Touched

by A. J. Aalto

  “Hmm,” Harry agreed guardedly. “Dearheart, are you quite sure you're not projecting? Is it in fact Agent Chapel that is causing this sudden fury, young Gary and his felonious pilfering of your biscuits?”

  “I am a law-abiding woman, and it's a damn good thing too, because he has some pretty big delusions, the deconstruction of which I would have heartily relished.”

  Harry fingered his empty goblet. “I always suspected that Agent Chapel had some serious defects and was not to be trusted. Thank you for exposing the squirrel's true nature.” Now the sarcasm was liberally applied. My face heated.

  “You're not taking this seriously at all,” I accused.

  “Should I be? The Agents are human. They do need to eat.”

  “They need to eat.” My throat felt full of bile. “They do. They've got lots of needs, don't they? What about me? What about you? Is nothing sacred around here?”

  “A revenant does not eat biscuits,” Harry said, looking confused at his need to point out the obvious. “What is it about their needs that has you so upset?”

  “Just because he's here doesn't mean he can help himself to whatever is mine, help himself to everything!” I sloshed soapy water around with the sponge, scrubbing the teapot more vigorously than tea stains required. “Why doesn't he just throw on my lingerie and traipse around waving my sex toys while he's at it!”

  “Lord and Lady,” Harry choked back a surprised laugh. “That's not a pretty picture to paint!” After a beat. “You own sex toys?”

  “No!”

  “You do not, then, refer to the purple apparatus in your night table that I was surprised to discover next to your wallet?”

  “That's a foot massager,” I fibbed, turning to scowl at him.

  His face was carefully blank, tasting the lie with a heavy-lidded gaze. “I thought I was your foot massager.”

  “Sometimes you're unavailable. And my foot massager isn't for Gary-blasted-Chapel to touch either!”

  Harry's eyeballs crawled backwards as though he were searching for answers to my malfunction on the inside of his skull. “Brace yourself for further betrayal, darling. I believe your young hunter had several biscuits as well.”

  “Well, of course he did. Batten I expect to annoy me. Batten can't help it. Batten was born to aggravate me. His very existence is punishment for horrid things I did in a past life. But Gary? Gary?” I waggled the wet sponge at him and dripped all over the floor. Harry watched the soapy mess with rising distress. “I suppose we should get his name tattooed on our wrists, since he owns everything else in this damn house.”

  “What sense does that make?” Harry pushed back from the table, rising. The kitchen filled with his anxiety, and despite the breakdown of our Bond, I felt it hit me in the solar plexus.

  “Stop that!” I shot back. “It makes perfect sense. Angry sense.”

  “As one can clearly see.” He swallowed hard. “Perhaps you should retire for the evening. You have had quite enough excitement for one day.”

  “And another thing.” I balled the sponge and tossed it back in the sink. “I want a fucking bath! Not a shower, a bath!”

  “Well, you cannot have a bath,” he said calmly. “Doctor's orders.”

  I pointed at him hard. “You bother me!”

  “Is there anything that is not bothering you at the moment, my love? Perhaps I can help you sort things out.”

  I exhaled hard, squeezing my eyes shut to stop weary tears. “Oh Harry. I'm sorry. I'm…”

  “Overwrought?”

  My shoulders fell. “If stress were water, I'd be dog-paddling the Pacific.”

  “Such a fuss you make. Come to me.” He stood and beckoned me to his embrace with arms open. Despite my suspicions, I stepped into the shelter of his familiar clinch and let myself melt against his body, the well-fed warmth of which I stubbornly ignored. “Oh, the crown of my comfort, the spring to my bumbershoot, the very laces of my boot. How I do abhor the song of your distress.”

  “Gosh. Never been called someone's bootlace before. I don't know what to say,” I muttered into the revenant's chest.

  “I may know what you need, my quivering quail.” His hand slid down one of my arms, his lingering touch raising all the hairs at the nape of my neck.

  “I don't think I'm ready for that just yet.”

  “Mmhmm,” he said as though he didn't believe me. “You're a tough little bird.”

  “I'll hurt something.”

  “We shall have to be gentle then, won't we?” he promised, tipping my chin up to face the twinkle in his eyes. “I'll go slip into the appropriate attire and meet you in the living room in ten, shall I?”

  “There's no way I can talk you out of it?”

  “Tut, tut,” he chided. “Surely you recognize that I know what is best for my pet?”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “You're going to have to do better than that,” Harry reprimanded.

  “But it hurts.”

  He asked me. “You're not injured here.”

  His graceful, supple body moved in to faultless alignment alongside mine, close enough to touch. The fine sandy hair across his perfectly sculpted chest tickled my bare shoulder as he leaned in closer. The lithe, taut line of the revenant's belly put me to shame, reminding me how very out of shape I'd let myself become.

  “You're stiff and out of practice,” he said, his mouth brushing my ear.

  “You're calling me stiff?” I huffed. “Don't make me state the obvious, dead guy.”

  Harry's cool hand landed firmly on my shoulder. “You can do it.”

  I groaned, reaching for my heel. “I don't think I can.”

  “Do not crank your ankle, you will injure yourself. Come now, ducky, this is a simple position. You mastered this long ago.”

  He helped me slide my ankle onto my knee in lotus position and then patted high on my thigh. So intimate were his long, even strokes kneading my muscles with familiarity, if anyone had peered through the frost-covered glass of the living room window, spying me in padmasana and Harry in yoga pants and bare chest, they might assume he was both my personal trainer and my lover. If only.

  “Better,” he encouraged. “Breathe. Don't slouch.”

  “I couldn't slouch if I tried,” I snarled.

  “Less whining, more focus. Straighten your spine. Now we are only going to do a half-twist. Stop when you feel pressure right here.” His agile hand lit across my belly.

  Yoga massage with Harry always involved a lot of coaching. He'd been limber for the better part of two centuries and I was just learning. Exercise is vital for revenants; their muscular systems don't work the same way as ours and fall flaccid quickly without daily upkeep, which eventually affects their preternatural might. Being undead doesn't negate the effects of a sedentary lifestyle, quite the opposite in fact. One look at eight hundred pound Fat Dracula on YouTube should explain why revenants stick to human blood. All ingested food becomes permanently stored fat in a revenant body, which is why Harry's only indulgence is the odd roll of Polo Mints he brought back from London. Even after Fat Dracula's liposuction, his weight had ballooned right back up, because he refused to give up bacon double cheese burgers. I sympathized, nothing like a good bacon double cheeseburger.

  “Nope, this is too much,” I reported, wincing.

  “All right, stop, stop, stop.” He put his hands on my hips. “Move to ardha matsyendrasana. Is this better?” He didn't wait for my answer; his hands were on my body and he knew exactly how I felt. “Breathe. Twist on exhale. Lift your ribcage. Gently, love, gently.”

  We moved together with his hands rubbing my muscles until I could do no more without hurting. He patted my knee to wordlessly release me from exercising. I went into rest pose and his feet touched my shoulders, softly pressing down. His fingers slid under my neck and pulled along under my ears in gentle waves. Once I was relaxed, he moved onto his own more strenuous routine. I didn't have to wonder if he was as hard as he looked. Harry's workout regimen kept hi
m strong and flexible.

  I spent the next ten minutes on my back watching him work out: proud warrior, tree pose, downward dog, sun salutations, he made it all look easy. When he started inversions and forearm stands, I grinned at him.

  “Show-off.”

  “If I wanted to blow my own horn, love, I would be doing this in the nude.”

  “Thanks. I'll never get that image out of my head,” I grumbled, moving to the couch.

  “At long last, I have you all to myself,” Harry said with a contented growl, sliding behind me on the couch. “Are you quite sure you are well enough for a feed? I would still be willing to wait a few more days.”

  I stiffened, not wanting to confront his deception about Gary but not sure I could keep my tongue from betraying me. Lies lay in my gut like spoiled tuna salad. He tried to pull me closer and I tensed.

  “Oh, how clumsy of me,” he breathed. “I have upset you. What have I done wrong?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Did we overdo the yoga?”

  “No, I'm fine.” I forced myself to relax against him, the cool curve of his body familiar. “It's time for your feed.”

  “You are uneasy, pet, restless. One should think it is the ideal time for us to unwind together.” His crisp and refined English tongue lilted with confusion as he continued his line of reasoning. “Everyone has left us. The special delivery has been taken away. You have charged the warden vine at the gate to warn us of any intrusion. Agent Chapel has left me one of his guns for self-defense.”

  “He did what?”

  “His Springfield XD tactical.”

  Chapel's favorite sidearm. I guess my little Beretta mini wasn't manly enough for Harry.

  “Soon enough, your agents will return. They've been splendid watchdogs.”

  “I bet they have.” I didn't intend for it to come out sounding so bitter.

  “We're perfectly safe,” he insisted.

  I agreed. “Any time now the knot in my stomach will unclench.”

  Harry wrestled something from behind a pillow. “What do you make of these fanciful things, my pet? I bought them for a future occasion but since you cannot find your others, I thought it best not to wait.”

  A new pair of gloves appeared from behind a couch cushion, soft as a calf's ear, in a light tan color. They had tiny, cheerful green frogs embroidered around the cuff. I couldn't not brighten.

  “Where in the world did you find these?”

  He beamed, pleased at my reaction. “I think you'll find that if one spends enough money on Savile Row and Jermyn Street, one can find an accommodating tailor who will make anything. And I've been through generations of bespoke tailors and haberdashers.”

  Knowing the extensive size of his wardrobe (his closet used to be a cold cellar and was three times as big as mine) I wondered how much money he'd spent on upscale clothing in four hundred years; stylish neckties from Hermes and white linen cravats in the style of Beau Brummell; cashmere scarves and seven-fold silk neckties, the “non plus ultra” of tie-making; hound's-tooth jackets, coats of herringbone and cheviot worsted wool; monk strap buckled shoes and welted Oxfords made by Foster & Son; Devonshire bowlers, pork-pie and top hats from Christies and Lock & Co Hatters. When his Oliver Brown Royal Ascot Tall topper was damaged, he mourned it for a week. He was currently waiting, not at all patiently, for a delivery of two dozen shirts from Turnbull & Asser custom-fitted on his last trip to England. I couldn't begin to imagine the cost. Even when he'd purchased the yoga pants he was wearing, he had ferreted out what company made the very best ones.

  “Oh Harry, thank you. They're nifty, I love them.”

  “You are most welcome, of course.”

  He threw his arm along the back of the couch. I felt his pulse speed up to match mine, felt the slow evenness of his breath against the back of my head. He required neither a pulse nor breath; both were affectations to put humans at ease. They worked. If I ignored the coolness of him, I could almost pretend he was still a man, that he wasn't the elegant reanimated dead.

  He was hungry, but he'd wait until I was ready, until I was comfortable. It was our routine. Harry did not like his feed to be rushed; he always said that anticipation was, in itself, a sensory delight to be savored, and would spend a good half hour just smelling my neck if I let him. Tonight I wished he'd just get it over with. I felt hurried by the anticipation of Batten or Chapel returning while we weren't quite finished. Feeding Harry wasn't exactly a clandestine affair, but I didn't want an audience. Being watched was an intrusion. Now that I thought about it, I didn't want Harry not to feed. I wanted Batten and Chapel not to come back.

  I must have been having a serious hate-on for humanity because Harry misread my feelings and said low, “I'll hunt her down and break her if you want me to.”

  I almost didn't hear it. He went very still, and I knew he was serious. “I shall scent her down like a bloodhound, and when I find her, I shall put my thumbs in her and tear her open like a bag of onions.”

  What do you say to something like that? Thank you very much? It's not necessary this time, but I'll take a rain check?

  “Not what you wanted to hear,” he said, more a comment than a question. While he pulled the fuzzy blanket off the back of the couch to lay it across my lap, he forgot to breathe, and the steady false beat of his heart faltered. “I do wish you would let me handle this.”

  “You've got my back, I get it,” I acknowledged. I figured it was the safest thing to say. “But I don't want—”

  “Slaughter and carnage. I can promise you, there wouldn't be anything left of her to get us into trouble.”

  “Harry, I can't listen to this,” I warned him. “I'm not worried about getting myself into trouble. You can't risk it. Your hands must be a hundred percent clean. You don't think Batten's chomping at the bit to watch you fuck up? He'd be the first one in line with a stake.”

  “No doubt,” Harry said with a chuckle.

  “And it's not what I meant to feel, anyway. I just don't want anyone but us to be here right now.”

  He ran his fingers through my hair fondly. “Why's that, love?”

  Thinking of Chapel, I said, “Guess I just want you all to myself.”

  There was little difference to Harry between “make people go away” and “make people go away forever”. As soon as it came, that underlying menace inherent in the revenant dissipated, and he was back to being just Harry, fake-breathing and fake-pulsing behind me. He might have dropped it for now, but I knew the idea was still squatting in his mind like a poisonous toad. The consummate predator, he'd fixated on his prey and would not likely forget it. And he didn't give two shits about the law, necessarily. Only the concern for the final destination of his soul, that lingering hope that he might redeem himself, kept him from stalking her right this minute, I imagined.

  “Harry, it's time for your feed,” I reminded. So much stalling. Did he think I was still too weak, or was he more interested in his new… I stopped myself before even thinking the word bleeder.

  “What do they call this haircut, again?” he murmured. “A fairy?”

  “A pixie cut.” Our hairdresser, Clarice, had done the best she could, considering she'd made a house call to the hospital. God bless small town folk. I'd taken to avoiding the mirror in my room, and in a way I'd been robbed of my true reflection just like a revenant. How long had it been since Harry had been able to see his human face in the glass, to see what we saw when we looked at him? I wondered what it was he really did see; I knew it wasn't nothing. It was probably best that the candid reflection did not appear to the human eye in mirrors or film.

  “No, go back go back,” he urged, pointing at the TV. I thumbed down on the remote and saw a scene I didn't recognize in an old black and white movie. “Dracula, Bela Lugosi, 1931. It just started.”

  “Ok, ok. We'll watch it again,” I sighed, but in truth it had been years.

  “Fancy some popcorn, my pet?” he offered.

  I made a
negative noise. “I'm too tired to eat.” Something I knew he was never too tired to do. As if reading my mind, he brushed his cool lips against my cheek, and a forelock of his hair teased my temple. He rested his chin on my shoulder from behind me. Hunger quivered through him but he said nothing about it.

  “So?” I prodded.

  “So what?”

  “What do you think of the pixie haircut?”

  “If I ever get my hands on the butcher that did it, I'll show her why they call them boning sheers.” I shivered and Harry chuckled, his mouth close to my ear. “Too much?”

  “Boning shears. Uber-blech.”

  “Since when are you squeamish?” he said with genuine astonishment.

  “Since the surgeon told me they had to put staples in my gut wound and I got a vivid mental image of my insides closed up by little metal claws. I repeat: blech.”

  “Whatever shall we do with all our CSI DVDs? And Bones. Oh, farewell to Dexter,” he teased. “Think I could get a fair price for them on EBay?”

  “Gimme some time. I'll get over it,” I said, shifting until I was contentedly surrounded by the width of him, crooked up into a nook in his arms.

  His chin sank questioningly to my neck and I put my hand on the back of his, our go-ahead signal. He barely whispered, “Only if you are certain, my Own?”

  I patted his hand there, where his knuckles rose in soft, gentle peaks, traced the delicate lines of his strong wrist. I heard the slightest wet snick as his fangs extended.

  When he pierced my skin, there was no Hollywood movie prop sound, no Foley-artist-puncturing-watermelon-with-spike noise. There was no sound now at all, nor pain. Harry slid gradually in, worked his way tenderly, sensitive of his pressure like a gentleman making love to his new bride. When that first flood of warm blood hit Harry's tongue, he sighed and I sank further into his embrace. His arms trembled and tightened, not out of fear that I'd try to leave but in unutterable ecstasy. He drank deep, and I felt him becoming rapidly dizzy from the heady, exhilarating torrent of hot life into his veins.

  “The Bond's not entirely kaput,” I said softly. “I can still feel your hunger.”