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The 2022 hurricane season produced exactly fifteen named storms, with only one making landfall in Louisiana. Hurricane Ian—as destructive, as monstrous as it was—left NOLA alone, and she was grateful for it. But Hurricane Odette (which never quite hit Category 4) came to kiss the Crescent City right on the mouth, like a lover.
A Category 3(ish) hurricane was nothing to scoff at. It was bad. People had been getting out. There was a wariness to the city that hadn’t been there eighty years earlier; an idea, as ingrained as the high-water marks that remained from 2005, that New Orleans was alone. The federal government had failed them. The world warmed, the feds failed, the city suffered. Mother Nature was a vengeful goddess, cursing everyone in the audience as she caught flame.
Louis had missed Katrina. He’d known about it, and if he’d been more…more with it…he might have followed along on the news, shared a little in the despair of his homeland. But he’d asked for no more than the cursory updates Armand had given him from time to time—and in late 2005, the UAE had been too busy with its own series of earth-shaking changes to pay much attention to one drowning city halfway across the globe. They’d spoken more about the first elections in their current land, the infancy of the government, the societal cycles of human beings.
Louis had thought he was real nice and detached, then. He’d felt it was considerate of Armand to gift him those brief updates without lingering on a subject that might bring pain. His lovely eyes, all-seeing, so thoughtful, so tranquil. So fucking diplomatic. So zen.
So Louis had missed Katrina. But he remembered other hurricanes—remembered them enough that something kind of human came out of his mouth when the detritus really started falling from the ceiling and the second or third window shattered inward on the grubby little house where Lestat had been “living”.
“You got a coffin or something around here?” Louis asked.
Okay, it wasn’t actually a very human thing to ask. But the sentiment was human. Like hiding underneath a bed from an air-raid siren.
He leaned back slightly to ask, took his mouth away from where it had been pressed against Lestat’s temple, half of his upper lip brushing against the silken hair above Lestat’s ear.
“Hmm?” Lestat asked, and opened his eyes. Louis didn’t think he’d even noticed the windows breaking. There was absolutely nothing zen about how Lestat looked. His eyes—always the part of himself that he could least keep under control when he was trying to seem some kind of way—were little blue lanterns in the windy darkness of the room, outlined in red. Bloody tear tracks drying on his face. He turned away, glanced at the blown-out candles, seemed to register the gale howling through the holes in the walls where windowpanes had been moments before.
“Coffin?” Louis prompted, batting away a whole chunk of wood from the ceiling as it arrowed directly toward his face.
He felt absurdly like he should clarify as he stood there in the accumulating rubble, felt like he was a child, reborn stupidly into this newly-contextualized world. I’m not expecting anything. I just don’t want to get swept away—
Saying I’m not expecting anything to Monsieur “I Expect Everything” himself would be strange, even if that prince of over-expectation had been brought so low, and mentioning being swept away (or worse, blown away) felt like it was loaded with emotion. There was so much emotion happening right now that Louis felt…a little less than zen himself.
But Lestat had already dropped his arms. He stepped out of their embrace, avoided the slim sliver speaker as it fell over, and snatched his iPad up from where it had tumbled onto the floor facedown and was getting soaked by rainwater. He tapped the screen and it woke up, illuminating his drawn face. The wifi was certainly knocked out by now, but cached piano music played for one more luminous instant before Lestat scowled and closed it.
“Tch. Cracked,” he said. “And no fledgling to take it for repairs.”
“I don’t think the Apple store is open right now!” Louis yelled, as the wind intensified further. Definite sounds of shingles coming off the roof—and Claudia in his head for a moment saying I was just a roof shingle that flew off of your house—which hurt. But it also made sense, why she’d made up that metaphor. She’d been a native, too.
“Ah well. At least we still have dinner!” Lestat said, and he looked like he was putting it back on, or shaking it off. A little lightness in him, a little half-smile when he held up the squirming duffel bag of rats. It was decidedly unconvincing, paired with how his eyes looked. And Louis could barely make out what he was saying. It was so loud outside that even vampire hearing wasn’t cutting it.
“We can talk about the shifting dynamics of our disordered eating—”
“What?”
“—in the COFFIN!” Louis yelled, and Lestat paused. Visible hesitation all over him in the intermittent strikes of lightning. But then the hesitance was gone as if it had not been there, and he nodded, brushed some fragments of broken glass off Louis's shoulder with one deft hand, ignored his ridiculously expensive bluetooth speaker, and picked up his wooden…his wooden block….with the fingernail-scratched piano keys and the blood for paint, held it in front of him in one hand and his bagful of rats and iPad in the other, sword and shield and dinner, and gestured for Louis to follow him.
“This way, mon ch—this way,” Lestat said. “Before the storm bears us away and deposits us in Lake Pontchartrain with the rest of the flotsam—”
There was actually only one way to go. Louis followed Lestat through the little door at the rear of the space, leaving the room where everything not nailed down was moving in the air.
“Close that, please!” Lestat said, and Louis genuinely had to wrestle the door closed like he had a fifth of his actual strength, so powerful was the wind. When he spun the lock (and slid the two deadbolts above it), the door rattled in its frame like a manacled prisoner.
But despite the rattling, this room was much quieter. Quieter because it appeared that the windows back here had been bricked up. A small bathroom to the left. A lamp on the floor, though the power had flickered off several minutes earlier. A few rolling racks of neatly-hung clothes. And in the center of it all—
“Oh,” Louis said. In the center of the room was his old black coffin. The coffin he’d slept in for thirty years of days back at the house on Rue Royale. The coffin with the big crush mark on its heavy lid from their fight.
Lestat didn’t look at him. Ignored the coffin-shaped elephant in the middle of the room. He leaned his “piano” against the wall. Brought his iPad over to a plug, set it down, busied himself at the outlet. Stood back up with a little metal cylinder clutched loosely between his fingers.
Louis laughed when he realized what it was. “You vape? You’re a person who vapes now?”
“I vape if it got a charge before the power went out. It is easier than smoking, yes? And so many good flavors,” Lestat said, and took a puff as if to demonstrate. “Sometimes I still have a real cigarette. On a warm summer night nothing tastes quite as nice. With one exception, of course.”
He was smiling a little again. Something about the fragility of the smile made Louis's chest clench.
“You want to try? This one is Mango Ice,” Lestat said. “The taste comes through quite well. Better than most foods. Probably all of the chemicals.”
Louis could think of almost nothing he wanted less than a big puff of Mango Ice-flavored nicotine air, but he grinned back. Tried to make Lestat’s weak expression stronger with a genuine smile of his own. Marriage was like that, probably. You held each other up. Maybe good marriages were like that. “It sounds disgusting, Lestat.”
A Lestat without a century of damage on him would have waltzed across the space, touched him, teased him. Been encouraged by that reciprocal smile, saying just one little puff couldn’t hurt, chéri, why won’t you try it?
Louis could see it. The smirk. The tilt of his head. Pressing that vape—it had a cloying and really not-mangolike-at-all scent that Louis could taste in the back of his throat from clear across the room—to Louis's mouth. Cajoling. Try it, my heart. Try. Try it. You will love it, I swear.
But Louis had been a pretty fucking bad sport about cajoling. In the old days that had never stopped Lestat, who was pretty fucking bad himself at picking up on subtle signals like “other people telling you what they want and feel”. But this Lestat had learned. Or maybe…maybe it still didn’t come naturally to him. So he skirted the margins like a hunted thing, afraid to impose on Louis in any way.
Another wild gust of wind made the bedroom door rattle. The entirety of the derelict house creaked and rocked in the darkness.
“Why don’t you eat something so we can crawl into my—into the coffin and shut it,” Louis said. “Just in case the door gets ripped off its hinges when the sun’s coming up.”
“There won’t be a lot of sun in the hurricane, cher,” Lestat said. Louis felt unaccountably pleased that Lestat hadn’t thought to cut off his term of endearment that time. “We will be safe enough in the morning, anyway. The windows out front face west.”
“I’m still a little uncomfortable in this wild weather,” Louis said, and sat down by his coffin, leaning against it. So familiar. For a long time he’d been wary in a coffin after being buried alive in Paris, though of course he’d gotten used to it again out of necessity. In Dubai it had been nice to use a bed. He thought involuntarily of Lestat in that bed, Lestat on the other side instead of Armand. He’d probably roll the sheets up on himself until Louis had nothing to grasp at and then crowd fully over onto his side of the bed to spoon.
“Nervous? I remember you were very serious about the hurricanes always, when they did come,” Lestat said. He tucked his reeking vape into a pocket and sat down gracefully, facing Louis from a few feet away—his ancient robe pooling around him like water—and drained three rats dry in rapid succession. He looked up at Louis with a hint of red at his mouth. Rat wasn’t particularly appealing to Louis anymore, not that it ever had been. But he contemplated licking the blood out of Lestat’s mouth anyway. Just to chase that haunted expression off his face.
“You missed the worst of them all,” Lestat said.
“The worst of them?” Louis asked.
“The worst hurricane in my memory. Katrina. The lady that almost defeated the lady New Orleans,” Lestat said. “In the end, though, we survived. But I’m being rude, Louis. You never answered me. Do you want a rat?”
“I already ate,” Louis said.
“D’accord,” Lestat said, and finished off a final rodent. He tucked all the drained rat corpses back into the bag. Then he got to his feet, went and unlocked the door, fought it open, threw the bag out into the screaming gale of the front room, and fought the door closed again. Very tidy.
“The first hurricane I really remember clearly was in 1888,” Louis said. He opened the coffin without looking around to see Lestat’s reaction. “Sugar houses and sheds blown down. Everything went out. Electric lights, telegraph, phone wires. It was the quietest world I’d ever known, like it had all been silenced by the wrath of God.”
Lestat, who had been born into that quiet world of the past, was silent behind him. Probably looking at Louis looking at the interior of the coffin. Louis didn’t turn to check. He kept his tone conversational.
“It was in August. I know that because I looked it up. If you’d asked me, I would have sworn it was September. I remember it being September. But memory is…” Louis spread his right hand out in the air, spiderwebbing the space. With his left hand he reached in and touched the pale green silk lining of his coffin. It was so worn. Antique, now.
Then he turned around. Lestat was still by the door, watching him.
He really was exhausted looking, Louis thought. Crazy. Grief-stricken. But beautiful. Heartbreakingly beautiful, hair shadowing his eyes, a bit of his sculpted chest visible above the line of his shirt and the slanting v shape of his robe.
“Yes,” Lestat said, and that single syllable told Louis that they were aware of the same things. The same transmutations of subjective experience. It was just that Lestat hadn’t needed to be actively interrogated by a two-time Pulitzer prize-winner to reach those conclusions.
“He did things inside my head,” Louis said. “I’m still figuring out the extent of it. It makes me feel like a stranger to myself, you know?”
“Yes. If you mean Armand. That’s his M.O., as they say,” Lestat said. He came closer. Almost close enough to touch.
“I wonder now if he even cared about me,” Louis said. “Is it possible that he could have done it all to fuck with you? Almost eighty years?”
“It’s possible. Eight decades is not so long for someone of Armand’s age—”
“It felt like an eternity,” Louis said.
“—but I find it more likely that he did care. It would be hard not to. You are infinitely lovable, Louis.”
Lestat was closer now, standing awkwardly adjacent to Louis and the open mouth of the coffin, and he looked so sincere when he said infinitely lovable that Louis reached out and grasped his hand. Such a familiar sensation, to hold that hand. He wound their fingers together and pulled, with the lightest pressure, until Lestat got the hint and sat down next to him on the floor.
“I don’t know,” Louis said.
“He cared,” Lestat said, facing him. Eyes overbright. He could start crying again at any moment, Louis thought. “He cared enough to call me when he was truly…when you actually worried him with the…when I imagine he felt like he was losing control—b-because you—”
“Okay, hey, I’m okay now,” Louis said.
“Are you? These things we grieve may not heal in a thousand lifetimes,” Lestat said, and he looked feverish with misery. Louis thought of the human blood on dry ice in his hotel room, his many options, privileges he had earned for himself with hard work. As soon as it was safe to leave they could go to the hotel together and he would make Lestat eat a real meal. Maybe sign him up for a hundred sessions of EMDR.
“I don’t think anyone every really gets over the loss of a child,” Louis said, and tugged Lestat a little closer, until they were sitting nearly legs-to-legs. “Not even creatures like us. Maybe especially not us. But at this moment I am doing all right. I wouldn’t have come to…get you…if I wasn’t ready. More than.”
“Come to get me?” Lestat looked at him. Figuring it out, hopeful. Still something breakable and reserved in his expression. He was astute, always astute, but…his judgement had been clearly fucked up during his self-imposed isolation in this depression hovel for the past three-quarters of a century.
“Yeah,” Louis said. “Remember all the stuff I said like ten minutes ago? And the hugging and kissing your face?”
“Yes of course, I was also involved in this,” Lestat said, and he sounded arrogant enough that Louis was encouraged. Maybe he could just irritate Lestat back to himself by talking to him like he was an idiot.
“But you just didn’t know what it all meant,” Louis said. Heard his own drawl—heavier now that he was home, for some reason—layering on the sarcasm.
“I had no idea,” Lestat said, equally sarcastic, and tilted his chin up. There he was. A shadow of attitude. Hiked eyebrow. Nice. “Perhaps you should do it again so I can discover your meaning.”
“Ha ha,” Louis said, but he leaned forward anyway. For a fraction of a second he saw Lestat’s eyes widen and then their mouths met and Louis was kissing him and it was so familiar and it was so good. All the intervening time had only made it sweeter. Lestat stayed in a crosslegged position, his body language weirdly passive instead of crowding and intense, but he put his hands immediately to the sides of Louis's head like he wanted to hold him in place. Louis realized he was doing the same. They gripped each other in a symmetrical lock, neither person retreating from the kiss, neither able to press an advantage. Lestat’s fingers buried in his hair, nails gently scratching along his scalp.
Louis mirrored the gesture, running his fingers through Lestat’s hair, pressing his mouth open for a deeper kiss, and Lestat actually moaned into his mouth. He leaned forward, coming up on his knees to kiss Louis back, and then he pulled away abruptly, shoulders rising and falling. Wiped one hand across the back of his mouth. Took a shuddery breath.
“Sorry, I—” Lestat visibly gathered himself. Still the bright eyes. Cheeks a little red now, too. “I am realizing that I don’t look my best, maybe. I am a little out of practice.”
Those were two separate thoughts. Louis felt his own heart stutter with an anxiety that didn’t entirely belong to him.
“Huh,” he said, and smiled.
“What is it?” Lestat asked, and Louis put one hand against his left pectoral, sliding it between his robe and his shirt. Feeling the heartbeat and the rise and fall.
“Our hearts are beating together. I wondered if that would still happen,” Louis said.
“Of course it would, it always would,” Lestat said. “Obviously, because—”
“And I think you look really good,” Louis said. He left his hand right where it was, palm over Lestat’s heart. After a second, Lestat put his own hand over Louis's, pressing it harder against his chest.
“I look good,” Lestat repeated.
“Really, really good. I mean you look kind of fucked-up, actually, but you’re still just about the most attractive man I’ve ever seen.”
“Just about?” Lestat asked, and pursed his lips, which made Louis laugh.
“Okay. You are the handsomest. The loveliest,” Louis said. “Nobody compares to you. Even in your tattered robe—”
“This dressing gown is vintage,” Lestat said. “And has been meticulously repaired, Louis.”
“It’s more than a hundred years old, Lestat,” Louis said, picturing Lestat’s surly millennial fledgling taking items of clothing to some aged French Quarter tailor and bringing them back in one of those WE ♥ OUR CUSTOMERS dry-cleaning bags.
“Immaterial anyway,” Lestat said, and waved his free hand dismissively. “Though I do appreciate the sentiment. The handsomest and loveliest man is you. Always you. Since I first saw you.”
“As for the other thing,” Louis said. Lestat was still cradling his right hand, pressing it hard into his breastbone, so Louis took his other hand and touched the side of his jaw. Lestat’s eyes closed, and he pressed his head into Louis's left hand as he pressed Louis's right hand against his heart, dark blonde lashes fluttering shut.
“The other thing?” Lestat asked, with his eyes still closed. He turned his lips so that they brushed against Louis's palm, and Louis had to do an old thing, a thing he hadn’t had to do in years: brace himself so he didn’t become so utterly consumed with desire that he lost the thread of the conversation. It was exactly as difficult as he remembered it being.
“You’re out of practice? You? The poster boy for “my love language is physical touch”? The guy who likes variety? The man who had to go to his mistress across the Mississippi when I stopped—”
Lestat lifted his head, and a small but very vocal part of Louis's brain mourned the loss of his mouth.
“What? My love language is français,” said Lestat, who clearly had not researched self-help books on his iPad, “and I do not think it is just a matter of it being my native tongue. There are these nuances, these…intricacies of emotion, well, you know, that are sometimes harder to express in English—”
“Deflecting, you’re deflecting,” Louis said.
“—I am not deflecting, I am saying I do not think anymore that I am, erm, cut out for this polyamory—”
“It was never polyamory,” Louis said. Maybe Lestat had looked up some things on his iPad.
“Right, fine, then I am not equipped for the open relationship. With you. If we are indeed getting…”
“Remarried?”
“I was going to say reacquainted,” Lestat said, but he was so obvious. His wan face lit up when Louis said remarried. Inside his ribs Louis's heart beat with a rhythm that was not his own.
“Yeah. Just you and me,” Louis said. “I won’t withhold, either. Unless you really piss me off. I’m sorry for being cold and indifferent. Pretending to be, actually. I’ve felt real coldness and indifference now, and I…with you it was nearly always…a game, to hurt you. Which is almost worse.”
“You don’t need to say anything about it, Louis. That is not even—of all the things—you should not be apologizing any more tonight. To me,” Lestat said, and that final little sentence was so bitter. Directed inward.
Lestat dropped his hand from where it covered Louis’s, and turned his gaze down, so that he was contemplating his own crossed legs, his mouth held in that curious tight way that Louis didn’t remember from their last life.
Louis kept his hand on Lestat’s chest, doggedly holding his fingers against the taut muscle. Bah-bom, bah-bom, bah-bom, went the heart under his fingers.
“Don’t do that. Don’t get all in your head, okay? I need to own my actions, for my own peace of mind. You have no idea what my mind has been doing to me over all this guilt. I said it when I got here. I tried to make you suffer—like you talked about during the trial. It was meant to hurt you. And it did hurt you,” Louis said, dropping his voice in an imitation of Lestat’s. “I know. I saw. I was there—”
“Stop, please stop,” Lestat said, and jerked himself away from Louis’s outstretched arm, pulling his body in on itself. “I cannot talk about that, please. I can’t right now. I can’t.” He put both his hands over his face.
“I’m not talking about when you dropped me, or when I tried to kill you—”
“It is strange, then, because it really sounds like you are,” Lestat murmured, into his hands.
“I’m not talking about it,” Louis insisted. “I mean, we’ll probably have to talk about it—”
“Won’t that be fun,” Lestat said.
“—but I’m not trying to talk about it now. I’m just saying that now, now, if we’re getting remarried, or re-companioned or whatever, I’m not going to hold it against you if you’re a little rusty in the coffin.”
“What?” Lestat asked. He dropped his hands, looking at Louis quizzically. His eyes were still a little red, and there was a vein in his forehead that was kind of sticking out, but generally he seemed like he was in a less dire state than back in the living room. “My language comprehension is literally perfect for a century and then you come to me with some new shit you have just invented, Louis. What does this mean, rusty in the coffin?”
“Like in bed,” Louis said.
“Yes, thank you, I know it is a bed for us, the coffin—”
“If you’re out of practice with fucking, Lestat,” Louis said, “that’s fine with me. Kind of sweet, actually.”
“Oh! Oh,” said Lestat, and barked out a laugh. Once upon a time Louis had been so put-out when Lestat would laugh like that. Now, of course, with the virtue of hindsight, he knew it meant Lestat was uncomfortable.
“I see,” Lestat went on, recovering pretty nicely, if you didn’t know him better than anyone. “I don’t know where you’ve gotten this crazy idea, Louis.”
“You literally just said you were out of practice,” Louis said. “When we were kissing. Just now.”
“Yes. But you must admire my boldness when I return with immediate denial,” Lestat said, and gave Louis the sweetest, smallest, most disarming smile. Raised his eyebrows and his hands. Shrugged his shoulders.
Louis couldn’t help it. He laughed, which made Lestat smile even more.
“Forgot how annoying you were when I was pining away for you,” Louis said.
“But you were pining,” Lestat said.
“You’re still deflecting.”
“Fine. I have not had a dalliance in…quite some time,” Lestat said. “I do not even leave this house to hunt, Louis. I’m very busy with my practice.”
So he hadn’t taken a lover since they parted. Almost certainly what that meant.
Louis inched forward. “Right. Shut away in here fingering your board, getting ready to be the next Arganach.”
“Merde alors, Argerich. Martha Argerich, one of the greatest classical pianists of all time!”
“I’m sure her work on the silent wooden plank is breathtaking. Name three of the greatest living figurative painters.”
Lestat inched closer, too. Now their knees were touching. “Is that what you’ve been doing? Something with the visual arts?”
“Dealing art. I have a good eye. It’s made me a lot of money.”
“I imagine you pick the most disturbing things,” Lestat said.
“Disturbing and beautiful,” Louis said, not taking his eyes off of Lestat.
“Rude, Louis,” Lestat said, his smile widening. But then there was a gust of wind louder than before—and it seemed like the walls and ceiling rippled ever so slightly around them. Detritus hitting the sides of the house. Underneath the thunderous noise you could hear—if you were inhuman, that was—a faint but vast chorus of alarms. Security systems, cars, ambulances. Pinpricks of sound in the wild night.
“Very intense,” Lestat said. “Picking up everything not bricked down. Probably tossing around the mobile homes in Chalmette and Gretna. Human beings like sardines in their tins.”
“Mouthwatering,” Louis said. “Coffin, now. Get in.”
“There’s nothing to fear,” Lestat said. “And if the house comes down, I don’t think the coffin will protect us.”
He definitely didn’t want to get in there with Louis. Nervous, gotta be, Louis decided. Probably a million times more nervous than he’d let on about being. Just the fact that Lestat had let on at all was bizarre. Evidence of how much Louis had taken him by surprise. They’d done this a thousand mornings, and yet.
“And nothing to lose by just hiding out in there, either.” He pushed Lestat’s shoulder, and Lestat sighed, got to his feet, and spun in a slow circle as he kicked off his shoes. Took his vape out and then pulled off his robe.
I’ve always loved watching you get undressed, Louis thought. But Lestat stopped there. He gave Louis a searching look, and then stepped into the coffin, still in his slacks and black undershirt.
Louis shed his jacket and shoes and…thought about it. Decided to let Lestat set the tone. He’d never considered Lestat being scared, not really—Lestat had always known more, pushed for more. Now it seemed that he was adrift, unmoored.
I thought about it often in the coffin where you left me, Lestat said, in his head. Hair falling down around his face. Mouth twisted with emotion.
Louis walked over to the coffin while the wind screamed outside, endlessly howling, a long whoop of half-insane laughter with no beginning or end. Waves of sound and fury.
As he peered in, Lestat, laid out like an angel on the old green silk, let out a huge whoosh of smoky Mango Ice air.
“You’re not going to spend the whole hurricane vaping in this coffin,” Louis said.
“I get antsy without my nicotine,” Lestat said.
“Shut up,” Louis said, and somebody’s heart stuttered inside both of them as he crawled in, arranged himself half atop and half-cradling Lestat, and reached up to pull the coffin lid shut behind them. They lay pressed together inside, resting skull-to-skull. His mouth was directly against the shell of Lestat’s ear.
“The hurricane that made me actually fearful of hurricanes happened in 1893,” Louis said, after a moment of strained silence. He almost wished for his old human senses, which would have made it impossible to see every single movement and expression that Lestat made in the darkness. But then, when he spoke into Lestat’s ear, Lestat shivered in response, and with his night-vision Louis could see the accompanying twist of his mouth, flutter of his eyes.
“Mmmyes?” Lestat asked, and Louis, emboldened by Lestat’s response to his nearness, let one hand drift down to his waist, Felt the little intake of breath when he made contact. “That was the Cheniere Caminada hurricane, was it not? I remember you speaking of it.”
“Yeah. I didn’t have to look up when that one happened because we called it The Great October Storm,” Louis said, and found the hemmed edge of the thin shirt Lestat was wearing. He pushed it up, a little, until the fingertips of his right hand were touching the bare skin of Lestat’s abdomen, right above the waistline of his pants.
“I read the James Henriot poem about that hurricane, many years ago, the one he wrote en français. It is difficult to find now, online or in print. There is this bookshop on Chartres that has some of the old newspapers, but as I said—”
“You don’t get out much,” Louis answered, and circled the pads of his fingers against Lestat’s skin.
“Ah. Yes. Also it usually closes before full dark,” Lestat said, and spread his legs ever so slightly, so that gravity just kind of…allowed Louis’s body to do its thing, and his bent knee fell into the small space afforded by those parted legs. Gorgeous legs. Their bodies couldn’t change much, not with immortality, but it seemed like Lestat was the slightest bit thinner now. Not eating right.
I could give him some of my blood, Louis thought, and then thought of the first night they ever slept together, and felt arousal sluicing through his concern like rainwater. It was sexual when it was Lestat. Thud thud thud went both of their hearts. Okay, he’d been low-key turned on the entire time they’d been in this back room together, fucked up as it was. The bond was just as physical as it was mental. Also…well. He imagined they’d be attracted to one another no matter how they met, no matter the year, the circumstances.
“My man didn’t used to have a problem with getting shops to stay open late for him,” Louis said.
“I suppose I could,” Lestat said, in a way that meant I’m absolutely not going to do that. Louis wondered if he would have to drag him bodily from this shack once the storm passed. Probably a bad idea for them to get involved in a physical altercation.
“But you tell me about the storm,” Lestat said, very deliberately changing the subject. “What you remember.”
“The orange crops were destroyed, a ton of people went bankrupt. The whole city flooded. Churches leveled. Towns swept away. Bohemia ceased to exist. I remember there was a female lighthouse keeper, which scandalized my mother. And she let two hundred people shelter in the lighthouse at Port Pontchartrain, and when it was all over the city recognized her for heroism.”
“Mon plus grand respect,” Lestat said. He let his vape—which he had been clutching like a rosary—drop onto his sternum.
“Oh yeah. I know how much you admire the saving of human lives.”
“I have admiration for exceptional individuals. She probably would have made an impressive vampire.”
“Like your fledgling?”
Lestat rolled his eyes, perfectly visible in the dark. “He was just someone I found breaking into my house.”
“You fuck him after you turned him?”
“Disgusting,” Lestat said. “I know you know I did not, and I also know you are baiting me, you want me to say oh Louis, Louis, I couldn’t bring myself to be with another after you, which is of course true, and while you were with the gremlin yes I was here, here worrying and mourning, and you know all of this already now so why you want me to say it out loud is beyond me, perhaps this is some fresh and inventive way to make me pay penance—”
Louis turned his mouth and kissed Lestat’s earlobe. Slid down the smallest bit to kiss the side of his neck with just a hint of sharp teeth, and Lestat went very still. Or very quiet, anyway. His body jerked. Louis pressed his thigh between Lestat’s legs and found that Lestat was just as hard as he was.
“Wasn’t thinking of penance at the moment,” Louis said, and dragged his hand up under Lestat’s shirt as he pushed down with his leg.
“Hhhhnn, okay,” Lestat said, and wrapped his arms around Louis, catching his mouth and kissing him. He tasted like rat blood and Mango Ice and his hair smelled like bespoke cologne, and it was so good to touch him that Louis felt like crying all over again.
They kissed—Lestat ran his tongue over Louis’s canines and ground up against his thigh, letting out a little moan at the friction. Pulled his mouth away for a second.
“Cher, mon cher, I missed you so much,” Lestat said. “I imagined you so often. You were not here but it helped me to pretend that you were—”
“I know,” Louis said, and used the hand that wasn’t touching Lestat’s skin to lift up a strand of his hair. “I did it too. Made it easier for me to live without you. Or hurt me worse, I’m not sure. Your hair smells good.”
“Yes? I use Prose,” Lestat said, and Louis, caught utterly by surprise, laughed out loud right against the curve of his cheek.
“What? I saw an advertisement on the internet,” Lestat said, immediately haughty. “You take a quiz and you tell them all about your hair type and then they send you a suite of things with your name on them—”
“I’ve seen the ads,” Louis said, still laughing. “I don’t know. Of course you’d do that. You always try things when they come around.” Which is why I’m so worried about you, he added internally, that you’ve been in stasis here for so long.
“I live to experience,” Lestat said, and then he looked…pained. He knew it was bullshit. Well, it wasn’t bullshit, actually, but Louis guessed that it had not exactly been true for the last several decades.
“You should experience my place in Dubai,” Louis said.
“I don’t plan on residing anywhere except New Orleans,” Lestat said, but some kind of emotion flickered across his face. Hope? How many times had Louis seen hope on Lestat’s face? A thousand? A hundred thousand? How many times had it been dashed?
Historically his hopes had gotten dashed pretty often, because he was hoping for something impossible, unlikely, or insane. Or something Louis just wasn’t going to do. But today, on this day, in this storm, with their lives stretching out ahead of them entwined, Louis wanted to give Lestat enough hope fulfilled to make him better. Not ever all the way better, after Claudia. That wouldn’t be possible for either of them. But better.
“Yeah, well, agreed. I missed home. However. I have a lot of stuff to wrap up there, and it might take a while. You should come with me.”
“I’m averse to traveling abroad, lately,” Lestat said, but Louis saw how his expression cracked open at “You should come with me” and went on talking. Just saying what he meant. Maybe that was a thing they could try doing consistently, now.
“I understand,” Louis said, and pressed a kiss to the corner of Lestat’s mouth. “But I don’t really want to be away from you when we just got back to…this. The penthouse has these tinted windows. The whole thing can be sealed up. I just sleep in a bed, like a regular bed. It’s very comfortable. I’d like to sleep there with you.”
“I will consider it,” Lestat said, and turned his mouth into Louis’s kiss so that their lips brushed.
“Good. You do that, okay? Consider it quick, because—”
“Louis, please,” Lestat said, and Louis heard the real strain in his voice, the bent-to-nearly-breaking sound of it, like Lestat had sounded in the first moments when he’d come into this dank little place. Lestat really was trying to turn in a performance of normalcy, but it was a very thin thing, something that could be pushed aside like cobwebs.
“What?” Louis asked.
“I am…” Lestat rested his head all the way back, put one hand to his forehead, brow furrowed with emotion. “I want all of it. To never be parted. Being kind to each other. You show up, you get in my coffin with me—”
“It’s my coffin, actually,” Louis said.
“C’est du bidon, you abandoned it long ago. In Louisiana it has legally belonged to me for at least a human lifetime.”
“I think you have to send a certified letter or something,” Louis said. “Sorry, sorry,” he added, when Lestat huffed at him. “Go on with what you were going to say.”
“So you have swept in with the storm. You’re being very nice, perhaps you are thinking you will finally tell me you love me, as you so obviously do.”
“Oh now I obviously do,” Louis said, and kissed Lestat right on the worried ridge of his forehead. “Lestat, I—”
“—and you have thought about this all, correct? I can tell something has happened to…bring you to revelation.”
“You have no idea,” Louis said. He leaned his weight more fully on Lestat. He definitely was a little cold. Underfed. Still rock-hard, despite whatever anxiety he was expressing. But Louis had always had that effect on him.
“I am glad for it,” Lestat said. “But Louis, I—I am still feeling a little out of sorts, and I—”
His voice broke. Louis felt his shoulders shake even before he realized that Lestat was crying.
“I was s-so worried about you, and I am so relieved, and I have been a little bit s-sad for a long while—”
“Yeah, no shit,” Louis said, and laid himself fully atop Lestat, because it was the most comforting thing he could think to do, and for a full minute he just held on while Lestat cried almost silently against the side of his head, and only started talking again when it seemed like Lestat was recovering.
“Okay, babe. Okay. I get you. I came in hot. You haven’t talked about Claudia to anyone yet, right? No outside voices. I didn’t realize all the things I never knew…misconstrued…I still feel like I’m just scratching the surface. I went through all this stuff, over the last few weeks. No pressure.”
“Babe?” Lestat repeated, wiping his face and then applying a cursory wipe to Louis’s hair. He sniffed, but in an I’ve-been-weeping way, not in an indignant way.
“I don’t know, it’s a term of endearment,” Louis said. “I was trying something. Like your pet names. And you are a babe.”
“I am,” Lestat agreed. “Which means you certainly never used that term for Armand.”
“No I did not,” Louis said.
“Good. I don’t want recycled love names,” Lestat said.
“What do you want?” Louis asked. “I don’t want to stress you out.”
If Lestat took issue with the implication that he was “stressed out”, a thing he was definitely capable of taking issue with despite having just admitted to being stressed out (emotionally destroyed and half-mad, Louis would have said), it was imperceptible.
“Hmm. What do I want,” Lestat said. In the quiet of his consideration, Louis could hear the storm as if they were standing outside in it. It sounded like New Orleans was being ripped apart around them.
“Whatever you want,” Louis said, which was risky as hell, considering who he was saying it to.
Lestat locked eyes with him, hollow and teary and worn as he was, and looked at Louis with all of the gravity he could manage in his most charismatic moments. To Louis, it seemed like the visible light spectrum, the sound of thunder, the matter of the universe itself bent around Lestat’s head. Or maybe that was just his perception. The two of them on one path.
We’re both autonomous people, Louis thought, even as he was unable to tear his eyes away. Though if he were being brutally honest with himself, if he were talking to himself like Daniel would have talked to him, then he would admit that sometimes he felt like he and Lestat were a single organism. Divided but never entirely separate. Maybe he’d felt that way since the first moment he’d ever seen Lestat, smiling up at him from across a whorehouse table. Or maybe it was a feeling that had grown up inside of him like roots.
“Je veux faire l'amour avec toi, chéri,” Lestat said. “If you can bear my being rusty in the coffin.”
“Not a hardship,” Louis said. “Drink some of my blood and you have yourself a deal.”
“This implication that I’m too weak to fuck is depraved,” Lestat said.
“Maybe you wore yourself out with all that crying,” Louis said. He leaned to the side to get his wrists in front of him.
“Va te faire foutre,” Lestat said, making a very rude face.
“Sorry, I don’t speak French well enough to understand you,” Louis said, and felt Lestat’s body rise and fall when he chuckled.
“Merely advice. You will need to go fuck yourself if I am so worn-out—” Lestat stopped talking as Louis drew one fingernail across the skin of his own wrist, blood welling up in a glittering line, rich and heady from his well-organized life of sustainable “vegetarianism”.
“Good?” Louis asked. Lestat’s pupils had opened up like night-blooming flowers. The points on his teeth drew down, extended, but he didn’t say anything.
“Come on. Just un petit coup,” Louis said, and pressed his wrist to Lestat’s mouth.
Lestat put his hands to Louis’s arm immediately, steadying it in place, and as soon as his lips were on Louis and he felt the pull of blood leaving his body he was completely aroused again, vampire biology was resilient like that, he could lose a decent amount of blood and still be good to go. It was just eating, but with Lestat it was different. Pure sex.
“Yes, please,” Louis said, and stroked his other hand through Lestat’s hair. He rearranged his legs so that his right knee was again between Lestat’s legs, pressed his erection against one of Lestat’s muscled thighs. I could probably come just from this, Louis thought, and then Lestat tore his mouth away with a jerky, sharp movement. Breathing heavily.
“Ah,” Lestat murmured, like he was about to say something, but then instead he tilted his face up, his eyes still blown open, and Louis kissed him, licked the blood off of his teeth, kissed him while the skin of his wrist re-knitted itself and kept kissing him until Lestat was shuddering all over. They had each other in a lock again, arms smashed against one another, mutually inhibiting their movement. A physical chant to make up for their inability to speak into one another’s minds: don’t go anywhere don’t go anywhere don’t go anywhere.
It was Lestat who leaned back first.
“Take these off,” he said, and push-pulled at Louis’s shirt, his pants.
“You too,” Louis said, and popped the coffin open. The house—this portion of it, at least—was still standing. He stepped out into the room and stripped naked, throwing his clothes on the floor, while Lestat followed behind him, shedding his thin shirt but taking a moment to fold his pants and hang them over the rail of one of his rolling clothes racks. He faced Louis, and Louis was greeted by the incongruous vision of Lestat wearing modern boxer briefs. He was so hard that they were pushed all out of shape, and Louis stepped forward, slung one hand around Lestat’s neck, tilted his head at the precise angle that he remembered perfectly from a lifetime ago, and pressed his other hand flat against the bulge of Lestat’s erection while they kissed. Just feeling him.
“Louis you are so—” Lestat murmured, in between kisses, “—so beautiful, you—”
Louis moved his hand a little, just to feel Lestat shudder in response. There was a spot of wetness on his briefs, and he pressed hard into Louis’s hand for a long moment, reached down and stroked the line of Louis’s abdomen, fingers tracing his obliques, finally touching his cock, nails barely brushing over his balls, his inner thighs—it was so familiar, everything he’d dreamed about for eighty years—and Lestat’s hands were shaking a little, his face was drawn with the intensity of his emotion, it was always like that, emotional first and foremost, love and lust together in a shaken glass—
The wind made itself known again, growing to unprecedented levels of ferocity, and the whole house juddered like a boat at sea, so strong that they broke apart, each of them looking at the walls and ceiling. Then everything went eerily silent.
“We’re gonna be in the eye of the storm soon, I think,” Louis said. “You have lube?”
“I—I haven’t been with anybody,” Lestat said, “that point has been talked to death, I think.”
“No way you’re not jerking off constantly in your celibacy, come on Lestat, no matter how depressed you are,” Louis said, and Lestat looked up at him with that little half-chagrined and half-wicked look that he sometimes wore in moments of vulnerability.
“I just didn’t want you to think I was lying,” Lestat said, and turned toward the tiny bathroom.
“I don’t think you’re lying,” Louis said, and followed him. He was so turned on that it was almost uncomfortable to walk. “If you were gonna lie, you’d lie and tell me you were bringing back five people a night.”
“Pshtt, what do you know about how I would lie,” Lestat said, waving a hand at him without turning around.
“Everything,” Louis said, and when Lestat stopped in the doorway, Louis came up right behind him and wrapped his arms around Lestat’s middle. He felt Lestat sigh, the way he relaxed a little when Louis touched him. Then he ground his hips slightly against Lestat’s ass and drew an entirely different kind of sigh out of him.
“You could take me over the sink,” Lestat said, breathlessly, and Louis peered around him doubtfully. The sink looked like it was held on the wall with zip ties and a benediction; it was too low, and every square inch….every square inch was covered in beauty products. All the Prose stuff, some kind of “natural waves” hair mousse, face serums—a demented thing to buy, if your skin wasn’t ever going to age, which meant Lestat was just applying them because he liked to—and one of the exact same kind of expensive electric toothbrushes that Armand (or, more likely, the staff acting under Armand’s direction) had gotten for each of them. Louis hid his smile against the back of Lestat’s shoulder and decided to give him shit about the toothbrush thing at a later time.
“I don’t think the sink can handle it,” Louis said. “Seems a little crowded on there, anyway.”
“Ah well,” Lestat said, and from the back of the equally crowded toilet he lifted up the most enormous bottle of lube that Louis had ever seen. Louis burst out laughing; he couldn’t help it.
“I know you’re big but this seems optimistic by any standard,” Louis said, when Lestat whirled around with his giant container of lube, eyebrows raised.
“It is three-point-eight liters for $399.95 plus tax,” Lestat said, following Louis back into the bedroom. “A good deal for such a fine brand, much better than the petrol jelly from the old days. Shut up, Louis.”
“You must love online shopping,” Louis said.
“As soon as the technology is perfected I’m getting the Neuralink,” Lestat said, and smiled widely when Louis laughed. Almost a normal smile. Not quite to the eyes, but as he stood there flush with Louis’s blood and his hands full of lube and his beautiful body in his modern boxer briefs, Louis felt more positive about their future than he had in…forever. His future and Lestat’s. Their shared future.
“Let me take these off,” he said, and grabbed the ridiculous bottle out of Lestat’s hand. Set it down next to the coffin and hooked his hands into Lestat’s underwear. Lestat put his arms over Louis’s shoulders, forearms against his neck, and stared right into his eyes as Louis pushed down his boxers.
“Mmmph,” Lestat said, lifting one leg at a time until he could kick the boxers across the room. He kissed Louis high on the cheekbone and then pressed against him, cock-to-cock, and Louis felt the wetness of Lestat’s precum against his dick. So fucking wet and hard and utterly turned on. Then Louis got him by the hips and kissed his mouth until Lestat was breathing fast, and when Louis opened his eyes Lestat’s were already wide open, staring at him, transfixed.
“Were you waiting for me?” Louis asked, and Lestat shook his head no into the temporarily silent room. Still no wind.
“I did not think you were coming back, mon cher,” Lestat said, and there was such a note of desolation in his words that Louis believed him. Lestat hadn’t been here, in this miserable place, until. He’d been here forever.
“I’m sorry,” Louis said, but Lestat just shook his head and climbed back into the coffin.
“You have no need to make apologies, we would just be going back and forth for eternity, I told you,” he said from inside. One clawed hand reached out of the coffin and pressed the pump on the lube. “No apologies right now. Unless you don’t get in here immediately.”
Then Louis bent down and looked in. Lestat was looking up at him, mouth slightly open and face flushed like he was in the grip of a fever. His knees were bent and parted, almost touching the sides of the wide (for a coffin) coffin, his cock so hard that it rested against the flat plane of his stomach, and he already had two fingers inside himself. Always such a delicate touch despite his wicked nails.
“Forgive me,” Lestat said, a little hitch in his breath, “I did not ask. You know I ascribe to a philosophy of égalitarisme sexuel—but you did say whatever I wanted. I want to feel you in me.”
“Hooooo. Shouldn’t be a problem,” Louis said. His mouth felt dry in a way that had nothing to do with blood or hunger or vampirism and everything to do with desire. Suddenly he was nervous, very nervous to make love to his husband. Ex-husband. Once and future companion. Whatever. Because Lestat seemed so vulnerable, gazing up at him. And Louis felt just as vulnerable above him. To be enveloped by his love—physically, emotionally—it was a lot, with Lestat. He’d never gotten out to begin with.
He climbed into the coffin, kneeling on the green silk, and Lestat wrapped one leg around his waist. Still fingering himself open. He looked a little glazed.
“Get me some more lubricant, please,” Lestat said, and Louis immediately bashed his head on the half-lowered coffin lid as he leaned out of it, which made Lestat cackle with unmitigated delight.
“Carefully, cheri,” Lestat admonished, “we have enough head-marks on this sarcophagus—” and Louis took his un-lubed hand and pinched one of Lestat’s nipples until he was gasping and laughing at the same time. Then Lestat lifted up his unoccupied hand and brought it to Louis’s cupped palm. Their fingers entwined for a second, smearing lube between them, and Lestat ran his hand over the head of Louis’s dick, touching the slit, pushing back his foreskin until Louis gritted his teeth.
“You are even more than I remember,” Lestat said, quietly.
“More what?” Louis asked. His voice was uneven. He had a sharp sensory memory of the first time they’d ever spent together thrumming through his body like fireworks. He had sucked on Lestat’s fingers before tearing his mouth away. Never wanted anything more in his life until right now.
“More everything,” Lestat said, and withdrew his fingers from inside himself, treating Louis to an unimpeded view of his body. His erection leaking against his abdomen. Louis reached out and touched him in return, then thumbed the dark flush at the head of his cock, running his fingertips over it, making Lestat move his face slowly from side to side like a man dreaming. Then his cock twitched and he shoved Louis’s hand away, baring his white teeth for a flashing instant.
“Don’t, don’t—” Lestat said. “I don’t have…I can’t take too much. I want to come with you inside me.”
“Then you should probably stop touching me, too,” Louis said, and Lestat’s face lit up with the most beatific look. He dropped his hand and slung his other leg around Louis, holding him.
“Now. Please,” he said.
“Don’t want a third finger?” Louis asked. “It will hurt.”
“I hope so,” Lestat said, carding his fingers through Louis’s hair. His eyes fell half-closed and then popped back open, pinning Louis with the directness of his gaze. When Louis pressed into him, Lestat tilted his head back, and Louis saw the thinnest, faintest line of a silvery scar at the base of this throat. Louis could hear his every breath, feel every beat of Lestat’s heart echoing in his own chest.
“Ahhhhh, ahhhh putain ahhh Louis, s'il te plaît, like that,” Lestat said, even though Louis wasn’t thrusting at all, yet.
Louis braced his left hand and stroked Lestat’s mouth with the knuckles of his right hand before shakily setting that one down, too, and Lestat chased Louis’s fingers with his lips until he was out of reach. When Louis started to move Lestat almost immediately clenched against him, curling himself up, all his muscles tightening, and Louis made a sound that felt like it was torn, bloody and raw, directly out of his lungs.
“Lestat—” Louis sucked in a breath, rocked into him again. His heartbeat inside of Lestat, Lestat looking at him with wild eyes, the blue banished to the farthest edges of the black, moving his body against Louis so intensely that the coffin made a groaning noise against the wood floor. The whole world spread into the sound of the coffin against the planks, a slower version of their hearts: bah-dum, dah-bum, bah-dum. Red tears in Lestat’s eyes as they moved together, from sensation or emotion; Louis didn’t know which. Outside, the wind started to howl again.
“Are you close,” Louis asked, trying to slow down their rhythm. “Lestat, are you c-close? Because I—”
Lestat made a short sobbing sound and turned his face into his arm, clutching Louis to him with his profound strength, moving fast enough that he started to screw up the pace, losing the thread, his hair in his eyes.
“Inside me, please, I want to keep you,” Lestat said, his voice so low and ruined that it was difficult to understand him, and he used Louis’s forearms to haul himself bodily upward, until their faces were centimeters away from each other, dug his nails into Louis deep enough to draw blood, his nose bumping against Louis’s nose, trying to kiss him with a mouth open in a grimace of pleasure-pain, and Louis felt a rushing in his ears. He fucked into Lestat so hard it felt like he could break him apart, and Lestat finally got close enough to bite into Louis’s lower lip, sending a sweet bolt of agony through him, drawing blood with his fangs, blood running into his mouth from Louis’s lips, tears on his face, and that was what pushed Louis over the edge, and he was coming, coming, saying Lestat’s name over and over, Lestat Lestat LestatLestatLestat. A ringing in his ears. A minute where he totally blanked out.
“Ahhhhhh holy shit,” Louis said when he came back to himself, feeling his legs tremble, and stayed buried in Lestat, rocking slightly in and out as his dick twitched. Finally feeling like he could think again. Lestat stared back at him from inches away with blood painting his mouth like lipstick, his chest heaving, and Louis kissed him, and realized that Lestat hadn’t come yet. His cock looked incredibly painful against his stomach, and when Louis took him in one hand Lestat made a high-pitched and broken sound, trying to drive his hips forward, trying to pull away like it was too much.
“Mon cœur mon cœur my Louis, Louis, my heart’s own—m-my heart’s own blood, mon cher oh please—”
“You can come, come on,” Louis said, and squeezed the base of his cock, pushed his foreskin with a shaking hand, wet sounds from touching his dick, wet sounds from Lestat breathing through tears. “Come on, yeah, you can do it, I love you. I love you. Lestat I love—”
Lestat looked at him wildly for a second, damp eyelids fluttering, with an intensity of expression that almost made him seem afraid, and then his body spasmed under Louis’s ministrations and he came, feet flexing around Louis’s back, thighs tense, making a specific sound that Louis was intimately familiar with, spilling all over his hand.
For a second Lestat seemed as blown-out as Louis felt. Trying to get his breath. Nothing happening inside. Still world. Even the screaming of the wind couldn’t touch it. Then he slitted his eyes open, mouth curved up.
“Hhhh. I love you, he finally says. I am surprised you did not call me babe at a crucial moment,” Lestat said.
“I’m gonna need you to fuck off,” Louis said, and shoved him lightly on the chest.
“Okay, babe,” Lestat said, and dragged Louis backward with him until they were both laying, entangled but not enjoined, foreheads pressed together, breathing together, fingers twined. Then Lestat disengaged one of his hands and reached behind Louis’s head, fumbling for a second before he pulled back with his vape in hand.
“Blow that out the coffin,” Louis commanded, and Lestat laughed, took a big drag of Mango Ice, blew it over his shoulder.
“You want to try, Louis,” he said. Cajoled. “You remember how nice it was, a cigarette after lovemaking?”
“Yeah, I guess I do,” Louis said, and felt himself smiling. Nodded. “Give me one hit—”
Lestat held the vape to his mouth, and Louis inhaled while Lestat watched him with big gauging-your-reaction eyes.
“It’s not good,” Louis told him, exhaling.
“Modern delights are wasted on you, my Louis,” Lestat said. “All these wonderfully automated vices.”
“Why don’t we put my house against your house and talk about that again,” Louis said.
“Ah. So you are proposing we move back in together. Putting our houses against one another.”
“That’s a linguistic stretch even for you. And I already told you I wanted to stay together, and you told me it was all too much to discuss right now,” Louis said.
“And then I told you to please chill like they say, and then you told me you loved me,” Lestat said. “An act of domestic terrorism. I love you too. So deeply, Louis.”
“I kept myself from telling you, you know, to hurt you. Not only to hurt you. Because I felt like…I felt like I would get subsumed in you, or something, if I couldn’t keep some part of myself back—”
“And yet you were the one who subsumed me,” Lestat said. “From the beginning.”
“But I’ve felt this way for as long as you have,” Louis said. “I love you, Lestat. You are loved.”
His words made something soften in Lestat’s face, a beacon of happiness. His eyes glinted.
“Don’t cry again,” Louis said, and kissed him. “Your face is covered in blood.”
“We are filthy,” Lestat declared, and climbed out of the coffin with a little less than his typical grace. His legs seemed a bit shaky. “Stay there, cher.”
“I don’t think you’re going to be able to wet a washcloth,” Louis said. “No way is the plumbing working. I heard a pipe burst in the wall forty-five minutes ago.”
Lestat came back and chucked a white bundle of something that said Clé de Peau Beauté on it into the open mouth of the coffin. Louis caught it, flipped open the little plastic lid. “Oh. Makeup remover towelettes. Is this where the phrase French Bath comes from?”
“You’re welcome to just…rot there in your fluids,” Lestat said.
“Your fluids,” Louis said, and Lestat laughed from outside.
Afterward Lestat crawled back into the coffin and he and Louis held each other. In the part of his brain that was always attuned to the darkness and light, Louis knew the sun was coming up, somewhere beyond the storm.
“Sleep, cher,” Lestat said. “We will be safe together.”
“Mhhmm. Think you’re right,” Louis whispered.
The door to the front of the ruined house rattled in the wind. The sun would rise soon. Lestat embraced him in their century-old coffin. And Louis had no desire to walk outside into oblivion. He slept.
Because the architects of vampires sought to humble them, Louis and Lestat could not hear each other without words. That kind of connection—a connection that would undoubtedly have helped the two of them in innumerable ways—was not possible. But when Louis dreamed that day, he dreamed of Lestat.
He was walking through the fallow field to the east of his father’s house. It was 1893. Paul was with him, just the two de Pointe du Lac boys (Louis about to turn sixteen) navigating the post-hurricane world. The sky was a delirious wash of orange and yellow and red, a sky that Louis never forgot, even through a hundred years of nights. Pockets of water ringed the flattened and scattered earth, and they’d escaped the worst of it. But it felt like coming out into a reborn world. To the north, a wall of black-gray clouds rolled away, ominously close, ominously tall, too dramatic to be a memory. That was part of the dream. And so was the voice Louis heard, obscured by fog somewhere beyond them: someone crying, not steadily but in faint waves, a sound of endless despair.
“Wait here a minute,” Louis said to Paul, and he jogged forward in the mist, moving by himself invisibly for a long time, until he came out in a new clearing, a barren space at the very edge of the storm-line, clouds rising away like the hands of God.
He was not alone in the clearing. Someone was kneeling on the earth, faced away from him in a black and gold dressing gown, and he knew it was Lestat, and then he knew it was the real Lestat, the one in his arms back in the waking world.
“Lestat?” he asked, and as he approached Lestat turned, suddenly, and Louis saw a yellow dress clutched in his hands. Claudia’s dress. He was twisting it between his fingers, and it was dark with mud and wet, and torn, as though it had passed through the deepest part of the storm.
“Louis?” Lestat said. “I don’t know where I am—”
“I come here sometimes. Normally I’m with Paul, and we find the body we found after The Great October Storm. A man out in the east field. He had a plank from a fence lodged straight through his heart. Never did find out who he was,” Louis said. “Why I’ve always been a little uneasy in a hurricane. What are you doing?”
“Me?” Lestat said, with a little laugh. “Oh, I do this many nights, cher. Different stage, same play. She…the wind picked her up and carried her away like dust—”
He couldn’t speak any more. Louis knelt next to him and Lestat handed him the dress with both hands, their fingers tangled together in the yellow silk. When Lestat could talk again, his voice was breaking.
“I don’t know h-how you can…bring somebody back from that…”
“You can’t,” Louis said. “I think you just have to live with it.”
He and Lestat leaned against each other, sharing their visions against all logic, and watched the clouds move out. In the real world they breathed in sync, sleeping as the storm blew itself out in a cloak of rain.
I love you, Louis thought, and, in the dream, Lestat heard him without words. In the imaginary sky above them, the wind whirled away.