Chapter Text
Her blood is too sweet, just like her perfume. Even the way she sighs out her pleasure is saccharine, her fingers twisting in his hair with feeble human strength as he drinks from her neck.
But the cocaine undercuts it all, a sharp slap across his brain, brightening the world for a brief time. He chases the light in her blood, drinking too much, following the burn.
A knock rattles the dressing room door, and it opens just as abruptly. Only Christine would be so rude.
Lestat pulls off the woman’s neck, letting the blood drip down his throat. When his eyes can focus, he sees Christine in the doorway frowning. He collects the blood on his lips with his thumb and presses it against his gums.
“We have a problem.”
Lestat needs more cocaine for whatever this is. “I don’t have problems,” he says. “I have a Christine for my problems.”
When she doesn’t move, mind fretting too quickly for Lestat to catch her worries, he sighs.
“Dear,” he says to the blissed-out, barely-breathing body on the couch next to him. “We must find your clothes.”
As the girl stirs, Christine says, “If we could find your clothes as well, that would be great.”
Lestat looks down. Ah. He doesn’t remember getting naked.
Oh, yes. He’d tried to forget how he’d started to lose his erection with her—too sweet, too soft, too not someone else—by going straight for her throat.
The coke is buzzing his veins, and by the time the sugary woman has stumbled out and Lestat has slipped on his underwear and a robe, the lethargy from the earlier Ketamine is almost completely gone.
“Yes, Christine,” he says, throwing himself into a chair in front of the makeup mirror. “What is your problem?”
“Your problem—is finances,” she says. “You’re out of them.”
He smiles at her in the mirror as he splashes on more glitter. “Incorrect. I have a very generous supply of those. Call Roget.”
“I did,” she says. She taps her phone, and the crackle of French voices crashes into the speaker phone from an ongoing call. “Mr. Roget, will you please explain?”
Lestat stares at the phone, something close to dread dulling his high.
“Ah, yes, Monsieur de Lioncourt?”
Lestat frowns. There seems to be scurrying in the Roget & Albert offices. “Yes?”
“Ah, monsieur. I have just regrettably informed Madame Claire that your accounts, eh, have been drained, monsieur.”
Lestat scoffs. “C'est impossible. Roget, if you are having troubles, keep my accounts out of it.”
“Non, monsieur. It is not us. Your accounts were drained by one of the account owners.”
Lestat stands, irritation itching his skin. “You are speaking to the only account owner, Roget! I did no such thing!”
“Ah, yes, well,” Roget starts. “It seems my grandfather activated the directive you signed in nineteen eleven, and then amended in nineteen seventeen, that should he receive proof of your death or should fifty years pass with no contact, your accounts should be transferred to—”
“What are you talking about?” Lestat snaps, able to hear neither his name nor hers. “You received no news of my death. And it was not fifty years! I was in contact with you in the 1970s when you helped me get my credit card.”
“Oh, that was my father—”
“I don’t care. Why did you activate the directive?” He stands next to Christine now, snarling into the little device.
“I—my grandfather activated the directive when he was visited by… by a…” He shuffles papers. “A monsieur Louis de Pointe du Lac, indicating that you had not been heard from.”
Lestat’s heart tremors, aching to join a familiar rhythm that he’s kept locked out and far away. Eighteen months of ignoring that rhythm, even as it called to him from the other side of phone calls from numbers he would block after the first “Hello, Lestat.” From elegant script hidden inside the stack of fan mail delivered to his dressing room—letters to burn before reading. From the side alleys of his first handful of venues, beckoning, beckoning, a siren song of familiarity, comfort, and heartbreak in one pulse.
Lestat clenches his jaw, focusing on that pressure. “When was this?”
“Ah, spring of…” Paperwork dances over the phone. “Nineteen…forty-six.”
Lestat stares at the cellular phone. It looks like a brick in Christine’s delicate hand.
In 1946, they would have been six years gone. Had Louis needed money? Lestat can’t grasp what Louis would be doing at his lawyer’s office at all.
Lestat shakes his head to clear it. His copy of Daniel Molloy’s pathetic excuse for journalism is long gone. He’d spent careful weeks dissecting every line of the first one hundred and fifty pages, looking for the direct quotation marks that indicated Louis was speaking—as if directly into his ear. Every lie, every half-truth, every misremembered moment like a whisper across his neck and then a punch to his stomach. When “Lestat” had slaughtered a train full of people, emotionally tortured his daughter, and dragged her home to play house… Lestat read it again. And again. Looking for any clue as to who wrote this, who created this. Who fabricated it. But even with Daniel Molloy’s name on the authored by line, there was only one person sitting in that Dubai penthouse who could corroborate diaries from 1917-1940.
Lestat didn’t even pack a bag. He just left. The first time he’d stepped foot out of New Orleans in decades, but he did it.
He’d finished annotating his copy of Interview with the Vampire in a location Louis would not find him, tripping over the Paris years and every mention of his ghost haunting the important moments of Louis’s life, like a mold that couldn’t be cleaned. He didn’t need to read any of that twice—barely once, some of it.
He’d sent that copy back to Daniel Molloy. And now that insufferable man was on the phone with Christine every day with another pitch for his documentary—but that was a different thing altogether.
Now, Lestat wishes he could check 1946 in the book. Did it say Louis went to Roget? Did Louis confess in as many words that he was low on funds? Lestat couldn’t recall. He had been focused on not lighting the thing on fire as Armand appeared on the page, slithering in between all the paragraphs and telling a story of Lestat that was as preposterous as Louis’s.
Lestat stumbles over his words for a moment. “I… Well, I am very much alive and speaking to you, Roget.” He snatches the phone from Christine’s hand. “Why is there a problem?”
“Ah, yes. You see, Monsieur de Pointe du Lac became the official owner of the accounts when he visited in nineteen forty-six. He received your things and signed them out. The account transferred to him, as was your directive, should he or his daughter make contact after you had died.”
Lestat feels a vise-like grip choking him. The mention of Claudia hard enough but…
Louis had signed out his things in 1946? Louis had received the letter?
Mr. Molloy had mentioned Lestat’s original calling card that he’d given Louis in 1910, still in Louis’s possession. He remembered the exact way Daniel Molloy had described it:
He pulls something from a keepsake box, but for all the care and tenderness used for this perfectly intact, century-old business card—Lestat de Lioncourt, in gold lettering—he could have been opening his wallet and flipping to a dutifully looked after photograph of a lover lost to war.
Lestat had held onto that sentence for several pages, like hope tied to a string.
And then, of course, the rest of book cut that string.
Had Louis kept the letter? Had he even read it? Lestat remembers no mention of it kept in the present in the same way as the calling card.
He aches for the pages from 1946 in that book.
Louis signed out his things. One of his father’s rings as well? Where was it? He’d meant to give it to Claudia one day. Had she received it? Would Louis have known that it was hers? Did it burn in the theater? Perhaps on one of the coven member’s fingers, stolen from her like so many things stolen.
“Well I have not died,” Lestat snaps, done with feeling these things. “Are you not hearing that, Roget? Why is this an issue now? I have been withdrawing funds many times over the past eighty years.”
“Yes, it’s a bit of paperwork that has… slipped through the cracks. But just yesterday, Monsieur de Pointe du Lac contacted the firm to drain the account. And as he is the beneficiary, I am sorry to say, he had every right to do so—”
Lestat throws the phone against dressing room wall, shattering the mirror along with the tiny screen. Christine sighs.
Lestat finds the lines of coke the girl had been doing. He snorts one to feel something spike his blood other than anger, betrayal, heartbreak. He wipes his nose and listens to his own rushing heart, creating a rhythm not even Louis’s could follow.
“How much money do I have?” he asks, when Christine has been too silent for too long.
“Do you mean… cash?” she asks. “I don’t carry cash for you, Lestat.”
He squeezes his eyes closed. “Are you telling me I am completely cut off?”
“Was that your only account?”
Lestat takes a deep breath. “Call Louis’s lawyer. Figure this out.”
“Sure,” she says, exhaustion in her voice. “Right after I get a new phone.”
She leaves, and Lestat stares at his face in the mirror.
Louis is tapping his shoulder and running away. That’s all this is. Louis is glancing up at him from the table at the Azalea before asking the soldier to go for a drive with him in his “pretty automobile.”
They’d been seeing each other before Daniel Molloy’s book had come out. Once every three weeks. Almost contractually by a certain point. Three weeks was as long as either of them could go without the other. Lestat, of course, needed more, but if he knew Louis was coming in three weeks and that he could count on that… It made the nights bearable.
They’d finally found a rhythm. They’d finally understood each other and what the other person needed and what they could ask the other person to give. Lestat was allowed to make love to Louis, and Louis was allowed space and freedom and time to miss him (Lestat assumed, hoped).
And then the book.
It had been eighteen months since he’d last taken Louis apart on a mattress with fresh sheets and soft pillows. Since Louis had grabbed for his face, dragging Lestat’s mouth to his as he came. Since Lestat had sunk his teeth into Louis’s shoulder, drinking deep of the blood he longed for.
Louis had his number though, and even after Lestat left New Orleans without a word, Louis had used it. He thinks for a moment about the times Louis got more than a few words in before Lestat had gotten control of himself and ended the call.
“It’s not accurate. Even the Talamasca was involved—”
“I didn’t want this published, Lestat. I burned the—”
“Don’t hang up. Tell me where you are—?”
He would get better at it, quicker. Then finally Larry had informed him that people don’t have to answer their phone calls. There is a mailbox for voices, and those can be deleted. What a genius invention.
Eventually, he would give up a cellular phone altogether. Christine is paid enough to manage all aspects of his life with her suite of employees.
Louis had begun writing to the fan mail next, and when the tour began, he began hovering outside the venues. Lestat had successfully avoided him every time, sometimes with a very petty lift off into the air where he knew Louis could not follow.
Lestat had responded, in his own way. “Long Face,” his first single, was nothing if not a response. Louis’s attempts to contact him had paused for a time.
And now? Draining his accounts? Forcing Lestat to reach out?
Lestat rolls his shoulders back and takes a deep breath. His reflection is broken into jagged outlines, and it takes him too long to realize it’s the broken mirror he’s looking into.
~*~
Christine tries to settle this with Louis’s lawyer, but they are insistent. A meeting.
Lestat decides to make it as inconvenient as possible. He is only available at 5:15 in the morning in Temecula, California, on a Tuesday.
If Louis is forcing a conversation on him, then Lestat will give him precisely forty-five minutes until sunrise.
“He agreed,” Christine says, tapping into her phone.
Lestat sits in the empty tour bus, all staff cleared out as they are currently “fur load”—a phrase Christine is trying to teach him. The band has been told not to leave the hotel and only charge to the room, as the hotel has not yet been tipped off about the canceled credit card. He has his legs crossed leisurely, and he’s drumming his nails on the table.
“Tell them we will meet at something called a Dairy Queen—”
“His team has already sent the meeting room. It’s at a Hyatt.”
Lestat purses his lips, sucking his teeth.
“How are you getting to Temecula with no credit card?” Christine asks.
Lestat bobs his crossed leg. “How much gasoline is in this thing?” he says, tapping the side of the bus.
“You can’t drive there by Tuesday.”
“I will fly then,” he says.
“How will I get to Temecula?”
He grins at her. “Would like to ride piggy-back or in my arms like a damsel?”
Christine sighs and opens her phone. “I’ll be billing you for this private plane.”
“Then you better get my funds back, Christine.”
Christine books two rooms at the Hyatt and arranges for his coffin to arrive Monday afternoon. He will give her a raise once his accounts are settled.
Christine then begins the very painful task of declaring his assets.
“Why does Louis need to know this?” he asks her as she itemizes all six of his guitars and both of his violins, estimating their worth.
“We are requesting to officially separate the accounts,” she says. “It’s like a divorce. Or in this case, since Louisiana is not a common law state, a dissolution of business.”
Lestat examines his nails. He understands none of these words, but that’s why he pays Christine. “And Louis needs to know how many drumsticks I own?”
“He will also be declaring his assets,” she says absently. “Now what’s the address of your New Orleans home?”
He’s a breath away from saying eleven thirty-two before realizing it’s not what she is referring to. And that isn’t his home anymore, anyway.
“That’s not my house,” Lestat says softly. “It’s Louis’s… asset.”
Christine pauses, glancing up at him. “The new one? The one you lived in from 2022 on?”
Lestat nods, looking away.
On the plane ride to California, Christine hands Lestat the list of Louis’s assets. Lestat wasn’t going to read anything—he doesn’t care how many bleeding canvases with obscure shapes that were supposed to symbolize death Louis owns—but then he sees the address of the Dubai penthouse.
Louis was in the process of selling, the last Lestat had talked to him about it. But that was over eighteen months ago.
Lestat flips the pages. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of listings, all detailed with the words “income property.” Lestat’s own New Orleans house that he’d left behind eighteen months ago is listed as an income property, though perhaps the only payment Louis had received on it from 2022 to 2023 is not fit to print.
He flips back to the first page. Dubai is not yet an “income property.” Lestat sucks his teeth. Something itches about that. But he can’t name it before his eyes catch on the other properties without “income” next to them. There’s Louis’s New Orleans house—not Lestat’s New Orleans house; a different one that Louis lived in when he wasn’t spending one night every three weeks pinned to the mattress and begging for Lestat’s cock in every hole he had.
Sometimes Lestat wonders if it was fair that Louis got twenty days and Lestat got one, and then twenty and then one, but three weeks had been just about as far as he could push himself to exist without Louis.
Until now, of course. Until the book.
Now, Lestat is doing fine, eighteen months on.
As the plane starts to descend, his leg starts to shake. He could really use a little hit of something before seeing Louis again, but his stash has dried up.
His eyes catch on the other listing—the last one that’s considered a residence.
Sausalito home, 1970-present.
Lestat tosses the paperwork back at Christine. “I don’t need to see it.”
~*~
Lestat makes them late on purpose. Christine should be used to it by now, but she’s tapping her foot anxiously in the elevator at 5:27am, worried about the sunrise.
“It’s fine. I’m sure they found a depressing little room with no windows.”
Lestat can hear Louis’s heartbeat from down the hall, and he knows Louis can hear his. His lawyer is a vampire, which is interesting. He picks up on that too, along with a tumble of thoughts of legalese Lestat doesn’t care about.
He pauses outside the room, and Christine turns back to make sure he’s still coming. Lestat lifts a hand, telling her to wait one moment before opening the door.
Louis’s scent is here. And Lestat has to take a second to gather himself. He wants to press his face into it. He wants to sleep wrapped in it.
He needs drugs. He needs Christine to get his money back so he can stop seeking out drugged up people in alleys or clubs or drug dens just to cling to a feeling that isn’t misery.
Lestat is quite aware that Louis can feel him hesitating outside and that Louis’s lawyer can hear these thoughts, so he closes his mind and nods at Christine to open the door. He slips his sunglasses on and follows her inside, curving around the table and heading for the opposite side of the table from his ex.
Christine starts pleasantries and handshakes. Lestat does no such thing. He stares at Louis through his dark sunglasses. He looks good. That camel coat and the chain he began wearing recently.
And he’s smiling at Lestat. Not like he’s won something by getting him here. But like something else.
Lestat pulls his eyes away and listens to the lawyers begin.
“Seeing as the money rightfully belongs to Mr. de Lioncourt,” Christine is continuing, “I’m wondering first if there’s an amicable way to return it to his possession.”
“Mr. du Lac is also a rightful owner of the funds, due to a signed letter from Mr. de Lioncourt in nineteen eleven and reconfirming again in nineteen seventeen—”
Lestat zones out. He focuses on his heartbeat, begging it to speed or slow—anything to lose Louis’s which has found him. The rhythm of their tangled hearts drowns out anything Christine is saying.
“Mr. de Lioncourt’s assets feel light.”
Lestat looks at the lawyer. He’s lifting a stack of papers, as if weighing them.
“Mr. de Lioncourt isn’t as much of a capitalist as Mr. du Lac,” Christine says.
“I was surprised to not find Royale Street listed,” Louis says suddenly.
Lestat looks at him. “That hasn’t been mine for a long time.”
Louis rolls his shoulders. “You could have secured it with Roget. To keep in a… family line.”
Is that all this is about? Louis wants 1132? Lestat finally takes his glasses off, narrowing his eyes at him.
“Apologies. I didn’t have someone with a head for business with me at the time,” he says pointedly. “It was uninhabited for many years so the city took it over as an historic building.” He glares, thinking of Dubai, thinking of Sausalito. “Perhaps if you wanted it, you should have come to claim it. I know you have a fondness for haunting the halls and floor plans of old relationships.”
Louis blinks, head tilting.
“As we’re on the subject of 1132 Royale St,” Christine says, steering them back, “Mr. de Lioncourt would like to point out that the only properties or assets he feels Mr. du Lac has rights to would be anything purchased or owned between the years of 1910 and 1940. As Mr. de Lioncourt no longer owns anything purchased between those years, he doesn’t think there’s anything else to discuss. He would like his finances to be returned.”
“Mr. du Lac disagrees that he’s not entitled to anything, but he would like to continue in good faith to discuss the ways in which Mr. de Lioncourt can attain his finances again.”
Lestat doesn’t care about this. Christine is too good at what she does. And if this is airtight, he will simply sign that Prada contract that he’s been ignoring. He can get back on his feet easily even if he starts from scratch.
But Louis is staring at him, and Lestat refuses to glance away first. Louis’s eyes dip to his open shirt buttons and back up his neck. Lestat tries not to swallow but fails.
He looks good. He smells good. And Lestat is in a room with him again for the first time in eighteen months—but he’s not allowed to hold him.
Fuck this.
“Mr. de Lioncourt is currently making a career off playing a character from Mr. du Lac’s book—”
“Is that what he’s doing,” Lestat interrupts with a laugh. “I didn’t know he was doing that.”
“So even if we were to only discuss past finances,” Louis’s lawyer continues, “it wouldn’t take into account the money Mr. de Lioncourt makes off playing a character that, for all intents and purposes, Mr. du Lac and Mr. Molloy own.”
Lestat’s gums itch. For cocaine or blood, he doesn’t care. He rolls his jaw, and Louis’s lips quirk.
“Mr. de Lioncourt is not a character. We should be suing Mr. du Lac for defamation, but we’re not. Not yet.”
“We would gladly come back with a suit for emotional distress, should we agree the events in the book are true—”
“Who the fuck is this guy?” Lestat asks, pointing a finger at Louis’s lawyer while asking Louis.
Louis’s eyes sparkle.
“If Mr. de Lioncourt would agree the book is based on him,” the lawyer says, “then he would have some crimes to answer to—”
“If that’s the case,” Lestat interrupts, “there’s a few other crimes I’d like to sue for. Christine, if we could ask the du Lac team for the forwarding address of Mr. du Lac’s last boyfriend, I would very much appreciate it—”
“I don’t know where Armand is,” Louis says plainly, pressing back a grin.
“Alright, coming back to the matter at hand,” Christine tries.
“Of course,” Louis’s lawyer says, “I’d just like to point out that perhaps it’s not just the finances in the Roget & Albert accounts that Mr. du Lac may have a right to. Mr. de Lioncourt is profiting off the character The Vampire Lestat, going as far to name his musical act after him.” Lestat’s shoulders creep up to his ears. “Mr. de Lioncourt did feed into this alter ego. He did infringe on copyright—”
He snaps.
“Ah, but he did not direct a play and then come home canoodling with one of its victims, did he? Who did that I wonder?” He lifts his finger to his ear to hear better. “Repeat the name?”
Louis pretends to think about it. “That would be Armand?”
“Armand!” Lestat cackles.
“You wanna get into Armand?” Louis asks.
“Santiago I could understand. At least he had a presence, but Armand?”
“I’m happy to discuss Armand if you think that would help you Lestat.”
Louis’s condescension makes it slip out. “Is it true that you had a second home in Sausalito with him?”
“We did.” He fucking smiles.
“Did you take turns driving across the Golden Gate Bridge—”
“Yeah—”
“Who held the wheel harder?”
“Writing numbers on each other’s backs and pretending to guess ‘em wrong.”
Lestat sees red. “I bet. I BET!”
“Come on, Lestat—”
“Very specific detail to pluck out of thin air! Va te faire foutre!”
Louis presses his lips together and reaches for something. Lestat only remembers there are other people in the room when Louis’s fingers touch his lawyer’s wrist.
Unnecessary. Provocative. Intimate.
Lestat’s chest freezes as he looks between them. The lawyer stares at Lestat like he’s heard enough about him to expect these outbursts.
They can speak into each other’s minds. Louis doesn’t need to communicate physically.
Louis’s lips quirk even as he refuses to meet Lestat’s gaze.
Wait till you see my pretty automobile.
“Let’s try and circle back to the particulars?” Christine says. “What is it that Mr. du Lac is proposing?”
Lestat is going to writhe out of his skin if he has to sit through this humiliation any longer. Because that’s all Louis wants, he realizes. To humiliate him.
“What do you want, Louis?” Lestat cuts in, narrowing his eyes salaciously. “Do you want me to beg for it?”
Louis’s lawyer opens his mouth, but Louis cuts him off, looking straight at Lestat.
“I have a string of new businesses,” Louis says, shrugging one shoulder, like all of this is casual. “Appealing to a specific type of clientele. Hotels. Clubs. Places for the sun-challenged to mingle. Revolving doors of prey and good places for the Farm to find supply. And also, ways for humanity to brush up against the dark underbelly.”
Lestat doesn’t know why Louis has to say “underbelly” like that. Like it’s supposed to make Lestat’s mind go to indecent places.
“Your point, Louis,” Lestat drawls.
“Very famous vampire would help.”
Lestat’s top lip curls. “You want me to promote your clubs.”
“I do.”
He sighs. “I can make an Instagram tweet.”
“I’m thinking more of a full-time job.” Louis levels his gaze at Lestat. “A ‘job’ is this thing you do for cash—”
“You want me to earn back my fucking money?” Lestat snarls.
Louis opens his hands on the table. “It’s my money now,” he says coolly. “Rightfully. It’s in my accounts. I’m offering you a way to get some of it back.”
Lestat’s gums throb. He wants to remind Louis how he came by that money. That Lestat had to endure for that money—in ways Louis did not have to endure. That this isn’t fair. That Lestat has already earned that money.
Christine begins to chime in, but Lestat knows this is just between the two of them now. Louis figured out how to pin him down finally. And it’s up to Lestat to figure out how to wriggle free.
“I need a lot of cash per week,” Lestat says, interrupting.
Something flickers in Louis’s eyes—a thrill of the chase.
“We have the records from Christine,” he says, gesturing toward the piles of paper. “I’m well-aware of your spending.”
“I don’t want to feel strapped for cash.”
“Happy to give you generous stipends for each appearance.”
“So, it’s an allowance.” Lestat sneers. “Like I’m a naughty child working for excellent marks in school? Or perhaps a housewife from the past century? Am I being given my spousal allowance, Louis?”
Louis smiles before he can bite it back. “If you’d like to see it that way.”
Something stirs low in Lestat’s belly as Louis tries to school his expression. Louis’s loving this. Louis’s getting off on it. Is it having Lestat at his mercy that he enjoys?
Lestat thinks back to the initial shock of reading the book. The way Louis detested him. The way Louis excused his own behavior with something called “the vampire bond.” Every piece of Lestat’s soul that was given to Louis had been called a manipulation or a corruption.
It had made Lestat wonder what it was they had been doing, every three weeks. What did Louis possibly get out of it, if he hated him so? Lestat’s pride had stirred, knowing that it had to be the sex if it wasn’t anything more. Louis had tried to tell him before their arrangement—just fun. Just sex. He didn’t want to talk and he didn’t want to even look at Lestat’s face sometimes. But then something shifted when he allowed himself to give in to their three weeks arrangement—something relaxed, something loosened. Louis would tell Lestat about his work trips and ask Lestat about his music. Louis would let Lestat just hold him and play with his hair and drink from his breast like he could reach his heart if he was patient enough.
When Lestat had been alone in a random city, annotating his copy of Interview with the Vampire, he’d realized that perhaps their present-day relationship was nothing more than another way for Louis to punish himself. He’d found many inventive ways to do so over the years, and choosing to return to Lestat’s arms would be quite the self-flagellation.
But now Lestat doesn’t understand. Is he winning something by keeping Lestat close? By sharpening the knife of his misery?
Louis plays games that exhaust him. He clears his throat.
“I have a social media team.” (He thinks. He’s sure there’s a team somewhere.) “I will happily promote your clubs, Louis. But I cannot be shipped all over the country for every Thursday karaoke night,” he says with a grin. “I have a career of my own to promote.”
“For now,” Louis says.
Lestat sees red again.
“What are we talking here?” Christine cuts in. “Physical appearances at grand openings? After parties in cities with Immortal Properties locations?”
“Thank you, Miss Claire,” Louis says. “Yes, that’s what I’m proposing.”
Christine nods. “This sounds manageable, but I’d need specifics on my desk as soon as—”
“I do not wish to see you,” Lestat says. The room goes quiet. Louis’s jaw ticks. “I will spend every midnight in one of your strip clubs. I will arrive at every red carpet with bells on.” His mouth quirks, and he lowers his voice dangerously. “But I do not agree to interact with the owner. You will not order me around like a dog when I’m there.” He tilts his head. “You may have to go back to Sausalito for that.”
Louis’s eyes glint. A smirk curls his lips. “I’m opening several clubs and bars. I’ll want you at grand openings, but I’m afraid I’ll have to be there too. You’ll have to put up with me a little.”
“What? Ribbon cutting?” Lestat sneers. “We each hold one end of the giant scissors?”
“That, and I’ll expect you on the dance floor,” Louis says. “At the bar. Maybe I’ll put in a piano lounge for you to perform at—”
“So, what? You pay me a salary, and I come and shake my ass at your club once a month?”
Louis relaxes back in his chair, like he’s on the downward slope of closing a business deal.
“Doesn’t haven’t to be monthly,” he says. “That would be too predictable. But I think scheduling it would be good. We’ll say…” He pretends to think about it, and then locks eyes with Lestat. “Every three weeks?”
Air puffs out of Lestat’s chest. Heat blossoms, low and provocative. Louis watches it land on him, like an arrow finding home. Lestat feels frayed and thin, and also home and safe, and also sick to his stomach.
“Leave us,” Lestat says, gaze still on Louis.
Louis’s eyes don’t move from him as he nods once, telling his lawyer to go.
Lestat breathes deeply as their lawyers leave, muttering to each other before the door shuts on them. Louis stares at him with a challenge in his eyes that they used to fuck out of each other.
Lestat straightens the cuffs of his jacket casually and tilts his head. The silence in the room is seductive.
“Has it been terribly difficult?” Lestat asks. “Finding someone to fuck you like I do?”
Louis bites back a grin. He shrugs. “My lawyer’s doing an admirable job.”
Lestat’s fangs drop. He rolls his jaw with closed lips, trying to retract them.
“But yeah,” Louis says. “It’s difficult to find someone who knows the andante to my allegro.”
Lestat gives him a catlike smile. “Do you like the song? It’s about a man who fucked me over one too many times—”
“I think you got a few more times in you.”
Lestat tears his eyes away first, biting back a smile and breathing in air that he doesn’t need but hopes can give him a second to think. His leg shakes under the table. When he leaves, he’s going to need to find some ket or something laced if he can. Fuck, why did he set this meeting in Temecula. Would he even be able to find anything before dawn?
Is there time to fly to downtown LA?
“What have you been taking?”
Lestat looks at him. Louis’s taking in the bounce of his leg and probably the thin skin under his eyes. It’s not pity or judgement. It’s interest.
He remembers the first lines of Daniel Molloy’s book.
In September of 1973, I met a vampire. I didn’t know he was a vampire at the time. He picked me up at Polynesian Mary’s, a known gay bar in San Francisco. He offered me drugs if I came back to his apartment on Divisadero, something I learned later that he did often with his victims.
It hadn’t surprised Lestat at the time of reading, to learn that Louis was enjoying the hedonism of the seventies. Lestat had had strange decades as well. It had been the phantom of Armand that hadn’t made sense to him.
Lestat sniffs and ignores the question.
“So. You finally found a way to force me to talk to you.” He glares at him. “Taking my money is low, Louis.”
“Blame Roget. He shouldn’t have signed over the accounts.”
Lestat licks his teeth. “What do you want?”
“I already told you. I want an ambassador for Immortal Properties.”
“And I already told you,” Lestat says, “I don’t want to see you.”
Louis’s lips tighten.
“When you can figure out a way to organize these grand openings and strip club seafood buffets without you and I sharing the same space, I will happily sign any contract your boyfriend can scrape together.” He stands, pushing up from the table. “Until then—”
“Sit down.”
The command comes low and firm. It shivers the blood in his veins, as if the atoms inside of him know that their twin heart has commanded them.
Lestat stares at him lazily. He’d gotten as far as out of his chair and to the side of it before Louis had stopped him. The chair is half pushed in.
Louis’s eyes are hard and dark. Promising.
Lestat tosses his hair and leans back against the wall instead. To pull out the chair again is to concede. He crosses his arms.
Louis’s gaze drips over him, a fire sparking.
Smoothly, Louis stands as well, slipping his hands down his camel coat buttons, straightening his clothes. Lestat tries not to drag his eyes down his body with it.
Louis takes a centering breath. “I didn’t want the book to come out.”
Lestat smiles. “Ah. That makes two of us.”
“But it’s out there,” Louis says. “Whatever version of truth it is—”
“I don’t want to talk about the book,” Lestat says. He aims for just as firm as Louis had been when he commanded him to sit. He’s not sure he nailed it, but at least Louis nods and stops.
“You been talking to Daniel about a documentary?” Louis asks, moving around the table toward him.
Lestat really should have said, I don’t want to talk about anything to do with the book, but it would be squabbling now.
He shrugs a shoulder, letting his crossed arms drop. “He is relentless.”
“He is.” Louis stands in front of him now, between Lestat and the table. There’s not a lot of space, and Lestat can pick up his scent so much better here. “You’re in Toledo next, yeah?”
Lestat isn’t sure, but he thinks that’s on the tour list. “I think so. I usually don’t know where I am until Salamander thanks the crowd for being there.”
“I got a club in Detroit.” Louis leans back on the table, curling his fingers under the tabletop on either side of his splayed thighs. Lestat fights the urge to drop his gaze. “After your concert on Thursday, bring whoever you want.” Louis voice is so smooth, it drips over his senses. “I’ll have anything you need for a good time.”
There’s an innuendo there, but Lestat ignores it. Louis’s going to provide him drugs like one of his hundred and twenty-eight boys in San Francisco. Louis’s going to own his time and his presence and hold money and drugs over his head like he’s training a dog.
Is all of this to make Lestat heel? More punishment for Louis, more humiliation for Lestat.
Lestat licks his lips, and Louis tracks it.
“I believe our arrangement is for every three weeks,” Lestat says with a smirk. “Today is Tuesday the fifth, so I don’t have to see you until the twenty-sixth. I believe we have a show in New Haven around then? Perhaps you can open a suck and fuck club quickly for the Yale students—”
“Lestat.”
“But I don’t think this Thursday works, no.” Lestat arches his shoulders off the wall, intending to hit him with a See you in three weeks, Louis, and waltz out the door.
Louis lifts his left leg and promptly plants his foot on the wall next to Lestat’s thigh, caging him.
The temperature in the conference room rises about ten degrees.
There’s a look on Louis’s face—one that Lestat used to drag out of him at the Azalea as he hungrily watched Louis move through the crowd, being ignored for hours. Or after putting on plays for Claudia in the living room, where every storyline began to veer toward lurid affairs between kings and courtesans or unhappy wives who sought kisses from strange men who paid them more attention than their husbands did. The look is one of fond exasperation, undercut with arousal, overlain with humor. It’s a look that says, I know what you’re doing. I know what you want. Patience.
Lestat’s skin shivers. To be on the receiving end of that look again…
“I don’t think this meeting counts,” Louis says. “Not by our standards.”
He lets the sole of his shoe slip from the wall and pushes himself to standing. There’s two feet between them, but still Lestat feels crowded.
“Our standards,” Lestat repeats, leaning back on the wall again, putting space between them, affecting casualness even as his heart slides into Louis’s rhythm.
“Mm-hmm.” Louis steps forward, eyes sliding down the open halves of Lestat’s shirt. He’s unbuttoned to his stomach. When he’d worn the shirt, he’d imagined Louis’s eyes on him, but now that it’s happening on Louis’s terms instead of Lestat’s, it feels like a weapon in Louis’s arsenal instead of his.
Lestat changes the subject.
“Why are you interested in my money, Louis? Do you not have enough of your own? I have seen your assets. They’re quite considerable.”
Louis’s mouth twitches. “That’s the thing about acquiring wealth. You can always acquire more.” His eyes flick up to Lestat’s, and his fingertips lift, landing on Lestat’s belt buckle. “I’m quite good at acquiring assets. I take good care of them.”
The look—I know what you’re doing. I know what you want. Patience.
It hits Lestat full force from only inches away as Louis deftly slips the leather through the buckle.
Air leaves Lestat’s chest like a death rattle. Like the last fight draining out of him. Fuck, he’s missed him.
“Is that what I’m going to be?” Lestat asks, pretending not to be affected by Louis’s fingers unzipping him now. “One of Louis de Pointe du Lac’s assets.”
Louis’s eyes are dark as he opens Lestat’s pants and slips his hand inside.
“Maybe,” Louis says. Lestat doesn’t remember the question he asked when Louis’s fingers slide to close over his cock. “You do handle like one of my cars. You always purr when you get started.”
Lestat’s lashes flutter closed, and he moans something deep in his chest, proving Louis’s point. When he pries his eyes open, Louis is looking at his mouth and Lestat thinks he wouldn’t need drugs if he had this.
Louis’s hand slips a loose grip over him, pulling his cock out of his pants and beginning to pump a slow rhythm.
Lestat’s heart is thudding with Louis’s, succumbing to his pulse. His eyes are hazy with lust and love and need. Louis twists his wrist just like Lestat likes it, and Lestat groans and drops his forehead on Louis’s shoulder, giving in.
His breath is humid over Louis’s clavicle, and his hips start to push forward against Louis’s grip. Lestat lifts his hands to Louis’s waist, fingers trailing to Louis’s belt.
“Nuh-uh,” Louis chides. “This one’s for me. Hands on the wall.”
Lestat whimpers and watches Louis’s hand work him. “Let me use my mouth on you, mon cher—”
Louis takes his jaw gently, tilting his head up to meet his eyes. “No. This is what I want. Hands—on the wall.”
Louis twists his wrist again, and Lestat obeys. Palms on the wall behind him.
With his jaw held in Louis’s hand, he’s forced to watch Louis’s face as his fist speeds up. Lestat whines.
Whatever Louis sees on Lestat’s face, he likes it. His beautiful mouth curves.
Lestat eyes roll back on a sigh.
Maybe it wasn’t so bad to be at Louis’s mercy—as long as Louis gave him mercy.
Louis’s mouth presses to Lestat’s ear. “You miss me?”
He gasps, nodding. His lips so close to his ear. His voice low and soft. He can almost imagine they are together—they are in love—they are perfect.
“Tell me you missed me.”
“I miss you all the time,” Lestat whispers. “You know that.”
Louis hums, some content sound that Lestat is glad to have given him. Louis pulls away from his ear and Lestat thinks he’ll kiss him. He’ll do anything to be kissed.
Louis releases his cock to lift his palm to his mouth and lick it. When he returns to grip him just right, to gather the come leaking from Lestat’s slit and use that as well to move over him… Lestat moans so loud he thinks the whole hotel can hear them.
Louis smiles, and Lestat falls into his green eyes. The eyes Lestat gave him.
“Louis…” Lestat lifts a hand to touch him, but remembers. He sticks his hands back to the wall.
“Good,” Louis whispers. And it shoots like heroin to Lestat’s cock. “See how nice it is when you do as you’re told?”
Lestat nods, lost.
“I take care of what’s mine.”
Tears fill his eyes. Mine. To be his…
Lestat leans forward, lips parted.
Louis pulls his face away, turning to the side, pushing Lestat’s head back against the wall gently.
The rejection burns. Lestat feels empty. Worthless. Unlovable. He remembers what it used to feel like when Louis wouldn’t let him love him. Two years ago, used as a body. Before they’d come to their agreement.
Louis sniffs and presses a kiss to his cheek. Lestat memorizes the shape of it.
“Not yet, baby,” Louis whispers. “I need to watch you come first.”
Lestat’s skin vibrates. Not yet.
Baby.
Louis has never used an endearment. The last time Lestat heard him say anything of the sort was when he called him Love—just before slitting his throat.
Another kiss presses to Lestat’s cheek. Then his throat. As if Louis knows what he’s thinking. As if Louis could kiss the wounds closed.
Lestat whimpers. Louis’s thumb rolls over the head of his cock.
“Shh.” Louis hushes him. He places his palm on Lestat’s cheek and forces his eyes up to him. “I’ve got you.”
Lestat can’t help it. His hands leave the wall, gripping Louis’s waist as he comes. He comes hard, splashing over Louis’s fist and onto each of their shirts.
He’s panting, breathing in the scent of him, clutching him close. Louis milks just a bit more from him before finally pulling a handkerchief from a pocket and cleaning them both up.
Lestat is wrung out, his mind running in circles of please kiss me, please kiss me. You said you would.
He reaches for Louis’s belt again, beginning to drop to his knees—
“I said no,” Louis says gently.
Blood tears make his vision pink. Louis doesn’t need him. He has someone else.
“Are you truly fucking your lawyer?” Lestat asks. His voice is small. His gaze stays on their shoes.
“Sometimes,” Louis says simply.
Lestat closes his eyes, pushing the tears back. He feels sick.
“You want me to stop?” Louis asks.
Lestat nods. His throat is tight and he doesn’t know why he feels so flayed open.
Louis lifts his chin, forcing him to meet his eyes, and says very slowly, gently, “Then, I’ll see you in Detroit. On Thursday.”
A stone drops in his hollow chest.
It feels foreign in his ears. A laugh puffs out of his chest. “What?”
Louis’s hand tightens on his chin. His eyes dig into Lestat’s.
“Because you’re mine,” Louis says. His gaze drops to his mouth. “Say you’re mine.”
The emptiness in Lestat’s chest fills with something rancid and hot. Rage. Betrayal. Neither toward Louis. Toward himself.
Like an addict needing a fix, Lestat fell to his knees for it. Louis has been trying to force this interaction for eighteen months, and the second there was an opening, Lestat folded. He obeyed like a dog.
Louis bumps their noses together, whispering, “I need you to say it.”
And Lestat can see it. The need. He needs it. He needs Lestat low for him to be high. Louis’s eyes are blown out in arousal, but still he won’t let Lestat even go to his knees before Lestat admits that he misses him, that he needs him, that he belongs to him.
Louis used to beg Lestat to tell him he loved him in that year of every three weeks. He never had to beg twice—Lestat was happy to whisper his devotions. But Louis needed to hear it. Lestat never thought of it as conceding anything. Even without a return of affections, it was a win for Lestat—to have Louis in his bed, to have Louis allowing him to say it.
To have any scrap of Louis that he would give. Even if it was only eight hours, every twenty-one days.
They’re both addicts maybe. Lestat is addicted to loving Louis. Louis is addicted to Lestat loving Louis.
“Lestat,” Louis prompts, desperation edging into his voice.
He still hasn’t kissed him. He said he would.
Lestat pushes Louis’s hands off him, his eyes hard.
“Not yet, baby,” Lestat snarls into his face. “I need to watch you come first.”
He slips out from Louis’s hold, moving quickly to the door. He throws it open and marches out, putting as much distance between them as possible until his heartbeat is the solitary one in his chest.