by Neve Wilder
She giggled at my frown. “Oh come on, this is fun. And if you weren’t all about guys, this costume would totally make me want to go home with you and be your one-night stand.”
“Would you make me take my costume off first?” I adjusted the lampshade and brushed at some fringe, posing invitingly.
“It could stay. Might be a little unwieldy, though,” she quipped.
“Definitely worth a video recording. Nightstand bangs a… what are you, exactly?” She had a glittery magenta star painted around her eye, a drip of fake blood oozing from one corner of her mouth, and a white bodysuit spattered with fake blood.
“Dead unicorn.” She grinned, tapping the slender party hat on her head I now realized was supposed to be her horn. “Terrible costume, I know. It was last-minute because I wasn’t sure I’d be coming.” She turned around so I could see the knife hilt she’d glued to her back, along with a kinda sad-looking old wig that I guessed was supposed to be a tail.
I tugged on it. “Your tail looks like something tossed from a car full of drag queens and run over repeatedly.”
She snickered and shrugged. “I know. That’s part of the charm. So you know Quinn, then? I had no idea.”
Hmmm, how to answer that question. I knew what he tasted and smelled like, knew what it felt like to have him up against me, and I knew he was an arrogant bastard and gifted artist, but I’d hardly even qualify us as friends at this point. Mutually interested in each other, absolutely. “Sort of? He saw me playing the other night and invited me. Saw him earlier, but he ran off and I can’t tell who anyone is here. I’ll probably jet soon.” I glanced hopefully at the entrance to the haunted house, thinking surely Quinn would take a break at some point.
“He’s probably doing the haunted house right now. Wanna go through with me? It’s always super scary.”
I switched my drink to my other hand, hedging as she linked her elbow through mine. I didn’t like haunted houses. They scared the crap out of me, regardless of the fact that I knew it was all an act. And I hated people jumping out at me. But I finally shrugged and said okay because I didn’t want to be lame.
We tacked ourselves onto another group that was just entering, and Amanda snugged up close to my side. Well, as close as she could get considering I was wearing a piece of furniture.
We moved through the first room, which consisted of a few coffins with some animatronic skeletons that sat up and jerked about mechanically to a soundtrack of screams and strobe lights as we passed. My shoulders relaxed slightly. If this was what we were in for, I could handle it.
Next, we wound around through cobwebs and more plastic sheeting into another room, which had been constructed to look like some eerie nursery with blood dashed all over the walls and a few baby cribs that appeared empty, aside from more blood. It was still creepy as hell, and I started getting the heebie-jeebies again, so when a dude popped up from one of the cribs wearing a baby bonnet and onesie with half his faced covered in gore, I jumped and yelled out, knocking into the guy in front of me.
Amanda startled, too, and released her grip on my elbow to clasp my clammy hand in hers, her eyes big and round as we rushed through and into the next hallway, only to be funneled into another room. This one was bigger, the floor covered in actual dirt from which disturbingly realistic body parts stuck up at intervals. I couldn’t tell where the light source was, but the entire room glowed a faint red.
“That hand is moving,” Amanda whispered loudly, scooting closer to me as she pointed out some fingers wiggling in the dirt five feet in front of us. “Do you think it’s battery powered, or is someone actually lying under all that dirt somehow?”
“Not sure I care. Let’s get out of here. I’m officially creeped out,” I groused. We tried to press ahead, but the gaggle of partiers in front of us was cutting up and laughing, and also inconveniently blocking any forward progress. I broke out in a sweat, because on top of hating haunted houses, I hated feeling confined.
When the chainsaw noise started up, I stiffened and just knew we were going to get some kind of dude in a hockey mask jumping out to terrorize us. I shut my eyes and took a deep breath, preparing and reminding myself I was an adult at a Halloween party.
I was right and wrong. Almost as soon as the people in front of us started moving, they stopped short again. I ran into some girl’s back with the pointy edge of my nightstand and got a glare for my distracted apology.
The chainsaw noises ramped up in volume, along with the screams, both soundtrack and the real thing. Amanda turned to me, saying something, but I couldn’t hear a damn thing beyond the shriek of machinery.
My heart pounded and my body flushed with adrenaline as I darted a look around, searching for an exit because I was done. Screw skeletons and jump scare tactics. They could suck a nut. I was ready to be out of there.
And then, like the icing on top of a crap cake, the eerie red darkness around us exploded with movement. It seemed like someone or something popped out from every goddamn corner and wall. A Jason, a Freddy Krueger, a fucking werewolf, and a zombie, all rushing toward our group so fast we scattered instinctively. I flailed around disoriented, looking for Amanda while screams filled my ears—more than a few of them my own.
When something heavy landed on my forearm, I reacted with pure primal reflex, jerking my arm up wildly only to hit resistance. I barely heard a loudly exclaimed curse, and then Dracula filled my vision, leaning in close as he took both my wrists and dragged me toward the wall, then parted the plastic sheeting and shoved me through a door hidden behind.
“Ru.” The purr of Quinn’s voice cut through my panic. The screams and chainsaw noises muted slightly as he closed the door behind him and dissolved into laughter. “You punched James.”
“Who the fuck is James?” I was still bewildered and flustered, trying to catch my breath, my heart bounding wildly out of control. “Fuck, I hate haunted houses,” I snapped to more laughter from Quinn. I was suddenly burning up in my stupid costume, so I started trying to wrestle it off me but kept getting my shoulder stuck in the process.
“Calm down,” he said, quieting, his voice low and even as he reached out and squeezed my biceps, that silly, amused smirk still on his face. “Let me.” In spite of the glare I aimed at him, he remained all too entertained by my frantic state. “God, you look so helplessly cute right now, all pissed off and wild.”
I wrinkled up my nose, trying for a sneer, but stood still regardless and let him help me lift the nightstand off my shoulders. The lampshade was long gone, lost in the haunted house somewhere. Good fucking riddance.
We set the nightstand on the ground, and I settled down enough to huff out, “What is it with you and luring me into the shadows?”
“What is it with you and following me into them?” he countered. “And technically, I’d say that time I was saving you, not luring you. Or saving James’s nose, maybe. ”
“I was fine,” I grumbled. “Just a little startled.”
“That wasn’t the scream of ‘just a little startled,’ that was ‘I might shit my pants.’”
“Yeah, yeah.” I was eager to get off the subject of my embarrassing kryptonite moment, so I pointed out the wall of canvases I’d noticed over his shoulder. They were stacked several deep and most of them as tall as me, arresting abstract portraits in black and white.
“That’s your stuff, then?”
He glanced over his shoulder, then turned fully around to stand next to me, nodding as he prodded his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “My stuff, yep. That about sums it up.”
“I didn’t mean it in a bad way. It’s pretty amazing, actually.” I knew jack shit about painting, but Quinn’s work was really impressive—at least to my untrained eye—and I couldn’t stop looking at it, all the stark black shapes and then softer shades of gray on pure white. “Aren’t artists supposed to love natural light and all that, though? What do you do?”
Quinn shrugged and trailed after me as I walked nearer to the
canvases for a closer inspection. The brushstrokes weren’t precise, but more like splashes that somehow formed an image in spite of the chaos.
“I learned to love colored lightbulbs and darkness, I guess.” He laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. There was a solemn edge to it.
“Am I not supposed to ask or something?” I cast a glance aside at him, concerned I’d only managed to insult him further, but he waved his hand and gave me a tiny smile.
“No, it’s fine. I’ve gotten used to it, really. I use a lot of red light. Or blue. Can’t see either color, of course, but I can tell the differences in shade. Lights and darks.”
“Did you go to school for art?”
“School of hard knocks.” He chuckled, and this time it was a softer sound that came close to my shoulder. “My foster parents did their best, but suffice it to say the world isn’t really built for people like me, so I had to figure out how to get by on my own. I was always good at art, and it seemed like the most viable career path for me, so I just… busted my ass to squeeze a living out of it. My eye doc is all excited about this new tech coming out—some contact lenses that will allow me to go without the sunglasses. They’re supposed to be in next week.”
“Seems like you’ve done well enough for yourself, though? Big loft, big party with a terrifying and probably expensive haunted house, nice car.”
“Yeah.” The way he drew the word out suggested there might be more to it than that, but he didn’t fill the lingering silence. I glanced at him to try to decode it and discovered he was watching me with an intent expression that was a mixture of heat and something else.
“What?”
“I don’t usually get mixed up with musicians.”
I snorted. “I don’t usually get mixed up with dudes who try to lure me into the shadows.” Technically, we hadn’t gotten mixed up yet, but I could feel it in the air around us, this anticipation and expectation, our unfinished business.
He blinked away from my study of him and ticked his chin at the canvas I’d paused near. “Les Graves.”
“Yeah, I know. He’s a friend of mine.” I smiled, eyeing the portrait of a face I knew well. He and his bandmate Evan had done a lot of shows at Grim’s before their first album had taken off like a shot, and Les still came in regularly to trawl through the records. “It’s gorgeous,” I said of it. Les had that look that made you want to simultaneously cuddle him and tear his clothes off, and Quinn had captured it perfectly. So perfectly I wondered if he knew him as more than an acquaintance or portrait subject. The way his expression knotted up as he stared at the painting confirmed my hunch.
“Yeah, it really is.” He sighed. “Friend, you said? Good for you for avoiding that axe.”
I snickered. “Spoken like someone who didn’t. Did you get ‘mixed up’ with him?” I asked even though it was obvious he had. Les had left more than a few broken hearts curbside on his twisty road to success. I’d always been glad not to be one of them. He was one of those guys who was great to have as a friend, not so great as a lover, since he could be fickle and impulsive.
“Yeah, I guess. It was years ago, though. I never got a chance to give him the painting, and I’ve never been sure what to do with it. We’re cool enough, I guess, but it always seemed like it’d be odd to give it to him. Like, what would I say? Here’s a thing I made for you when I was half in love with you?”
“Only half?” I eyed him skeptically, trying to imagine him and Les together and hating the tiny jolt of jealousy that ran through me that so didn’t belong there this early in our… unconsummated whatever we were.
“Fine, maybe three-fourths, but like I said, it was a while ago and…” He shrugged and waved his hand, clearly wanting a subject change, so I nodded at the next canvas.
“Now this is one I can really get behind. The man in black himself.” The dark figure loomed and seemed to explode dimensionally off the canvas, the brushstrokes filled with an undeniable energy and presence that fit his iconic status.
“You like Johnny Cash?”
“Shit, who doesn’t?”
Quinn burst into laughter, confusing me until he said, “Sorry, I was just thinking about when I came into the store the other day and that little sprite—”
I knew immediately who Quinn was referring to. Owen was characterized that way a lot. “Owen.”
He chortled. “Yeah, Owen, said I had a man-in-black thing going on and asked me if I’d come to kidnap you or beat you up.”
“Sounds like Owen. And you should have kidnapped me because I’d been in that back room for hours sorting through some lady’s serious addiction to orchestral pop. The back of a trunk would have been a nice change of scenery from Burt Bacharach.”
I whirled around and flopped into a sprawl on Quinn’s bed, watching as he followed after me, stopping just at the edge. He wriggled out of his coat and flopped down next to me. I could feel his eyes on my profile.
“I don’t think I would’ve stuck you in the trunk. Maybe the back seat,” he mused.
I angled toward him, propping on my elbow and regarding the long, elegant lines of his body, even bundled in the Gothic clothing. “You’d have needed something to restrain me. I’d be putting up a fight.”
“I thought you just said you’d be happy for the change of scenery?” A hint of a smile played over his lips, and I thought I detected a glimmer behind the blue lenses of his glasses.
“Well, to keep up appearances of a kidnapping and all. Make it legit.”
“Duct tape, then?”
“So sticky, much pain,” I countered.
“Rope.”
My breath shallowed out as I imagined him tying me up. I’d never really gotten into that kind of thing, but something about his costume and the way he was looking at me had me ready to stick my wrists out and beg him to bind them. Maybe it was the alcohol, I wasn’t sure, but the guy did some wicked shit to my thought processes. “I could get down with some rope.”
“I could get down with you and some rope.” He regarded me carefully. “Are you drunk?”
“I was left to my own devices for too long, I guess. Not that drunk, though.” I stretched my arm out in front of me and zoomed my finger in and out to my nose, then side to side, following it until Quinn laughed. I liked the sound of his laughter, much more friendly than the vibe he’d given off at Howie’s that first night, and while I’d enjoyed our back-and-forth, I was genuinely interested in him now, and seeing this relaxed side of him was a wholly different turn-on. When I let my hand fall back to the mattress, his smile faded gradually. A muscle in his jaw fluttered as he swallowed.
There was a charge between us, like I could have reached into the narrow space between our bodies and sparks would’ve flown from my fingers as if I’d shoved them into the midst of an electrical storm. When my eyes caught on his, I could tell he was feeling the same thing. I was hard and aching, all the pent-up, unreleased tension between us distilled into my groin and making my dick throb.
“No rope. Or duct tape,” he said softly, reaching out to trace his finger along my upper lip and looking every inch like a danger, at least to my sanity. “Just you and me.”
I closed my eyes at the coolness of his touch, and when it lifted away, I opened them again, drawing in a deep, quiet breath that I thought spelled out exactly how much I wanted him. “Finishing what we started.”
He gave a tiny nod even as he leaned forward and kissed me. Soft, at first, like he was testing me out, waiting to see how I’d react or what I was going to give him in return. He was this mixture of fierce and vulnerable that was really fucking doing it for me, and I reached out and grabbed a fistful of the ruffles on his shirt to tug him closer. “I’ve been waiting for this for days.”
6
Quinn
Ru’s mouth was hot and punch sweet, his tongue sliding and dancing nimbly with mine as we collapsed toward each other. I caught him by the chin, licked the scruff along his jaw, the corner of his mouth, sloppy and hedonistic,
enjoying the quiet moan that escaped him.
He dragged in a slow breath as he pulled back and left me smoldering, hot in my costume and wanting only to peel every article of clothing between us off. I squirmed around, tugging my cravat looser while his hands roamed me; then I pulled the glasses from my nose and tossed them aside. Ru’s breath hitched. My eyes usually had that effect. The irises were so pale in coloring that they were almost indistinguishable from the white sclera that surrounded them, and so infinitely sensitive that even losing the tinted shades made them water up and required me to squint for a second until they adjusted.
Ru’s lips parted, and it was lovely to see him without a barrier, all the lights and darks of him thick and pronounced and striking. The high cut of his cheekbones, that jaw strong and angular as an anvil, the tendons that stretched down his throat, and the dark dish of shadow at the base. He abandoned the slow, grazing touches to my ribs and brushed the pad of his thumb under my eye.
“Beautiful,” he murmured. “Like smoke curling up from a fire.”
And painful. And endlessly annoying. But beautiful worked if it meant he kept touching me. My heart swelled and galloped in my chest, and I gave in and closed my eyes. “Photophobia—” I whispered, even though he already seemed to know. His mouth covered mine again and made the rest of my explanation evaporate.
This kiss was quieter, but just as heady, the taste and scent of him enveloping me. I wanted to drink him in, spend hours exploring the variant shades of his body. I forgot the party outside, forgot everything except the rasp of our breaths and the heat rolling over my skin where our bodies met and aligned. I heard my glasses clattering to the floor as his hands came around my waist, and I threaded mine through his hair to keep him close, tugging the ends to expose his throat, where I blazed a trail over the hard thump thump of his pulse through the arteries that ran along the side, then teased them with a light scrape of my teeth.
He sighed as I sucked the tender flesh and lapped at his warm skin.