The Green's Hill Novellas Read online

  Marcus blushed and looked away. He didn’t want to wear his heart on his sleeve. He didn’t want to burden Phillip with this inappropriate crush. He just wanted Phillip to keep talking to him, keep being his friend.

  “Well, if I hadn’t liked you, you’d be dead,” he admitted wryly, and he was rewarded with Phillip’s loud guffaw. He turned his head and pillowed it on his arm, resigning himself to the intimacy of the situation, without the promise of even a kiss.

  “What are you doing tonight?” Phillip asked unexpectedly.

  “Going round the gas ’n’ sips with Adrian. There are some werecreatures he wants to check on, make sure they’re okay. I’m sort of his right-hand man for that.”

  Phillip grunted. “You’re good with ’em,” he said reluctantly. “Green doesn’t have anything for me to do—”

  “You could come with us.” Marcus hoped his voice didn’t sound as needy to Phillip’s ears as it did to his own.

  Phillip looked both hopeful and regretful. “I scare the shit out of them,” he said hesitantly. He’d gone with them once before, but the werecreature they were going to visit had helped care for one of the men Phillip had savaged in his first two weeks, and one look at Phillip had sent the little werefox hauling tail through the underbrush in front of the gas station.

  “Well, not in the last month!” Marcus looked at him through the same eyes that saw the hidden shyness, and the same heart that had heard that embarrassed confession of I’m an asshole. “Look, man, you want to hang out, I’m good with that. Come with us. Adrian’s a good guy—you’ll have fun.”

  Again that shy smile, and Marcus started thinking he’d walk through sunshine for it.

  “Don’t get so fucking needy,” Phillip said, rolling his eyes. The smile remained, though. “Give me a minute, and I’ll go shower.”

  Marcus frowned. “A minute? What do you need a minute for?”

  “This!”

  Without warning, Phillip lifted up and closed his mouth over Marcus’s, and Marcus actually gasped.

  And then he responded, and Phillip plundered, hard and strong, and invaded and took. Marcus gave without thought and without reservation, kissing back, following, allowing himself to be led. His whole body went on high alert. He’d gone to sleep in his jeans the night before. (Vampires did not “sleep.” They died. There was no comfort consideration until the sun set the next day, and usually they were alert and ready to go. Pajamas weren’t really necessary.) His cock was hard and ready underneath the button fly, and he was helpless in Phillip’s arms.

  Phillip pulled back, hauling air through lungs that didn’t need it, and looked at him in surprise. “It was a test,” he mumbled, arching his hips unconsciously under the comforter. Marcus could feel his hard-on through the covers, against his thigh. “I wondered if I could kiss a man, if I had changed enough and…. Goddess—God—whoever….” He passed his hand in front of his lean, kiss-swollen lips in an unconsciously vulnerable gesture, and Marcus had to swallow hard on his own hurt.

  Marcus pulled back abruptly and popped off the bed. “Sensual and consensual,” he rasped. “Toying with someone as an experiment is just cruel!”

  Phillip looked at him—puzzled, still, and in a state of wonder. “I had no idea it would be that way,” he muttered, and Marcus couldn’t look at him anymore. He ran for the shower, clasping his aching cock in the onslaught of hot water and squeezing until white cascaded through his vision and spat out over his fist.

  Phillip’s surprised wonder was behind his eyes the entire time.

  Phillip had apparently skipped his own shower and was dressed (black slacks, a V-neck sweater—very sharp) when he got out, and Marcus very studiously ignored him as he pulled his jeans and sweater (plain brown crewneck) on, along with plain boxers. They had an allowance—more than any of them used, actually—and he could afford anything he liked. He liked worn jeans, he thought resentfully. Phillip could keep his slick stockbroker’s shit. He looked good in it.

  He looked wonderful in it.

  “That girl, Beverly, one of the werekitties—she’s coming back this morning,” Phillip said into the strained quiet.

  “Good for her.”

  “We’ll probably go out for a while, have sex, be a couple. I’ve noticed that it works to have a shape-shifter in your bed.”

  “It does,” Marcus said neutrally. It was true. Gourmet food and uninhibited, sensual sex, all in one package. He’d dated his fair share of fragile-seeming, tough-bodied shape-shifters as well.

  “When that runs its course, I think I may want to kiss you again.”

  Marcus looked at him, puzzled. “When it runs its course?”

  “Hey—I was a serial monogamist when I was breathing. Don’t ask me to change that now!”

  Marcus laughed and shook his head, unable at this point to do anything else.

  “Well, for all you know, I’ll be dating someone else by then too, so don’t do me any favors.”

  Phillip grunted, as though he hadn’t thought of that. “Well, we’ve got time, I guess.”

  Time for this inconvenient, horrible, aching crush to stop pressing against his chest?

  “Fucking awesome.”

  IT NEVER went away. They did the rounds with Adrian that night, and after that, every night. Phillip continued to help Green with the finances, and Marcus would spend that time tutoring the young shape-shifters or vampires so they could gain skills that would help the collective, but they always, girl or no girl, other errands or no other errands, spent at least a couple of hours a night in each other’s company.

  It started to feel like sunset to Marcus. It was the time he was truly alive.

  True to his word, Phillip kept dating little Beverly, and Marcus took up with Gina again. Marcus wasn’t sure how Beverly felt, but in her room one early morning, Gina looked at him as their bodies lay still on the sheets and said, “Who the hell are you pining for, Marcus? Because the only thing engaged in what we just did was your dick.”

  Marcus tried a smile and kissed her cheek. “Sorry. I was distracted.”

  “No shit.” Gina stood and stretched, comfortable in her nakedness, and threw on a T-shirt for form. When Marcus had known her alive, her hair had been hacked and spiked and dyed and a general disaster. In death, her hair was shoulder length, dark blonde, and curly. She didn’t do anything to it—no dye, no spray—and Marcus liked that. He liked the smell of her skin just after she’d fed. He liked that she cared for the new vampires and shape-shifters like he did, and that together, they were Adrian’s backup line when he was bringing new ones over.

  He liked many things about her—enough to maybe be mated to her for many years.

  But she wasn’t Phillip, and that wasn’t anything they could fix.

  “I was….” He floundered for words. “Imprudent. I was imprudent, and I got… I don’t know. Supernaturally attached.”

  “Bullshit,” Gina said flatly.

  “I’m sorry?” Gina was not usually that forthright. She’d been timid as a human and was quiet as a vampire.

  “Adrian says he’s got the maker’s connection. The fact is, you were attached to the guy before he was changed. It’s not ‘supernatural attachment,’ you moron—it’s love!”

  Marcus shook his head and shrugged. “It’s going to go away,” he insisted. “It’s not….” He couldn’t make himself say it.

  Gina came and sat down next to him as he struggled to sit up in bed and find his jeans and boxers. “We’re not the elves, you know,” she said gently. “We’re perfectly capable of lying, even to ourselves.”

  Marcus swallowed and for some reason remembered that moment outside his family’s house, right after he’d been turned. How easy would it have been to tell himself that he just wanted to go visit them to say hello? That he wasn’t dying to taste their lifeblood as it flowed hot over his mouth?

  “Goddess,” he swore, resting his forehead on his knees. “It is real.”

  “You guys are roommates,” G
ina told him unnecessarily. “Something is bound to happen. Don’t lose hope, baby.”

  “What am I going to do in the meantime?”

  Gina shrugged, the gesture surprisingly grown-up for someone who would never age past twenty-three. “Do what you’ve been doing. Date other people. Just not….” Her voice caught sharply, and Marcus looked up.

  One crimson tear trickled down past her nose to hover on her lip. Her tongue darted out to taste it before it dropped, and he reached out a fingertip to wipe the track of it. He brought the fingertip to his lips and sucked gently.

  “Just not you,” he said, feeling like complete shit.

  “If that would be okay, baby?” she said, her voice rough. “You—do you know I loved you back when you were my adult-ed teacher?”

  Marcus shook his head. “I’m a man,” he told her. “And I was human for a long time. We’re not that bright, you know.”

  Gina nodded and stood up abruptly. “I’m gonna go shower. If you could, you know….”

  “Yeah.”

  Marcus put on his jeans as soon as she disappeared, and was back in his own bed before dawn.

  There was a whoosh from the doorway just as the sun rose, and when he awakened, he wasn’t alone.

  Benefits

  “DON’T YOU have your own bed?” Marcus snapped, pretty much the minute his eyes jolted open.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t want to sleep in it,” Phillip replied. He was all that was casual, there in his blue jeans and black sweater. God, the jeans were designer, and the sweater was cashmere. Did he do nothing that wasn’t slicker than lube on a glass sex toy?

  Goddammit, Marcus, you have a literature minor. Find another fucking metaphor!

  “Sprite invasion?” It was a legitimate question. The tiniest of Green’s faerie kingdom tended to set up shop in inexplicable places. Once, an entire dorm full of nyads had to relocate because the pixies, nixies, sprites, and brownies just showed up in every corner of their room and started fucking like lemmings for over two months. Green had no idea what had set them off, but the subsequent boom in nixies, pixies, sprites, and brownies practically doubled Green’s power base and allowed Green’s power over the weather to extend for a fifteen-mile radius surrounding the house. Everyone was pleased, and there was more construction in the hill. Maybe if there was a sprite invasion, Marcus wouldn’t be stuck with a roommate who looked damned good in a designer cashmere sweater. It was a promising thought, but Marcus, looking at Phillip’s perfectly made bed, was not optimistic.

  Phillip’s expression at the question, though, was priceless. “Where would they invade? And isn’t that a little bit personal for a fey to venture without permission?”

  It took Marcus a minute, but by the time he figured out what Phillip meant—that, coupled with the stray thought about lubricant—well, he was pretty much convulsing with laughter.

  He calmed himself down a bit and looked up to find that Phillip was looking at him with an expression that Marcus could only term “soft.”

  “What?” he asked, and Phillip shrugged.

  “You are one of the quietest people I’ve ever met. I had no idea you could laugh like that.”

  Marcus blinked at him, and the full weight of his crush came slamming down on his chest. In a moment, he didn’t feel like laughing at all.

  “I still don’t know what you’re doing here,” he said.

  Phillip looked away. “There’s a woman named Grace downstairs in the vault. She was dying of cancer, and Adrian—he was all the way out in Redding, man, you know that?—and he sees her, sitting outside on her porch and he—the thing is, he had to talk her into it. She loved her husband so much she was willing to die, just to spend her last two months with him. And Adrian, he loved her so much, and not just as… I mean, man, she’s not even pretty. But Adrian, the way he talked about her in my head as he was asking for help to go get her—”

  “He didn’t ask me!” Marcus was hurt. Getting the new vampires, helping the novices, wasn’t that his job?

  “He said you were doing something important,” Phillip said, surprised.

  The only important thing he’d been doing the night before had been… breaking up with Gina. Christ. Half the hill was telepathic, and three-quarters of it had supersonic ultraspifty hearing, but this was the first time in ten years Marcus had ever bemoaned the loss of his privacy quite so acutely.

  “I was, sort of,” Marcus muttered. Well, no matter who he slept with after this, the truth was he couldn’t bullshit anyone about it anymore, could he? “So why does a new vampire mean you get to sleep in my bed, jerkoff? The last time you did this, you kissed me and then blithely announced that you were going to continue fucking someone else for a while.”

  Phillip shrugged, and damn him, it really didn’t occur to him that he’d done anything wrong. “Well, you know. Fucking isn’t kissing. What we did in the vault was one thing. I just wanted to, you know. Think about doing it outside the vault—”

  “Didn’t you do it with Green?”

  Again that shrug. “Green’s different, and you know it. Being with Green isn’t fucking. It’s like… like being rolled by the love god or something. He does that to everybody. It’s like his job, and he’s employee of the goddamned millennium.”

  Marcus blinked, still lying on his side because, in spite of his irritation and his rather wounded feeling of being Phillip’s guinea pig, you could not have a conversation with someone lying side by side in bed that wasn’t unequivocally intimate. Phillip’s lean Dracula face looked almost boyish when he was lying there, and his eyes were half-hooded and sweet and not burning out with some sort of repressed fury. This was the face that Marcus saw when they were hanging out in their room, reading or listening to music or watching television. This was the face that you could catch a glimpse of right before or after he dared you to race, or after he won. (Now that they were both vampires, Phillip won any race, any contest of strength, any competition hands down. For Marcus, it was all about the experience. For Phillip, it was all about crowing like Peter Pan on steroids.)

  “But you’re not hearing me,” Phillip was saying, pulling Marcus away from dwelling on his crush. “Adrian brought Grace back, and she was really in love. And she’s got this whole mother thing going, so, like, it’s going to be all girls in her room, all the time, because she’s totally freaked out by Adrian—because, you know, he looks, like, sixteen—so he wants us available.”

  “Available?”

  “We were in our thirties—”

  “You still are!” He’d only been brought over six months ago!

  “You know what I mean. We don’t look twelve.”

  “You said he looked sixteen!”

  “Why are you being suck a complete dick?”

  They froze, and Phillip’s fangs shot out. He used one of them to worry his lower lip, while what should have been a simple flub in his speech, half a spoonerism, really, hung between the two of them like the blow job of Damocles.

  “Such,” he said unnecessarily. “I meant ‘such.’”

  “I know,” Marcus said, his mouth feeling like talcum powder and baking soda. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a dick.”

  And there. It should have been gone between them, but it wasn’t.

  “Why were you?” Goddess. Nothing about Phillip invited confidences. He was slick, and he was cavalier about all the shit that Marcus really loved, and he was bold and confident when Marcus was laid-back and observant. How was Marcus supposed to tell him anything, when a kiss was a test and fucking didn’t mean kissing either?

  “You’re in my bed,” Marcus said, wondering if that would be enough of an explanation.

  “You like me here.”

  If Marcus had fed recently, he would have blushed. As it was, he had to look away. “How would you know that?” he asked his dresser bureau. It was pretty, he realized, not for the first time. Green and some of the other sidhe tended to carve the furniture here. The furniture in this room was hand c
arved, hand finished with linseed oil, and generally felt like a living extension of the hill itself.

  And it was a hell of a lot more comfortable to look at than Phillip’s intense brown-eyed scrutiny.

  The hand on his crotch was a surprise, and he was hard, swollen, and aroused against his jeans. He didn’t have a shirt on, and that invading hand traveled confidently up his chest—which was pretty muscular, with all the working out he’d been doing since Phillip had moved in—and pinched his flat, rose-colored male nipple.

  Marcus gasped, undulated his hips helplessly, and tried not to thrust his fangs through his lip with the twin emotions of shyness and irritability.

  “What in the fuck are you doing?” he asked—but there was a whine in his voice, and when Phillip’s hand went back to his cock, he thrust toward it and not away from it.

  “Why don’t you just—I don’t know—do what you did in the vault? Grab me by the hair and… just….”

  Marcus finished Phillip’s thought with action. His hand knotted in Phillip’s slicked-back hair, and he pushed. Phillip didn’t even put up a show of reluctance. Phillip’s hands were fumbling with Marcus’s fly almost before Marcus had a good grip, and Marcus almost came in his jeans right there. He growled instead, irritated, aroused, and strangely hurt.

  This was okay, as long as Marcus made him want it. It wasn’t how Marcus had imagined love with either sex. But his jeans were unbuttoned and his boxers pushed down, and he was aware that Phillip was breathing, on purpose—knowing his rough, forced air was brushing Marcus’s cock as it throbbed and quivered against his lower belly.

  “You gonna just sit there?” Marcus snarled.

  “You gonna make me do more?” Phillip snarled back. It sounded a lot like begging.

  “Lick me, dammit, base to crown. Open your mouth and…. Ahhhhhhh, good. Like that.”

  Phillip was inexpert, but he was trying. When he opened his mouth and popped the crown of Marcus’s cock inside, he wrapped his lips around it carefully, fangs too, and pulled in his cheeks. Then, with hardly more than guidance from Marcus’s hand cupping the back of his skull, he took Marcus all the way down to the back of his throat.