesh,” he murmurs.
Another kiss to the point of his chin, and then he sinks to his knees.
—I’m weary all the time—the time—so weary all the time—
He rubs his face on Louis’s hardening cock through his briefs, mouth open like he’s already imagining sucking it. His eyes are turned up to Louis. Jesus.
“Hi,” he whispers. Shy.
Louis caresses his cheek.
“Hey.”
Lestat gags in the corner.
But Louis didn’t spend decades in his company without learning how to ignore him; he combs his fingers through Armand’s hair and leans back against the side table where the record still plays as the other vampire presses hungry, open-mouthed kisses to the cotton that covers his twitching cock. Louis hisses through his teeth. Armand reaches between his own legs to palm himself through his briefs. A lighter clicks; Louis smells smoke. Lestat has lit himself a cigarette and is leaned back against the wall where he’s perched on the couch arm—he can smell the smoke of Lestat’s cigarette, how is that possible?
—keeps rainin’ all the time—
“You can have it, honey,” he hears himself tell Armand.
Armand doesn’t need telling twice. He tugs Louis’s briefs down, and his cock springs free, blood-flushed, dewy at the tip. He wraps his hand around it, pumps it with his fist a few times, and Louis groans, curses under his breath.
Armand runs his tongue over his lips, then spits hard and messy onto the head of Louis’s cock. He chases it down to the root with his tongue, lifts his cock to rove down to his balls.
“Jesus—”
Slow, methodical, Armand slides his mouth back around him. His tongue is like velvet and almost mortal-warm. He must have fed earlier.
The song on the record changes, something more percussive and energized.
Up, down. Up, down. Louis’s core boils; he shifts his weight, and Armand takes one of his hands and lays it on the back of his head, a silent invitation that Louis doesn’t take. He just pets his hair as Armand works, and meets the amber eyes staring up at him so he doesn’t have to look at the watching figure on the couch.
Then Armand starts sucking, and Louis doesn’t have to worry about looking at anything.
He grabs the side table for support, his other hand tangling in Armand’s hair. The muscles in his thighs and his core go tight and hot. Armand works him through it, mouth sealed around his cock, moving in time with his fist. How often does he do this—Maître of the Paris Coven, lowering himself to his knees for somebody’s dick?
“How old are you?” Louis murmurs. He hisses as, with a loud pop of suction, Armand pulls off his cock. He blinks up at him, licking his lips. He strokes Louis with a slow, deliberate hand.
“How old do you think?”
“He’s a hag,” says Lestat from the corner.
Shut up, Louis thinks. Out loud, he says, “No idea.”
Armand gives the crown a little kitten-lick, then kisses it before sinking back down, cheeks hollowed. Louis catches his breath as his dick pops into Armand’s throat. Tight, warm.
His balls throb in Armand’s palm. Sweat on the backs of his knees. His clenching gut. Armand fucks his own face, his throat, on Louis’s cock. Louis’s nails scrape his scalp.
“Louis,” Lestat whispers.
Still the cigarette. Just watching. Smoke curls from Lestat’s nostrils, dragon-like. Tiny twin reflections of Louis falling apart in his dark eyes.
Funny, that his madness is capable of such detail.
—every road I walk along—I walk along with you—
He doesn’t warn Armand before he comes; Armand catches all of it anyway, maintaining the same steady rhythm and suction that got them there until Louis’s legs are shaking, and then he finally pulls his mouth off his cock. He wipes his lips with his fingertips, incongruously demure, and sits back on his heels, taking in Louis panting above him. Big eyes, like a doe. He leans his cheek against Louis’s thigh.
“Good?”
Louis huffs a laugh. He squeezes his eyes shut, forcing the dream from his head, and ruffles Armand’s hair.
“Now you’re just fishing.”
And suddenly, somehow, there’s a fourth man in the room, because he’s remembering Jonah and the peaty smell of the bayou around them. The fireflies.
What happened to him?
He strokes Armand’s sweat-damp hair.
He did me some face and I drove him home.
And then what?
“Louis?”
To the present. The now. Louis catches Armand’s hands, makes to pull him to his feet.
“Let me get you back.”
In response, Armand throws an image at him, and Louis inwardly winces at the splitting in his mind’s eye—Lestat in one retina, and in the other, Armand grinding his cock on Louis’s shoe while Louis fucks his drooling mouth with his fingers.
But Louis’s shoes got kicked somewhere under the coffee table and the sick desperation with which the imagined Armand looks up at him makes his gut ache, even in his afterglow.
“Why is that, mon cher?” Lestat smiles that Lelio smile. “Does it look familiar?”
He yanks his tie loose and blood explodes from his throat. It arcs ten feet to splatter the opposite wall. Louis flinches despite himself—how can he not, it’s like a goddamn fountain, and he can smell it, and Armand’s eyes are quickly shuttering where he kneels at Louis’s feet.
“I’m sorry,” he says, soft and quick. He gets to his feet. “What do you—”
“Shhhh.” Louis tries to shake it off. “It’s nothing. C’me here.” He guides Armand’s jaw up to kiss him, but Armand pulls back.
“Are you sure? Some men don’t like it after—”
“I’m trying to kiss you, and you wanna make a problem out of it?”
Armand laughs, looks askance, and Louis catches an image in his head, just a flash before Armand yanks frantically out of sight. All it is is a burst of light and agony, but Louis’s body recognizes the sensation as the same one he’d felt when Lestat’s knuckles connected with the bone above his left eye.
Lestat, still bleeding from the neck, pouts at him over Armand’s shoulder.
Armand looks a little embarrassed. Louis pets his neck, trying to unravel the tangle in his head. Himself, Lestat, the obvious and easily-interpreted storm cloud that hangs over Armand, Armand who’s eyeing him oh-so-carefully and doesn’t even seem aware he’s doing it.
He takes a gamble.
“Why don’t you show me, then.” He taps Armand’s lower lip. “Show me you’re all cleaned up.”
Armand blinks at him. A smile crosses his face, soft and secret. He licks his lips and then parts them.
“Wider,” Louis says.
Armand obeys. He opens his mouth fully and sticks his tongue out so Louis can see that he swallowed everything there was to swallow. Louis makes a show of inspection, tilts his head this way and that. He rests his thumb on the spongy tip of Armand’s tongue. Armand’s eyes glitter. He breathes in and out—slow, slow.
“Yeah, guess you are.” He pats Armand’s cheek. “Atta boy.”
Armand melts a little against him, and Louis finally kisses him, trying to concentrate on Armand’s mouth and not the itchy feeling in his chest or Lestat, who’s saying something brutal and boring about the fine fillies in Mister Du Lac’s stable. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
He kisses Armand to the couch and soaks up all the satisfaction he can from pushing Armand on it, watching him sprawl beneath him. Clearly it’s where Armand likes to be, too; he grins up at Louis with a dizzy kind of enjoyment, putting his arms over Louis’s shoulders as Louis climbs on top of him.
The phantom smell of blood and cigarette smoke is stronger here. Lestat makes no effort to move off the arm of the couch, even as they angle around to lay on it lengthwise. Louis noses into Armand’s throat, worrying the delicate skin there while Armand pants underneath him. The tell-tale gum ache of his fangs descending.
Armand lays a hand between his neck and Louis’s mouth.
“I meant what I said, before.” Shy quirk of his mouth. “No drink tonight.”
Louis blinks. The fangs were body-instinct. Feeding hadn’t really crossed his mind. But Armand seems to interpret his silence a different way.
“It’s not that I don’t—” He presses his chapped lips together. “There are things that I don’t want you to see.”
“Aww,” Lestat coos from behind. “Did somebody get his little heart broken? Quelle dommage.”
Louis nods.
“Okay.” He lifts Armand’s hand and sucks two of his fingers into his mouth. “That’s okay.” Mumbled around his fingertips.
“Not just yet. That’s all.”
Lestat snorts. “Look at him, he’s trying to get you to do it anyway. Miserable little alley cat.”
Louis ignores him. He finds the band of Armand’s briefs and gives it a playful snap. Armand wriggles under him.
“Still wearing those?”
Armand makes a move to slip them off, but Louis shakes his head.
“Uh-uh. I like unwrapping.” He hooks his fingers under his briefs. “Up you get.”
But Armand anticipated him, he’s planted his feet and already he’s arching up. Louis pulls the fabric down the curve of his ass, and as Armand settles back onto the cushions, he tugs them down his thighs, his calves, lifts his legs to free each ankle. Armand grins at him, shaky, giddy. The briefs hit the blood-spattered wall and drop pristine beside the side table. Billie Holiday wails on the record player.
—days I knew as happy sweet—sequestered days—
Armand all but yanks Louis down into the crook of his open legs and open arms for a hungry kiss. Louis could get used to this. Last person he really got to kiss was—
“Who?” Lestat asks, all innocent. He gasps. “Ooh, was it me? You mean you haven’t been a bad boy even once since—”
Someone new, is the point. Somebody he gets to figure out as he goes and won’t have to kill and drink at the end of the night. His cock is starting to get hard again, nudging the line of Armand’s pelvis. Armand licks his lips.
“Hello again,” he murmurs. He reaches down, but Louis catches his hand and pins it with his other one above his head, against the couch arm. A little shiver runs through him as he sinks into Louis’s grasp.
So this one actually goes where you put him, he thinks.
They both feel his cock twitch. Armand smiles. Louis nuzzles into his exposed underarms, licks the hair there, the skin, the slightly iron tang of what passes for sweat in a vampire. Armand squirms, ticklish. Louis bites the side of his pec and slides his hands up the backs of his thighs, to push his knees to his chest.
Armand stills in his arms.
Scar tissue.
It’s startlingly bad. Like rows of thin canyons in his skin. Like wood grain. Like somebody took a switch and laid it on him with all the force of their arm behind it, and then did it again. And again.
They ladder their way up and down the backs of his legs, his ass. With his legs up like this, Louis can see that the soles of his feet are scarred too.
Armand grips his own wrist above his head. When Louis seeks out his mind, he slams into an iron wall. No entry.
“Here we go,” says Lestat.
Louis kisses one smooth knee, then the other.
“That’s okay,” he says. Like you’d say it to a spooked horse or a child that’s broken something. “That’s okay.” He strokes the back of his neck.
Worried about me seeing, is that it? he adds silently.
A slow blink from Armand. His throat bobs. The wall he threw up around his mind stays in place.
You don’t have to tell me, Louis continues. You don’t have to say anything. He peppers kisses over Armand’s knee, pets his flank. We don’t have to make it a thing.
Mouth on the soft inside of one thigh. Some of the scars wrap around here. They interrupt the pattern of the hair on his legs. Pale, raised lines of bare flesh. Despite everything, Armand’s cock is still hard, maybe even more so than it was before. It weeps a little trail of precum on his belly.
His voice, soft and small.
We already have.
Somehow, his eyes are ancient and infantile, all at once. They fix on a point somewhere past Louis’s head, and Louis is certain in this moment that Armand, too, is looking at a phantom, and that the phantom is looking back at him.
Louis rubs his thumb in the hollow beneath his ear.
“Viens à moi,” he says.
Armand stares up at him. His mouth twists.
For a second, Louis thinks he’s going to hit him.
Armand surges up and kisses him, deep and needful.
“Is that the best you could come up with?” Lestat asks above Louis’s shoulder. Louis will not look up.
“Okay?” he asks, when Armand gives him space enough to breathe. Armand presses their foreheads together.
“Just as well he’s already one of us, you’d be begging me to turn him. Louis and his pet charity cases.”
“Just touch me,” Armand whispers. “Just touch me, just touch—”
“Only wash your hands afterward because you don’t know where he’s been. Remember the last time you threw your lot in with a handsome, accented stranger?”
“—please, Louis—”
“—you’re not stupid, you know what this is, do you want to get off, or is petting him and assuring him his dick still works your idea of a happy ending?”
—and if it don’t help me, so help me—it’s the bottom of the deep blue sea—
Through the kiss, Louis feels for Armand’s erection. It twitches and leaks in his hand, and Armand squirms like he wants to break his discipline and buck his hips into it. Louis smiles against Armand’s mouth.
“There he is. I got you, honey.”
A little over an hour ago, he had nearly incinerated Louis in a tunnel beneath the pavement. Now he lies underneath him, panting and frantic, his delicate fangs descended and the muscles in his thighs rigid with sex-tension.
“You know, I think I like you like this,” Louis says with another pull of his cock. Armand huffs a helpless little laugh and whimpers low in his throat as Louis grasps his waist in both hands. He plants a column of kisses down his sternum, pausing his descent only to maul each nipple with his teeth. Armand arches into his mouth.
“Oh, yes—”
Louis slides down the sofa, and he bites at Armand’s belly one last time, then wets his lips and sinks his mouth onto Armand’s cock. He tastes like a body. Faint traces of Savon de Marseille lingering on his skin and his pubic hair. Armand catches his breath and sighs as Louis sucks him gently, just easing him into it, and rubs his fingers into the spot just past his balls.
Lestat always loved that.
He says something over his head. Louis sucks Armand’s cock harder and grinds his fingers into his taint, and the wail he gets in return drowns out whatever it might have been.
More, please, more—
Louis obliges him. He can’t take it down his throat like Armand can, but he gives it his all. It’s been too long since the last time. Easy to forget when it’s been this long how much he loves this, having a man in his arms, a cock in his mouth, the way they fall apart for him. These furtive ecstasies.
And new ones, too, like the words he can send Armand’s way as he sucks him, taking a gamble and winning—thought about this for ages—you take it so nice—such a good boy for me—
Armand bucks into his mouth, and Louis splutters around his cock and lays his free arm across his hips, pinning him. Precum leaks onto his tongue.
Stay put.
Something presses on the back of his head.
He turns his eyes up to Armand and finds him with four of his own fingers in his mouth, his other hand gripping the couch arm.
The pressure guides Louis’s head down again, not forcing, just a steady presence shepherding him through what he would be doing regardless. Pressure the width of a hand he knows so well.
Up and down, up and down.
What he had looked like in the dim, rosy light of the parlor with Lily—handsome devil, watching Louis watch him back. His chilly hand, his thumb cold on Louis’s tongue.
In his sojourn across the front with Claudia, there had been no time to mourn this. Here, sucking Armand’s cock, the missing of Lestat’s body comes on him, hard.
And all he has now is pressure.
Up and down. Up and down.
He finishes Armand like an automaton. His come has an iron tang to it, like Lestat’s did. One of the Gift’s quirks. Did Armand taste Lestat’s too, a century or so ago, and when he swallowed Louis’s cock a few minutes ago, did he remember?
Their panting slows. The record ends. Louis occupies himself with the insides of Armand’s thighs, not trying to start anything, just licking, kissing. The scar tissue is ropy under his mouth. He strokes lazy circles on Armand’s hipbone with his thumb. The clock on the wall ticks on.
“Well, I don’t know about you two, but I need a fag,” says Lestat.
Louis gives him a sidelong glare. Lestat fumbles in the breast pocket of his vest for his cigarette packet and blows a loud sigh when he gets it open.
“Ah, I’m all out. Tant pis.” He retrieves Louis’s jacket from where it landed in a heap on the floor. “May I, mon cœur?”
He doesn’t wait for Louis’s permission—of course. Finds the little packet, bums two cigarettes. He waves one at Louis.
“Join me? Ah, well, suit yourself.”
He sticks both in his mouth and lights one, then the other, and sits on the floor beside the record player. He hums one of the songs from the record, conducts himself with an airy hand.
Armand is petting his hair. Louis kisses his belly and props himself up, lets Armand cup his face.
“Curfew will be soon,” he murmurs.
Louis ignores the scoff coming from the other side of the room.
“Curfew, huh?” he says.
“A necessary evil.”
Louis hums. He crawls up to kiss Armand, who chases his mouth each time he pulls back. Louis kneads one of his pecs.
“Think you’ve got time for another round?”
Armand presses his forehead to Louis’s.
“Let’s just stay this way,” he whispers. He tugs Louis closer, hooks an ankle around his. “Just for a little while.”
Lestat stubs out of his cigarette. Fresh blood sheets down from his throat.
“Yes. Let’s stay.”