“When you gon’ let me turn you, Mo chroí?”

The words left his mouth soft, quiet, almost reverent—barely more than a breath, the ghost of a sound against the shell of your ear. He’d asked before. God knew he had.

Always in these moments—always when you were soft. Loose-limbed and drowsy from his hands on you, his mouth, his everything. When your guard was down, when your breath came sweet and steady, and your heart beat slow enough he could almost taste it through the air; when the world felt far away, when your breath was warm and even, your lashes soft against your cheeks, the curve of your bare shoulder lit up by slivers of moonlight through the breeze of the curtains gap.

He let his hand drift—lazy, slow—across the bare skin of your back, tracing the same stretch of you over and over like he was learning you by feel alone, committing every dip and rise to memory because he knew, deep down, it was never going to be enough.

That’s what you did to him. What you were.

Centuries—actual centuries—of moving through this world half-alive, a ghost in skin, feeding when he had to, killing when he felt like it, screwing when it didn’t seem worth the effort to care about anything more…till you.

Till your gentle smile, sweet as syrup and twice as bad for any man’s health; did he realize that he wouldn’t have the faintest of clues what to do without you. And when he saw how you’d handled those sunday school kids? All coo’s and coddles, skirts dirty with dust, hair stuck to the sweat of your temples as the hem of your skirt brushed the tears off the sweetest baby he’d ever seen?

He hadn’t been right since.

And now? Now he was so far gone he couldn’t breathe without thinking about it. About the way you’d look with his mark at your throat. The way your lips would part when he sank in—slow, so goddamn careful—not just to drink, but to keep.

His hand, rough and calloused from centuries of violence, softened against the delicate stretch of your bare back. He traced circles there—idly, thoughtlessly—like he was soothing a sleeping fawn, like he wasn’t fighting the gnawing ache in his teeth, the deep-down itch in his bones that clawed at his very being, his sense of reason. His fingertips skimmed up, brushing along your neck, over the pulse he could hear as clear as a song, thrumming soft and steady beneath delicate skin.

“Don’t make sense,” he murmured, more to himself than to you, thumb brushing the tender stretch of your throat, just under the curve of your jaw. His fangs ached, burned even, but he swallowed it down like he always did. “Don’t make no damn sense how bad I want you.”