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Mick handed Josef a glass as he rounded the couch and sat downa next to him, taking a long swig of blood from his own glass.
Josef's nose wrinkled slightly as he took a sip. "I'd really hoped that now that you have a newfound appreciation for vampirism, you'd give up your older, grosser habits. How do I convince you to start drinking fresh from the vein?"
Mick laughed and tilted his glass toward Josef in a mock salute. "Sorry, Dad."
"Didn't I tell you to stop that?"
"Sorry, Daddy?" Mick was pretty sure he kept a straight face.
Josef didn't; his expression was not unlike the one he made at Mick's choice of refreshments, only somehow worse. "Keep that up and I'm telling Beth."
"No you won't," Mick said. He tried not to think about the implications of what it would mean to tell Beth about this. Why she'd need to be appraised of a little joking amongst friends … and of what her place was in his life right now. He still wasn't ready to think about exactly what that looked like, what that meant.
"No, I won't," Josef agreed. His head tipped back against the couch. "Because I don't have a fetish for public humiliation."
"But you do have a fetish for being called Daddy."
Josef scoffed. "Not unless you're a beautiful, nubile woman several centuries younger than me."
"Well, I am several centuries younger than you," Mick pointed out. He let himself smile, finally; he wasn't sure why he kept pushing Josef's buttons on this one, but he sure was making them easy to press.
Josef growled, and before Mick knew it he was pinned, Josef crouched over him on the couch. He plucked the glass, still half-full, from Mick's hands and set it gently on the buffet behind them; his other hand pinned one of Mick's to the cushions, an iron grip around his wrist. His mouth was very, very near to Mick's neck. Mick's pulse rushed, and then slowed to match the sluggish beat of Josef's ancient heart. Josef might not be his sire in the ways that mattered, but the blood didn't know that.
"Why are you trying me like this?" Josef snarled. "Is this fun for you? Do you think this is fun for me?"
Mick swallowed heavily, kept his voice as normal as possible when he said, "You seem like you're having fun."
"I didn't want this," Joseph said, low in his ear. "I tried to warn you."
"Warn me? That you'd … try and kill me?" It was getting harder to speak, with Josef's breath on his throat. Harder to think about anything but the way it had felt when Josef's fangs had sliced through him.
"Kill you?" Josef laughed, a wounded, strangled thing without any humor in it. "Kill you? What — Did you think it was love that kept you coming back to Coraline?"
The words were both a curve ball and a low blow, and it went some way toward pulling Mick out of the thrall he'd been feeling.
"It was love," he insisted. It was hard to feel the same way about someone after they'd murdered you, but whatever gruesome shape it had twisted into, the love he felt for Coraline had kept him crawling back again and again, until he remembered each time how much he hated her.
"You didn't think it was this? Her blood in your veins?"
Now Mick could feel the points of Josef's fangs against his throat, a cruel tease. It felt like all his blood was surging up to meet them, like it wanted to be pulled from his veins and into Josef's cool, open mouth, over his tongue and down his throat and —
Mick's breath caught. He pressed his hips down into the couch cushion, needing to put as much space between himself and the body on top of him as possible. His blood wasn't the only part of him beginning to strain upward; or at least, his neck wasn't the only place the blood was rushing.
Josef's tongue flicked lightly against his carotid. Other than that, he was holding very, very still.
"So —" Mick took a strangled breath, tried to clear his throat. "You're feeling it too."
"'Feeling it'? The urge to bend you over the nearest surface?" Josef was up and off him before Mick could blink. Despite the lack of any body heat, Mick felt the chill of his absence. Josef's laugh was just as cold. "Yes, but I have been resisting this urge, because I value our friendship."
Been resisting. He'd been feeling this, this need that Mick felt now, had been feeling it for — how long? Since the moment he'd swallowed the first mouthful of Mick's blood; since the moment Mick had tasted his? Before?
Had Mick been feeling it too, this whole time? He'd been so overwhelmed: readjusting to being a vampire, trying to expand his business ventures. Beth.
He stood up. Josef hadn't gone far; Mick could have touched him if he reached out. But he didn't. He did say Josef's name, just once, and very softly.
He didn't even feel it when Josef took a step back toward him, crowding in close. He felt it when Josef's hands touched him, one on his shoulder, one under his chin, tilting his head just slightly. He felt it when Josef's fangs pricked the side of his neck, and gasped. His eyes shut tightly enough that he saw stars. But the pain didn't increase; his blood didn't flow. Josef had bitten him just hard enough to break the skin, not deep enough to hit a vein.
"Please," he said. Begged. He knew he was embarrassing himself but he didn't care; he needed to feel it again: Josef's fangs, inside him; Josef's blood in his mouth. It hadn't felt this way with Coraline, not exactly, but he could feel the echo of it.
He fit his own hands onto Josef's hips. He didn't know if he meant to pull him in, to press them together and try to relieve some of this ache that he couldn't stop feeling, but … Josef was older than him, stronger, and Mick couldn't move him at all.
Josef's fangs slid out of his neck, gentle in comparison to the grip he still had on Mick, and then his hands slid away too. Mick would have sworn that the hand on his neck lingered, fingers dragging over the skin there. The absence hurt more than the pain had. He felt … empty. Unaccountably lonely. He could feel the holes in his neck shrinking and then closing over entirely. Josef had left no blood to show they'd ever been there.
Mick's own hands dropped as Josef took a step back.
Josef's face was closed off, no trace of his usual sardonic smile, not even a fanged scowl. His eyes were a brilliant and utterly inhuman icy white.
"Get out," Josef snapped. "Don't you have a mystery to solve, Nancy Drew?"
Mick blinked, shook his head slightly to clear it. He looked around himself: the familiar bookshelves, the familiar art. "You're in my house," he said. Not as pointed as he wished he sounded. A little stunned, a little wary.
Josef's eyes tracked around just as Mick's had, fading back to their human hazel. "So I am. Well —" He tugged on his tie to straighten it, brushed his hands down the lapels of his jacket with a casual confidence that seemed, for once, feigned. "I'll see myself out."
He brushed past Mick as he walked to the door, and Mick's blood sparked at the contact. He turned in time to watch Josef let himself out. The door closed slowly and soundlessly, not even having the decency to slam shut behind him.
Mick's gaze stuck on the door, at the screen next to it showing nothing but an empty hallway. Maybe if he kept watching, Josef would appear again; maybe they could talk about this. Maybe they could …
He shook his head and went to collect the glasses they'd been drinking from. He drained the rest of his as he walked back to the kitchen, the cold blood sliding thickly down his throat. There was work he could be doing — an embezzlement case he'd just taken on. He could work out. He could read a book, watch a movie.
His fangs itched in his gums. He wanted … he just wanted. He spent so much time wanting, these days.
Despite himself, he looked back at his security camera. The screen was still empty. The door stayed closed.