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For the first time in three-hundred-and-forty-seven-years, Damian is awake to greet the dawn of a new day.
As he stands under the sun’s rays with Jake by his side, he can feel his cells waking up, thrumming with an abundance of energy. His lungs inflate, not just to draw in stale air for speech, but with purpose. There’s relief with each breath, satisfaction where there hasn’t been in a long time. Damian raises two fingers to his own throat and counts his pulse into the thousands.
Jake doesn’t rush him. He drifts away from Damian’s side every so often to retrieve splinters of coffin from the lawn, or to speak with Manfield and Lesley, but it’s never long before he slips back into Damian’s arms again as if he never left.
As he basks in golden light, Damian ponders the mystery of his return to mortality. What was the catalyst? Making love for the first time in centuries? Being beaten half-to-death by strangers? Jake’s love bite?
Damian doesn’t know and thinks he probably never will. And that’s okay. Some things in life are meant to remain unknown, and the how is not so important as the why and the what next.
By the time they crawl into bed that night, Damian’s skin is sun-kissed and warm to the touch. To his surprise, his face and shoulders erupted with fawn-colored freckles while outside, and Jake catalogs them all with kisses. Damian’s mind races along with his heart as Jake moves lower down his body, until eventually Damian catches him by the shoulder and squeezes.
“Wait. Before we do this, there’s something I must confess.”
Jake glances up at him, and his lips curl into an easy, carefree smile. “What is it?”
“Last night…” Damian has to take a deep breath before he can continue, mining his courage from deep inside himself. “Last night, before we made love, I hypnotized you. I forced you to tell me that you loved me, and I coerced you into my room and into my bed. I am… so sorry.”
Damian waits to see Jake’s expression collapse, for his jaw to drop open in horror and his eyes to glaze over with distrust, but no such thing happens. At most, a slight furrow appears between his brows, and he says, “But that doesn’t make any sense. How can it be hypnotism if I remember it?”
“Hypnotism doesn’t necessarily erase the memory of an event. It’s possible for a victim to recall the details with clarity, unless expressly instructed otherwise by the hypnotizer.”
“Oh. I see.” Slowly, Jake sits back on his knees between Damian’s thighs. He bites his lip. “That was after I stripped for you, right? After you found my duffel bag? You started acting so distant all of the sudden. I knew something had changed.” Jake’s eyes drop to his hands, which he balls up into fists in his lap.
Damian darts out a hand to rub his thumb anxiously back and forth across Jake’s knuckles. For a long moment he thinks he’s lost Jake for certain, that his dishonesty constituted too great a betrayal. Then Jake’s head snaps up and he says, “Wait! How could you have hypnotized me into something I already wanted?”
Damian tilts his head to one side. “What do you mean?”
“Last night I spilled beer on my pants and went into your room to find that robe to change into. I came out and took the rest of my clothes off in front of you, and that’s when you hypnotized me, right?” At Damian’s nod, Jake continues excitedly. “But that’s wrong! Don’t you see? I knew I was in love with you the moment I decided to spare your life. I knew I wanted to sleep with you the moment our eyes met. So really, you didn’t hypnotize me at all. I was already willing to do anything you asked of me. Anything and more. When you told me to tell you I loved you, I didn’t feel compelled to because of some supernatural influence. I told you because I meant it and I wanted you to know.”
Jake grips Damian’s hand tight, and Damian returns the squeeze ten-fold. “Do you mean that?” Damian asks, his voice choked with emotion.
“I do,” says Jake, and he crawls his way into Damian’s lap so that he can cradle Damian’s face in his hands. “I love you, Damian. I slept with you because I wanted to, not because you told me to. And I’m telling you I love you now because that’s how I really feel.”
The kiss they share then is fiercely passionate. It comes as a surprise to Damian when his lungs begin to protest their lack of oxygen, and he pulls back reluctantly to gasp for breath against his beloved’s throat.
“Thank you,” Damian whispers. “Thank you for telling me.”
They make love again that night, and this time it’s different. There are no more secrets; no more walls between them. They are as emotionally vulnerable with each other as they are physically, and it heightens the experience to new levels.
In the morning, when the sun comes up, Damian doesn’t rush to close the curtains. He lies there with his lover in his arms and greets the sunrise like an old friend.