If anyone had ever told Paul that he would go away on a vacation with another guy and that they would fuck like bunnies and snuggle in bed and talk about their hopes and dreams like some kind of fucking mushy chick flick afterward and that he would love every minute of it, well… I would have punched their teeth down their throat. It’s too fucking ridiculous, Paul told himself, day after day. And yet, it was also too wonderful to stop.
Every time he woke up in Laurent’s arms he told himself that it had to end, that he had to stop this now before it got any harder. And then Laurent would open those big beautiful eyes of his or murmur Paul’s name, or send a surge of love and desire through their bond and he would ditch the idea. Just another hour, another day…a little more time can’t hurt, can it? Deep down he knew it could and would hurt a hell of a lot. That the longer he waited to break the bond, the worse it would be. But he just couldn’t bear to break it. Not now. Not yet.
They fell into an easy, comfortable routine. Roaming around Asheville together, seeing the sights. They toured the Biltmore mansion one night and Laurent described how it had been when the original Vanderbilts had still been living there. Paul was startled to learn that the other man was over a hundred but Laurent explained to him that vampires born to the Blood aged so slowly that he and Paul were essentially the same age. That made him feel a little better although he wasn’t certain what to think when Laurent told him that they would stay the same physical age, growing old at exactly the same pace as long as they were bonded. “Your lifespan will match mine,”
Laurent assured him. “Instead of dying when you are ninety or a hundred, you will live for centuries—we’ll both live for centuries—together.”
The idea of living for five or six or seven hundred years seemed strange to Paul and sort of unreal. Could the blood bond between them really stop time? Or at least slow it down so much that he and Laurent would be together practically forever? And more importantly, did he want them to be together forever? Doesn’t matter what I want, not really. Because we can’t be together, not and go back to our normal lives. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, that he was becoming more and more reluctant to end this strange but wonderful relationship he found himself in. But reluctant or not, it had to be done. There was no way he could go back to Miami with Laurent’s marks on his neck, no way he could admit to the pack and his old man what the other vampire meant to him.
The knowledge that he was eventually going to have to break the bond weighed heavy on him but Paul tried not to think about it. He lived in the moment, enjoying their limited time together as much as he could and refusing to think about the future.
Laurent made concentrating on the present easy. He never pushed Paul to talk about their relationship, like a girl probably would have. And despite being vampire and another man, he was a fucking incredible lover. He was also willing to listen to Paul and not scoff when he talked about opening his own bike shop and living someplace besides the apartment over the Chop Shop’s garage. Not to mention the fact that when he laughed in that soft, low, melodious voice or touched Paul’s arm while he murmured his name, or did a hundred other little things, it made Paul want to hold him close and never let him go. But I’ll have to let him go. Soon… He pushed the thought away every time it popped up but as their time drew to a close, it popped up more and more frequently.
In his weaker moments, mostly right after they finished making love, Paul began to fantasize about the two of them running away together. He knew it was stupid and unrealistic, but he kept getting these pictures in his head of him and Laurent living somewhere else—maybe a little house in the mountains where there was actually snow in the winter. Someplace where everybody would mind their own business and not give a shit about two guys shacked up together. Paul wasn’t quite sure what Laurent would do although he knew he had some kind of fancy degree from Oxford. But he imagined himself working at his own shop all day and then spending the nights with Laurent, making love, talking, cooking—which was something that Laurent enjoyed and was bizarrely good at considering vamps didn’t eat. He’d whipped up several meals for Paul in his Nana’s disused kitchen that looked like something you’d see on the food channel on TV and had seemed delighted to simply watch Paul eat them.