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Daniel returns the rental car, because why the hell would he drive back to Florida given that Armand had shown up with the jet? Atlanta to Miami is an hour and fifty-five minutes in the air, enough time to strip Armand, pin him to that ridiculous bed, and kiss him until he begs for Daniel’s fangs in his neck and in that tender spot Daniel’s found on his inner thigh. Daniel obliges, because Armand is even prettier bloodied.
Daniel sucks Armand off while he reads aloud from the Wikipedia page on Groundhog Day, as in: not the movie they’d watched the night before, but the surrealist Pennsylvania holiday. Armand only gets as far as the section on how Punxsutawney Phil is related to Candlemas lore before he loses his words, drops the iPad over the side of the bed, and rakes his fingernails down Daniel’s shoulder blades with a lovely wail.
“Yes, yes,” Armand sighs, shivering through the aftershocks. “Take it off.” He watches Daniel remove his faded AC/DC tee, licks his lips as Daniel wipes his mouth on it, and then makes grabby hands as Daniel climbs back on top of him. “Here, my love. Yes.”
Daniel likes hearing Armand’s articulacy come back online, because it means he’ll be the one on his back for the duration. He grunts when Armand flips him over, and he’s content to let Armand hiss and swear while he unfastens Daniel’s jeans just enough to get his dick out. Daniel has no idea why Armand’s favorite Mile High Club thing is riding him while he’s half dressed. He gets mouthy fast and comes even faster.
“You asked me once if the cockpit can hear,” Armand muses, resting his chin on Daniel’s chest while Daniel tries to recover. “Remember that?”
“I dunno,” Daniel yawns, raking his fingers through Armand’s hair with hazy adoration. “Kinda hard to think right now. Tell me about it, princess.”
Armand rolls his eyes, which happens a lot more now than it had fifty years ago. “I did not approve that one. How long have you been thinking it?”
Daniel shrugs. “Since we had cocktails with Louis and Lestat.”
Armand smacks his hip. “Which means they likely heard you!”
“It was involuntary. You all but had your hand down my pants.”
“Ah, so I did. Anything for my beautiful boy.”
“How long until we land? I kinda lost track.”
Daniel props himself up on his elbows, watching Armand rise, shake out his limbs, and start gathering their clothing from the floor. He tosses the armful of garments right on top of Daniel, and then he retrieves the iPad, tapping it impatiently to display the time.
“Thirty minutes, give or take,” Armand says, coming back to sit on the edge of the mattress. He sets the iPad on the little table before twisting his body to plant one arm on either side of Daniel’s shoulders, leaning over him. “Will you need to hunt again, my darling?”
“I thought we authorized that one for use on you,” Daniel teases, tapping Armand’s nose.
“You didn’t take me up on it, so I’ve decided to use it on you instead,” Armand says. “Will you need to hunt? We didn’t have much earlier.”
“Nah, had my favorite snack,” Daniel reminds him, poking Armand’s neck.
“I shouldn’t spoil you,” Armand replies fondly, “but you make it so easy.”
They’re back on Night Island with hours to spare until sunrise, so Daniel stakes out on the softly lit terrace with his laptop to see if he can write for a while. Meanwhile, Armand finishes unpacking—he gets antsy unless that task is immediately squared away—and then drags out a second lawn chair so he can mess around on his iPad while Daniel tries to get his latest article draft unstuck.
“I don’t like writing,” Armand says contemplatively, and Daniel can see out of the corner of his eye that he’s playing Pokémon GO. “I enjoy describing things, though. I get lost in it. I’d only be able to write a book if someone took live dictation.”
“Good thing it’s my job and not yours,” Daniel replies. “FYI, my ghostwriting skills aren’t currently for hire. That was worse than selling myself.”
“I don’t want to be the subject of a book,” Armand says, staring for a moment as if mesmerized by the series of nearby PokéStops he’s just spun. “It’s enough for me to come to grips with how prominently I feature in the current one,” he adds reluctantly. “I’m the villain of the piece.”
Daniel stops typing and turns to him. He catches Armand’s free hand as it dangles from the armrest. “Have a little more faith in me than that.”
“I’d have far less faith in you if you hadn’t told it exactly like it is,” Armand replies, emphatic. He squeezes Daniel’s hand, lacing their fingers.
“Okay, so you’re a monster,” Daniel reassures him. “There’s no way around it given the point of view. But to your credit, you’re a sexy monster.”
Armand looks human when he laughs—that surprised hitch of his breath, that musical giggle. He swings their hands between the arms of their chairs, staring up at the sky. “Did you happen to tell them that you’re a monster now, too? Or are you saving that twist for the documentary?”
“Haven’t decided,” Daniel says. “They’ll think I’m faking it regardless. They’re gonna think you’re faking it, too. Reviewers already think I named the villain after my art dealer boyfriend. They’ll try to cancel me when they decide you’re half my age. Cancellation rates being what they are…”
“Would it help if we were engaged?” Armand asks. “Vampires rarely pursue legal marriage for obvious reasons.” He turns off the iPad, wistfully closing his eyes as he trails his fingernails along the glassy black screen. “I could never think of Louis as my husband. My partner, my companion? Most certainly. You know now that it’s because…” When he opens his eyes, they’re vivid amber, alive. “Because that’s how I think of you.”
“That explains why neither of my wives worked out,” Daniel says. “I was still married to you. On some unconscious level, I knew it.”
Armand sits forward, angling his body toward Daniel. He brings Daniel’s hand up to his lips, his fangs grazing Daniel’s knuckles. “You are precious to me,” he says, “for reasons that I will never fully understand. I never…” He exhales, shaking his head, running his tongue along his teeth. “I never should have told past paramours that I wanted them more than anything else in the world. I never meant it until I met you.”
“If that’s true,” Daniel says, running his fingers down the plane of Armand’s cheek, “then it means a lot that you’ve never used that line on me.”
Armand nods, rising. He sets his iPad on the lawn chair, staring out over the water as the wind picks up. “I’m going for a walk. I won’t be long.”
Daniel doesn’t think anything of it until he wraps up the article, sits forward to stretch, and realizes that Armand has been gone for nearly two hours. He’d chalk it up to Armand walking over to the shops, because he loves the neon lights and infinite variety of shit you can buy, but it’s fucking Sunday. Even Night Island closes for twenty-four hours once a week so that human employees can have a break.
“Fuck,” Daniel says. He drops his laptop and takes off down the terrace, because leaving Armand to his own devices when he’s still kind of fragile from their talk the night before is a really bad idea. This is the kind of mood in which he’s prone to running off without an explanation.
Daniel checks the shopping arcades first. If Armand is in the mood to tear something apart, he’s not above pilfering something from one of the tech vendors that rents space and compensating them later. But Daniel doesn’t see or hear any sign of him, not even with heightened senses.
He’s momentarily distracted by the dazzling neon and LED lights that persist from dusk until dawn, not much different from the way he remembers the island looking in the early 1980s. Armand’s vision of a futuristic aesthetic has passed into postmodernity, a bastion of sci-fi exteriors and interiors where the Renaissance meets mid-century modern. Every genre film that Armand has ever loved is represented in this architecture.
That’s when Daniel reflects on the through-line of what they had just been talking about. He realizes he’s been looking in the wrong place.
The pier is situated midway between the villa and the shopping arcades, so he backtracks. He’s barely set foot on it when he realizes those are Armand’s clothes in a haphazard pile out near the end of it. That’s not a bad sign in and of itself, but if Louis can swim the Mississippi to reach the next town over, then Armand might be halfway to Bermuda by now. Daniel bolts toward the clothing; he’s next to the pile in less than a second.
Daniel picks through it to see if Armand has left everything on his person behind. He’s only managed to catalog Armand’s shirt, pants, and those goddamn sunglasses before there’s a commotion at the end of the pier, someone breaking the surface of the water.
Armand hauls himself clumsily onto the pier, which is indication enough that he’s done something rash. He crawls forward using only one of his arms, which makes Daniel’s pulse skyrocket as he rushes toward him. Armand stops, hunkered down on his knees.
“Night swimming without me?” Daniel asks, removing his cardigan. He crouches and drapes it around Armand’s bare, trembling shoulders. There’s a piece of slimy brown macroalgae tangled in Armand’s curls, so Daniel extracts it. And then he offers his wrist, because telling Armand he looks like death warmed over wouldn’t be a strong enough statement. He looks like…fuck, like even the Bermuda Triangle didn’t want him.
Armand sucks in a jarring lungful of air, his fangs bared. He grabs Daniel’s hand to steady it while he latches onto Daniel’s wrist, but Daniel can’t help but notice that Armand’s other hand is curled against his chest with several shreds of green macroalgae protruding from it. There’s brackish muck beneath his fingernails. His eyes are wide open, a nasty shade of bloodshot vermilion. He’s clutching something over his heart.
“You look like sirens are supposed to look,” Daniel quips uneasily, untangling Armand’s sodden, snarled curls while he feeds. “I’m gonna take a Polaroid of you like this and send it to Orlando, tell Disney they got mermaids all wrong. Hey, uh, babe? Easy.”
Armand makes a disgusted noise. He disengages from Daniel’s wrist, ominously heaving. He vomits a bellyful of blood-tinged seawater. His curled right hand falls from his chest, dropping something in front of Daniel on the weathered, salt-seasoned wood with a thunk.
“I didn’t pocket it when I pulled it off your neck,” Armand rasps, his eyelids fluttering like he’s feverish. “I threw it in the water out of spite.”
Daniel stares at the locket. Particles of sand and vegetation cling to the casting’s finer details. Still life with sunken treasure. Thirty-seven years underwater has left the gold pitted. The broken chain is still threaded through the bail, a monstrous tangle of Byzantine links.
Hands shaking, Daniel picks it up and pops it open. The glass reliquary mounted inside is flawless, untouched. He imagines it as Armand’s blood retrieved from the heart of a shipwreck. He snaps it shut and sticks the whole filthy, sopping jumble in his back pocket, and then he throws his arms around Armand because, for a split second, he forgets Armand isn’t human and doesn’t want him to go hypothermic.
“C’mere,” Daniel says, kissing Armand all over his haunted, grubby face. “Aw, is this what you looked like when Lestat found you in Paris?”
“Fuck off,” Armand spits, but he clings to Daniel, nuzzling blindly against his neck. “We’ll have to find a jeweler to properly clean and restore it. The chain will need to be untangled and re-soldered. It was continuous, if you recall, with no clasp. Didn’t want you to lose it.”
“I slipped it over my head the day you gave it to me,” Daniel agrees, allowing himself to tip back onto his ass as Armand goes slack in his arms. “It never left my person once in, what, nine or ten years? Not till the night you broke up with me out here and ripped it off.”
“It took almost three years for a goldsmith in Florence to complete it. I made her re-carve the wax cast twice. Polishing took months. Setting the reliquary was a biohazard, she said, so I gave her another fifty thousand dollars,” Armand mumbles, his teeth chattering.
“I think you must’ve been kinda unhinged to begin with. All that perfectionism and nothing to do with it. No wonder you took to painting.”
“Can we please not talk about that,” Armand says thinly. “Can we just be glad it’s not lost.”
Screw it, Daniel thinks. He wants to see what else his newfound strength and speed are good for, so he bundles Armand into a bridal carry and thinks about which sequence of movements and muscles will get him to his feet. Like running, it’s instant. Fucking effortless.
Armand gasps, twining his arms around Daniel’s neck. He laughs, a burst of joy right against Daniel’s ear. “Can we do more of this, please.”
“I’m gonna have to grab you like this next time you try to shove something down the sink,” Daniel says, carrying him. “Think it’ll be effective?”
“No,” Armand sniffs. “Not even the promise of intimacy can separate an artist from his art.”
“That’s what destroying shit is for you? Modern art?” Daniel asks. Galaxy-brain moment. “Sweetheart, let’s get you on Instagram.”
“I am,” Armand replies. “I just don’t use it much because app games are too distracting.”
“Part cranky Millennial, part half-millennium-old twink. What am I gonna do with you?”
“Fuck me senseless? I retrieved your betrothal token, after all.”
“Hah, see? There it is. That juxtaposition. I nailed it, didn’t I?”
“Do you want me to get started on whether you’re Gen X or a Boomer?”
“Hard pass. C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up so I can wreck you again.”