After School Special [Closed]

☙ Teacher's Pet ❧

    The desert was cold, and loud, and reeked of cheap beer and skunk weed and sweat. The sweat persisted from the heat of the daylight hours, when the sun beat down hot on people wearing too much leather and not enough deodorant. At night, all that heat disappeared in favor of a persistent chill. Too dry, none of the humidity of wetter climates to keep things warm.

    Michael Bell did not look like a professor. He barely looked human. He'd told himself that he wouldn't go overboard this time.

    He'd gone overboard. Again.

    He was always like this at festivals, at concerts. Some part of him felt like it shouldn't even count. Wasn't everyone allowed to make bad decisions at festivals? He wasn't bleeding people completely dry. He hadn't killed anyone, as far as he could tell. He was being careful enough to stop before he went too far, and healed them before they could bleed out from their injuries.

    It was fine. This was fine. He'd go back to being responsible when he went home, when classes started up again. He was allowed to take a break once in a while.

    Guitars and screaming continued under the starlight. He focused on a new target in the crowd. She was wearing a skimpy denim dress and a fake feathered headdress. He hated her immediately. She had green hair.

    He caught her by the arm so he could catch her eyes. "This won't hurt," he told her, compelled her. "Don't scream." Then he pulled her close, and buried his teeth in her neck. Her blood ran hot over his tongue, throbbed with her heartbeat, looking for all the world like they were kissing in the dark. She didn't taste as good as he wanted her to, but she was good enough. He could feel his own heart beat faster, his pulse race. Everything tasting better, feeling better, sounding better. All his nerve endings alight and alive with effervescent joy, like he could conquer the world.

    Maybe he could fuck her. If she took the goddamn stupid fucking headdress off. He wouldn't make her. He wasn't a monster. But he was objectively handsome, and maybe once she forgot he'd done this she'd want to. She seemed like someone who'd be willing to let him fuck her. Because what he wanted wasn't any kind of a two-player game; what he wanted was to do something to someone.

    He pulled away from her neck when he felt her pulse weaken. Shit. Almost too late. Almost bad. But it was fine. Everything was good. He had this under control. He bit into his own hand, and shoved it into her mouth to force her to drink. The torn-open meat of her neck started to heal. He had blood dripping off his mouth, down his chin and staining his shirt. His eyes were a hideous shade of black.

    He was allowed to let loose and have fun sometimes.

Veronica was riding on someone’s shoulders.

She couldn’t remember whose, and she wasn’t sure if she had climbed up there willingly or had been picked up as some kind of joke. She vaguely remembered complaining that she couldn't see. Maybe she had been trying to be cute. She did enjoy positive attention. Otherwise, It was absolutely unnecessary to be riding on someone’s shoulders when she could just as easily make herself feather-light and float upwards above the crowd. She could lounge as easily as being suspended in water, and watch the concert adrift on the chilly breeze.

Perhaps, she had already tried that, and that’s why strong arms wrapped around her thighs, left bare by the cut of her shorts, were keeping her pinned to someone. Maybe they were worried she would float away like a neglected balloon. Veronica titled her head back to laugh upwards at the star-dotted sky, and nearly tipped off her perch, but someone steadied her with a hand between her shoulder blades and pushed her back into an upright position.

“You alright there, champ?” they asked, and she recognized the voice as belonging to Max. Her would-be chaperone (as far as Solarflare was concerned) on this particular adventure.
Nodding, she pushed damp green locks away from her forehead, before taking another swig of a warm beer. If Max was behind her, who was chauffeuring her around? She looked down, curling hair sprouted atop a head in a haphazard mess, the color of which she couldn’t make out in the darkness.

“Who is this?” she asked, trying to yell over the noise, her free hand pat the curls gently. At least she tried to be gentle. The way he tilted his head away from her hand, suggested that she was not succeeding.

“Carter.”

She didn’t know who answered. She hummed in feigned understanding, nodding thoughtfully. Someone laughed, maybe at her. Veronica didn’t care.

The crowd was cheering, so Veronica was cheering. Arms lifting above her head as she whooped and hollered with everyone else. A swift breeze chilled the exposed skin at the small of her back and she wondered if she’d brought her bomber jacket. Maybe she’d left it in the car?

Feet tied up in her worn combat boots kicked against the broad chest of her mount. “I want down,” she whined, almost petulant like a child. He who was potentially called Carter, dropped down to one knee and she green-haired woman dismounted with some difficulty.

“Thanks,” Veronica lilted, lifting a hand to pat maybe-Carter on the chest. She tried for gently.

Max leaned closer to her, sweat and body spray mingled around her nose and she frowned. Lips near her ear asked where she was going. He pulled back to frown down at her, but she was already turning on her heel and wandering away, feeling as if she knew the general direction of the car. A pack of cigarettes appeared from somewhere within her shirt, she pulled one out and lit it with a lighter that had been stuffed inside the box.

“The car,” she explained, blowing minty smoke, maybe to Max who she assumed was following her, or maybe to no one since it was possible she had lost him somewhere in the crowd.

“I just want my jacket.”

    He heard something. Smelled something. He didn't know what he was doing, or what the target was. Something his hindbrain understood to be prey had caught on one of his senses, informing every predatory instinct to fix onto the source until he found it.

    The smell of someone's skin, menthols, a tone of voice.

    His last victim had already forgotten that he ever happened. He was moving through the crowd with unnatural speed, pausing here and there to try and catch the trail again.

    There. Right there. Everything around her was a blur of things he didn't care about, and he was at her side so quickly he could have snapped her neck before she ever even noticed him.

    Not that he would. No. He was completely in control of himself. He knew exactly what he was doing, which was whatever he wanted. He wanted to smell her hair. He could hear her heart beating, the blood in her veins. He could practically smell it.

    "You could borrow mine," he suggested. He was good at making his voice carry under the thrum of music. He licked blood from his lips, ran his fingers over his chin and then licked those. He missed a lot of spots. It was the jacket he only wore when he was out of town, unwinding, the jacket he used to wear all the time before he'd turned. Covered in pins and patches, some of them just drawn-on scraps of fabric his friends had made for him back when he'd used to have friends.

    Veronica. He hadn't fucked her over his desk since that first time. That was fucking stupid. She liked him. There was literally no reason they couldn't be together, except that he was a dumbass. He just hadn't realized it, because he'd let himself get too hungry.

    She smelled so fucking good. She tasted better. She'd let him drink from her while they had sex, probably. Really drink.

Unsteady, but determined steps halted after she tripped over something that could have been a rock. Then again, it could have been an arm or a leg, or...anything else really. She didn't look down to find out. Moments seemed to pass around her in staccato fragments.

Someone was at her side, which should not have been noticeable since wading through the thick throng of people meant someone was always at her side, but this was different. This was the presence of someone who wanted her attention. Veronica heard him before she turned to him.

It wasn’t quite so much that the sound of his voice immediately sobered her, but it cut through the lethargic fog of her thoughts like a knife. “Michael?” She looked up, too quickly, and her vision shifted slightly to the right. She rubbed her palm against one of her eyes, further smearing dark mascara into the hollow above her cheek. When he stopped spinning she stared up at him. Brown eyes rolling upwards to lock onto a darkened gaze that’s sole purpose was to alert her that he was dangerous, but it failed, as always. “What are you…” she trailed off, useless questions dying in her throat. He so very rarely wanted her attention, or he liked to pretend he didn't but he was hovering over her now, looking at her...like that.

She watched the poor effort he made tidying himself of the blood that stained his mouth and his chin. It ran down his throat and spread across the fabric of his shirt. She could see it, even in the darkness.

The blood, for the most part, made him immediately unkissable, which was her typical desire to being presented with his face. She covered her frown with a drag of her cigarette, eyes narrowing slightly as if she were glaring at him. Cocking her head, green hair fell over her shoulder as her sights dropped to the jacket he was offering her.

“Yours probably has blood all over it,” she complained, shamelessly blowing smoke at him. Her free hand reached and slipped a nail beneath one of the pins threaded through his lapel, she flicked it upwards. “Enjoying yourself?” she asked, changing the subject in a forced monotone that did nothing to hide what would could have been jealousy. Her hand left his accessories to adjust the straps of her crop top as she pulled from the cigarette again.

    Her heart was beating so loud and so fast. It did that whenever he got close to her. It still wasn't pounding as hard as it sometimes did. She looked… sleepy, maybe.

    Like she needed to get fucked, was what she looked like, but then again she always did. He was just very sure of that, this time, the way he usually wasn't sure of anything.

    Her eyes went to his mouth – she wanted to kiss him, of course she wanted to kiss him, who wouldn't want to kiss him – and then lower. He grabbed the hem of his shirt, pulled it up and bared his stomach in the process of wiping off his face. It didn't occur to him that there was any reason not to do that.

    "Probably," he agreed about his jacket. It didn't bother him at the moment. It might bother her, though he couldn't think why. Squeamish, didn't know any better. "Better to be touching the inside than the outside," he suggested with a shrug, a lopsided sort of smirk, the clear implication that she'd be touching something.

    "That's what I'm here for," he said, watching her hand. Then he reached out, and hooked a finger in the strap of her top to tug her closer. "That's why you're here, right?"

    For fun. For him. For both. His eyes drifted significantly lower than her face. The night was cold, and her top was thin, and he could think of at least three places he wanted his hands.

She should have been more surprised to see him. More concerned that he was here, and had somehow picked her out of thousands of sweating and moving bodies that occupied the desert. But she wasn’t. He had a habit of showing up when she least expected; when she least wanted him to. This trip was to get her away from her problems, not leave her face to face with one.

Though, she only considered him a problem in that moment. Alone, and in the dark and covered in blood. Surrounded by people that didn’t give a shit about the two of them. He was acting different. She wasn’t sure she liked it. She didn’t hide her interest in the exposed plane of his stomach when he lifted his shirt. Didn’t have to. Didn’t mean anything was going to come of it.

Veronica hummed, noncommittally, in the face of his cocksure smirk. She figured he could hear it, even over the din of the ongoing festival, so she played disinterested as she let the half-spent cigarette fall from her fingers and into the dirt. Her sights drifted to the glowing ember buried in the sand and snuffed it out with the toe of her boot. “I have my own, thanks.”

He seemed to think that she was going to be another hors d'oeuvres on the festival blood tour he was sampling. Her brow furrowed. How dare he.

How dare he approach her like this. Like he was the one who decided when they stop pretending there wasn’t something between them. How dare he blow her off, and ignore her and tiptoe around her when it was inconvenient for him.

How dare. Complex thoughts were hard to form between the alcohol and the press of fangs behind his smirking lips.

Veronica allowed herself to be moved at the insistence of his tug on her shirt. She stepped closer, filling the small bit of space that had been between them. They had never tested his strength against her powers, but it was possible that she would not have been moved had she not wanted to be. “Yeah. That’s why I was here,” she replied, pointing out that she’d been having fun without him. Shorter without heels, she had to lift her face to look at him, though he'd lost interest in her face. It exposed the line of her throat, and presented her mouth as if it was his for the taking. She could smell him now, feel the stolen warmth radiating off of him. She swallowed hard; blood pumped in her ears in time with the music. She wondered if he could smell those other men on her.

“Is there something I can help you with, professor?”

    She didn't look happy to see him. Was she still angry with him? That was stupid. Wasn't this what she wanted?

    "I want you to wear mine," he said. Because she was his. She was supposed to smell like him. Like her, and him, together. It wasn't as if the cold could even bother him. He was warmer now than he usually was, as warm as any living person.

    Unless she only liked him when he was cold and half-dead. It wasn't like it would be the first time.

    Wouldn't that just be fucking predictable.

    Showing off her neck, acting all bitchy. Smelling like alcohol and men he didn't know, having fun without him. Serve her right if he bit her. Really bit her. Showed her what it was like. See how much she liked him, then. All the pretty talk about acceptance and deserving to be happy would dry right up as she'd actually seen him.

    Serve her right.

    "I'm sorry," he sneered, "am I not being professorial enough for you? You want me to leave and come back when I feel like giving you a lecture? I thought you wanted me to lighten up."

    He should bite her. Tell her to shut up and then bite her. Teach her a lesson, if she liked it so much when he was teaching her lesson. He'd fixed onto her heartbeat again, pounding in his ears. He thought it was hers. His own heart didn't usually beat this much. Made it hard to tell.

    His eyes were getting darker.

Veronica made a face. An annoyed twist at the curve of her mouth before her eyes made a perfect half-circle. He was being a brat, but she didn’t tell him so. Brat didn't seem like a good enough word. She tried to think of another. She shifted on her feet, one hip angling outwards as she propped her hand on it. When she looked at him again her mouth was a straight line.

“Then give it to me,” she said, standing straight to take a step back and thrust her hand out at him. Fidgeting. Wiggling fingers demanded the article of clothing. She was getting colder and if he was going to tower and menace he could afford to give it up.

He got shitty. A smart remark and a petulant tone. She frowned again before lighting another cigarette, and glaring up at that dark gaze. He looked like he wanted to eat her. Her pulse quickened, for the first time something close to fear was sour in the back of her throat. She inhaled deeply on the cigarette, gaze falling to the dark patch of blood on his shirt. When she exhaled, she blew smoke down but still at him in a way that was almost deliberately defiant.

Part of her wanted to just walk away from him. Not that he couldn’t stop her, or follow her, since apparently she was very easy for him to find. But, it would perhaps make a point. She half turned as if she would move away from him. Forgetting the jacket and the blood and the whole whatever the fuck they were doing, but she stopped.

“So, what’s your deal?” she demanded, flicking ash onto the ground and turning back to him. Trying for flippant and probably failing. An unintentional quiver to her tone. Dark green locks of hair were curling weightlessly around her head. “You’re being a real dick.”

    He grinned as soon as she asked for his jacket, feeling victorious. He shrugged it off his shoulders, moved with unnatural speed behind her so that he could wrap it around her. It felt gentlemanly, and chivalrous, and possessive. He enjoyed doing it more than he had any right to. He smelled her hair before she could stop him.

    Her heart was loud and fast like it was trying to escape her ribcage. Fear. Served her right.

    Goddamn, she was pretty, though. So pretty.

    For a second he thought she might try to run from him, and so he immediately moved again, more of that unnatural speed to put him right in front of her. He liked this trick. It was a good trick. Harder than it looked, and when he was hungry it made his muscles ache. But he wasn't hungry, now. He felt great. He probably looked great. His hands were shoved into the pockets of his jeans, casual as anything, a rare instance of his arms being bared. Usually if it wasn't long-sleeved shirts or sport coats, it was his leather jacket instead. One wrist had his wristband for the festival; the other had a worn out old leather band, covered in mismatched spikes and studs that had fallen off other people's jackets. They were all older than she was.

    Her hair. Her hair… looked amazing. Goddamn, she had the most amazing hair. He'd ball his fist in that hair when he bit her. Or she'd be on top of him and that hair would fall against his skin. Or she'd be beneath him and that hair would spread out on pillows, or a blanket, or the rear windshield of someone's car, or the desert sand.

    "I'm always a dick," he reminded her. "I'm a vampire." He made a face, then grinned again. The grin faded when he decided he didn't like the way she was looking at him. Fear, but… not the right kind?

    "What's your deal?" he shot back. "I thought you were cool with this." He waved a hand in front of his face to indicate vampirism, all the things that made him a monster.

Back muscles tensed when he rushed behind her. Other than the pinching tightness in her shoulders, she did her best to behave as if she wasn’t afraid of him. Even though his behavior was unusual and she knew he could hear her heart pounding with that exact emotion. She didn’t move at the sensation of his face against her hair.

Veronica held the jacket closed with one hand, as she half-turned away from hi. She did jump when he appeared in front of her. A hitch in her step, a brief lift of her shoulders before she frowned at him. She looked him over quickly, smoke billowing from her mouth as she surveyed his cocksure posture and irritating grin.

Larger locks of hair had joined the others, pulling away from her face and hanging in lazy pinwheels near the crown of her head. The edges of her shirt didn’t fall properly, shifting and revealing the edges of the lacy bandeau she wore underneath as the gravity around Veronica reacted to him. It was not only the inclination of fear that had her powers going slightly array. He wasn’t wrong. He did look good, but she had tired of laying herself at his feet. Or his cock, rather. If he wanted something from her, he would have to work for it.

Or take it.

She was expecting the latter.

“Nope, this is a special kind of dick,” Veronica pointed out, finishing the cigarette and letting it fall just like the last. Another cloud of smoke. Stepping closer she reached out to poke a finger in the middle of his chest. She opened her mouth, but closed it. Words faltering on her tongue, unsure of what to say, beer making her brain feel fuzzy. She looked up at him and frowned as if that would communicate her jumble of thoughts.

This felt like a bad time for...whatever this was.

Lips parting, she gaped when he threw her words back at her. Cool with this he said as if he wasn’t being mean and extra.

She absolutely should not have taken his words as some kind of challenge but she was drunk and reckless and this felt like some sort of test to prove that he had been right this whole time and that he could scare her away from him. She stopped poking him and flattened her hand over his sternum.

“Fuck you, Michael,” she said with misplaced indignation as the hand on his chest balled into a fist, gripping his shirt. She ignored the blood on the fabric and on his mouth when she forced him to bend lower and kiss her.

    Floaty. That was what she looked like. Powers, right? She had powers that let her look all lightweight and ethereal, sort of a goddess look that he was finding himself very into.

    She looked so good with his jacket. Like she'd looked in his shirt, in his apartment. Why hadn't he fucked her again, when she'd been wearing that? In retrospect he really, really should have. Probably too tired at the time, hadn't been eating enough. He should have bitten her properly, so they could have kept going. He'd remember that next time. This time. He'd been erring on the side of caution and it had been an error, he should have realized he'd been wrong. It wasn't supposed to hurt, just trying to function. He'd had an irrational fear of losing control, but he hadn't lost control yet. He was more in control of himself than ever, definitely more than when he was hungry.

    If she didn't like it, that was her problem, not his.

    He did not anticipate the sudden kissing. If her goal was to completely surprise him, she succeeded. He recovered quickly enough, his mouth hungry against hers – possibly a literal hunger, but he didn't bite her yet. He wrapped his arms around her waist to pick her up instead, because as long as she was making herself all pretty and floaty he really might as well. And feeding so much had made him stronger, besides. He could throw her over his shoulder if he wanted, and carry her away. Instead he held her tight to press her chest against his, catching her mouth again and again with his own, a faint hint of copper still on his tongue.

    His happy moan was muffled, if she even would have been able to hear it over the music and the crowd. Just another couple, airing out their dirty laundry and making out in public.

It was habit to make herself lighter when he grabbed her. She was nearly weightless by the time she locked her legs around him, green hair a wispy halo around her head. She should have made herself heavier, just to fuck with him, but he was stronger now than usual and she didn’t want to waste the energy, because she found she was enjoying kissing him, more than she’d originally planned too.

There was something desperate and possessive in the way his lips moved against her, and in the way he pressed her body against his. Veronica thought she’d been kissing him out of spite, to prove a point. She’d already forgotten what that was.

The blood should have bothered her more than it did.

Whatever noise he was making vibrated against her mouth. He didn’t stop kissing her, so she assumed it was a positive sound. Veronica pulled her mouth away from him, she pressed one last quick peck on his lips before lifting her face mostly out of his reach. “What do you want, Michael?”

She stared down at him. She was asking a lot of things at one time, as she pondered the contrast of his behavior. He’d gone from pushing her away to pulling her closer. Giving her his jacket and his attention, when she’d hardly been able to get his time. What did he want right now? What did he want later? It didn’t feel like the right time to ask, but she did so anyway.

    She weighed nothing, less than nothing. They fit together perfectly, she belonged in his arms, her pulse pounded in his mouth. Fangs brushed against her tongue.

    His brow furrowed looking up at her, not understanding the question. "I want you," he said, thinking it was obvious. His eyes were dark, his fangs long. His eyes dipped to her neck, met her gaze again. He was eager, impatient. Why were they talking? Why weren't they doing anything besides finding a tent where he could bury himself inside her, fang and flesh and savoring the heat of her.

    "Do you have a tent?" he asked. He hadn't bothered getting one, able to compel anyone to share theirs if he wanted. He hadn't wanted, since he hadn't needed to sleep, his brain buzzing with fresh blood. "I can get one," he added. "Or we can go back to my car." His eyes fell to her lips, her neck, her lips again. "Or we can just stay here."

    They'd hardly be the only ones fucking right in the middle of the crowd.

    Thoughts of the future, of anything past the absolute present didn't even occur to him. Right now, he didn't want anything but her, and he couldn't imagine anything else mattering.

He was holding her tight and she didn't know if that was because he wanted her close or he was worried that she might float away. It was possible that she would, all light and elated to have his attention the way that she wanted. That bit of fear that had been dancing around in the back of her head was waning the longer he held her. If he had wanted to hurt her, he would have already, right?

He didn't want to hurt her, right?

At least not in anyway that she didn't also want him to.

Veronica didn't get the response that she wanted for her question, but his answer made her forget that she was thinking so far ahead, anyway. He wanted her. Her pulse quickened. She was getting what she wanted, why was she being such a brat about it? An impish smile was curving the corners of her mouth. Her hair was hovering around her hair like a green halo.

He wasn't subtle in the way his eyes didn't stay on her face. Bouncing between her neck and her mouth with an obvious desire. The deep neckline of her ripped up tank top made a pretty display of what he wanted. Her pupils were all wide with delight as she watched his dark gaze flit all over her.

"Your car-" she said, practically interrupting him. She had literally dreamed about the red Thunderbird since the had been stranded in the parking lot of the record store with her. Her mouth was on his again. "You're absolutely going to fuck me in your car," she demanded between kisses.