The pillow beneath my head wasn’t as coarse as the sofa’s cushion had been against my cheek. I nuzzled into the cotton and could smell Cole’s distinctive scent. Despite myself, I took in a deep breath of it and groaned. How can just smelling him make me so horny, so quickly? I thought, still half-asleep and shameless. I actually just wanted to touch him. Before I opened my eyes, I realised I was in his bed because I could feel the sheets and the duvet covering me. Blinking into wakefulness in the dark room, I noticed that only slithers of daylight made it past the blackout blinds, casting the room into perpetual twilight.

Swinging my legs from the bed, I noticed I still had all my clothes on; only my boots were missing; they sat by the side of the nightstand. Oh, he didn’t undress me. Honestly, I didn’t think I would have minded if he had – there were no surprises left for him underneath my clothes anyway. While my eyes focused in that direction, I saw the four flashing, red digital figures on his alarm clock telling me it was almost two in the afternoon. Thank God it’s Sunday.

I wasn’t as ginger about exiting his bedroom this time; at least the apartment beyond the door sounded silent. My first thought was to find Cole. Peering around the place, I didn’t have to look far or hunt long; he was on the sofa. Fast asleep and dressed down in only dark grey joggers. I swallowed hard at the sight of him and bit my lip. Hmm, he’s gorgeous and looks so peaceful when he sleeps. With his head lulled on its side, his hair had fallen over his eyes a little; it was tempting to reach out and brush it away. One of his arms rested over his bare stomach whilst the other was curled upward and behind his head, showing off his bicep.

Deciding to leave him to sleep, I checked two doors before I found the bathroom. I knew it was cheeky to assume that it was okay to use the facilities, but I stripped out of my clubbing clothes and hoped into the shower to freshen up. There was nothing in the way of feminine bath products, but I made do with what I could find. Head and shoulders is unisex, right? I let my head tip back into the rainfall of the shower and washed away any traces of sleep from my face. With my toes scrunched into the bathmat, I looked around for a towel, but when I couldn’t find an unused one, I had no choice but to grab Cole’s black towelling dressing gown off the back of the door or venture out into the living room naked. I pulled it on and nuzzled my nose into the collar briefly. Hmm, that scent was intoxicating... Though the robe swamped me, I exited the bathroom with my clothes hung over my arm.

Cole was awake. He glanced over his shoulder at me and did a double-take at what I was wearing. The faint smile that pulled at one side of his lips let me know that he didn’t mind that I had borrowed his dressing gown. I smiled and was about to greet him when I noticed that he had his mobile held to his ear; he was on the phone. He ended the conversation quickly but didn’t take his eyes off me the whole time, and I stood there awkwardly while he gawped at me.

“Sorry, I borrowed this. There wasn’t a towel…” I muttered. “Oh, I had a shower as well.”

“That’s fine.” He smiled warmly, but the gesture was weak even though his gaze was intense. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yeah, I feel so much better now I’ve had some real rest. I haven’t been able to sleep properly at home. I guess it was because I live alone.”

“Your parents let you live alone? In this city?” He blurted, shocked. I was relieved when he calmed down quickly; I didn’t want him to go full dad mode on me because I didn’t see him that way, regardless of knowing his age. “Hm, living alone isn’t very safe.” He mumbled, obviously disappointed. With a shake of his head, he stood from the sofa and wandered towards me - I could not help but gawk at him. I hoped that I was not too obvious, but then he suddenly excused himself and passed me on the way to his bedroom. He was not gone more than a few seconds, and when he came back, he was pulling a t-shirt over his head. “Would you like a cuppa tea?”

“Yeah, that’d be great, thanks.” I smiled and nodded. “Milk an' two sugars, please.” I requested as I laid my clothes over the sofa's arm and made myself comfortable amidst the cushions.

Cole found me cosied up as if I lived there when he handed me my tea - my curled legs at my side. I kept the robe held tight around me and was comfortable, still snuggled up in the towelling as my hair dried.

“So, when you came back with me last night, what did you want to talk about?” Cole asked. He took a seat, choosing to sit on the other side facing the large wall-mounted TV and lounged back. Whether he knew it or not, he was looking at me rather intensely.

“Well, without wanting to sound corny… You.” I grinned. “I’m pretty boring, but I’ll tell you all about me if you tell me about you. You do still want to be friends, don’t you?” I asked, sipping from my drink.

“Sure, if you’ll have me.” He smiled weakly again and sipped at his tea.

Cole started at the beginning and told me the story of his life. While the first part of it seemed rather ordinary, he was still an interesting person. We discovered that regardless of the generational age gap, we had a lot in common. It turned out he was not born a Vampire, and in his life, as a Mortal, he had been an English teacher and amateur writer, with a hobby for cross-country running and attending live music concerts. He had published a few of his works and let me take a flick through one. I admired his book collection and spotted that he owned one of my favourite poetry anthologies, an edition that had a poem for every day of the year. I opened it to find that inside there was a message left on the first page. ‘Congratulations on passing the exam, my darling. All my love Victoria.’ I looked behind me to find Cole stood close and reading the handwritten note from over my shoulder. We shared a smile before he continued his story and revealed that he had met Victoria when he was fourteen and married when he was only nineteen. Their love story was incredibly sweet, but even before Cole had told me how it ended, I had a feeling that it was the saddest chapter of his life from the look in his eyes. At thirty-four years of age, Cole had gotten up one morning and gone out for his run and noticed that he was more out of breath than usual. It had been getting progressively worse, so Victoria convinced him to give up smoking. Another four weeks later, he was coughing up blood and had a diagnosis from the doctors that he had stage four lung cancer; it was too late to do anything. Sent home to die, Cole was devastated by the news. As a last resort, he signed up for experimental therapy that turned out to be a ploy. Cured of his ailment, he might’ve been, but at an equally life-destroying cost. The treatment he had undergone had Sired him into Sanguine Vampire.

Their world turned upside down, and Cole’s new state begged belief, but Victoria had tried to accept the change for the sake of their four-month-old son Michael. Due to his Siring, Cole was left unable to have any more children which put a massive strain on their relationship. When he turned forty and had not aged a day, Victoria realised that their life together could never be normal. They would never grow old together, and Michael would eventually have to deny that Cole was his father for the sake of living a normal life.

They separated, but Victoria tracked him down living in Surrey two years later and asked for a divorce; she wanted to remarry. Cole explained that her finding someone else was heartbreaking enough, but when he found out that it was his best friend Brian from university, Cole attempted to take his own life. Unsuccessful five times in a row, Cole eventually gave up and decided to forget that Nicolas Edward Taylor existed and start a new life. He had reinvented himself a few times over the last twenty years but still kept in touch with his estranged family.

“I see Mike from time to time. Actually, on the day of your parents funeral, I had been to see him, his wife and the kids. They don’t know I’m their granddad, but it’s nice to see them growing up. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the fact that I look the same age as my son, or that one day he’ll be an old man while I’m still like this, but I’m grateful to be part of their lives, even if it is only peripheral.”

“How come you never got remarried?” I asked. By now, we had been talking so long that the sun had started to go down. Seeing that I had nowhere else to be, I was happy to stay and continue our conversation. He was lounged down one side of the sofa, and I the other, on my stomach with my chin propped on my palms and my ankles crossed. “I mean someone Mythical, of course, but wouldn’t it make you happy? You don’t sound as though you enjoy the bachelor lifestyle.”

“There are a lot of reasons why, but I’m not sure I want to talk about it,” Cole explained, and I surmised that the main reason was that he still loved Victoria. After all, he had planned to spend the rest of his life with her; he seemed like a faithful person and a man who would have been a good husband.

“You must’ve had girlfriends, though?”

“What makes you say that?” He smirked, seemingly intrigued.

“You said you don’t hook up with people, so you must’ve had girlfriends to have had any kind of… sex life…” Before I could reign myself in, and from mentioning sex, it was too late. I bit my lip and looked away for a long moment. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t sleep with him again because there was nothing to gain from getting entangled with him and hooked on how he made me feel, but maybe I already was? We had spent one night together, and since then, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Some nights before I went to sleep, I would slip my hands beneath the sheets and indulged myself and reminisce about that night of passion. “Why don’t you act like someone who’s sixty-six? How come it doesn’t feel like I’m talking to someone who is old enough to be my dad?” I asked. How could I find him remotely attractive now that I knew he was an older man at heart?

“I think people age, socially speaking because we’re conditioned to by society… Some things are considered ‘inappropriate’ for sixty-year-olds to do, and a lot of the time, they’re limited to what they’re still able to do because of how mortal bodies deteriorate. I look like I do and have the body I do, so I’ve been able to remain around younger people and continue living a life full of youthful experiences. I just go into things with more accumulated wisdom.”

“That makes sense.” I rose my brows; I couldn’t disagree with his philosophy. “You’re just a thirty-four-year-old who is wise beyond his years.”

“Yet you still won’t touch me now that you know how old I am…” Cole stared me down and made his statement with a deadpan expression that made my skin feel hot. Could he tell that for a while, I had been struggling to convince myself that it mattered that he was both forty-five years my senior and vampire when he looked like he did? After all, Cole was still the same person, and now that I knew more about him as a person, he was only more appealing. He was intelligent and interested in the same things as me. He liked anything si-fi, literature and poetry, EBM music well, any music, action movies, foreign cuisine, he was a sucker for deserts just like me, and he was absolutely hilarious to top it all off. He had made me laugh a lot in the time I had been there getting to know him; he had a childishly playful side that was endearing and infectious. It was easy to relax around him. Sat there, laying wait and for me to give in to my urges and pounce on him, his hazel eyes stared me down.

Ugh, you’re hard to resist. You’re dangerous because you know it. “Say that I do come over there and touch you, then what?” Now it was my turn to stare him down. “You want to date me? Be my boyfriend? Isn’t it already complicated enough as it is?”

“You’re the first woman I’ve been attracted to in a long time, Ana.” That statement alone stopped me in my tracks. If I were honest, I had never been as attracted to someone as I was to him.

“Isn’t this magnetism between us just about sex?”

“Perhaps. At least at first, but isn’t it always that way? Besides, we’ve sat here talking and telling each other about ourselves for the last seven hours, and if anything, I’m only more interested.”

Damn it! He felt exactly the same way I did, but he was confident enough to admit it. “There is so much change going off in my life lately…” I started, but as I realised what I was about to say, I also realised it was bullshit. The changes I was speaking of, I could have escaped if I let myself be with Cole. He could ground me, keep me safe, help me with my studies, fuck me silly, keep me from feeling lonely, and make me happy. Wasn’t he just what I needed? “Would there be anything to gain?”

“I can’t see that we have anything to lose…” Cole shrugged.

I had gotten up onto all fours and crawled over the sofa to him. On my way, he sat up and pulled the t-shirt off over his head so that when I pressed my hands against him, I could feel over the smooth edges of his physique. The flavour of his cool skin beneath my lips made me moan into his chest. With my fingers busy prizing his joggers down his thighs, I lapped my tongue the length of his sternum, and that made him moan. I grinned coyly in return. A trail of chaste kisses and sensual licks of my tongue made it clear where I was going to put my mouth next. His underwear could barely contain his excitement, and as my fingers reached to unleash him, he stopped me. Like a deer in the headlights, I stared up into his eyes, lost for words.

Cole silently pulled me onto his lap and proceeded to kiss me so hard it made me dizzy. I didn’t care if we did anything else. The world disappeared. Animal magnetism had a lot to answer for! Amidst our make-out session, Cole tugged the lazy bow I had made of the waist tie of his dressing-gown free and pushed the towelling back off my shoulders so that it fell off me and gathered at my rear. Now that he had me sat, naked, on his lap, his hungry hands and lips explored me. How he stated at me with thirsty eyes was exciting. Eventually, he laid me down and buried his head between my thighs. Deliriously I cried out in the apartment as I shook uncontrollably; my entire body was a slave to his tongues tormenting. Once, twice, thrice. I counted. Cole was determined to take care of me or ruin me, whichever he did so diligently. “Cole!” I screamed. “Please, I can’t take any more.” I panted.

He was grinning when he looked up at my face. “Oh, yes, you can.” That was when he stood up and disappeared into his bedroom again. I peered over the back of the sofa, wondering whether I should follow him, but when he came back through the door and threw a handful of condoms down onto the couch, I knew why he had left. He unleashed himself and glanced to the pile of foil packets, hinting that I should prepare him like he had wanted me to the last time. I grabbed one and tore it open, fully intending to put it for him, but then I stopped and met his eyes.

“I don’t want this to sound insensitive, but if you can’t get me pregnant, and I trust that you don’t have any nasty diseases, do we need this?” Holding the slimy latex between my fingers, I rose one of my brows at him. “Or do you think I ha-”

“No, I don’t, but it would be rude to assume that you still don’t want to use them.”

“I don’t,” I said, tossing it aside without hesitation. With Cole knelt between my thighs, I suddenly sat up and took him into my mouth before he could stop me. He let me enjoy him long enough to get a taste of him. The way he filled my mouth, and then some, made me ache to feel him elsewhere.

When we eventually pressed our bodies together the way that nature intended, we both watched between the gap left by our bodies. We thrived off of the others pleasure. When he was nearing his end, he pulled away from me and quickly threw the t-shirt he had taken off over my stomach and came undone before my eyes. On all fours over me, Cole came down from the rush and watched me panting as I caught my breath. Although what we had done had been frenzied, the deviance of it was exciting.

That was the way it was for a while, hot and heavy.

I didn’t want to distract myself from uni’ work, so I didn’t see Cole until Thursday night at the Omen. He would text me every morning and every night but respected my space. If I wanted or needed him, he was only a phone call away. I kept our relationship a secret from Theresa and Lindsay, but when they left the club for their dorm room, I lingered behind and met Cole in the cleaning closet after his shift.

“I missed you.” He said as he closed the door behind him. Quickly he moved to cup my face in his hands and set his lips on mine. “But I love watching you dance.”