Three of Hearts

Chapter 2

With a sigh Noah opened the door to his apartment building. It had definitely seen better days, though it was in decent repair and didn’t have rodents. But the carpet in the halls was the cheapest industrial hard-wearing stuff and yet so worn it needed replacing, while the paint was chipped and peeling.

He climbed the equally worn and scuffed stairs slowly, wishing he’d been able to get a ground floor apartment and not one on the third, highest floor. He was loaded down with books, and the climb was annoying, especially after walking a good half mile from the school to get to the building. Also annoying, though it was just a small thought at the back of his mind; he’d been to all his classes now and saw neither of the possible vampires in any of them.

Footsteps behind him sounded at a brisk pace, and he stepped to the edge of the stairs to let whoever it was pass.

Then he froze in shock. It was the red-headed maybe-vampire. He flashed Noah a cheery smile as he passed by, taking the stairs two at a time. “Hi!”

“Uh. Hi.”

The maybe-vampire gave Noah a wave, then vanished up the stairwell, leaving Noah staring after him. He’d gone up to the third floor. Did he live there? Was Noah next door neighbors with a vampire?

He decided this needed investigating. Which meant finding an excuse to talk to all his neighbors. It was Friday, and even though this wasn’t the dorms, they were all very likely to be students, in these cheap rooms within walking distance of campus. So most of them would probably be home over the weekend. But what excuse could he come up with to knock on all the doors and ask about who lived there?

Eventually he decided to make cookies. He’d look like a dork, but nobody minded baked goods. And it had two bonuses. One, he would have cookies, and two, vampires probably didn’t eat cookies. If the neighbor refused them, it would be another data point to support the otherwise improbable hypothesis that Noah was living right next to a vampire.

So on Saturday afternoon, with his apartment smelling like baking and his roommate hovering hopefully, Noah plated up six paper plates of chocolate chip cookies.

“Aww, you’re giving them all away?”

Noah’s roommate, Chuck, looked at him with puppy dog eyes. He was a slightly chubby blond with hipster glasses and a scruff of beard, who’d already had two different girls over to the apartment in the space of a week.

Noah rolled his eyes. “Six apartments, six plates, doofus. These are ours, so you get half of them.”

“Awesome!”

With a smile Noah picked up a plate and set out on his quest. Hopefully Chuck would leave him some cookies, but he didn’t really care that much. He had investigating to do.

Four doors later he found his maybe-vampires. The redhead was the one who answered the door. He was only wearing boxers, revealing that he was fairly fit. Not the kind of ripped-and-cut of a serious gym-rat, but the kind of general good shape that came from regular physical activity. Noah tried not to stare at the guy as he stood in the doorway, blinking in mild confusion at the cookies. Noah also tried not to blush. The redhead’s shirtless figure was pretty dang good looking. “Um. Hey there! I figured since we’ll be neighbors at least all this semester, I should come say hi. I’m Noah. These are for you.” He held out the cookies.

“Hi. I’m Jack.” He blinked at the cookies without taking them, though that didn’t really tell Noah anything, because so far two out of three previous encounters had been confused by the offering of baked goods.

The other maybe-vampire appeared behind Jack, also shirtless and tall enough to easily look over his head. He put his hand familiarly on Jack’s shoulder, his fingers startlingly pale against Jack’s darker skin. He was thinner as well as taller, with a lean build that meant Noah could just about count his ribs. His face was narrower, too, fine-featured and almost pretty, with long lashes framing his dark eyes, where Jack had a kind of snub-nosed, boyish masculinity.

“What’s this?” The other vampire’s voice was faintly accented, something from the British Isles, perhaps, though it was hard to judge from just those two words.

“Hi! I was baking, and thought I should share with my new neighbors and say hi, that kind of thing. Do you guys like cookies?”

“This is Gabe,” said Jack, giving a small smile back over his shoulder. “And sorry, we both have some severe allergies that limit our diets. So cookies are right out. Thank you for the thought, though.”

“Aw, that’s too bad.” Noah felt his heart racing as he tried to smile normally. Holy s**t, they actually are vampires. “Um. It’s good to meet you, though. See you around?”

“Sure.” Jack flashed another friendly smile, and Noah couldn’t really tell if he had fangs or not in it, but as he turned away he felt certain all the same. The lack of reflection and both of them having “severe allergies?” Either one of those alone wouldn’t be anything like proof, but together felt like irrefutable evidence.

He finished delivering his cookies and told Chuck that he could have a whole plate since somebody hadn’t wanted theirs, then sat down with a glass of milk and a couple of cookies of his own, but the whole time he was moving in something of a daze. He lived across the hall from two actual vampires.

Finishing the cookie, Noah sat back in his chair at the dining room table and considered. What exactly did it mean? In some ways, probably nothing. He doubted the pair went around biting the neighbors, so he wasn’t likely to be affected directly. Yet only two days ago he’d been sure he lived in a totally mundane world and could only read about the supernatural. Now he knew that at least one sort of supernatural being was real. It didn’t change much on a practical level. Yet it changed absolutely everything.

Still, the vampires in question were college students, and he’d found out about them by accident. He hadn’t been contacted to go on some kind of grand adventure, or dragged into some world-spanning magical scheme. He just…lived across the hall from a pair of vampires. Who were probably gay.

He heaved a sigh at that. Probably gay and both handsome as hell in differing ways. If they weren’t so obviously dating each other, he’d be mightily tempted to try hitting on one of them. Though that sort of thing was always fraught for him.

His second sigh was deeper, carrying a lifetime of difficult moments in it. Dating meant disclosing, and sometimes that went very badly. There was a reason he was currently single, and it wasn’t a happy one. He shifted in his chair, remembering the anger of his last would-be boyfriend. “Not a real man,” echoed in his head. There had been other things said, and some of them had been in some ways harsher. There had been insults and swear words thrown his way, but that phrase was the one that lingered. Not a real man. Just a girl, pretending to be a boy, but not actually allowed in the clubhouse. Not allowed to do the things boys did, not allowed to act the way boys acted. Expected to somehow fit into a frilly, pink space that was all wrong, yet still, even now, feeling only tolerated in the spaces that should have felt so right.

“Ugh.” He rose from the table and stalked into his room, angry at himself for falling into the same stupid train of thought again. Beating himself up because people had been sexist to him as a kid, or because people were transphobic sometimes now wasn’t going to accomplish anything. None of that was his fault. He did the best he could, and now that he finally passed for male most of the time things were actually pretty good.

It just sometimes felt like he would be single forever. He could let himself pass unnoticed in most situations, but if he was going to get in bed with a guy, he needed to let them know, there was no escaping that.

He stood staring at the closet door, which was a floor to ceiling mirror, and shook his finger at himself. “Noah’s brain, shut up. You just found out there are such things as vampires and you’re moaning about your love life instead. That is completely dumb, stop it.”

With another sigh he flopped back on the bed.

Vampires. Actually real. Right across the hall. That was what he should be thinking about, not his lack of s*x. He licked his lips, his mind suddenly darting to some of the vampire fiction he’d read. He wondered how much reality would have in common with those stories.

Of course the stories varied wildly. Vampires were depicted as everything from near-mindless predatory animals—evidence suggested probably not, mindless animals didn’t make good college students, the behavior of some frat boys to the contrary—to nearly ordinary human beings with an odd medical condition. That didn’t seem likely either, given that no medical condition could possibly explain failing to reflect in a mirror.

Nearly all the stories presented vampires and blood drinking in particular as something sexually charged, though. From Carmilla’s obvious lesbianism to Anne Rice’s obvious homosexual tension, and even including the creepy and dubious behavior of the vampires in Twilight, nearly everything Noah had ever read about them had been, in a word, sexy.

He thought of the way Jack had looked shirtless and felt his cheeks heating. Sexy was right. And Gabe had looked just as good. Noah had a sudden vision of himself, pinned between the two of them, getting bitten by both.

Without even consciously meaning to, he found his hand had moved between his legs. He swallowed hard, his blush deepening. This was completely ridiculous and probably more than a little creepy. He should not be m**********g to the thought of his neighbors.

God, though, if they were like most of the stories…Noah shivered, rubbing a little harder. His hand was cupped over his packer, the soft false p***s he wore tucked into a pouch in his specially made underwear. It made his pants fit correctly, kept his lack of real c**k from being obvious, and helped him feel a little more masculine, a little more confident.

It also made a good way to masturbate without having to touch the actual genitals beneath it directly. Noah didn’t really like touching himself. It was too much of a reminder that he lacked something he desperately wished he had. The indirect touch over the silicone c**k was still not quite right, but it was better than nothing.

He slipped his hand inside his pants, and into the pocket at the front of his boxers. His fingers curled around the flaccid rubber shaft of the packer and pushed the base of it down against himself, his mind still full of fantasy images of being between the two handsome vampires. He moaned softly. It was a thrilling fantasy, the thought of being taken by such a pair. His hand stroked along the packer, rubbing it against himself with each stroke, his head going back against the pillows as he played out his fantasy scenario.

Noah moaned again, keeping it soft so his roommate wouldn’t hear, but unable to keep from making some noise. He was panting now, his hand moving fast, his hips lifting and his body tensed as he sought his pleasure. His mind was full of blood and s*x, his fantasy blurring into incoherence as he neared his peak.

“Ah…yes…” His breathless cries were still quiet, but they rose rapidly in pitch, and then with a soft grunt and a profound shudder he came hard.

A deep sigh followed, his body relaxing, his cheeks still flushed with embarrassment about his ridiculous fantasy. He let go of the packer and pulled his hand out of his pants, pushing aside another brief stab of regret that he couldn’t magically get a normally functioning c**k, and letting his eyes close as he basked in the satisfied afterglow.

“That was pretty wrong,” he said to the empty room, and then chuckled at himself. “But being right is over-rated.”

A knock on the door made him jump and flush brighter. “Hey Noah, you in there?”

“Yeah, what is it?”

Chuck cracked the door open and looked in. He had a cookie in his hand and he was grinning. “Looks like this building’s got a party room. Somebody on the second floor just dropped by to say they’re having a welcome-to-school fling tonight, and we’re invited.”

“Oh. What kind of party are we talking here?”

“They said if you’ve got booze, bring it.”

Noah blinked. He was legal, being twenty-two, but he was pretty sure that at least half the building’s occupants weren’t. So it was probably going to be the kind of party where you could get into trouble. Then again, it wasn’t as though he was some kind of straight-edge or square. And hell, if they’d invited the entire building, maybe the vampires would be there.

“So you coming?”

“Sure, might as well.”

Rising from the bed, Noah realized he had only one problem. What the hell was he supposed to wear to this thing?