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It’s the feeling of it, or - - no.
Not the feeling, not right away, not first.
First, it’s the sound.
The crackle of the record, the swell of the strings, the purr of her treacly voice, oozing through the humid air to drip down the sides of his skull, and then - - more. His unmistakable hand on the piano keys, the violin’s bow, the vibraphone’s mallet. A century of skill in the flick of a wrist and the press of a finger, an artistry born from decades of practice that eclipsed the fleeting fancy of any mortal existence. His words, his voice, his baritone the wind beneath her mezzo-soprano, carrying her across those climbing catguts to ricochet off his ear drums, and it’s that that stirs the tempest of Louis’ long-forgotten temper.
Weather to waves that push the sunken seas to stir, build, crash against the unmoving shore of his head, and it was Claudia – no, Grace – who had whiled away the afternoons of their childhood with books of Greece and its Apollo, it’s Aphrodite, but it’s Louis who feels himself suddenly Poseidon, the earth shaking beneath his feet as he yanks the record free of its needle to stride out into the hungry dark. Louis – two legs and a leading hand on the hard edge of that vinyl – who would render his body a trident as he cuts a path through the night, crossing corners, streets, traffic (and oh, are the cars different from when he last went out? In shape and sound and color? He’s been trying to hunt more, he has, but time ever blurs without - - fuck) only to plunge into the Mississippi, and as the water slides around his body, he thinks ain’t that something?
The drag of distraction.
His suddenly soaked shirt and the pungent putrefaction that fills his mouth, his form cutting, pushing, penetrating. The water, cold despite the hot breath of the New Orleans fall, cascading over him and under him, the silt rising to find him as the rot teases his lips, his nostrils, his damned and uncloseable eyes, because for once he’s single-minded, single-tasked. Lestat can play siren tonight, but Louis won’t play sailor for him – knows nothing but that as he battles the current to shove the record inside his waterlogged shirt.
He won’t fumble his way to the rocks for a song and a piece of ass only to be swallowed whole, for he felt himself Poseidon for a moment in his house, a moment out of it, didn’t he? Still feels him in his bones, and if he’s him (and let him be, God. Let him be that instead of the siren’s mark, let him be that instead of himself), he needs Demeter’s ankle in his hand, his Amphitrite back beneath him. Needs to control the roaring sea inside him so he stands a chance of controlling himself at all, and the thought has his legs kicking and his arms scooping, the water billowing around him, and like this it’s almost something close to fly––
No.
He knows what that had felt like.
Louis exhales.
Lets the air escape him like it had that night, but it ain’t smoke and dust and sky that would choke him on the inhale, not now. Now it’s the viscid sawdust and the silt and the sewage of his hometown’s river, and the feeling, the familiarity, it buoys him. Lets him kick off the cloak of despondency and feel his way back into this odyssey, record tight against his chest as his arms work to pull him through the water, and he feels it then too. The anticipation, the dread, the heat, because he knows that at the end of this night (the end of every night to come), there can be and is only Lestat.
The door splinters. Buckles. The force of his kick clearing it as easy as a hand through a spider’s web, and Louis’ chest heaves as he strides into Antoinette’s apartment, her gasping little screams the best music he’s heard from her this night or any before it. It’s a small place, her apartment, some slight and second story thing not an hour on foot from their own home down in Rue Royale, but he barely registers it as he moves. His legs firm and fast as he follows the heady smell of jasmine and gin and fucking to where his ragged heart tells him he’ll find Lestat.
And lo, there the devil is. Nude but for the soft crush of the sheet, low on his slender hips, unruffled as his girl scrambles from her own bed, his golden hair mussed and his body slender, tapered as it ever is, frozen in its eternal invitation. The heat in his head, his chest, drips.
“Six years of begging, you think a song’s gon’ get a rise out of me?”
The words tear from his throat, hoarse even to his own ears, and Lestat blinks. Lestat tilts his head back, chin up, eyes clear as cut glass as he takes him in, and Louis ain’t seen him in a year, not since Claudia’s claws drew a line through the finish of a car that would’ve been his, and he hasn’t wanted this. Hasn’t wanted him, he hasn’t, he hasn’t (how could he? Split open and splintered, his dignity, his pride, his manhood left to the clouds, miles above what had been their home together) but if Antoinette’s voice is as saccharine as cheap syrup, Lestat’s has only ever gone down like pure Tupelo honey.
“Did you like it?” he asks, like the song ain’t the reason he’s standing here, what’s left of his self-respect forgotten back in Rue Royale, and like this, Louis can let the sugar of her voice melt to nothing on his tongue until all that remains are the words, a hardened pill of proclamations that mean nothing so long as he’s in her bed instead of his. Louis swallows.
Louis holds up the record, ready for the break.
Light moves faster than sound, and Louis thinks despite the thin blood of alley cats and river rats running through his veins these nights, he moves faster than both, because Lestat hits the floor with a thud but Louis don’t hear it ‘til he’s got his hands on him again. No, he don’t hear shit but the pounding of his sawtooth heart, the crash of those waves against the cliffs of his broken-healed-broken bones, but he feels it. The sudden strength in his grip as he hauls him back up, and the wobble in Lestat’s gait, unsteady on his feet as Louis backs him up, jagged slip of record pressed flat between Louis’ palm and Lestat’s elbow, and he can’t let him find himself. Not now. Not when all Louis can smell on him is Antoinette (her voice on his song, her cheap ass perfume on his man), and it sets those seas of him roiling as his hands grapple up his arms. As they find that face of his that would see him on Caravaggio’s canvas, and Louis could break his neck with a flick of a wrist, but then he catches a glimpse of those fangs that made him and damned him and broke him beneath that too-pink upper lip, and a heat tears through him he can’t control, and - - fuck.
He doesn’t know he’s going to kiss him until his tongue is in his mouth.
Warm and wet and it ain’t just that his voice sounds like Tupelo honey, because he tastes like it too, buttery and sweet like the liquid, sun-dappled afternoons of his childhood, and it ain’t right.
How much it feels like coming home.
The feeling chafes even as he thrusts his tongue deeper into Lestat’s mouth, Lestat’s own rising to meet it. Chafes worse when he feels Lestat’s hand reaching to hold the back of his neck and that too familiar press of his gentle palm – no. Not gentle. Not always. Panic pounds like a drum in his chest and suddenly he feels the wind whip cold past his ears and - - no.
Louis knocks his arm away with his elbow and fumbles with his right hand, finding that last splintered shard of the record, and before he can think, he plunges it deep into Lestat’s thin belly. It goes somethin’ easy, the pulse of panic silenced as Lestat reminds him how eager he always is to receive, and he knows it’s an illusion (how tight his hands had been on him on the way up, how hard gravity had planted its own on his shoulders when Lestat let go—), but he relishes in this body’s pliancy now. In the yield of Lestat before him, exposed and needy (always so fuckin’ needy), and he doesn’t leave the time for the scent of Lestat’s blood to find his nose before he grabs a fistful of golden hair, yanks his head to the side, and bites.
When had he drunk from him last, he wonders, half in a dream.
More than a decade, has to be. May as well have been a lifetime, a century, an eternity on this marble of a planet for the way the first pull of it feels. The way it drags through the wilds of him like dawn’s first cut of sunlight, a dappled glow through a forest canopy before the heavens spill their warmth, and how it feeds him. Ambrosia on the arête, the feeling chased only by the taste – cognac and quinces and the peachy mountain cornflower – divinity beyond words, beyond capture, and he drinks as Lestat bows against him, supple, lost already to the swoon, but then ain’t Louis too? The pulse of Lestat’s blood inside him swallowing the tepid rats’. The intimacy, more, the power of it golden in his throat, and Louis pulls his fangs out of the bubbling spring of Lestat's neck only to raise his head. To let his mouth hang open as he stares up at the humming lightbulb above them in a pale worship of a facile sun, his senses dancing, cock already hard in his still-damp slacks, Lestat panting in his arms, naked as he came and his own dick already weeping against Louis’ shirt, and it’s sudden.
The bitter fury that seeds and sprouts and flowers something dark in the forest between them, and nights crash upon the nights before them, a rolling surf against the shore, and he can’t make sense of it.
What Lestat took from him that night in the church, what he took from him when he let that woman into their home, what he took from them that night he dropped him from the sky like a feckless child fumbling something fragile. Humiliation upon humiliation, and humiliation still, for what does he take from him now? His strength, his pride, his resolve, his dignity, and did he lie to himself when he dove into the river he’d lived his mortal life on? Is he not Poseidon fetching his Amphitrite, but still the sailor, losing himself to the sea for the promise of a pretty place to sink his cock? To give himself willingly over to a creature who’d wield the temptation of what lies between its legs only to kill and consume?
The thought is enough to have him drop his head back down to where Lestat rests his own now on his shoulder, his own lips parted and his eyes half-lidded, an impossible blue staring back at him the same way they did their first night together. His maker, his murderer, the horror of his love a cloak Louis can never shed, but oh, Louis thinks. Something in him growing tender beneath the bruise of the shame as Lestat shifts his weight, golden hair falling to brush Louis’ arm, can’t his own love be something horrible too?
This time, he hears the thud as he spins Lestat around and shoves him forwards, watching with blown pupils as he drops heavily to the floor, all knees and palms and snow-kissed shoulders, and Louis didn’t even drink that much, but he can feel it. The flush to his own cheeks, the sudden heat in his complexion, a vampiric strength, health, he’d deny himself ever and always suddenly surging through his veins, and it ain’t just that it’s Lestat. Can’t be, he tells himself, it’s that it’s anything at all. The barren riverbeds of his veins suddenly flusher than the Mississippi in August, and it has his eyes sparking like stars in his head as he grabs Lestat roughly beneath the arms, fingers digging into his axillas, and hoists him up. Lestat stumbles without bearings, and good, a vicious part of Louis thinks as he thrusts him face-first into the cedarwood door of Antoinette’s wardrobe, because ain’t he always made sure Louis’ never had his?
The bang as his forehead hits the surface of it is almost louder than Lestat’s grunt, his hands quick to scramble against it, searching for enough purchase to push back and turn, but Louis doesn’t give him the chance. He drops a forearm across his shoulders, bearing down to flatten Lestat’s chest against the wardrobe as his other hand drops to grab his narrow hip (and how it fits, how it’s always fit, there in his wanting palm), pulling his ass back until it settles in the cradle of his hips. The feeling of him there, warm and round against his already aching cock has the heat jolting low in him, forcing him to suck in a breath, and he don’t know if it’s the sound or the feeling of his bare ass against Louis’ crotch, but Lestat suddenly moans. He arches his back in a way Louis didn’t know a man could before he met him, his bloodied neck twisting until his cheek rests against the door, and Louis can’t help it.
The looking.
The meeting of Lestat’s too-blue eye.
He swallows, control slipping as he presses his forearm a little harder, grips his hip a little tighter.
“This what you wanted?” he asks, voice raw in a way he hopes Lestat can’t hear, shifting his own hips until the buttons of his straining slacks could leave marks in Lestat’s bare ass, his cock rigid, hot, pressed against his crease even through the fabric. Lestat’s mouth falls open, the perfect pout of his lower lip already swollen, and Louis’ gaze goes half lidded as his dick starts to ache. “Huh?”
“You know I am ever available when you are so inclined, mon cher.”
Low and a little cloying, and it’s something to the way that he says it. Like they’re still playin’ married and this is just another Friday night, and it don’t work, not with how breathless he is, but - - fuck.
It sparks something through Louis all the same.
He bares his teeth again, moves the arm against his shoulders to shove four fingers into Lestat’s big mouth, yanking his head sideways by the low row of his blunt teeth, relishing in the spasm of tension that reverberates through Lestat’s body beneath him, and sinks his fangs into the side of his neck he ain’t bitten yet.
It’s no less a taste of the divine.
Summer rain to an oxbow, flushing down the meandering rivers of him, warm and clear. Louis’ lashes flutter, the anger in his chest unraveling, the hand Lestat ain’t sucking on dropping from his hip to his cock, fingers finding too easy the underside of his long, velvety shaft. It pulls a breathless moan from Lestat, muffled by the fingers in his mouth, and it sounds somehow like the morning birdsong Louis ain’t heard since his last one alive, and he feels it.
Lestat’s hand suddenly thrown behind him, sliding into Louis’ hair, holding him closer to his neck as he sucks wet and wanting on Louis’ fingers. Drool drips down Louis’ hand as Lestat’s claws scratch light against his scalp just like they would those autumnal nights in coffin, and for a moment, lost again in the swoon, Louis could almost let this be the only thing that’s ever passed between them. Could imagine away the pain and the anger and the humiliation and the hopelessness, the wind whipping past his ears on the way up, the way down, the break and the betrayal and the claws in the too-soft underside of his jaw. Could imagine away his dead brother and his sister’s rejection and the daughter he made him, who tended him like a nurse these last six years, and the bodies and the blood and the endless nights ahead of them. Could imagine away it all until the world was just this: Lestat’s fingers in his hair and his blood in his mouth, pliant and generous, their bodies entwined, his husband, his maker, his belo- -
But then - -
The pressure.
The rub.
A jolt of heat to his cock, and Louis swallows.
Grunts as he feels Lestat grind his bare ass against him, hips undulating in an abrupt, undisguised impatience. More, a sudden demand, Lestat’s own cock twitching against Louis’ hovering fingers, and suddenly a hundred nights flood Louis’ memory, the illusion of his surrender shattered, because ain’t this where it always ends? Control, power, for only so long as Lestat allows it, Lestat so sure he still gets to set the pace even here, in his mistress’ apartment, with a fist in his mouth and Louis’ teeth in his neck.
Irritation simmers low in his belly even as his cock pulses hot against the insistent press of Lestat’s ass, and he pulls off his neck with a wet pop, spots appearing before his eyes as he moves his hand back to Lestat’s hip, pushing him forwards in a way that makes them both inhale at the lost contact. He pulls his head back, gaze moving from Lestat’s weeping neck to find his face again, and maybe that was a mistake, because his cock aches to see him there. Pressed into the unfamiliar, red-stained cedarwood door – a reminder of where they are, who’s apartment they’re in – wet eyes half-lidded and lips slick and swollen where they’re still locked around Louis’ fingers. He sucks the last of his blood off his fangs just to sate the immediate and pressing need to bite him again.
“She know you like it best like this?” he hears himself ask, voice too loud, even to his own ears, and he thinks she does now if she’s still out there watching as Lestat blinks a little rapidly, swallows in a way Louis can feel. He presses two fingers down hard onto Lestat’s tongue, bloodied saliva pooling behind his own molars, the taste of it more Lestat than himself, but ain’t that been the way since the night in the church? Louis exhales a bitter laugh. “Yeah, ain’t ever been the soft touch that gets you begging for it, huh? So damn ready to get on your back the second you think someone might try to put you on it.”
It's enough to make Lestat’s jaw loosen, his lashes flutter, his ass cheeks clench, and Louis drops a hand to squeeze one briefly, relishing in the weight of it in his palm, before he lets it go. Sliding his hand up instead to hold the back of Lestat’s clammy neck, catching sweat-damp strands of his blond hair around his knuckles while he pulls his fingers out of Lestat’s mouth (the whimper that escapes him at that strikes through Louis like a bolt of lightning), only to drop his hand between them.
For a moment, as Louis slides a wet finger down the firm crease of his ass, searching for the tight-wound pucker of his hole, time seems to slow. The sound of his own panting breaths fills his ears, the traffic outside reduced to a rumbling thrum, music – jazz – from a dive down the street echoes as the smell of sweat and cedarwood and sex and Lestat fills his nose, and how long has it been since they last had each other, Louis wonders vaguely, fingers smoothing through the thin trail of wiry hair between Lestat’s cheeks, before they find the soft give between his already trembling thighs.
Thirteen years, he thinks, hollow chest suddenly full as he finally sinks a finger in.
Tight as their weddin’ night. The thought comes blind, hot, Lestat’s inner muscles clasping something desperate at his finger, the cock-hugging passage between his legs stretching even around the lone intrusion, and it makes his dick throb in a way Louis wasn’t sure it still could. A roughshod heat that leaves his slacks a vice, and he wishes he’d unbuckled his belt when he still had any sense left in him. He exhales a rough breath instead, adjusts behind Lestat, free hand pressing hard onto his neck as he lets his gaze drop to watch Lestat’s hole take his finger to the lowest knuckle.
In his grip, Lestat pants, fingers curling into fists at the closet door, his lips puffy from suckin’ on the fingers now teasing at his ass, and Louis’ slacks are straining, the heat in him enough to make him dizzy, so he makes no preamble with pushing in the second and starting to finger fuck him open.
A keen tears out of Lestat’s throat, the sound ricocheting off the ceiling, thin and reedy in the hollow of his mistress’ apartment, before suddenly, he starts to babble:
“Toi seul, mon amour, c'est toi seul que je désire autant, toi seul qui puisses le faire—”
It takes a moment for Louis to decipher it, to hear it, distracted by the promise of the clutch of Lestat’s body, but the words - - they land somewhere raw in him, and his mouth falls open, and then it’s quick.
The assault of her on his senses.
Jasmine and cunt and fizzy sparkling wine and her cheap ass perfume. Cigarette smoke lingers on the fabric drapes, worse, peels still through the cracked glass of one of her windows, and she’s out there still, he’s sure, but he won’t check, no. Not when he glances up to Lestat’s blissed out face pressed into her wardrobe door, oblivious to the tempest gathering once again in Louis’ belly, because how her sheets had looked, tangled around his waist, he knows they’d fucked earlier this night. Could smell it on them both, and the question cracks like thunder through him.
Had he tasted her in Lestat’s blood tonight?
Something in him starts to burn.
“Shut the fuck up,” he bites, voice low and firm, and it’s enough to make Lestat’s pupils focus, to have them flick back to Louis behind him, his tongue darting out over his puffy bottom lip, and Louis knows that look. Knows the spark of defiance that has Lestat opening his mouth again to speak, and it’s urgent suddenly, the need to make him stop talking. Roughly, Louis yanks his fingers out just to smack his ass hard, watching his hips buckle forward and savoring the cry when Lestat’s cock hits the cedarwood door, and he should prep him more, knows he should, but suddenly it’s all he can do to fumble with his belt, the buttons on his slacks. To kick them down his thighs and pull out his heavy, aching cock as Lestat lifts his arms only to brace himself against the door, hips back and wanting.
And he can’t lose himself to the sight of it.
Can’t lose himself to the perfect line of Lestat’s arched back, the curve of his ass presented like the gift it always feels like when he’s inside him, his arms strong against the door and his shoulder blades protruding like folded wings, and oh, how he’d flown him that night. The terror gripping Louis anew, and he knows suddenly that he needs to break him of it. Needs worse than the broken record in his belly, needs Lestat as split open as he was, needs him to feel what he felt – helpless, powerless, to know not where the ground is until his knees break against it, and - - yes. The thought has him suddenly surging forwards, hands finding the backs of Lestat’s knees, summoning his vampiric strength to swiftly hoist him up, folding him up against the wardrobe door.
Lestat’s yelp rips through the room, through Louis’ head, making his cock leak as he watches Lestat’s hands scramble against the door before reaching up, fingers searching for purchase against the roof of the closet as his knees bend and his toes curl and it ain’t enough (will anything be? He can’t - - ), but Lestat’s in his arms now, dangling in the air, and there’s an aching thrill there. Has to be for the way his cock throbs, rigid and ready, and the heat he finds surging through him at Lestat’s lower back, no longer arching in wanton invitation, but doming back into Louis’ chest, gravity having its effect just as it did on Louis, the notches of his middle spine at Louis’ mouth, and he thinks he could bite him there, and so he does.
Not enough to truly drink, but enough to break the skin. Enough to make Lestat spasm, cry out, enough to draw blood that Louis can press his tongue to. Lestat’s cry warps into a groan, the sound loud, echoing in Louis’ ears, and slowly, he draws his hands out wide, spreading Lestat’s legs against the wardrobe door like butterfly wings pinned to a board.
For a moment, all Louis can hear is their heavy breaths. All he can taste the ambrosia that drips onto his tongue like honey from the source, all he can smell simply Lestat, perfumed in the habit he’d never quite escaped from in his immortality, but also just him, earthy and sweet and ever the only scent Louis wants on his pillow, in his car, in the air kissing his nose.
He swallows.
Feels his Adam’s apple bob, adjusts his hands where they squeeze Lestat’s skinny thighs.
Contemplates, briefly, letting go.
Seeing if Lestat could levitate.
Could fly here in his mistress’ place.
If he’d claim himself now, reveal himself so that Louis could finally see him clearly, but then something in him can’t do it. Everything inside him feels unmoored, and he doesn’t know what it might dredge up in the wild waters of him to see Lestat off the ground again if he’s not the one holding him there, and so he adjusts his grip again, letting go of one of his thighs only to watch Lestat’s grip go white knuckled on the top of the wardrobe, holding on even as his leg starts to slide down, and that’s - - real, Louis thinks, blinking hard. He’s holding, he’s fixed, he’s something Louis recognises from - - from before and - -
“Louis,” Lestat suddenly whines. “Prends-moi.”
The words land like a stone in the sea of him, reverberating in his groin, and suddenly Louis’ gaze refocuses on the slope of Lestat’s spine, the sudden way he plants his knees in the wardrobe door, tilting his hips back, and Louis needs no further invitation.
He spits in his newly freed hand, grabbing his cock and jolting at the contact, at the heat and the thick, stiff weight of himself, the perfect, velvety tug of his shaft, and he rubs it a little, wetting it before he presses the tip to Lestat’s hole.
Even at this angle, Lestat hovering above him and face half hidden by his taut biceps, clinging to the top of the closet, he can see that Lestat’s mouth is hanging open again, his pupils blowing as Louis starts to push the head of his cock in, and it wasn’t enough. Not enough prep, not enough lubrication, but it doesn’t matter, can’t matter, not when the first clutch of Lestat’s body around his cock is the first time he’s felt anything like good in a decade.
The whine of skin down polished wood sounds, Lestat’s leg starting to drop, and Louis’ quick to grab it again, hoisting it back up against the door, and his lashes flutter as he starts to rock his hips, fucking his cock deeper into Lestat’s tight passage as he lowers the other man down onto him, and it ain’t easy. Not when Lestat’s wound so tight. Not when his legs and abdomen are tense trying to keep himself up, and it’s - - something. That Lestat asked but won’t let go. Won’t let Louis carry his weight, and he blinks hard again, adjusts his grip, eases him down a little further, ass tight and hot and only just wet enough to stretch around Louis’ girth, and it feels so fucking good, the vice-tight squeeze of Lestat’s body around him, but it’s better still when he feels Lestat finally start to relax into it. His grip loosening on the top of the closet as he gives himself over to him, when those moments of resistance give way only to the tenderest of surrenders, and as he sinks ever so slightly down on him, something in Louis’ chest warms – a peel of sunlight glowing gold across the heady seas of him – and before he can stop himself, he presses a kiss to the soft skin of Lestat’s shoulder blade.
A fleeting intimacy, but the sob that bursts from Lestat’s throat grips Louis by his own, and he blinks too rapidly, the hot pulse of tears suddenly building behind his eyes, clouding over the sun in his chest and it’s too much, this—
It ain’t what this was supposed to be.
Suddenly the wind is whipping past his ears again, his body cutting down through the sky like a blade through a sheet, and it hurts – throbs agonizingly – in a place he cannot name, and the hurt can only ever be swallowed by the anger. Too quickly, Louis’ grip tightens beneath Lestat’s thighs and he heaves him up the wardrobe door, off his cock, only to step back and drop him. He hits the ground with a bang and a cry, not on his knees as Louis had wanted him, but hard on his hip, crumbling at the foot of the closet, and it feels good, but not as good as it was supposed to, but it’s something - - something, Louis thinks, as a sudden wet warmth drips off his chin.
He swipes at his face, rushing the tears away as his expression falls into a grimace, watching as Lestat rolls over onto his hands and knees, meaning to push up, bruise already blossoming on his hip, and Louis moves almost without thinking. He drops hard to his own knees between Lestat’s parted legs, kicking them further open and stretching a hand up to find the back of his neck again. With a rough grip, he forces Lestat’s head back down to the floor, hearing him moan against the boards as he watches Lestat’s strong arms give easy, willing, before Louis grabs his cock again, and maybe that’s easy too. To thrust in to the hilt in one, swift motion.
Overhead, the light flickers again, bulb dimming as it fights the night, the jazz band down the street takes their intermission, a drunken vagrant argues with passersby, and Louis finds his eyes tracing the finest of blood sweat as it drips from his forehead onto his lover’s slick back. A bead tinged red sliding down his craggy spine as his body takes the heavy anchor of Louis’ thick cock. His inner walls clenching hot and tight around him in impossible undulations, a current around the root of him that feels impossibly good, better somehow, than Louis ever remembered it, and he exhales a rough, wet breath, hands sliding back to the dip of Lestat’s tiny, tapered waist.
He grips him there, fingers curling around him as Lestat’s own hands coil against the floor, face twisting to look back at Louis, cheeks pink and temple bruised from where he’d hit the floor, and when he sees Louis, he whines.
“Louis, mon cher, je suis—”
But Louis - - he can’t.
He snaps his hips roughly, firming his grip on Lestat’s waist as he does it, feeling them both jerk forwards across Antoinette’s apartment floor, and Lestat’s moan is loud. A curlin’ sound in Louis’ ears, oil to the drum of it, and he feels his sac tighten. His cock throbbing inside him, leaking already, and it’s enough to make him pull half the way out before driving hard back in, his body humming with the need to have him, and oh, how Lestat drops his head forward, pushes up onto his elbows, arches his back, desperate, always, to be had.
Before he knows it, Louis’ fucking him hard there on the floor, pace relentless, knees bruising on the boards as he pounds into him, Lestat groaning and crying and pushing back to meet his thrusts, matching his rhythm instead of trying to lead it, and Louis tightens one hand on his waist even as he drops the other beneath them, grabbing his balls in a way that makes Lestat jolt and clench, striking stars behind Louis’ eyes, before he moves to squeeze the base of Lestat’s cock before he starts to stroke, never slowing his own rhythm, and fuck, was it always this good? The drag of his cock against Lestat’s tight inner walls a rolling and endless pleasure, and it’s been thirteen years, but he finds that bundle of nerves like it ain’t been a day, and Lestat collapses forwards, toes curling as he starts to whine in short, sharp staccato.
Moments then, that’s all it is before Lestat’s spilling hot and wet over Louis’ hand, cock pulsing against his palm in a way that makes Louis’ fangs drop, and Louis lets him go just to grab his waist again. Yanking him hard back onto his cock to snap his hips roughly to meet him, balls slapping against his taint, Lestat’s pale cheeks jiggling with the force of Louis’ thrusts, his hiccupping whines breathless, and it has to be the flush of Lestat’s blood that has him lasting, because he feels it when he finally cums. All the days, weeks, months, years he hasn’t, a decade unravelling inside him as he empties himself wet and hot inside Lestat’s clenching hole, like he can’t let a drop of him go, and Louis - - Louis don’t want that either.
Wants Lestat breathlessly full of him, sealed around his cock and pinned and weak beneath him, a broken-winged thing like he’s been, but - - more. Wants him caught between his hands and held there for something eternal, and it’s small, the voice in his head that says no part of Lestat can ever be contained.
Still, his fingers clutch at Lestat’s waist, one sticky with Lestat’s cum, the other clammy with sweat, not squeezing, just holding him there like he would sometimes in coffin, in those quiet and simple nights when the dark blanketed them from anything that could hurt them, and for a moment, he just - -
Looks at him.
Spent now without the fury, without the drive, and how slight he is beneath Louis’ hands, no bigger than himself. Fragile almost. The tapered lines of his body hiding a power Louis doesn’t know how to understand, and he squeezes now gently because he can. Because some small (big) part of him still sees Lestat and thinks husband, and don’t that mean this body’s his? To have and to hold, and he holds him now, soft as one hand slides down his back to feel where they’re still connected, to scoop up the trickle of his seed that’d escape on the side of his finger and rub it into Lestat’s perineum, making him choke on a sob as Louis squeezes his waist with his other hand, and he should pull out, he should, but - -
But the bite on his spine ain’t healed, and Louis finds himself raising his hand to his mouth to bite a finger, leaving blood to pearl at the tip before rubbing it there until the wound closes, and it’s an impulse, that’s all, but then - -
Then Lestat tilts his head back over his shoulder, a hopeful look on his beautiful and ruined face that gives way to dismay at whatever look is on Louis’, and he hadn’t meant it to be - - hadn’t meant any of this, but it’s enough to make him pull out.
The cool air meets his still-hot flesh, calling out at the loss of Lestat’s warmth, but Louis can’t listen to it, can’t feel it, not when the false floor he’s built himself this night is starting to give. Poseidon, that’s what this was supposed to be, who he was supposed to be, not the sailor crashing his ship for a taste of a siren’s body, but strong and in-control, but he feels unsteady on these waves now. He rises on wobbly legs to his feet, yanking up his underwear, his slacks, tucking his tender cock back in, and roughly doing up his belt, hyper aware of Lestat turning to sit down with a groan on the floor behind him.
He could leave, should leave. Go home to Rue Royale knowing for once he took more than he gave. Could leave Lestat like this, bruised and wrecked and he knows still wanting, split open by Louis’ hand, his teeth, his cock, but then—
How quickly, he wonders, would he have himself back in her bed?
The thought has him glancing out to the window where he catches only the thin curl of smoke from her cigarette through smudged glass, the ruffle of her skirts as Louisiana’s breath shifts them, and it feels like something. To be in her home the way she’s been too long in theirs. To humiliate her in it, like she’s humiliated him in his. He sniffs, finds himself taking in the place properly, the color and the clutter, and it’s smaller than he’d thought, curtains strung up to give the illusion of rooms, a few ratty rugs sprawled across scuffed floorboards, vases of wilting flowers atop tables covered by silk, and he’d seen enough of that in the rooms his old whores kept to know it meant the tops weren’t nothin’ to look at – likely stained and splintered from spills and scrapes.
There are candles damn near everywhere too, thick ones on plinths and skinny ones in candelabras, giving the room a waxy sort of smell, and only two look like they’ve ever been lit, which makes sense for the lamps she must collect too. Small crystal table lamps and long-stemmed art deco ones, and from here he can see the one beside her bed in the reflection of a mirror enough to realize it’s been angled to hide the tear in the shade.
And there are more mirrors.
Plenty of them, he thinks, taking in the one on the bedside and the other on the wall, a third on the chest of drawers in the corner, and he makes his way towards that one. An excuse to linger, even he knows it, a seed of shame laying roots (are you fool enough to forget what he did to you? Leave-him-leave-him-leave-him), and he catches his own reflection in the dusty surface of it, face drawn and cheeks still flushed, but his eyes are greener than he’s maybe ever seen them. Brighter for the blood of his maker running through him anew, for the orgasm that had left his blood hot for the first time in a decade, and the thought makes his gaze skirt back to where Lestat’s still on the floor. He’s back sitting on his ass now, watching him quietly even as he fingers the shard of broken record still sunk into his belly, and it’s as if he’s been waiting for Louis’ attention again, for it’s only then that he yanks it out.
Lestat grunts, body jerking forwards, and Louis’ spent dick twitches.
He works his jaw, gaze flitting down to where the blood starts to ooze from the wound, the scent finding his nose as Louis quickly turns his attention back to the chest of drawers, finding distraction briefly in just rifling through all the shit on top of it. Anything he can do with his hands that ain’t pulling Lestat back into him (onto him).
It's muddled, is the thing. A mess of pressed powders and silk stockings and heavy earrings with gold plating and a delicate filigree engraved cigarette case he just knows somehow Lestat bought her, and too quickly he feels his hands searching for the traces of him among all that’s hers. The emerald ring and the leather-strapped watch with the pink-gold case and the teardrop lugs, and the horsehair brush with the ornate silver handle, and he picks the latter up before he can even think. Turns it over to find the few loose golden strands caught in the bristles he knows will be grown back by morning, and it shocks him. How quickly the memory tears through him.
It had been one of the first nights with their daughter that Lestat had taken this brush to her hair after a hunt, her locks tangled from testing her speed on those fool enough to be down Audubon Park past midnight, not knowin’ you didn’t detangle hair like hers, like theirs with a hard bristled brush like that. The mess he’d made in frizzing her tight curls, the fight, the tears that had followed, Claudia’s full-bodied sobs, so young, so unknown to them still, and somehow she could only hope to match Lestat’s own tears, wounded in his confusion. It had been all Louis could to tell him to leave it and to pull instead their daughter into coffin with him, Lestat crying something in French Louis couldn’t make out as he’d pressed Claudia’s head to his chest and promised her that it would all be fixed come evening.
Decades that may as well be seconds or centuries or anything between for the way it lodges in his throat now, time flattened to a pill, unable to be swallowed. His daughter now his sister, his maker, his husband, the teeth in his neck, the claws in his jaw, and he drops the thing like it could shatter, like he did that night, a hairbrush to splinter against a dresser top, a body to break against the ground, and it’s a coincidence, has to be, that somewhere behind him, he hears movement. Clammy feet against the floorboards, the soft sense of motion, and it tears through him quick as a wildfire.
A sudden, unmistakable panic.
He jerks his head up to the mirror, catching a glimpse of where Lestat’s pushing off the floor, poised to stand, only to find himself twisting around to see him properly, like the mirror might have her tricks, and when he finds she doesn’t, the words are torn from him, harsh and raw, before he can think.
“I say you can get up?”
Pink.
That’s the color of Lestat’s palms as he holds them up in a show of surrender, dropping back to sit on the floor with a soft thud and a pained little groan, and it’s all it takes for Louis’ fractured, fractious heartbeat to limp its way back to something normal. Or maybe not, he thinks, because without the mirror’s illusion of distance, Louis finds his gaze fixed on Lestat simply as he is. Broad shoulders and strong arms belying his otherwise svelte figure, all skin and scrape and sinew in the warm light oozing from Antoinette’s endless fuckin’ lamps. Like this, Louis can see his bruised neck and his swollen lips, the taper of his bloodied belly, his long, thin cock limp and his thighs spotted purple from Louis’ recent grip. Still, how he seems to glow, deific in his debauchery as he stares those sea glass eyes back at Louis, the riptide of his attention dragging him out to the very waters he sought to control tonight, and the thought makes him swallow.
Has him twisting back to the chest of drawers and grabbing at the handle, just to hold something that ain’t him, and he tugs open the drawer, stares down into a mass of jersey sweaters with floral brocades and embellished collars. Finds himself wondering, however vaguely in his desire for distraction, if this is what now sits in his sister’s drawers, and - - no, coz he knows what sits in Claudia’s (but she’s not - -). He closes it. Grabs the handle below and somehow it’s worse. The folded piles of men’s shirts he doesn’t recognize – polos and fitted sweaters and a few collared shirts yet to be pressed, and Louis blinks. Gaze flicking over wrinkled rayon and double-breasted pockets, over stripes and rounded club collars, and then - -
Louis pauses.
Eyes fixing almost of their own accord on one of the unpressed shirts, fingers reaching to trace one of the delicate glass buttons, engraved impossibly with the fleur-de-lys, and he knows it speaks not just to New Orleans, but to Paris, to France, yet he knows somehow that Lestat wears it only for this city. Wears it for - -
His hand flattens, palm resting on the fabric like it used to on Lestat’s chest, like it does now only ever on his own, and he swallows. Lifts his arm before the feeling can take, and closes the drawer with a snap.
With a shaky exhale, he reaches for the top drawer, and this is - - better, he thinks. Pushing his tongue into his bottom lip at the abundance of silk and wispy lace that greets him. A far cry from the bloomers he used to pull down Miss Lily’s thighs, that he’d bought once for Claudia (she shops only for herself now), but he ain’t naïve. Knows times have changed, has seen the ads in papers and pamphlets, the store windows dressed up, hell, invests in more than a few places around this town that trade in women’s underthings, but still. It’s something else to see a drawer full of tap pants meant for coverin’ the one cunt, and he wonders briefly if Lestat picked any of them out for her.
The thought has him reaching out a hand again, picking through the peach satin and green silk, the lilac and snowy white and carnation pink, fabric meant only to cover the cup of an ass before spilling out lace or ribbons or frills. All of it made to be seen, Louis thinks, cold and without feeling, tossing a couple pairs to the floor just because he can, and he can feel Lestat shift his weight on the floor behind him, but he doesn’t look back, no, not even when his hand closes on something long and cool and hard.
Thing is, he knows what it is before he’s even gotten a look at it – a man of his professional experience was required to know the tools of the trade when it came to good fucking, after all (although he’d seen one before he’d pimped, hadn’t he? The thought - - memory sticks) – but it’s something else still to hold it up to the warm light, pale and heavy in his hand.
The dildo is made of ivory and is the color of such, no bigger than seven inches, with an elegantly carved head and a polished wooden handle at the base, and he feels almost far away from himself when he hears Lestat’s intake of breath as Louis holds it up higher so he can see.
The question leaves his lips before it’s even crossed his mind.
“She ever use this on you?”
For a moment, the question hangs in the humid air between them. A pregnant pause among the distant sounds of jazz from the joint up the road, a backfiring car, a couple laughing on the street below, and Louis lets his gaze slide from the dildo to Lestat’s reflection in the mirror, and it ain’t a surprise to see him staring back at him. As if he was waiting for Louis to finally acknowledge him again, and he’s still nude, of course he is, a slip of golden hair and bloodied skin, but he juts up his chin and his lips, delicately shut in his eternal little pout, quirk into something like a smile when their eyes finally meet.
He hums in affirmation, the sound stirring the seas of Louis’ feeling, voice low and droll as he flicks out a wrist:
“Not particularly well, I must admit, but she has a certain technique with it.”
Louis’ jaw clicks shut.
Is it a surprise? Should it be one? Lestat’s a giver, but he’s been open about his need for a regular dicking since he spread his legs in coffin on their wedding night, the clutch of his body so tight and hot Louis hadn’t thought they’d ever have a problem, but it had been something of a comfort, maybe. All those years with Antoinette, to know that was something she could never give him. Then again, shouldn’t he have known Lestat always finds a way to get what he wants?
The thought licks hot.
He drops his gaze back to the lingerie drawer, eyes flicking over the smudge of color, all those peaches and lilacs tangled together, and it’s the white that sticks out, pretty as a picture, all slippery rayon meant to clutch the waist and layers of lace framing the crotch and cupping the ass, and he grabs them before he can think. With the hand still holding the dildo, he slams the drawer shut and finally turns around to leave the dresser behind him, barely looking at Lestat as he tosses the panties at him with an agile arm, the fabric fluttering down into his lap, instead watching the trajectory of the dildo as he throws it even further, watching it land at its mark, bouncing softly on the mattress of Antoinette’s bed.
Louis nods his chin up at it, before he turns to look back at Lestat.
“First time I ever saw one of those was in college, I ever tell you that?”
The memory is suddenly sharp. Like a door’s been kicked open and a frosty wind let in, sleet soaking into his shirt and freezing his eyelashes, but it ain’t a bad feeling exactly, suddenly just a pressing one as he stares down at Lestat on the floor. Like he needs Lestat to know this suddenly, and Lestat seems to understand for the way he peers up at him curiously, a little uncertain, cautious, not deferential, as his hand closes on the panties in his lap. The touch of it seems to almost surprise him, for he looks down at them briefly only to quickly look back up at Louis, eyebrow raised in question, as if asking if Louis wants him to put them on, and Louis doesn’t give him the grace of a reply. Won’t, or maybe can’t, at least not yet.
“Near half this town thought I could’ve gotten into any school ‘cross the country. Any that would’ve had me, anyway, but I only ever wanted to be in New Orleans,” he says, his mortal life, or - - no. The man he was before Lestat suddenly cast in a stark light in his head. He works his jaw, gaze flicking up to meet Lestat’s. “Wanted to be close to home.”
This Lestat knew, of course. They’d talked about it plenty those months Lestat had let him play fool and friend before he’d had him in the townhouse with Miss Lily. Lestat had stories of the world in those days, but Louis had only had stories of this city, and he’d felt the need to explain why. That Paul had been in hospital out in Jackson when Louis had been ready for college, and Grace had still been a girl, younger than Claudia had been when he found her, and it had mattered to him. To be close to them, to his mother and father too, who needed him in the winters to help manage the sugar cane harvest.
“And so you chose New Orleans University where you filled your beautiful head with all the learnings of the world and other parts of yourself with such - - ah,” Lestat makes a show of twisting his wrist limply towards the bed where the dildo lies. “Universal designs.”
Louis snorts, but he feels it. Something reviling at the thought of using one on himself, the internalised disgust at the thought of ever needing dick badly enough to not even be so bothered to find a man who could do him right (a shame like a vine that can only ever be cut back). He rolls his shoulders back a little, eyes returning to Lestat, who stares up at him with a flat smile.
“Still wanted the college experience though, so I stayed during my studies at the dorms out at Talbot House,” he continues, and Lestat’s smile wavers at Louis ignoring his comment, sitting up a little straighter on the floor, almost cowed, like he knows he misread what Louis was saying, however deliberately, and suddenly feels the need to show that he knows better.
“You shared a room with your young Wallace.”
A flickering memory then. That dark and handsome face with eyes softer than any man’s Louis had known before or since, his chest strong in sharp woolen vests, even when the New Orleans heat threatened to melt them quick as candles, and his hands elegant and ever around a pen, scratching in his notebooks.
“That’s right, Wally Barnett. He works for the Chicago Defender now.”
Damn near sixty-years-old but it’d show on him in a way it won’t ever on Louis. Married some nice girl from Alabama, a teacher, he remembers, from last he checked up on him, with four kids who must be all grown now. How many grandchildren must he have, Louis wonders vaguely (how many will Grace have?)
“A journalist,” Lestat says, and Louis blinks, glancing down at him to where Lestat’s no longer looking at him, but rather the panties as he shakes them out, the lace fluttering in the warm air between them, and Louis swallows.
“Good one too.”
That much he knows at least. He’d started getting the paper delivered along with too many others in the years Claudia had wandered, chasing any word from her in the cities he thought she might have found herself in, and it had been a surprise to see Wally’s name so often in the bylines, although it shouldn’t have been. He’d known his old roommate had become a journalist – it had been near all he’d talked about doing in their years together in college – just he hadn’t known where, and it had felt something like closing the distance between the man Louis was and the man he’d once been, to read Wally’s words in print.
On the floor, Lestat suddenly pulls his legs in, pressing them practically to his chest as he swings the panties round to slip his feet through the holes, and Louis’ mouth suddenly feels a little dry.
“We got on,” he says, gaze fixed on where the soft, creamy fabric starts to slide up Lestat’s delicate ankles, his skinny, pale calves, and he maybe wouldn’t even notice Lestat’s eyes on him again if it wasn’t for the way he stopped. Louis attention darts back up to Lestat’s face, only to exhale a laugh at the hot, green look there. “Not like that. Understood each other. Used to go out on the town after classes, down those coffee stands and lounges, talk about things like we—”
Like we used to.
The words stick in his throat, and he shakes his head as Lestat’s look suddenly shifts, his eyes glassy beneath the hazy lights, and Louis glances back down to where Lestat’s still holding the panties awkwardly at his shins, slender fingers twisted in the rayon, and maybe this was a mistake.
Maybe it always was.
Louis shifts his weight, shaking his head a little, fumbling again for the memory for the distraction if nothing else.
“Some time in our second year at NOU, he had a friend visit from out of town. Some white boy from New York,” Louis says, and he can see him then, in the flickering picture show of his head. Theo Hayworth. Handsome with his lazy smile and dark eyes and blond hair – not in the way Lestat was, no, not like sun on wheatfields, Theo’s hair had been a mousy, mottled mop that had reminded Louis of the coyote pelts some of the travelling salesmen tried to hawk down at Poydras Market in the fall.
“Still don’t know how Wally knew him, a friend of a friend of somethin’, but he seemed to know his way ‘round New Orleans’ backstreets better than some of us locals,” he adds, raising his head again, and it’s sharp. The bolt of heat that licks through him when he realizes Lestat’s sliding the panties up his pale legs again, the lace dragging over his knees as he starts to tug them over his thighs. “Think he liked that. Knowin’ every dive and dance hall and absinthe house that offered a good time. I didn’t always want to go with them, didn’t need all of that, even back then, but Theo always wanted me there with them.”
He remembers that too. Theo’s insistence that Louis join them – after all, he’d say, he was only to be in town a few weeks, and he wanted to know Wally’s friends as well as he knew Wally – and Louis had allowed himself to be talked into too many drunken nights in the city, Theo’s heady cologne never far from his nose. He sniffs, like he could catch it again now, tugged from the memory only by Lestat rising a little off the floor to slide the tap pants up over his ass, and they fit. Course they fit, elastic snapping neat around his narrow waist, and he sees him twitch when they cut the hole Louis had stabbed into him in two, immediately starting to stain the fabric red.
“One of those last nights, he took us to a sex club,” he says, eyes dragging hot from Lestat’s tapered waist to where his cock and balls bulge in the front of the panties, straining the rayon and making the tiered lace angle oddly over the tops of his creamy thighs. His gaze flicks up to where Lestat’s watching him now, cheeks already flushed and pupils blown, and Louis huffs, turning around to walk back to the dresser, finding Antoinette’s filigree cigarette case and lighter, before striding back past Lestat to sit on the end of Antoinette’s bed. He pops the cigarette case, eyeing the three rolled inside. “I’d never been to a place like that, and I didn’t think they’d let boys like me and Wally in, but Theo knew his way around it. Got us all a table at the back and three fingers of whiskey that went down like paint stripper, and he told us how it worked. That we’d see the girls perform then have our pick upstairs. It was on him, he said. He’d pay. A thank you for our hospitality.”
He taps out one of the cigarettes, clicking the case shut and glancing back up at Lestat, and it simmers somewhere low in him. The sight of Lestat swiveling on the floor to face him and adjusting himself in the panties, fingers moving his cock through the fabric, and Louis makes a show of raising an eyebrow, like he would those long, workin’ nights at The Azaelia.
“I say you can do that?” he says, voice low and firm as he puts the cigarette between his lips. “Get your hands off yourself.”
Lestat blinks, jaw jutting a little, petulant, but he does as he’s told for a change, dropping a hand back on the floor behind him as Louis slips the cigarette case into the breast pocket of his shirt. He grabs the lighter, clicking the flint spark to burn the end of the cigarette, taking a long drag of it once it takes, relishing the heat and smoke in his mouth, in his lungs, before he refocuses his gaze on Lestat on the floor before him.
“First time I’d seen a white girl like that,” he says, because it had been. Her thighs pock-marked and soft, jiggling as she spread them up there on that stage, the thick thatch of curly black hair there not unlike what he’d found in his limp-dicked fumblings with the girls down in the hooded parts of the cemetery near home (and it echoed in his head then, now, Ruth Spencer’s voice as she said ain’t it supposed to get hard? Like there was something wrong, and there was, Louis had thought then, thinks still, despite himself, now, humiliation tightening his throat, because even at fifteen he’d known what he was), but beneath the hair, the girl on stage was pink, and she spread her lips and exposed her cunt to the hollers of men, and that was when Louis had seen it.
The thick shaft of wood carved in the unmistakable shape of a cock, and she’d made a show of it, ‘course she had. Wasn’t that the point? Pressing it between her tits as she sucked on the head of it, drool oozing down the shaft in a mockery of fellatio, and it wasn’t long until she’d teased it at her pussy, lips gobbling up the head like the ones on her face had done before she’d put the damned thing inside herself, and Louis had had to look away, sick with the sight of it, only to see Theo staring knowingly back at him.
He still remembers the panic that had torn through him, still remembers Theo’s smile, how it hadn’t eased a thing, not then.
Now, Louis puts the cigarette back between his lips, reaching back on the bed to grab the dildo. He points it loosely at Lestat as he takes another drag on his cigarette.
“She used one of these in her whorin’ on that stage,” he tells Lestat, and Lestat leans back a little at that, into his hands, feet on the floor and knees still bent, but longer now, and ever so slightly spread.
“So every man in her audience could imagine it theirs,” Lestat purrs lightly. “What an inspired performance.”
It’s enough to make Louis frown as he drops the thing back to the bed.
“Not every man,” he says. “Not mine. Not Theo’s either, as it turned out.”
That at least makes Lestat pause, his attention fixing back on Louis, and the blood really is soaking into the top of the panties now, a smear of red oozing from the wound Louis had left in him, and it’s something. The thought of havin’ him wet.
“We drank some more and watched the other girls, and when they were done, Theo took us upstairs to where you could buy their company for the rest of the night, and while we waited our pick, he told us he’d heard there was a club like this in New York where you could see boys do the same. You can touch yourself now, if you want.”
The invitation, the instruction, seems to briefly blindside Lestat, which - - good, Louis thinks, exhaling a plume of smoke. He only half knows what he’s doing himself, but its something, at least, to know Lestat knows less for once. Lestat’s throat bobs, and he tilts his head to the side, as if considering not doing it – a performance that don’t land with Louis’ audience, not with the flush that finds his chest and the sudden extra strain in those panties. Maybe he knows too, because it ain’t long before he’s dropping a hand to slide delicately up his own thigh until it can tease the lace trim that’d stick there if he let it. Louis sucks on his lower lip.
“Still remember the way Wally laughed,” he tells the sliver of skin Lestat teases beneath the lace. “Asked who the fuck’s that for? Like he couldn’t even conceive of it, and I could barely breathe. Couldn’t hear anything but the blood in my ears and the ragtime they were playin’ downstairs, and I needed Theo to shut the fuck up, but he didn’t. He said - - he said some men are into that, that’s what he said, and he said it lookin’ right at me.”
On the floor in front of him, Lestat slides his hand further up, cupping himself through the rayon, squeezing just so, until Louis can see the outline of him hardening in the fabric, his knees spreading a little wider in show.
“And did such a pointed revelation expose you to your journalist?”
Which - -
Well.
“No,” Louis says with a huff, nursing the last inch of his cigarette. “Theo had timed it somethin’ perfect. It was Wally’s turn to pick a girl, and he disappeared for the night, and before I could think about which I was gonna have to take upstairs, Theo suggested we have a drink back at the dorm. Whole walk back, I wasn’t sure if he was gonna kiss me or kill me.”
And he remembers that something keen. The hesitation, the uncertainty at what lay in the twitch of Theo’s smile, the risk of it all, again, the shame of his own need, but then too the heat, the anticipation, the quick-sparking desire, and Louis had known he’d say yes before Theo had even asked. As they’d walked back to the dorms, Theo had spoken softly of the summer he’d recently spent in Greece, of moonlit strolls through the Acropolis and the tan he’d gotten swimming off the coast of Salamis and the grape leaves stuffed with rice and lamb he’d eaten at every stop. Louis hadn’t quite had it in him to say he’d never gone past Tennessee back then, but he’d found the nerve to say he’d never left the country, and he still remembers that too. The jolt that ran through him when Theo had stopped him on the street, a warm hand on his arm as he’d said Louis, you gotta change that, there are places better than this for us.
Louis feels his face shift into something between a smile and a grimace at the memory, gaze soft as he watches Lestat’s hand slide up past his cock, tracing instead the waistband of his panties, cinching him there something perfect, and he says it for Lestat’s reaction, but also because it’s something true:
“Guess that night was the first time I fucked a man too.”
A scramble in the dark as soon as they’d gotten back to Louis and Wally’s dorm, that’s what it’d been. Something fast and hungry at first, Theo’s mouth hot on his, but nothing compared to the weight of his cock pressed against Louis’ own, rutting against each other until they’d both cum in their slacks, and he’d been desperate in a way he’d never felt as Theo had laughed breathless against his lips, coaxing him back to Louis’ twin bed because they had the time, he’d promised. He’d paid the whorehouse to keep Wally entertained the night through, and it had been with gentle hands and patience that he’d shown Louis how to open another man up and take him apart. A college education in the ways of the body, and he’d had Louis first only to let Louis have him in return, each orgasm a link in the chain of Louis’ sexual awakening, the discovery of what had always been there that he knew he’d have to bury again, but not then. Not that night.
No, that night, hidden in his dorm room, away from his family and the church and all the watchful eyes of his neighbors, he’d been able to simply be.
Now, Lestat just stares at him, mouth open and flushed, panties straining, fingers still on his waistband, and Louis knows he can see it. Knows that he must’ve plucked this memory from his head in those too-human months in the early nights of their courtship, of the hunt. More than that, knows he’s hot with it – jealous and turned on and so fuckin’ barefaced about both, and something in Louis feels firm.
More, feels finally in control.
He lets his knees fall out as he takes another drag.
“After I asked him if that club in New York was real. Real as you and me, he’d said, then - -” Louis shakes his head, snorts, puts on a voice as he says: “Shame there ain’t one here. Like you could ever have anything like that in New Orleans.”
He flicks the end of his cigarette, lets the ash fall to the floor, and Lestat pays it no mind, gaze fixed on Louis as he starts to trail his fingers lightly across his cock through his panties.
“Wondered sometimes though. When I was workin’ down on Canal Street, inspired as I had been by the whorehouse… Wondered if there wasn’t a market for it.”
And it’s that that finally makes Lestat speak, ever encouraging when it came to Louis’ business-minded ventures.
“In my experience, there’s a market for everything,” he hums, voice a little thick, as Louis takes him in again. Lestat flushes a little with the renewed attention, arches his back, scoots ever so slightly closer across the floor. “There was in Paris, at the very least.”
Which - -
Louis raises an eyebrow, gaze flicking down Lestat’s long, leonine body, reclined now onto an elbow on the floor, the hand not splayed beneath him lazily moving to finger the waistline of his panties, teasing at the bloodstained patch on his right side, his cock half-hard in the panties now, the head teasing at the elastic, and Louis traces the familiar line of him with his eyes, sucks briefly on his teeth, before he speaks again.
“I can imagine,” he concedes, voice dry and low as he adds: “Didn’t I tell you to touch yourself?”
It’s enough to make Lestat’s breath hitch, loud in the otherwise quiet, his throat to bob, and he listens this time. Fingers finally slipping into the panties to grip his cock, mouth falling open with a moan at the contact, and Louis feels a shock of heat rush through him, even as he drops the butt of his cigarette deliberately to the corner of one of Antoinette’s gaudy rugs, putting it out there with the toe of his shoe.
“Seeing you in the Fair Play Saloon, in The Azaelia, it wasn’t just the girls who looked at you, but you knew that.”
The words make Lestat exhale a wet little breath, lashes fluttering as he pushes his hand low, and - - oh, Louis thinks heat dripping. He’s catching whatever’s left wet of Louis’ cum on (in) him before he starts to stroke himself off.
“I have always caught the eye,” he purrs as his hand shifts to his cock, arching his back at Louis’ hot look. “I enjoy it, I thought you did once too.”
Did he?
He doesn’t remember, but it doesn’t stop his chest tightening as the words press the smell of Antoinette fresh beneath his nose.
All jasmine and cheap citrus, but more. All the girls at the opera, Azaelia, music halls and absinthe bars who’d hang on his every word, Lestat soaking up the attention like a spot of drought-parched earth, Louis’ low boiling anger, his humiliation at having to sit back and say nothin’, to maintain the ruse of their condition – business partners, bachelors, valet and employer – and he feels his nostrils flare, his eyes darken, but then - - at least here, with her, there ain’t no ruse left to maintain.
Louis moves fast.
He reaches down, grabbing Lestat by a skinny ankle and yanking him suddenly, sharply across the floor towards him. Lestat gasps, body dragging as he falls back onto his elbow, head falling back as his hand tightens on his cock, and Louis would roll his eyes if he could take them off Lestat at all.
“Always such a fuckin’ slut,” he says, letting go of his ankle to sit back up on the bed, and Lestat just moans, the sound ricocheting off the ceiling in a way that has someone in the neighboring apartment bang against the wall, but neither of them pay them any mind. Louis’ not sure he can, not with the way Lestat’s exposed his neck, the skin bruised and mottled from where Louis had sunk his teeth into both sides of it. His gaze flicks down of its own volition to the smear of rosy cum from their earlier fornication, for it’s already drying already on his abdomen, mingling with the bloodied gash Louis had sunk in him, and he sucks in a wet breath, tastes Lestat still on his tongue.
His cock twitches.
“Sat up in my club every damned night, dressed up in somethin’ tight, somethin’ that fit you too good to be decent, lappin’ up the attention…” he says, resisting the urge to squeeze himself through his slacks, and something about it has him suddenly hot. The anger at himself, the shame, for being here again bleeding into something else, the picture of Lestat there in his mistress’ panties, body used and wrecked, moaning like the whore he is, and it’s there in a way that pools bloodied saliva behind his molars. A heat at the thought of his maker - - his husband - - being put somewhere lower than Louis’ ever been. He sniffs, heart pounding in his chest, blood running hot through his veins, and he’s sure to look down his nose as he says: “Shouldn’t have married you that night, I should have hired you.”
And he hears it. Lestat’s breath hitch, the judder of his own heartbeat, the stutter of his fist on his cock before it suddenly speeds up. The heady, unmistakable smell of his pre-cum finds Louis’ nose, and of course he’d get off on this too. Louis reaches for the cigarette tin in his breast pocket, pulling it out as he kicks a foot out, pressing it into Lestat’s inner thigh, keeping his legs spread for him as he watches him jerk himself off.
“And here I thought you had decided you didn’t like to share,” Lestat says, a little breathless now as his hand works himself over, his hips rocking off the floor and the lace fluttering around the seam of his groin as he does, and Louis shrugs even as his cock swells, starting to strain in his slacks. He taps out a cigarette and reaches again for the lighter.
“Different arrangements make for different expectations,” he says, pressing his foot a little firmer into Lestat’s pale thigh. Enough he knows the edge will leave a mark. “This way I’d at least have gotten something out of you fuckin’ around.”
Lestat clicks his tongue, pushes up a little off the ground only to free the hand not jerking himself off to fondle Louis’ shoe, his grip warm and firm even through the leather before he slides it up beneath Louis’ slacks, searching for skin and finding only sock. Still though, he kneads at his ankle, an easy sort of massage like he used to give the backs of Louis’ calves and thighs after long nights on his feet, and Louis swallows something thick. He kicks Lestat’s hand away, pulling his leg back beneath him, ignoring the briefly wounded look that crosses Lestat’s face as a result.
He works his mouth, eyebrows furrowing, as he pushes his cigarette between his lips and lights it. He takes a short, sharp drag, before pulling it out, tilting his chin up even as he spreads his legs a little on the bed to accommodate his still hardening cock.
“Because wouldn’t you have been good for business? It ain’t openin’ a - - specialty brothel, but havin’ a boy on the books who’d take any of them might have gotten me somewhere. The old Alderman liked to stick it up the ass, bet he would’ve loved yours.”
“That stubby little cock of his, I would’ve hardly felt it,” Lestat says, voice hoarse and slow, leaning back again, the wet sound of his hand on his cock matching the motion beneath the pale fabric, and he knows he’s close. Can see it in the flush of his chest and his open mouth and his half-lidded gaze and the speed of his strokes, and Louis swallows. The heat in him deepening and he should’ve picked another pair of panties. The rose pink or the peach, because the white ain’t right, not like this. Bridal, chaste, everything Lestat’s not, and he swallows as a damp, pale pink patch grows in the crotch of them as Lestat’s blown gaze refocuses on him. “And it would be your grosse bite I’d want. Yours I’d dream of, yours I’d imagine.”
His chest hitches as he says it, his hand working a little faster, and Louis can feel his own chest rising and falling, feel his slacks straining almost painfully again, the urge to unbuckle his belt and free himself, to touch himself growing more pressing, the heat becoming almost painful, but he won’t. Can’t give him the satisfaction of knowing this might be doing it for him as much as it’s clearly doing it for Lestat.
“Would you - - ” Lestat gasps, his lashes flutter, his hand stretching the waistband of the panties until the near-purple head of his leaking cock pokes out of it. “Would you finally partake in your whores, Louis? If you had one such as me?”
And Louis doesn’t say anything, fuck, maybe can’t, but there must be something on his face, because Lestat arches his back, body curving up, head dropping back until his hair tumbles almost to the floor, the long line of his bloodied neck exposed, his legs splaying wider, panties straining, lace trim shooting at odd angles, and Louis has to remind himself to breathe.
“Would that have satisfied you more? Being my whore?” he asks, voice low and honest, and with that, Lestat spills. A full body shudder that tears through him as he climaxes in a heady burst of blood-tinged cum that shoots up his chest from the stretched waistband of his panties, and Louis works his mouth. Takes in his debased form, and it’s something that feels uncontainable. The dizzying arousal that sparks his every nerve and rushes heat to his now-rigid cock, the tightness in his belly and the thrum of his pulse, but maybe he’s finally found himself Poseidon tonight, because somehow his control holds, even as Lestat falls back onto himself, wobbly in the aftermath of his orgasm.
Louis takes a drag of his cigarette, watching as Lestat blinks rapidly, coming back to himself faster than he should, before he turns a briefly uncertain look back on Louis, gaze flicking over his closed face, but he sees it. The way Lestat’s shoulders relax when his eyes drop and he sees Louis hard in his slacks. He lets his gaze fix back on Louis’ own as he pushes himself back up into a seat, pulling his hand gently from his panties only to trail it up through the cum on his chest and make a show of licking it off his fingers.
Brat, Louis thinks, as he exhales a rough breath of smoke, bracing himself for Lestat’s inevitable reply when he hears him say:
“Would it have satisfied you?”
Louis sucks on his teeth, watching as Lestat suddenly rolls over onto his hands and knees, lips wet and eyes dark. With a flick of his head, he tosses his hair over one shoulder, arching his back, a continued performance as he starts to crawl the barely-there distance back towards him.
“Would you have had me audition?” he asks, voice droll, almost lazy in the aftermath of his orgasm, staring up at Louis through the heavy fringe of his lashes, and Louis feels his cock throb at the sight. His hand pushing his cigarette between his lips again, ash falling from the end to burn at his thigh, and has he already lost that thread of control? Fuck. He sucks in a wet breath.
“I could audition,” Lestat breathes, lips twitching like he knows Louis’ slipping. “I could still be your whore.”
With that, he covers each of Louis’ shoes with his hands, gently tugging his legs out towards him, making space for himself in a way that has Louis’ cock jolting, and he drops a hand to grip the sheets beneath him to stop him tangling a hand in Lestat’s hair. It barely matters, not with the way Lestat wets his lips, tongue pink as he glances up at Louis from the floor between his legs and purrs.
“Let me be your whore.”
And he should say no, knows he should. Knows that nothing good comes of Lestat like this, because he ain’t a siren on the rocks here, and he’s definitely not Amphitrite, he’s the worst sort of honeytrap. Sweet and golden and designed to stick, and Louis ain’t an easy mark, he’s not, he’s held out six years after—
(The wind, it hadn’t just whipped, it had burned, his fingers grasping, legs kicking as he spun, the collision with the ground – knees, shoulder, chest, head – fuck, no).
Denied himself this even longer.
Ain’t that strength?
Ain’t that control?
Ain’t he already lost both tonight?
Why can’t he have this one more time, especially if it means having him like this?
His chest tightens as his fingers find the edge of his cigarette, pinching the cheap paper roll of it, thumb flicking the end this time, so some of the ash falls into Lestat’s golden hair.
“No hands,” he says, voice rough and low and mean, because he needs to be now, and Lestat’s gaze flicks back up to his, a little curious as Louis drops the hand low, pushing the end of the cigarette between Lestat’s lips, guiding him to take a drag.
“I charge top dollar,” he tells him as Lestat inhales, the long-forgotten pimp he once was seeping back into his affect, easy as reaching for his cane. “And no whorehouse worth shit is gonna do that for show you just put on. You want an audition? Show me you got something I can actually sell.”
It’s enough to make Lestat’s pupils blow, just like Louis knew it would, and he makes his own show of tilting his legs a little further out, pulling the cigarette back from between Lestat’s pursed lips, feeling the heat of his exhale against his crotch as he drops the cigarette back between his own lips. He inhales roughly, tasting Lestat’s mouth on it, before feeling the nuzzle of Lestat’s nose against his knee. The wet, hot breath as he presses a loose, light bite to the clothed muscle just above it, and Louis’ leg twitches as his gaze goes half-lidded, Lestat kissing his way up his inner thigh, and had he forgotten this too?
How stupid fuckin’ good Lestat’s always been with his mouth?
The too big line of his lips, the sinful swell of his lower one, locked in an eternal pout Louis had once thought an act, but now knows is just how it sits (he still remembers the first night he awoke before Lestat in those early months of companionship, turning to see the thing jutted out and pink as it always was, how easy, how good it had felt to press his own full lips to the scar beside it, feeling Lestat’s expression twitch up into a smile as he woke, which was all Louis needed to suck the plush flesh between his teeth and bite). He can feel it through his slacks now, the heat of him leaving his balls tight and he’s barely done mouthing at his middle thigh, the bulge of Louis’ hard cock in his slacks just starting to tap against Lestat’s temple, when Louis can resist no longer. He reaches out to bury a hand in Lestat’s hair, tugging him close.
Lestat’s moan eats the quiet. A heady, raw sound that has Louis’ chest heaving and his cock aching as Lestat turns his face towards him. An easy heat, pressure, as Lestat mouths at the crotch of his slacks over his cock, slipping a wet tongue through the slits between the buttons to lick at Louis’ underwear, make him gasp above him. Stifle it with another drag, his hand buried in those golden curls as Lestat parts his lips wider, mouthing at Louis’ dick through the cotton like there ain’t nowhere he’d rather be.
Slipping his hand down to press three fingers to the base of Lestat’s head, keeping him in place, Louis pulls the cigarette from between his lips and exhales. Smoke filling the air above Lestat, and he wonders vaguely if this is what it felt like to the men at the clubs. To be a John getting exactly what you want, but then, how could it be, because as Lestat slips his tongue into the fabric between the buttons of Louis’ slacks again, Louis just can’t imagine anyone better at this than Lestat. He sucks in a wet breath, moving his hand back up to press Lestat’s head more firmly against his crotch, savoring the pressure of his face against him when Lestat goes willingly, his lover’s teeth moving to clasp the fabric, tugging, like he can get it down over the buttons that way, like he's desperate to suck cock, which - - fuck, ain’t he always, Louis thinks, looking down again to watch the muscles of Lestat’s shoulders shift beneath him.
“Look good like this,” Louis says before he can stop himself, and Lestat blinks up at him, pupils blown and eyes bright, no. More than bright. Worshipful almost in a way that Louis can’t look away from, devout at his altar, and his hand softens in Lestat’s hair, and for a moment, they can only look at each other. Louis’ breath caught and maybe Lestat’s is too, because briefly they feel caught in the riptide of one another’s attention, and maybe Louis is Poseidon after all, for he’s never felt more divine than when Lestat’s at his feet. Amphitrite at the throne of him, and it’s an illusion, a deception, he knows it is (the wind--) but Louis’ chest is heaving, his cock throbbing, his hand tightening again in Lestat’s hair only no it’s not, because suddenly, Lestat’s on his feet.
Raised in one easy and fluid motion, making Louis’ breath hitch, his pulse stutter, Lestat over him in a way Louis can’t have him, not yet, not now, but Lestat moves fast. He tilts his head down, blond hair tumbling over his shoulder as he reaches forwards to pluck the cigarette from Louis’ fingers, taking the final drag from it before he drops it to the floor, jutting his chin as if to say are you going to stamp it out, a question, an instruction, which Louis follows through on before he can even think, snuffing the ember with the sole of his shoe as Lestat starts to sway his hips.
“There are many ways I can look good, mon cher,” Lestat purrs as he lifts a leg, dropping his knee onto the bed beside Louis’ hip, panties gaping at the crotch to reveal a sliver of his groin – his heavy balls and curving cock – before the roll of his hips shifts the lace to cover it. Louis’ belly tightens, desire twisting his gut, and he raises a hand to clasp at Lestat’s thigh, hard enough the soft skin there dimples beneath his fingers, pulling a moan from the back of Lestat’s throat.
The sound reverberates through his very being, tugs that knot of need in him, and he reaches down to grab at the back of Lestat’s still standing thigh, urging him up onto the bed to straddle him properly, and oh, how Lestat goes willingly. Eyes dark as he climbs onto his lap, arms coming up to circle Louis’ shoulders. The mattress dips beneath his weight as he starts to undulate. An easy, full body roll that has Louis’ hands sliding up the backs of his legs, cock throbbing every time Lestat rocks his own still-flaccid (and fuck, surely still sensitive, for the breathless little sounds he makes) one against him. The lace tickles Louis’ wrists as he glides his fingers up beneath it, feeling the too-generous swell of Lestat’s ass as he searches out the seam with his nails.
Above him, Lestat groans, dropping his head back as he rolls his hips a little faster, the heat and the friction of him almost more than Louis can stand, and he teases at the seam of the panties, the promise of his tight hole a slip and an inch away, and have they ever done this before? Yes, fuck, once, more than once. Lestat danced like others walked, lived for the seduction as much as the sex, but Louis can’t remember the last time he didn’t burn with embarrassment to have him on him like this. The intensity of his own desire swallowed only by the shame at how much he prized it, and that alone made it something to be denied. To be rejected, lied about with shrugs and ugly looks, and later he’d used the excuse that Claudia might steal home early and see, or worse, pluck the picture of it from his head, and Lestat had backed off like he didn’t know just how much Louis wanted this. These private performances Lestat could put on just for him, these - - scenes that spoke to the thing in Louis that sought so desperately to possess him entirely.
He exhales a rough breath, gaze dragging up Lestat’s bloodied belly and cinched waist, his flat chest and strawberry nipples, the line of his throat, marked already by his fangs and long, stretched back in offer. Louis feels his fangs start to protract and tightens his grip on Lestat’s ass, finally starting to rock his hips up to meet him, searching out the friction of his body, the give and the take of it, and Lestat moans again, louder this time, head lolling forwards until the canopy of his golden hair drops over them, and his arms are sliding lower over Louis’ shoulders and he’s sinking forwards, grinding his hardening cock against Louis’. A breathless sound escapes from Louis’ mouth that Lestat suddenly tries to catch in his own in something like a kiss, a sudden return to intimacy and it’s that that jolts Louis from his reverie, snapping through him like a crack of thunder.
“You think I want that with you?” Louis bites, heart thudding too hard in his chest, because this ain’t that, ain’t what they’re supposed to be playin’ right now, he’s supposed to be in control, and he pushes sharply forwards on the bed. Moving Lestat with him and letting go of his ass only to shove at his knees, feeling something between satisfaction and shame at the wounded look that crosses Lestat’s face as he directs Lestat back to the floor. “Turn around if you ain’t gonna act right.”
The soles of Lestat’s feet hit the ground with a soft, staggered thud as Louis pulls his own legs together, ignoring his heavy cock straining in his lap as Lestat’s eyes dart over his face. Lestat’s cheeks suddenly flush like he’s ever been capable of feeling embarrassed, and good, Louis thinks, bitterly (how flushed had he felt, every time Claudia had looked at him and known what he still wanted. How she’d nursed him back to himself only to know—to know). He juts up his chin, pushes a hand out at one of Lestat’s hips in instruction to turn around, and Lestat finally offers him a cloying, put-upon smile.
“Of course, monsieur,” he simpers, climbing properly off Louis’ lap, and he makes a production of it. Holding out his hands, head tilted to the side and he’s slow as syrup drippin’ as he turns around, all brat again in this new moment, and still, somehow, it goes straight to his cock. Louis sucks in a wet breath, and Lestat’s barely got his back to him before Louis suddenly surges forwards, hands finding that tight little waist and grabbing him roughly, and yanking. No way he was expecting it, not with the way Lestat jolts at the contact, stumbling back as Louis pulls him back into his lap, rolling his hips up off the bed to meet his ass the second he’s on him, and how they both moan at the hard sudden contact, and this is - - better, Louis thinks. Lestat light in his lap, his thin thighs bracketing his own thicker ones, his ass firm and round against his cock, miles of pale skin pressed to his clothed chest, and his own hands where they should always be, clutching the narrowest part of his lover’s waist.
“Go on then,” Louis hums, squeezing there again as he starts to spread his thighs only to spread Lestat’s, sinking his ass down onto the bulge of his cock in the process. The pressure of him there leaves Louis seeing stars, and he feels that too. The added weight when he spreads their legs enough that Lestat’s toes start to dangle off the ground, knees hooked helplessly over Louis’ thighs. Louis’ lashes flutter, a strange and tangled sort of satisfaction at having him hovering again, a feeling he can’t name twisting in his chest as he says: “Show me how good you can look.”
And to that, Lestat needs no further instruction.
Humid air slips down past Louis’ belly as Lestat starts to arch his back, hips rolling in an indolent circle against Louis’ groin, the crease of his ass seeking the bulge in Louis’ slacks even through the layers of fabric, and how easy Louis catches there. He pants and Lestat moans, gyrating in a way that leaves Louis hot. He runs a hand up Lestat’s sides then around, searching out the pebble of his hard nipple to catch between his fingers, pinching hard enough to make Lestat tremble, to have his hands searching out Louis’ knees, the grip of his elegant hands there tight enough Louis’ sure they’ll leave bruises, but he doesn’t care. Can’t, not when Lestat curls his feet around Louis’ calves and uses the leverage his grip gives him to drop his chest further forwards, the line of his long, pale back exposed in invitation, and Louis moves the hand from his nipple to splay against the skin there, bowing him forwards even as his hand on his waist keeps him steady.
For a moment, Louis can’t remember how to breathe. Can’t remember if he even needs to, or if he could die here in this moment, Lestat nude but for the white panties, the cream layers of lace pretty as a weddin’ set splayed against the dark cotton covering his thighs. His cock, hard and straining in his slacks, peaking up through the fabric where a button’s apparently popped, pressed into the swell and the slow circling of Lestat’s apple of an ass.
It rises in him like a wave, the desire to own, to possess, to keep, and the thought has his fangs descending and his hands moving again before he can think. The one at his back slipping up to grab a fistful of blond hair as the hand at his waist curves around to his belly, pressing at the wound at his panty-line yet to heal, making Lestat stutter out a gasp. The metallic tang of fresh blood hits his nose as it oozes into rayon, and it’s enough for Louis to snap. He yanks Lestat back against him by his hair, pulling him back against his chest and at once sinks his fangs into Lestat’s shoulder as he plunges two fingers into the wound of him.
The cry that tears its way out of Lestat’s lips shakes the windows, but Louis doesn’t hear it. Louis can’t hear anything but the heady rush of Lestat’s hot, wet blood that fills his mouth again, and the pulpy press of his abdomen muscles as Louis buries his fingers deeper inside him, lashes fluttering and chest easing and cock straining with need. Above him, Lestat’s hands scramble behind him, trying to hold onto any part of Louis that he can, and he feels familiar fingers slide into his hair, feels the loose fabric at the side of his shirt grabbed, and vaguely Louis thinks he’d said no hands, but it’s hard to care as he draws deep pulls of golden light from his lover’s neck. The taste of him belied only by the power and the heat and the strength and the unbridled lust that floods his mouth and fills his veins, and he’s not sure how long he drinks for, but it must be some time for Lestat’s hand goes limp in his shirt, his body lax as it sinks back against his, lost in the swoon, and Louis fucks his fingers deeper into the wound, Lestat hiccupping with every thrust, ass still slowly, unrhythmically rubbing against his cock, and he thinks he could live this forever when he feels it.
The wet heat of a different sort of arousal and the hard, heavy line of something suddenly fumbled to his thigh. It’s - - strange, and Louis finds himself pulling off without preamble, blood dripping from his fangs, and for a moment, it’s disorienting. He’s disoriented, bright spots appearing before his eyes and a tangled up lust that don’t feel like his own or like Lestat’s either, and he blinks. Fingers still in Lestat’s wound even if his teeth aren’t in his neck, and he feels Lestat heaving breaths on top of him, no longer undulating, one hand still tangled back in Louis’ hair, but the other - -
Louis’ gaze travels down the long, pale line of Lestat’s arm to where his hand sits on the bed next to Louis’ thigh, suddenly clutching the ivory dildo, and it’s only then that he realizes that hot, wet arousal is hers.
It hits like a monsoon.
He jerks his head up sharply over Lestat’s flushed shoulder, and she’s there, spying through the window, Actaeon at the pool, watching still, and does Lestat know, does he realize? Stupid damned question, of course he does, Louis thinks, thunder cracking in his chest. Lestat would have her here, hand clutched to the phallus she’d use on herself, on him, in this bed with them if he could – her voice on his song – and the thought surges like furies over the crashing seas of him.
With the hand still in Lestat’s hair, Louis shoves Lestat up and sideways, spilling him on the bed, and he’s still half lost to the swoon for how sluggishly he moves, but it never takes Lestat long to come back to himself. Louis stands quickly, tearing the dildo from his hand and tossing it as far from them as he can, the weight of it causing it to land with a bang, and it’s urgent suddenly. The need to get her away from him, out of him, to purge her and possess him, no, to punish him for it. For all of it.
Louis’ quick to kneel up on the bed, mattress dipping beneath him again as he fumbles with his belt buckle, tearing it free of its loops as he knee-walks over to Lestat, unbalanced in the sheets. Lestat’s managed to get himself up onto all fours now, meaning to push himself up to kneel too, but Louis doesn’t give him the chance to. Can’t, not now, not again when he can so easily wrench back control with the ever undeniable invitation of his body, and he reaches for the waistband of the panties, yanking them down to Lestat’s thighs, ignoring the moan Lestat lets out, the arch of his back, desperate for cock as Louis loops the belt to clutch buckle and end in his fist and cracks the leather hard against Lestat’s bare ass.
Lestat yelps.
A high-pitched seal bark of a sound as his hips collapse forwards into the sheets, a furious red welt already blossoming on the curve of his pale ass, silk tap pants halfway down his thighs, and this ain’t something they’ve done before, but fuck, if it don’t feel good. Louis’ chest heaves, and he adjusts his knees on the mattress, rising up a little taller as he raises his arm again, bringing it down so fast the motion whistles before it smacks. Lestat buckles forwards again, only he doesn’t yelp this time, no, he groans, the slightly salty smell of his pre-cum in the air – a scent Louis would recognize anywhere – and it figures he’d get off on this too.
Louis inhales, finally undoing his slacks just to free his aching cock as he cracks the belt against Lestat’s ass again once, twice, three times in quick succession, the welts blooming bright and red as Lestat falls down onto his forearms just to arch his back into it again. The sound of both of them panting fills the air between them, broken only by the snap of the belt against his ass and upper thighs, and it’s the tenth one, when Lestat drops his head, spreading his legs as wide as the panties around his thighs will allow and wails out a Louiissss, that Louis knows neither of them can wait any longer.
Dropping the end of the belt, he loops it roughly around the front of Lestat’s hips, pushing his now-bobbing cock out of the way to do it, earning him another gasp, before he grabs the other end again and uses the belt to haul Lestat’s hips back towards him. It’s different somehow, close up like this, to see the marks, and before he can stop himself, he fists both ends of the belt in one hand, dropping it to Lestat’s lower back as he brushes the other across his cheek, briefly entranced by the red welts crisscrossing the skin there, some already bruising while others broke the skin in long, skinny cuts. Above him, Lestat shudders, and Louis takes the chance to cup his cheek more firmly, pulling it sideways to reveal the perfect pink pucker of his hole, still swollen and loose from their earlier fucking.
“This what it’d be like for any John I book you, huh?” Louis says, voice hoarse even to his own ears, feeling his way back to the earlier show. He shifts his weight a little, mattress dipping as he does, chest heaving in a way he can’t stop. “Always gettin’ you used.”
“Are you promising to have me first each night, mon cher, mon - - souteneur,” Lestat says, and his own voice sounds a little wrecked as he looks back at over his shoulder. His eyes an impossible blue and his cheeks flushed and tear streaked again, but still. The sight of him is always like getting kicked in the chest (it had been, hadn’t it? Whe he dropped him?). Louis swallows, heart pounding, shifting his hand sideways to stick a thumb roughly into his ass. Lestat lets out an ah, dropping his head forwards as he adds: “Laisse-moi poursuivre ton souvenir dans chaque main qui me touche.”
For a moment, all he can hear is the echo of Lestat’s words, and they ring too raw, too real, a promise of some sort of loyalty as they play at roles where no loyalty could ever be had, and it’s a farce, he knows it is, because Lestat’s wanted others warming his bed since before they had Claudia. Been unsatisfied with the memory of Louis’ touch alone for as long as they’ve been together, seeking strangers not because he had to, but because he wanted to, and what did that make Louis? A mouse caught beneath the paw of a cat, something to be yanked around and kept and toyed with, and when he wouldn’t be toyed with anymore, reduced to bones to sharpen teeth on, something to be broken, and the thought sits on his chest. Chokes his throat, and he can’t - - won’t grace him with an answer as he pulls his thumb out just to shove his own slacks and underwear down. His desperate, aching cock bobbing thick and heavy in the air between them. He quickly sucks on two fingers, thrusting them in a few rough times, scissoring him, and Lestat arches back again.
“Louis, oui, j'ai besoin de toi, baise-moi, allez,” he whines, and he’s still loose enough from before, but they used to like this part best. The savoring of each other’s bodies, but then if Lestat wants to play the whore to get back in his bed, Louis won’t deny him.
He’ll give him just what he wants.
Louis pulls his fingers out before spitting in his hand and grabbing the base of his cock, wetting himself roughly before he lines himself up, and he doesn’t give himself time to think about it, can’t with Lestat already rubbing back against him anyway, and thrusts.
And - -
Fuck.
Don’t matter that he’s still open from where they fucked earlier, he’s not loose enough, and a palmful of spit wasn’t enough to get either of them slick. It hurts, and they both cry out, the dry rub rough where they’re both most sensitive, Lestat bowing forwards, but there’s nowhere to go with Louis’ grip on the belt, and Lestat fists the sheets, a tension in his shoulders that Louis can see, and even in his hopeless anger, hopeless hurt, he reaches his free hand down to squeeze his hip in comfort. The gesture makes Lestat choke out a sob, and something in Louis trembles as he looks down between them, knows he ain’t even halfway in him and it still feels like coming home, and he lets his lashes flutter shut, allowing himself to focus on the impossibly tight clutch of Lestat’s body instead.
The feeling of it has his cock throbbing, desperate to be buried deeper even with the dry of it, and he drops the belt only to slit his palm, using the blood that oozes from his skin to better wet the part of him not yet inside Lestat, and he’s gentler this time as he starts to rock his hips. Urging Lestat back onto him, his inner walls clenched, but Louis can feel it. The ease of the bloodied lubrication, the way he tries to unclench. He grips Lestat’s hips, feels the bony points of them, as he guides him gently back onto him, and it’s Lestat who pants, whines, tries to pick up the pace, and when Louis won’t let him, it's Lestat who throws his head back, an ugly look on his face when he pops an eyebrow back at him.
“And now you’d have me softly. Is this how you would have played with those New York boys?” Lestat says, and Louis stares at him, and he feels it, Lestat’s teeth in his neck, his blood ever in his veins, the way he saw behind the mask before Louis could ever take it off. “Baise-moi comme je sais que tu en as envie.”
And it’s bait, but fuck if it doesn’t work. Louis’ mouth hardens into a line, his grip tightening on Lestat’s hips as he starts to fuck him a little deeper, rougher, and Lestat groans. Makes a show of turning back around, arching his back so his bruised ass sticks up a little higher, and he’s still tight, but there’s less resistance the deeper he gets. The blood he’d added more lubricating the more Louis fucks him. In front of him, Lestat drops to his forearms again, unusually quiet as he takes Louis’ strokes like he took his belt, and the thought clicks something into place, and - - no. Louis might’ve wanted this to be punishing, but he doesn’t want it to feel like a punishment (does he? – no), they ain’t doin’ it like that, Louis thinks, and fuck, if Lestat wants to play on his demons to get his way, well, Louis can do that too.
“Come on now,” he grunts, landing a particularly hard thrust that shoves Lestat forwards slightly on the bed. “Thought you wanted to audition, I know you ain’t ever been a dead fuck.”
Not like he knows he himself has been. The thought lodges, uncomfortable in his chest, and he moves a hand from Lestat’s waist to circle beneath him, thumbing at the head of his cock just to make him gasp, and it works. Enough at least to get Lestat starting to meet his thrusts, back up on his hands as he starts to bounce on it, head flicking to toss his hair back over his shoulder, to moan, and Louis meets his energy with his own, driving deeper with every thrust.
“There you go,” he says, even as he slits his thumb with the nail of his index finger, promptly smearing blood onto the part of his cock that ain’t yet in him, wetting himself to help ease the passage for both of them, and he feels it. Lestat’s shiver when he senses Louis’ blood breach him, and it lands in him somewhere too deep because that wasn’t - - he wasn’t going to give him that - -
(Lestat’s teeth in his neck, on the ground, then - - not. How drinking from him had always felt like floating until the moment Lestat flew).
He works his jaw.
“Such a fuckin’ slut,” he chokes out, and Lestat keens, because of course he does, and Louis thrusts in harder, faster. “How many could I have you take like this, huh?”
And he finds it then, that little clutch of nerves deep inside Lestat that ever entwine the divine and desecration, a feeling Louis knows too well, and he snaps his hips to hit it again, and again. Fucks it until a carnal sound rips from Lestat’s throat, until he clenches in a way he means, and he collapses forwards in the bed, back arched and ass up in offer, no, need, and fuck, Louis’ not even to the hilt yet. He exhales, sharp, hot.
“My girls could work the clock, but you can’t, not with what you - - we are. You got something else though, don’t you?” Louis says, thumbing at where Lestat’s stretched around him, driving himself another millimeter forwards, grinding against his prostate until Lestat’s gasping in the sheets. “Way your body snaps back to what it was when you were made, huh? I could sell your virgin ass fresh every night.”
He pulls out with that, almost to the tip, stroking himself roughly with his bloodied palm, lubricating the velvety tug of his cock before driving in with a rough force, the blood easing the fucking as Lestat’s body gives way to it in some sort of swoon, and Louis’ strokes are fast and still incomplete. A hard, rhythmic slide that Lestat’s soon driving back onto desperately with his red ass, meeting his thrusts until the slap of skin-on-skin is all they can hear, and he’s getting close – almost to the hilt – balls tightening each time they smack against Lestat’s perineum, when Lestat suddenly pushes back up onto his hands and says:
“You - - ah! You have my apologies, mon cher, but I’m - - ah - - I’m afraid my ass was not virginal at my making.”
It’s enough to stutter the slap of Louis’ hips against his ass, to have him blink, to reaffirm his grip on Lestat’s cinched little waist, and - - did he know that? He’d always assumed, and suddenly he’s not sure why. He knows he’d had a lover back then, knows about - - about Nicolas - - but there was something to that tiny bit of resistance every time, like his body wasn’t used to it, that made Louis assume he’d only developed his taste for taking it after he’d been turned.
He works his mouth, feels it - - strangely, as he picks up his pace again.
“It feels - - you feel like it,” he says, and the words are enough to make Lestat clench, leaving Louis to choke out a moan and a sound to tear from Lestat’s own throat that Louis doesn’t think he’s ever heard before, and oh, maybe it tears through him too. A fresh heat shoots to his cock, and he starts fucking Lestat roughly again, hard, the bed scraping up the floorboards and the head banging against the wall, an intoxicating beat to echo the way he moves inside his lover, and Lestat’s breathless moans are a symphony atop it, but it holds, because - - why’d he think that? Why’d he think there was any way Lestat hadn’t been had before he was made? How could he think he knew him (the air, it whistles past his ears again), because he knew Lestat knew about Theo, but what is Lestat if not a secret in a fist?
Louis shakes his head, a pressure building behind his eyes as he pounds into him, harder now, and the words are ripped hoarse and high from his throat, when he says: “Ain’t that all that matters? What you tell people your body can do?”
At that, Lestat tenses again, his body a vice that won’t let Louis go, and Louis grits his teeth, raises a hand from Lestat’s waist to the headboard, gripping it hard as he fucks him, the drag of his body hotter than Satan’s hand, hole, and the thought has him spiraling down. It’s got to be in response, but Lestat raises his own hands, pressing up to the headboard too, just so he can meet the force of Louis’ thrusts, and he feels it. The slats on the bed starting to buckle beneath them.
“You sell yourself as one thing, I can sell you as another, can’t I?” he bites, and his head feels too full, his chest aching and his balls tightening. “Let you lie to someone else for a change.”
Lestat drops his head, his palm ground red against the wall, and Louis fucks him harder and the bed really does buckle then. The slats breaking and the mattress falling through, and Louis arm jerks from the bed head as Lestat scrambles as they hit the padded floor, and Louis don’t care. Can’t when all he can see is Lestat’s tight shoulders and flushed back, all he can remember is the deceit and - - and the drop. His own body laid broken and bare and powerless by the hands of the one he - -
He shakes his head, feels tears prick his eyes.
“This good for you?” he asks, voice fractured, even to his own ears, and he knows he’s crying now, aching and split open. “This what you want? You’d rather be this than my husband?”
And he don’t even know what he’s saying anymore beyond the fact that this hurts somewhere in him in a way that he can’t ignore. An anchor dropped in the sea of him that the water can’t just brush past, and it’s sudden when Lestat pushes back against him, when he says:
“Louis,” when he says: “No - - how can I - - ? Let me look at you, mon cher, please.”
And oh, Louis should say no. He means to, wants to, knows exactly what really looking at Lestat means, but he - - he can’t. Not in this broken bed, in this beaten down life, and he draws in a shaky breath as he pulls roughly out. He sits back on his haunches on the mattress, chest heaving and it’s a mistake, he thinks, watching Lestat tenderly roll over, kicking off the panties only to spread his legs. A mistake he thinks, as Lestat casts wet eyes back at him, lifting his legs only for Louis to grab him by his ankles, delicate enough it’s like they’ve been made to hook over his own narrow shoulders, and he folds Lestat in half to do just that as he sinks back into him, and - - fuck.
He doesn’t even realize he’s crying until a bloody tear falls on Lestat’s face.
“Louis,” Lestat murmurs, and Louis shakes his head, thrusting back into him in a way that makes Lestat’s mouth fall back open, and he can’t look at him, or - - no. Can’t stop looking at him, once he lets himself, seconds after the thrust. Lestat’s face red and tear stained and wrecked, but so open, his eyes so wide, as Louis starts to fuck him again, not as rough, not as hard or as fast as before, but just as deep, dragging them through their pleasure as Lestat tries to grab his face, his neck, and Louis grabs his wrists and pins them to the bed either side of his head. Burying them in the cushions and leaving his belly the only friction for Lestat’s purple cock, and then he just—
He kisses him.
Deeply, passionately, feeling Lestat’s wrists strain in his grasp, and he pins them harder (and does he let him? Or is it Lestat’s blood in his veins, his husband’s drained form tonight that gives Louis the strength to hold him down?) He pushes both his wrists into one hand and drops a hand low between them, grabbing Lestat’s cock as Lestat’s calves spasm at his shoulders, and he barely has to flick a hand to have Lestat shuddering to a dry orgasm – finally nothin’ left to give – clenching hard around Louis’ cock, and Louis keeps going. Willing himself to draw it out, nipping Lestat’s lip to suck hungry laps of blood from it, before shifting to his bruised neck to sink his teeth in him again. One hand letting go of his wrist to grab a palmful of ass instead, Lestat’s hand immediately dropping to the back of his head, pulling him in, even as the soles of his feet catch the humid air above their head, and Louis’ thrusts grow short and rough.
The slick sounds of good fucking filling the air between them, and Lestat’s lost to the overstimulation, and maybe Louis is too, but it’s only with his tongue deep in Lestat’s mouth, his cock thick in his ass and one of their hands entwined that he finally drops his hips to the hilt and lets himself finally release again.
What do they look like, he wonders, from the outside-in?
A tangle of limbs, of light and shade, of curled toes and pressed noses and curved backs and clasped hands. A mess of skin and spit and spirit in soiled sheets and splintered wood. Not hearts dancing, but pounding in rhythm, the drum he’d heard the night of his turning ever playing in his chest, pulsing in his veins, consumed by temptation and tempted to consume, and he’d been right that night, their wedding night, when he’d thought Lestat the devil, because he’d felt it again between his legs before sun-up in their coffin and too many nights after. Was too often reminded with Lestat that Lucifer was once the most treasured of God’s angels – a slip of heaven destined to create hell, and Louis had felt it then as he’d pressed his way into the heat of his maker’s body, and he feels it now, still buried inside him, hips spasming to the last of his orgasm, that he’d follow him all the way down if it meant the feeling of Lestat’s face in his hands and his body pressed against his own.
Husband and whore and maker and brother, siren and Demeter and Amphitrite in equal measure and did any of it ever matter? It hasn’t any time Lestat’s dragged him down before. Didn’t the night he made him or the night they made Claudia, didn’t any night between, and maybe it didn’t that one either. The night he dropped him from the sky like a stone from a cloud, for even on the way up, it had only ever felt like falling in reverse, and ain’t he ever brought low by the one he—
Oh.
The one he loves.
Tap tap tap.
Louis raps his knuckles on the window, rattling the glass in its flimsy pane as on the other side Antoinette hovers, apprehensive and red-faced as she stares back at him. It’s with a tilt of his head that he gestures her back in, not waiting to see if she follows the instruction before he moves slowly back to her bed, the washcloth he’d retrieved from her bathroom cool and damp in his hands.
It’s a drop to get down beside Lestat now, with the bedframe broken and the mattress sunk to the floor, and Louis’ knees are a little stiff as he does it, moving to sit beside Lestat’s pale and svelte form. Vaguely, Louis thinks he probably drank too much from him, the bite marks in his neck and shoulder, his chest, puckered and failing to heal, the wound at his belly tacky with dried blood, but still. Lestat offers him a tender smile as Louis presses the washcloth to his belly, gentle as he wipes the cum off his skin, and maybe it’s something.
The way he hears Antoinette come in, yet Lestat’s gaze, soft in the mellow light of her apartment, never leaves his own.
“You got some trunks?” Louis asks, moving the washcloth lower,
“Excuse me?”
Terse, her voice. Catty, and Louis wets his lips,
“You got some trunks to pack his belongings in?”
Beneath him, Lestat’s pulse seems to stop.
“I—”
“Lestat,” Louis says, gaze flicking back up to his face. “She got some trunks to pack your belongings in?”
For a moment, the air seems to hum. The thick and humid heat palpable between them, the scent of sex inescapable, of blood and sweat too. A blanket of the last hour – hours – dropped over them in a way that has Antoinette suffocating behind them while Lestat only looks mystified back up at him, breathless, suddenly, with the suggestion.
“Oui, in the wardrobe behind the kitchen.”
With that, Louis glances back at Antoinette over his shoulder, lets his gaze flick derisively over the haphazardly dressed, frazzled figure she cuts in the doorway before giving her a look that says well? Go and get them. She shifts her weight, squares her shoulders, as if to refuse, when suddenly Lestat says:
“We have had our fun, ma cocotte, let us part as friends.”
And he sees it. The familiar flush of humiliation that crosses her face, the huff, the hurt, and Louis can’t quite swallow the grin that twitches at his lips as he turns his attention back to where Lestat’s still sprawled in her sheets, staring up at Louis with a soft and hazy warmth. Louis raises an eyebrow down at him, and Lestat shifts a hand to his hip as he parts his legs just enough Louis can press the damp washcloth there, and he’s beautiful.
Of course he’s beautiful, ever and always, and Lestat’s breath hitches at the pressure against his tender entrance, and Louis hears the wind whip past his ears and the shame that eats his bones like acid and he thinks - - he thinks and yet.
Behind them, Antoinette finally moves, heading deeper into the small apartment, and Louis can hear her fumbling in the other room with the closet, pulling out trunks as Lestat spreads his legs a little wider, hand caressing Louis’ hip through his slacks as he cleans him up, but still. He waits for Antoinette to be back in the room before he hoists Lestat’s leg up with a hand to the back of his thigh, making him inhale sharply as he tugs his thigh sideways to spread his ass cheek until he can see his pink-tinged cum dribble out, and he makes sure Antoinette gets an eyeful of that too before he presses the cloth to his leaking hole.
He feels it.
The queasy feeling of disgust intermingled with arousal that emanates off her, a feeling, perhaps, he knows, yet still. There’s something to exposing Lestat here, with her, that feels good.
“Nothin’ of his is staying,” Louis says, loud and clear as he stares down at Lestat. Hearing Antoinette pop the trunks on the floor and start to open up her drawers, making a bitter show no doubt of sorting through Lestat’s things, and Louis looks back at Lestat. Presses a finger through the cloth to Lestat’s hole, rubbing there just to see his chest flush, to hear him moan – predictable, in his perpetual arousal – before he makes a show of rolling his eyes, relishing only a little in the way Lestat’s throat tightens. He drops the cloth there, and then Lestat’s thigh as he clambers off the bed again.
“You can finish cleaning yourself up, you look like a whore.”
Callous, yes, but at least it has Lestat back up on an elbow, lip curled and eyes bright.
“Well, you would know,” Lestat simpers, pushing up onto his elbow and Louis raises an eyebrow only for Lestat to defer instantly, knowing, likely, the precariousness of Louis’ offer. He tilts his chin up, cloying, as he adds: “Haven’t I ever been yours, mon cher?”
A flirtation, Louis thinks, and it settles somewhere strange in him. The sudden thought that despite this night, despite knowing that he’ll have him back in his coffin before sun-up, nothing’s truly changed. At least, not yet, he promises himself, and Louis gives him a once over, wants to tell him there will be rules now because there have to be, but suddenly he doesn’t want to give Antoinette the satisfaction of knowing that.
He turns, striding across the small apartment to find the wardrobe he fucked Lestat against first this night, opening up the door and finding a crisp, pale blue shirt with double breasted pockets, and then, from the trunks splayed open on the floor a pair of black slacks. He searches only briefly for underwear, but ain’t surprised to find none without rayon and frills (and he does think of giving him a pair of those for the ride home, but the thought of allowing any part of her out of this apartment with them leaves the seas in him crashing).
Above him, Antoinette suddenly clears her throat, and Louis glances up to find her staring back at him, a handful of Lestat’s folded sweaters in her hands, waiting to go into the trunk, and Louis stands a little straighter. Squares his shoulders as he takes her in again, before he says in a low voice that he hopes Lestat can’t hear:
“You got til I finish dressing him to pack him up, then you best forget him.”
And oh, Louis thinks, chest tight, if only it were possible to forget Lestat.
“And so, we return,” Lestat hums, voice low and droll like Louis can’t hear the relief and the anticipation pulsing like a current beneath it as he turns the keys to start Lestat’s car. The engine rumbles to life, vibrating beneath them in a way that makes Lestat shift his weight in the passenger seat, and the thought that he’s likely sore tightens Louis’ throat as his hands come to grip the steering wheel and his foot lowers on the accelerator.
“Conditionally,” Louis replies, and Lestat’s head swings around, eyes a little wider, but he nods, earnestly and honestly, not so much deferential as desperate.
“Of course.”
“Claudia will want to talk.”
And Lestat’s expression shifts at that, offering a smile that comes off more as a grimace, and Louis can’t quite stop the reflection of it in his own look. She’d been there after all, hadn’t she? Beside him at the record player? Louis can barely remember. Couldn’t see her, hear her for the sound of the now-shattered song, the last memory of it the wound still barely healed on Lestat’s firm belly.
She won’t be happy.
He don’t need to read her mind to know that, but then, when is she these days?
Louis sniffs, gaze fixing on the road ahead as he drives, New Orleans opening up before him in a way it hasn’t near a decade, the townhouses and the jazz joints and the low slung bars blurring past their windows as he drives, the rough and rotting smell of the stagnant river heavy in the air, the sounds of the nightlife bright in hollers and trumpets and the thrum of cicadas and the calls of the mockingbirds, but...more.
With Lestat beside him, sweet and cleaned-up despite the bruises on his arms and the marks on his temple, it could almost be a decade ago, be something good, more, could almost be—
Before.
Louis wets his lips, rolls his shoulders, sits up a little straighter, glances back, and for the first time, maybe, meets Lestat’s hopeful smile with his own, before he says:
“That woman…”
He trails off. Unsure briefly of what he means to say, and he feels Lestat’s gaze on him again, as uncertain as perhaps Louis feels himself.
“Antoinette?” he prompts, tone a little soft. A half attempt at flippancy, and Louis’ hands tighten on the wheel. Too many thoughts are tangled in his head, the threads of all these humiliations, the hurt, the shame, but this one - - this one he did something about tonight.
Can’t he do something about it again?
When he pulls up to the traffic lights, the red glow hovering above them, he works his mouth. Turns, finally, to face Lestat, and oh, he thinks he loves him, but also how he means it when he says:
“You embarrass me with her again, I’ll bleed you dry.”