The Weight of Forever

He had stopped counting the years sometime in the eighteenth century.

Centuries blurred together when you had no reason to mark them. Wars came and went. Empires rose and fell. The women he loved grew old and died, their beautiful faces collapsing into wrinkles, their bright eyes dimming, their warm hands turning cold in his. After the third time, he made a rule: no more mortals. No more watching love dissolve into loss. He would feed, yes. He would pleasure, occasionally. But he would not love.

For two hundred years, he kept the rule.

Then he met Elizabeth.

She was a violinist, performing in a small club in the part of the city that never slept. He'd been drawn by the music, not the piece itself, but the way she played it. There was something in her fingers, in the bend of her wrist, in the way she closed her eyes when the melody crested, that made him stop at the door and listen.

When the set ended, she looked up and saw him watching. Most humans looked away quickly, some instinct warning them of what he was. She held his gaze. Her eyes were the colour of whiskey, warm and curious and utterly unafraid.

"Did you like it?" she asked, approaching him with her violin case in hand.

"I liked the way you played it."

She smiled. "That's a very careful answer."

"I'm a very careful person."

She laughed, and the sound went through him like sunlight. "Careful is boring. Come have a drink with me. I want to know why you're standing in the doorway of my show like a vampire waiting to be invited in."

He should have left then. The word—vampire, spoken so casually, so accurately—should have been his exit cue. Instead, he found himself following her to the bar.

That was three months ago.

Three months of late nights and early mornings, of conversations that stretched until dawn, of her hands on his skin and his hands in her hair. Three months of breaking every rule he'd made. Three months of feeling alive in a way he hadn't felt for centuries.

He hadn't told her what he was. Not in words. But she knew. He could see it in the way she looked at him sometimes, a question in her whiskey eyes that she never quite asked. She knew he was different. She knew he was dangerous. She didn't care.

Tonight, she lay in his arms in the apartment he'd kept for a decade, one of many, places to rest when the sun demanded it. Her skin was warm against his, her heartbeat a steady rhythm under his palm. She was tracing patterns on his chest, lazy and content.

"I'm not going to ask," she said quietly.

"Ask what?"

"What you are. Where you go during the day. Why you never eat." She lifted her head to look at him. "I'm not going to ask, because I don't want to know. I just want this. I want you."

He felt something crack in his chest, a fissure in the ice he'd built around his heart. "Elizabeth—"

"I know." She pressed her fingers to his lips. "I know there's something you're not telling me. I know this can't last forever. But forever is a long time, and I've never been good at waiting."

He kissed her then, because he couldn't not. Because her mouth was warm and willing and she tasted like life, like everything he'd denied himself for centuries. She opened for him, her body curving into his, and he forgot for a moment that he was a predator, a monster, a thing that drank blood to survive.

When he entered her, it was with a tenderness that surprised them both. He moved slowly, watching her face, reading every micro-expression of pleasure. Her hands gripped his shoulders, her hips rose to meet his, and the sounds she made—soft gasps, broken moans, his name whispered like a prayer—filled the room and filled him.

Afterward, she lay in his arms, her breath evening into sleep. He watched her for a long time, memorising the curve of her cheek, the flutter of her eyelids, the pulse beating steadily in her throat.

That pulse.

He'd resisted it for three months. Fed elsewhere, always elsewhere, never allowing himself to think about what her blood would taste like. But tonight, with her trusting and vulnerable in his arms, the hunger rose like a tide.

He pressed his lips to her throat, feeling the beat of her heart against his mouth. He could take just a little. Just enough to taste. She wouldn't even wake.

But he knew, with the certainty of centuries, that a little wouldn't be enough. Once he started, he wouldn't be able to stop. And she would become like him—or she would die.

He pulled away, shaking.

In the morning, she found him at the window, watching the sun rise through the cracks in the curtains.

"You stayed," she said, surprise in her voice. "I thought you'd be gone before light."

"I couldn't leave."

She came to him, wrapped in a sheet, and stood beside him at the window. "Tell me."

"I can't."

"You can. I already know. I just need to hear you say it."

He looked at her, this woman who had cracked him open, who had made him feel again after centuries of numbness. "I'm not human. I haven't been human for a very long time."

"I know."

"I drink blood to survive. I can't go in sunlight. I've lived for centuries, watching everyone I love grow old and die."

"I know."

"And if I love you, if I really love you, I'll have to watch you die too. Or I'll have to make you like me. And I don't know which is worse."

She was quiet for a long moment, her hand finding his. "Have you ever asked anyone? What they want?"

"What do you mean?"

"All those lovers you watched die, did any of them have a choice? Did you ask if they wanted to be turned, or did you just decide for them?"

He stared at her. In all his centuries, he'd never considered this. He'd always assumed that turning someone was a curse, a burden, a thing to be avoided at all costs. He'd never asked.

"I'm asking you now," she said. "If I had a choice, if I could choose to be with you forever, to be what you are, would you let me?"

"Elizabeth. You don't know what you're asking. The hunger. The centuries. Watching everyone else you love grow old while you stay the same. It's not a gift. It's a sentence."

"Maybe. But the sentence I'm living now is pretty short. Eighty years, if I'm lucky. And I've already spent thirty of them." She turned to face him, her whiskey eyes fierce. "I'd rather have forever with you than eighty years without you."

"You can't know that."

"I can. I do." She took his face in her hands. "I've never felt this way about anyone. I've never been this sure about anything. If you walk away now to protect me from a choice I'm begging to make, you're not protecting me. You're choosing for me. And that's not love. That's control."

He felt tears on his face—tears he hadn't shed in centuries. "I'm scared."

"I know. So am I. But we can be scared together."

He kissed her, and this time the kiss was different. Desperate. Hungry. Full of all the centuries of loneliness and all the hope he'd never allowed himself to feel.

"Are you sure?" he whispered against her mouth.

"I've never been more sure of anything."

He lowered his mouth to her throat. Felt her pulse against his lips. Felt her hand in his hair, guiding him, offering herself.

"Trust me," he said.

"I do."

He bit down.

The pain was sharp, brief, she gasped, her body tensing, but then something else flooded through her. Pleasure, intense and overwhelming, spreading from the wound through every nerve. She cried out, her hands gripping him, and he drank.

Her blood was everything he'd imagined and more. Warm and rich and alive, tasting of her, of music and laughter and the particular sweetness of her soul. He took only what he needed, then sealed the wound with his tongue.

She was trembling, her eyes wide, her pupils blown.

"That was—" she started.

"It gets stronger. The hunger. The thirst. It will be unbearable at first."

"Then we'll bear it together."

He bit his own wrist and held it to her mouth. "Drink. It's the only way."

She hesitated for just a moment, then closed her lips over the wound. The taste of him flooded her, centuries of memory, of loss, of loneliness, of the faint, persistent hope that had kept him going. She drank until he pulled away, and when she looked up, her eyes were different. They held an ancient knowledge now, a depth that hadn't been there before.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Like I've been asleep my whole life and just woke up."

He smiled, the first real smile in centuries. "That's exactly right."

They lay together as the sun rose, its light no longer a threat to her. She was changed now, forever. She would never grow old, never sicken, never die. She would watch her family fade, her friends pass, her human life recede into memory.

But she would also have him. Forever.

"I'm scared," she admitted, hours later, as the day stretched on.

"Me too."

"But I'm also happy. I've never been this happy."

He held her closer. "Neither have I."

In the weeks that followed, they learned each other anew. Her new senses, her new hungers, her new place in the world. He taught her to hunt, to control the thirst, to move through the night like the predator she'd become. And she taught him something he'd forgotten: how to hope.

They made love in the dark, in the light, in every place and position. Her new body was more responsive, more sensitive, capable of pleasures she'd never imagined. And his centuries of experience found new expression in her willingness, her curiosity, her endless hunger for him.

One night, decades later, they stood on a balcony overlooking a city that had changed a hundred times since she'd been turned. She leaned against him, her head on his shoulder.

"Do you ever regret it?" he asked. "Letting me turn you?"

She turned to look at him, and her eyes, still whiskey-coloured, still warm, held centuries of love. "Not for a single second. Not ever."

"Even though you've lost everyone?"

"Everyone except you. And you're the only one who matters."

He kissed her, and she melted into him, and the night stretched on forever, as it would, now. As it would.

The weight of forever was heavy. But it was lighter when shared. And they had all the time in the world to carry it together.