I Bit.

“I promise,” she muttered as she covered my mouth with hers. The kiss was so deep, so indulgent, the moment so heated, that I’d nearly forgotten what she expected of me until she pulled her lips away from mine and, grasping my hair between her fingers and turning us around so that she was against the wall, arched me toward the spot on her neck that complemented the one on mine that was now burning from within from the previous night’s trauma and from without from the friction of her mouth.

I must be clear here. I am not a vampire fetishist. The circumstances of my amortality have made me extremely uncomfortable with the symbolic flirtation with death. My instinctive drive is toward self-preservation rather than self-destruction, and my too-recent and remarkably non-erotic run-in with Richard had done nothing to change this. I was little better than a tough, bloody beef jerky to him, not the subject of a kinky mega-hickey that Crypt kids and people like them seem to imagine themselves to be. I had no desire to roleplay with Jeanine a persona I could not and cannot relate to and that was still largely abstract and theoretical to her as well. But I had to acknowledge that this was the situation I’d constructed for us. I had set my terms, and now she was setting hers. Accepting that the next few minutes would be entirely different experiences for the two of us, I bit.

Fangless, however, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to hurt or provoke her as she seemed to want me to and she wouldn’t be spurred to action, but as it turned out, she needed much less “motivation” than she’d let on. I sank my teeth bloodlessly into her flesh; she pushed me away, hard, and I let myself fall against a dining room chair. My prior encounters with Richard and Kay notwithstanding, my self-defense training is considerable (part of that self-preservation dimension), and I can generally hold my own. I held back somewhat as I tussled with Jeanine.

I tackled her to the floor and made as if I were going for her neck again but gave her room to kick me off. I rolled into the coffeetable and looked up just before she reached me. I caught her hand as she went in for the kill and pushed her away against the couch. I jumped to my feet, but not as quickly as she did, so that when I lunged toward her for the last time, she could use my forward motion to slingshot me past her and into a now half-empty bookcase. Seeing that her adrenaline was sufficiently elevated, I exaggerated being stunned from the exertion long enough for her to thrust the wooden stake at my chest… but only a fraction of an inch, coming nowhere near the amount of force necessary to penetrate the ribcage.