Lily Vale

The night train rattled west through black countryside, rain threading the windows in silver lines. The private compartment was all brass lamps and worn velvet, warm against the storm outside. I sat alone, my notebook open on my knee, the vampires' plans inked in my careful shorthand. The tunnel beneath the river. The bribed gate captain. The night of the new moon. I muttered under my breath, rehearsing it for the hundredth time.

"Your Highness... the attack comes in six days. There's a man inside your walls..."

The capital was still twelve dark hours away. Twelve hours, and then I handed the princess the key to everything.

Then, a knock. Soft and apologetic, barely louder than the rain. Before my pen had even left the page, the door slid open a careful inch, and a young woman leaned into the gap. She was flushed, as if she'd hurried the length of the train, dark hair escaping from a soft red beret, pretty in a way that made the lamp seem warmer the moment she appeared.

"Oh, thank goodness, someone's in here." She held up a ticket between two fingers like evidence at a trial. "I'm so sorry to bother you, but I appear to be the victim of a terrible conspiracy. The conductor says my compartment was double-booked, the sleeping car is stuffed to the luggage racks, and the dining car is full of card players who, quote, 'won't be moving for anyone.'"

She didn't quite wait for the answer. In she came, trailing a little suitcase, rain-damp wool, and a faint scent of warm honey and night jasmine, and by the time the luggage rack had swallowed her case and she'd settled into the seat across from mine, arranging her coat around her like a cat making a bed, refusing would have taken more cruelty than the night had in it.

"Lily," she said, offering her hand across the gap between us. "And you are...?"

Her eyes flicked once, just once, to the open notebook on my knee. Then away, out to the storm-tossed window, unbothered, as though it were the most boring thing in the world.

"No problem at all," I said with a smile, and shook her hand. "I'm James." There was something quirky about her, out of place, maybe even a little clumsy.

The sky finally made its move. Thunder cracked over the train like the world splitting open, and the lamp guttered low, the compartment drowning in blue dark.

"Oh!" A small, high squeak from across the compartment. Then, in the blink before the light steadied, she was somehow beside me, kneeling on the bench with one hand fisted in my sleeve, her beret knocked askew, her eyes enormous. I couldn't have said how she crossed over so fast. The dark, I supposed.

"I'm sorry," she blurted, laughing at herself, cheeks pink. "That was so embarrassing. Thunder gets me. I promise I'm not usually this much trouble." A fresh growl rolled under the floorboards, and she pressed closer instead of pulling away, small and warm against my arm. "Just until the next one passes. Please. They come in twos, you know."

Strange girl. One moment she was all flustered apologies, the next she was tucked against my arm like she'd been there for years. Something about her didn't quite add up. But it was a long, dark ride to the capital, and I found I was glad not to be alone in it.

She peered up at me through her lashes, still tucked against my arm. "So. James." The lamplight made her amber eyes shine like struck matches. "What are you afraid of?"

"Bears," I said, with all the solemnity of a man testifying in court. "Big ones. And running out of tea before the dining car closes."

She laughed, a bright, easy thing that filled the little compartment, and swatted my arm with the back of her hand. "That's a lie. You're a terrible liar, James." Her eyes narrowed happily, like she'd caught something and was deciding to keep it. "But I'll allow it. Everyone on this train is allowed one secret."

The second thunder came and went, softer, farther, done. Her excuse had passed with it. Neither of us mentioned that. Neither of us moved, either.

The storm wore itself down to steady rain, and somewhere in the comfortable quiet, she seemed to realize where she was still attached. She went pink to the ears and laughed.

"Oh no. I've been hanging off you like a barnacle this entire time, haven't I." She peeled herself away and retreated to her own seat, folding her hands in her lap like a well-behaved girl, tugging her beret straight with as much dignity as the situation allowed. "I'm so sorry, James. I can be a little silly when I get scared."

The lamp threw the same warm light as before. Somehow the compartment felt bigger with the gap between us, and the place along my arm where she'd been was cool now, as if the storm had reached through the glass to touch exactly that spot. Ridiculous, the things a man notices. I turned a page in my notebook that I had no intention of reading.

"So," she said, tucking her knees up under her coat like we'd known each other for years instead of minutes. "Bears."

"Bears," I confirmed.

"On a train." Her mouth was fighting itself and losing. "You're afraid of bears. On a train."

"I never said on a train!"

That undid her. A giggle first, small and pressed behind her glove, and then a proper laugh, bright and unguarded.

"I also don't trust swans," I offered.

She made a sound like a kettle giving up. "Swans."

"They're bigger than they look, and they know things."

She dissolved into giggles, curled into her corner with her gloves pressed to her mouth, small and helpless with it. Every time she recovered, she'd look at me, find me still perfectly serious, and go under again. I hadn't known I was funny. It was a nice thing to learn in front of an audience like her.

"Fine." She wiped at an eye beneath her glove, breathless, and smoothed her coat with great ceremony. "My turn, since I've had all your fears confessed. Honestly? I'm terrified of being boring." Her chin came up, like a woman confessing to a scandal. "There. Now you know one true thing about me."

"That seems very unlikely to be a danger in your case."

She blinked, and the giggle that slipped out of her was softer than all the rest. "You can't just say things like that, James."

The heat climbing my neck had nothing to do with the lamp. I did what any intelligent man does when caught out: I turned to the window and studied the rain like it owed me money.

She didn't rescue me. She just sat there in her corner, letting me hide, and somehow I could hear her smiling in the quiet, warm as the lamp itself.

"Come to think of it, I did promise you biscuits." She rose, and the beret came off with two fingers, her dark hair tumbling loose down her shoulders, and she shook it out like she'd been let out of something.

The suitcase on the rack surrendered a round tin, dented at one corner like it had lived a life. She had to go up on her toes on the bench to reach it, wobbled, saved herself with one hand on my shoulder like I was furniture, and dropped back down beside me.

"Right." The lid came off with a small pop and even more ceremony. "Biscuit etiquette. Pay attention, this matters. The ginger ones are for emergencies only."

"What counts as an emergency?"

"Heartbreak. Thunder. Missing your stop." She lined the little biscuits up on the tin's lid like ammunition. "Ginger is not a casual biscuit. Shortbread is for polite company. Vanilla is mine, and that one is not up for discussion. And the honey ones..." She took a vanilla one for herself, biting it in half without ceremony, and studied me over the tin with a scientist's squint. "Mm. Yes. You strike me as a honey man."

"I don't know what that means."

"Steady," she said, as if that settled it, and picked out a honey one, taking my hand in both of hers, small and gloved and certain, folding my fingers around it like she was handling something fragile. "Honey men hold things carefully."

I unfolded my fingers and gave the honey one back to her, and took a vanilla one from her little arrangement instead. Old rule, the one that has kept me breathing this long: never eat what a stranger wants you to eat. Eat what a stranger eats.

She stared at me with the biscuit I'd handed back still held up in her fingers, and something moved behind her eyes, quick as a fish under ice, too fast to name. Then she burst out laughing. "You turned down my honey and took my vanilla. Out of my own tin." She bit into the honey one herself with pointed ceremony, chewing at me. "That was the rudest, most careful thing anyone has ever done with my baking, and I've decided to be flattered."

The tin sat warm on our knees, her whole self angled toward me somewhere along the way, knees to knees, hair loose, lamplight in her eyes. "There," she said, pleased with the world. "Now you know two true things about me. I'm afraid of being boring, and I make good biscuits."

Somewhere in there I'd stopped blinking. I was staring into her eyes the way you look into a fire, warm past the point of noticing, and she let me, smiling like she had all night and every intention of using it.

Then some cold little clerk in the back of my skull cleared its throat. The notebook. The princess. The whole kingdom, sitting open on my knee, page up, beside a stranger I'd known for an hour. I closed it with a snap I pretended was casual and buried it deep in my bag, under the spare shirts, zipped the whole thing down like winter was coming. Sensible, I told myself. A long ride. A tired man. Nothing to do with her.

She watched me do it over her biscuit, amber eyes going from the bag to me and back, and said nothing at all.

The quiet after my notebook theatrics had a shape to it. Then she reached over without warning and brushed a crumb from the corner of my mouth with her thumb. Slow. Matter-of-fact. Done before I could decide how to feel about it. "Rule one," she said softly. "No crumbs on my watch."

I should have said something. Thank you, or that's unnecessary, or anything at all. I just sat there, very aware of my own mouth.

There was one vanilla biscuit left. I reached for it. So did she. And the train chose that exact moment to lurch, hard, over something on the rails. The tin clattered to the floor, her hand caught my wrist, and then her face was an inch from mine, all amber eyes and honey and breath I could feel. Nobody moved. One heartbeat. Two. That was one too many, and we both knew it.

She pulled back first, laughing, shy in a way I hadn't heard from her before. Or maybe it was the same as always, and I was only now hearing it right. "Oh. Sorry. Train's fault," she said, and blamed it with a smile that didn't quite commit to the alibi.

The last vanilla went down with the tin, a casualty of war. She mourned it properly, hand over her heart. "A moment of silence. He had so much left to give."

And I was warm. That was the thing. The corner of my mouth where her thumb had been. My wrist where she'd caught me. My hand, still, from her folding biscuits into it an hour ago. Little fires, none of them fading with the hour.

The quiet stretched until she stretched too, fanning her collar with one gloved hand, and made a small, put-upon noise. "Goodness. When did this train get so hot?"

Her fingers went to the zipper at her throat and drew it down, unhurried, all the way. The wool fell open like a curtain on a small stage, and underneath was nothing a woman wears on a day train. Lacy silk, whispering against the coat lining, held up by two thin straps that had no business existing within a hundred miles of a ticket inspector.

"I would have changed properly if they'd given me the compartment I was promised," she said, prim, as if the prim voice matched what the coat was hiding. It did not. The lace did not. The little silver buckle on one of the straps certainly did not.

I knew I should look away. Politeness usually requires it. But she didn't seem to mind being looked at, and the lamp was kind to her, and the silver silk moved when she breathed, and somewhere in there the train sounds went soft and far, and I found I was comfortable, just watching. Not thinking anything. Not needing to.

She was looking back at me. Not embarrassed, not teasing, just looking, amber and steady, with the lamplight pooled in her eyes like honey settling in a jar. She smiled, slow, and let me look, and the smile said everything is fine, and the compartment was very warm and very quiet, and everything was fine.

"There," she said at last, soft and pleased, settling back into the velvet like we had concluded some important business. "Better."

Better. Yes. That was the word for it, I thought, and it was some while before I bothered to think anything else.

She didn't send me back to myself so much as follow me down. Her knees came up, her shoulder found the seat-back beside mine, and she tucked herself in along the bench like the compartment had been built around her. "Warm now," she said. It wasn't a question. It wasn't anything. It was just true, and I agreed with it without deciding to.

Then she started talking, low, half to me and half to the window, and it wasn't conversation anymore. It was weather-talk that turned into a story about a lighthouse keeper she'd once met, who counted the rain for a living. It was her aunt who kept bees, and her opinions on snow. It was half-sentences that didn't need their endings, and soft little mm sounds, and pauses where nothing was missing.

And under all of it, the other thing she was doing, or that was being done to me: the gown shifting with her breath, lamplight moving on her legs where the coat had fallen open, silk pooling and sliding with every small adjustment of her body, and every so often a soft giggle that rippled through her and reached into my mind and quieted it. It was hard to say where the words ended and the rest of her began. I didn't try very hard to say.

I stopped tracking the sentences. The words were warm water, and I had stopped checking where the spring was. I floated on the sound of her, and the sound was honey-smooth low notes, and somewhere in there I realized I hadn't thought anything in several minutes, and it was the most comfortable I'd been in years.

The murmur wound down like a music box. Somewhere in the last few notes I'd drifted so close to her that I could feel the words in her collarbone before I heard them, and then the words stopped, and the silence where they'd been was cold, and I caught myself leaning into it, waiting, actually waiting, like a plant turned toward a window.

"Mm," she said at last, a smile inside the sound. "You're a good listener, James."

I had no memory of a single thing she'd said, but the compliment still made me smile.

I checked my watch, and the hour didn't add up. There was a warm hole in the evening where an hour of my life should have been.

A worried thought crossed my mind, but was interrupted by her approach. Quick and light as a cat, she was on my lap, knees on the bench on either side of me, gown pooling between us, gazing into my eyes. "You're cute, James," she said with a soft giggle that rang in my mind.

I opened my mouth, but absolutely nothing came out. Her hips shifted, settling, the silk slid, and every word I owned went somewhere else, and her eyes caught the lamplight and held it.

"This is nice," she murmured, warm as a banked fire, and the words had a weight to them, like small stones dropping into still water, and I watched them settle.

The watch was still in my hand. I'd forgotten what it was for.

Her voice had gone somewhere soft and low. "You don't need that watch." I nodded, and hurriedly stored it into my bag beside me.

When I looked up, she was smiling, and something in my chest unknotted under it, a knot I hadn't known I was carrying.

She leaned in. Her lips touched mine, soft, unhurried, and tasted faintly of honey, and the lamp and the rain and the train all went quiet and far away, and I was exactly where I should be, and I had never agreed to anything so completely in my life.

When she drew back, it was only far enough to look at me, and her approving smile was still there, closer now, and there was something almost tender in it.

Her lips stayed at the corner of my mouth when the kiss ended, and her voice never really stopped at all. "Lie back," she murmured, and my back found the bench before the sentence did.

I was aware of hands, mostly mine, and how clumsy they'd gotten, and how little I minded. Somewhere in the dark the silk shifted, and the coat fell open around us both like a curtain drawn by someone else, and then she was above me, amber and lamplit and patient, and the last thing in the world I was capable of was anything she hadn't asked for.

She looked down at my crotch and then back into my eyes with expectation. I scrambled to undo them under her, and released the throbbing within. She gave another approving smile, and the smile felt amazing.

With a soft giggle, she took me in, unhurried, watching my eyes the whole way down. The sound I made wasn't a word. It wasn't trying to be.

Her hips set a rhythm like something remembered from a dream, slow, certain, older than the train and the storm together.

Every stroke was a slow step down a long warm staircase, and I felt myself sinking with each one, deeper, softer, further from the lamp and the rain and every hard edge of the world.

Once, just once, she asked something and my mind reached for the words and found the shelf where I kept them suddenly bare. She didn't frown. She didn't repeat herself. She just slowed. Half-tempo, honey turned to molasses, and the emptiness of it was unbearable, a need with no bottom, and I heard myself answering before I knew what the question had been, anything, anything she wanted, just please keep the world moving like that.

"Good," she murmured, and the rhythm came back like the sun.

Amidst the blur of questions I answered and things I agreed to, one stood out to me. "You love me," she said with a smile. Not a question, but she waited for my confirmation nonetheless. I hesitated, and the rhythm slowed to that torturous crawl. In that moment I realized it didn't matter what was true anymore, I just needed to agree. "I love you," I said with a smile, and the feeling washed over my whole body and soul. It must have been true after all.

She gave an approving giggle, low and pleased, and I felt it move through me where we were joined, and that was when my last edges dissolved.

It all went dream-like after that. Heavenly, even. Time went soft, the train went away, the world went away, and there was only her, and the pleasure, and the slow warm staircase that had no bottom now, just floor after floor of amber light and perfect motion. I stopped being a man on a train and became something simpler: warmth, and agreement, and want, shaped exactly the way her hands wanted it.

Things peeled away from me as I sank, layer by layer. The compartment. The mission. The rain. Somewhere far above, the name James bobbed on the surface, and I watched it go without reaching for it.

And in the dream-like pleasure, understandings came to me the way warmth comes to cold water, gently, totally, from the inside out. I understood that I didn't care about the princess. The thought arrived without pain, without guilt, a small polite fact, like hearing a station called for somewhere I had never been. And I understood that I was obsessed with Lily. Utterly. The kind of obsessed that had always been true, that had been there all along, only waiting for me to notice.

Somewhere in all of it she laid down over me, drawing the coat around us both, like a tent, like a world with walls made only of her, and the dark inside it was the softest dark I had ever known.

That was where she found my neck. I felt her smile against my skin, and then the small bright sting of her teeth, and I understood this too, in the dream, with total peace: that this was everything I needed.

I came inside of her, giving her everything, including my mind.

I dreamed of vampires. In the dream they weren't what the stories said. They were beautiful and patient and warm, and they moved like the night moves, and one of them stood in an amber field holding out her hand, and taking it felt like coming home. I wanted things in the dreams that I couldn't name after, and the wanting was sweet.

There was more of it, hours of it, all in the same warm key: dark like a held breath, patient like a tide, and over and over, in every dream inside the dream, the same soft invitation. Take me. Take me. The words were mine, and they were sweet, and when I woke I was almost sure my neck was still tingling.

It was morning. Real morning, gray-gold light through the glass, the rain gone, the countryside rolling past like the world had never once been in danger. The compartment was exactly as it had been. That felt like the strange part.

And she was across the room. Curled in the other seat with her knees tucked like a cat in a sunbeam, looking out the window at the morning like it belonged to her, dressed in wine-red velvet with a deep neckline and black gloves to the elbow, an outfit I would have called formal if it didn't look so natural on her. She was gorgeous. Her hair, her outfit, her pale skin. How could I get so lucky to have her sit near me? I knew I had to meet her.

"Hello," I said, and it came out soft and reverent, like I was interrupting something sacred.

She looked at me, and my heart soared. "Hello," she said back, in a voice that sounded like heaven.

"What's your name?" I asked, like it was the most important question ever asked.

"Lily," she said, and a genuine smile surfaced and sank, brief and warm. "I love that name," I said, and meant it more than I had ever meant anything.

"I'm James."

"What do you want, James?"

"You," I said, without thought, without any of the filters a careful man keeps between his mouth and his chest. A quick laugh escaped her, bright and startled and gone. "Well," she said. "At least you're honest."

"I'm going to the vampire castle," she added, watching me like a coin she had just spun. The fact that she was a vampire made me want her that much more, despite my princess being in conflict with them.

She turned from the window then, fully, patient, politely interested. "And what about you, James? Who do you work for?"

The question arrived like a customs officer. Something old in me stood up straight and reached for the refusal I had carried all my life. But she was looking at me like the question was safe, like questions between us had always been safe, like she was the one place in the world a man could say anything and be kept well. The refusal weighed nothing. I couldn't remember what I was protecting it from. "The princess," I said. "I work for the princess."

The genuine smile again, small and approving, going through me like warm water. "The princess," she repeated, tasting it, filing it somewhere I couldn't see. "And what does she have you carrying, that's so important?"

"I can't say." It came out instantly, the last reflex I owned. And her face cooled by a single polite degree, nothing dramatic, and my heart sank at it, at the faint cooling of her approval, like the sun going behind one small cloud.

She stood. She crossed the compartment without hurry, and my eyes ran up and down her body the whole way, helpless, cataloguing her, wanting her, and she let me look the way you let a dog look at dinner.

She sat beside me, smooth and elegant as poured cream, closer than the seat required, and I stared into her eyes like they were the only light left on in the world.

"If you tell me," she said, "I'll touch you."

"Okay," I mumbled, and the word was out before the last of me had finished objecting.

Her gloved hand came to rest on my leg, light as a settled bird, and I started to throb before it had finished arriving, and with the touch came the truth, all of it, pouring out: the mission, the notebook, the vampires' plans, the tunnel under the river, the bribed captain, the night of the new moon, all of it told to her, to a vampire, in exchange for the weight of one hand on my leg.

"Good," she said, and the approval felt so good in my soul that I needed more of it. I needed it more than anything.

Her hand slid closer to my crotch, unhurried. "But maybe there's something more important than that?"

"What could be more important than s-"

Her hand gracefully opened my pants and pulled out what was hers.

Pleasure rushed through my entire body, and I relaxed into her control.

"Well," she said. "You could go to the castle with me."

"Wha..." The stroking began, and my mind was lost. All of my remaining consciousness scrambled for one thing, and it wasn't the mission: it was her approval.

"Yeah," I said.

She smiled, and the joy of earning it filled my brain with pleasure while her touch filled my body with the same.

"You'd have to give up your mission," she said, her fingers never slowing. "But you'd get to be my slave. Forever."

The forever hung there, in the air between us. I couldn't possibly agree to this. Even the last piece of me that knew it was drowning politely, without a struggle.

She leaned in. "And that means I'll get to bite you, and take some of you, every single day," she whispered against my neck.

"I'd love that," I let out.

She pulled away and looked at me with expectation.

"Then give me your bag. You don't need it anymore."

Her pace began to speed up, and deep inside of me I knew the grave cost of even hesitating. I wouldn't dare give her a reason to slow down. I grabbed the bag with one arm, careful not to interfere with her touch in any way, and slid it over to her.

"Good boy," she said, and leaned in for a taste of my neck.

I exploded at the touch. Pulse after pulse, as she stroked me and sucked more and more from me. I gave it, and I loved it.

She finally finished, seeming satisfied. My body collapsed against the back of the chair, drained, and perfectly relaxed, emptied of everything, the mission included.

She rose and walked back to her seat, unhurried, my bag in her hands, and settled by the window like a queen returning to her throne.

"We'll get off at the next stop," she said, "and take the next train back to the castle."

I smiled and nodded, and enjoyed the rest of the ride, watching her perfection.

My new princess.