Page 14 of Little Fangs

Unless we counted forehead kisses.

Oh god. I kissed him first.

I had feelings.

5. MICAH

I had a crush, and it felt like the first time I’d ever had a crush, because he was right alongside me almost all the time. I knew it was dangerous to have a crush on a human, but I couldn’t help it. He did something to me, and his dick was literally imprinted on the inside of my mind. It also wasn’t my fault that I was like—older, but my entire body including my head was that of a twenty-year-old, so of course I was thinking about sex.

When I lived at the manor, I could never have sex with anyone, so I was mostly found reading books with a lot of sexy times, alongside whatever I could find on the internet. There was so much more porn now online than there was when I was going through the early stages of being a vampire.

And so far, I’d been able to masturbate in the bathroom without Harlan noticing. Twice a day. I couldn’t help it. It kept me from being overcome by intense horniness at nighttime when I was sleeping beside him.

Part of me wanted it, but another part of me wanted to leave it a mystery and just live with the idea in my brain of what sex with him would be like. It wouldn’t be good for either of us to indulge in it, because I had to leave, and he had to stay.

“Are you okay?” Harlan asked from the kitchen doorway. “I could just hear you mumbling to yourself.”

I turned to him, wide eyed. Of course, I’d been mumbling, my head had been spinning with everything that had happened the last few days. “I’m just trying to remember how to do everything.”

“When was the last time you used an oven?”

“Once, I used an oven to reheat something for like five minutes, but that was—oh, actually, that was a microwave.”

“Okay, so, I’ll take that as never,” he said chuckling. “I know you said you wanted to do this for me, but I think we could totally do it together. Teamwork.”

“Teamwork,” I said, nodding. “Okay. I think that could be okay.”

I was working off the idea that a way to a man’s heart was through his stomach—i.e. making them delicious food, and not in a way that was like, the real way to a man’s heart, which was actually through the chest cage or up through their diaphragm, because the plan wasn’t to kill Harlan, but to make him like me more.

We made the food together, and I think my crush on him was more obvious now. He caught me staring a couple of times as I watched him work his big muscles into pounding the cornbread mixture.

“Your turn,” he said. “I’ve seen the way you run around, I’m sure you’ve got some energy left?”

Vampire skills weren’t something I’d been able to use fully, mostly because I didn’t think I’d ever been fed enough blood to feel like I could. I almost turned the cornbread mix into a whipped cream with the speed at which I was pounding the whisk around the bowl.

Harlan applauded me. “I’m just glad you used the hand on the whisk and not me.”

“What does that mean?”

He shrugged. “Like—I don’t know, like—”

“I’d never hurt you,” I told him. “That’s a promise.”

“And I’ll never hurt you.”

I squeezed my teeth over my lips, trying to hide the smile he’d caused on my face. “Okay, now I need to put this in the oven, but—I forgot how long for, and the temperature.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure I get the right temperature for it.”

It was supposed to be a treat I made for him, but he was doing most of the work, even though he called it a collaborative effort. At least the ideas were mine. All the things I’d seen people eating, or they’d talked about eating. When I had access to the internet, they would always go on about it. And I’d long since lost the memory of the way some of the things tasted or felt inside my mouth.

As the mac and cheese bake, cornbread, and dinosaur nuggets were all in the oven, we sat in the living room together on the rug in front of the fire. Harlan was going through all the jigsaw puzzles he’d collected over the years.

“And you’ve never completed any of them?” I asked.

“I’ve been busy,” he said. “Plus, they’re always a steal. I get them at flea markets or yard sales for a couple of bucks. I figure they’d come in handy if there was ever a time all the power went out and I couldn’t do anything else.”

There was a Christmas one, with presents under the tree, colorful tinsel, and lights. I slapped my hand on it. “I wanna do this one.”