Summary: You and Max needed a new start for your life in eternity.
Warnings: just the right amount of fluff, smut and happiness those two and you deserve in the end
Previous Chapter
Story Masterlist | my Pedro-Character-Masterlist
Your back hit the wall with enough force to rattle the framed print hanging beside your head, the impact punching a startled gasp from your lungs. The sound barely had time to leave you before Max drove into you again, hard enough to make your nails dig into his shoulders.
He had lifted you effortlessly moments earlier, your legs wrapped tight around his hips while he pinned you between his body and the freshly painted wall of your new apartment, and now the only thing keeping either of you steady was the relentless way he held you there.
“Fuck,” Max breathed against your mouth, sounding almost disbelieving himself as he thrust deeper.
You could barely answer him. Your forehead dropped briefly against his shoulder while another sharp wave of pleasure rolled through your body, stealing any coherent thought straight from your mind. You tightened your legs around his waist to keep yourself anchored while your arms hooked around his neck, fingers tangling in the curls at the nape of it.
Every movement drove him deeper and the rough drag of it sent another helpless sound from your lips.
The picture frame beside you shook again with the next impact.
Max laughed softly against your skin, breath warm where his lips brushed your jaw. “Easy, sweetheart,” he murmured. “Trying to traumatize the new neighbors already?”
You tried to retort something smart, but his next thrust ruined the attempt entirely. The only thing you managed was a broken moan that he swallowed immediately with a grin against your mouth. His own composure looked dangerously close to snapping too, dark eyes blown wide and fixed on you like he still couldn’t fully believe this was real.
The apartment around you still looked half-lived in. Open moving boxes lined one wall of the spacious New Orleans loft while stacks of records and books covered most available surfaces.
A warm lamp glowed in the corner beside the old record player Max had insisted on bringing across state lines himself, and somewhere beneath the sound of your breathing and the creak of furniture, Deftones played low and hazy through the room.
You had fully intended to spend the evening unpacking.
That plan had lasted maybe twenty minutes.
You had been kneeling on the rug sorting through records when Max walked into the living room and caught sight of you cross-legged on the floor in one of his oversized shirts, muttering to yourself while organizing vinyl sleeves into messy piles.
He had watched you for all of five seconds before abandoning any pretense of self-control. One moment you had been holding a Bowie record, the next he was behind you, kissing the back of your neck while pushing the shirt up your body.
That had become a pattern lately.
Ever since leaving New York behind and starting over down south, you had slipped into each other with terrifying ease.
The decision to leave the city had hurt more than you expected, but staying there had eventually begun to feel impossible. Too many ghosts lived in Brooklyn now. Too many memories stained every corner of it.
Before leaving, you had made sure enough evidence against Torres found its way into the right hands. Anonymous tips, hidden reports, overlooked details suddenly resurfacing. It would never bring Samantha, Keira, Lara or Abigail back, but at least their cases would find closure. At least their killer would no longer vanish into unsolved files.
For you and Max, though, closure meant distance.
So you had traded New York winters for humid Louisiana nights, moved into a sprawling apartment above a quiet side street in the French Quarter, and attempted to figure out what eternity together was supposed to look like.
Apparently it looked a lot like this.
Max finally pulled you away from the wall only to carry you a few steps across the room and set you onto the dining table. The wood was cold beneath your back as you laughed breathlessly and shoved aside two open boxes of cookies that had somehow become dinner decoration over the past week - Oreos and Thin Mints sitting absurdly beside unpacked cutlery and half-burned candles.
“Real romantic setup we got going here,” you muttered between breaths.
“I’m a man of sophistication,” Max shot back immediately, gripping your thighs to pull you closer to the edge of the table before thrusting into you again without warning.
Your head tipped back at the sensation. Your legs lifted instinctively around his hips while his hands held you open for him. The music playing nearby no longer covered the sounds you made together. Not that either of you seemed particularly interested in being quiet anymore.
From somewhere near the kitchen came an offended meow.
Oreo leapt off the counter with visible irritation, tail flicking sharply as he abandoned the room altogether.
Max laughed weakly at the sight only for you to lean up and catch his lower lip between your teeth the second he looked back at you. The bite drew another sound from him and your grin widened immediately.
“You hungry, my love?” he teased knowingly.
You rolled your eyes despite the way your body instantly reacted to the question. Feeding had become easier with time, though not necessarily simpler emotionally. Max had guided you through it carefully, showing you how to choose predators over innocents, how to control yourself, how to survive without losing whatever humanity still remained in you. You had adapted frighteningly fast compared to his own turning decades earlier.
You had told him, that it was because you had him at your side.
He came close to believing you.
Now his hand slid between your bodies, fingers finding the sensitive spot that made you jerk beneath him immediately. He circled it slowly while his other hand came up to cover your mouth, muffling the sharp sound that escaped you as pleasure crashed through you again.
“That’s it,” he murmured against your ear. “You’re doing so good for me.”
The praise alone nearly destroyed you.
You clung tighter to him as the climax hit hard and sudden, your entire body tightening around him while the table creaked beneath you. Max groaned at the feeling, grip on your hips turning bruising as he chased his own release seconds later, burying his face briefly against your throat while his movements finally lost rhythm completely.
You rested limply against his chest, laughing softly as you both tried to recover some semblance of composure. “Think the neighbors officially hate us.”
“They’ll get used to it,” Max said easily, helping you off the table when your shaky legs nearly failed you.
“I didn’t,” you muttered.
His grin turned unbearably smug at that. “Could’ve fooled me.”
You shoved weakly at his chest while pulling his abandoned shirt back over your head. Max only laughed and wrapped his arms around your waist from behind the second you finished dressing, pressing a kiss to the top of your shoulder.
“Come on,” you said eventually, leaning back into him. “Let’s go outside for a bit. I wanna see the Christmas lights before this city turns into tourist hell.”
“We should probably find you dinner first,” Max remarked while digging through an abandoned pile of clothes near the couch in search of something marginally presentable. The record player crackled softly as the song ended and he finally crossed the room to switch it off, pausing only to scratch Oreo behind the ears where the cat had claimed the armchair with dramatic exhaustion after being repeatedly subjected to your lack of restraint.
You snorted quietly while opening the wide drawer beside the front door, revealing an almost absurd amount of sunglasses lined up. It had been one of the very first things you unpacked after moving in, mostly because Max had declared them “survival essentials,” though you suspected vanity played an equally important role.
“Well,” you mused, running your fingers over the neatly arranged frames, “good thing New Orleans seems to have an endless supply of creeps wandering around after midnight.” You glanced back over your shoulder toward him. “Dior or Versace?”
Max tucked his shirt into the wide pants he had found and wandered over, sliding up behind you until his chest rested warm against your back. His arms folded loosely around your waist while he peered into the drawer over your shoulder like the choice required serious contemplation.
“You choose, sweetheart,” he murmured easily. “I trust your impeccable taste.”
You rolled your eyes but couldn’t stop smiling as you picked out a dramatic pair of black Miu Miu sunglasses for yourself before selecting his favorite Chanel frames. You turned toward him and carefully slid them onto his face, adjusting them with exaggerated precision while studying him critically.
“You know,” you said thoughtfully, “the first time I saw you wearing these, I genuinely thought you were the most pretentious asshole I’d ever met.”
Max gasped softly in mock offense. “And here I thought we had chemistry from the start.”
“Oh, we absolutely had chemistry,” you corrected while slipping into your coat. “The explosive kind.”
His grin widened instantly. “Turns out I’m just a simple style over substance guy.”
“Whatever helps you sleep during the day, 90s boy.”
He laughed under his breath and opened the apartment door for you with a dramatic flourish. Together you stepped out into the dim hallway and descended toward the street below, where cool December air curled around you the second you emerged outside. Compared to New York winters it was almost gentle, the night carrying traces of rain, old stone and distant music drifting through the French Quarter.
Max slipped an arm around your shoulders automatically, drawing you into his side as you started down the glowing street. You leaned against him without thinking, breathing in his familiar scent. It always flooded your system like an overpowering drug.
“How long exactly are you planning to call me that?” he asked, amusement threading through his voice as he pressed a kiss into your hairline.
You tilted your head up just enough to grin at him beneath the oversized sunglasses. “At least another century.”
Your laughter blended quietly into the hum of the city as the New Orleans night swallowed you both wholly, the endless promise of eternity ahead of you.
Taglist:
This fic will forever have a special place in my heart. It was a joyride to create and I am gonna miss Ashley's and Max's banter immensely. I have to thank all of you readers, commenters and supporters. I always hoped the twists and turns in the story would keep you on edge, all while the romance did not cut short.
So honestly thanks to all of you! I hope we will read each other somewhere else again 🤍🤍🤍
summary: after trying to convince him for months to do a trip for your birthday, he finally agrees. and well, he fucks you till you see stars. happy birthday to you.
trigger warnings: age gap (reader in her early 20s, joel in his 40s), fluff, oral sex (m!receiving), light spanking, fingering, praise kink, breeding kink, degrading kink
words: around 2k? (didn't count them)
a/n: hey guys!! sorry for the later update. sorry if this oneshot seems rushed, but i was very busy the last couple of days. I will also be on vacation for the next three weeks, so sorry if it will be a little quiet on here. hope you still like it!
finally.
finally he agreed to this.
even if it was just a two day roadtrip, you fought for it for months, trying to convince him to do something with you. not just, sneaking behind your dad's back, spending the night. maybe a weekend.
he said it's not right. shouldn't be away for so long. could be obvious.
but, here you are.
sitting next to him in his truck, driving through texas.
you have been sneaking around with joel for about six months now. but you have already known him for way longer.
your dad moved to this neighborhood around six years ago. freshly divorced from your mom. you, just fifteen, somehow trying to cope and deal with everything. you had your troubles settling in, your dad didn't. he became friends with joel pretty quickly. and eventually turned best friends.
you've seen him around a bunch, but well, never really cared. that was until you turned nineteen. you remember the moment exactly.
you were at a party. drank a little. there was this guy. he was checking you out, you knew him from school.
you know it was stupid, but you were thinking whatever. you feel like everybody already had a boyfriend or something. so you made out with him. but it quickly turned into something you did not want.
his hands in places where you did not want them to be, while he pushed you into a corner. you quickly panicked, but thanks to your self defense classes, you kicked him into his balls and left.
you knew you couldn't call your dad because he would ground you for months, besides that you already just got into college. he would be raving mad. so, you called joel.
he didn't question it. he didn't say anything. just showed up with his truck and picked you up. muttered something about how you should try to be responsible and not do stupid things like this.
but besides the light scolding, he noticed.
noticed how your breath was still uneven. you fidgeting with your hands. you didn't need to say anything, but he understood. could figure.
that night, he hold your hand the entire time on the drive back.
and from then, well. he started to care and you did either. maybe a little too much than you should.
you started to hang out with him. randomly showing up at his doorstep when your dad wasn't home or took his afternoon nap.
it was comforting. he was comfort.
but besides that, you started to notice his hands. arms. eyes. nose. back. shoulders.
fucking everything about him made you blush. or stare. or nearly drool.
you thought it's just a stupid crush. besides, he's 36 and over 10 years older than you are. plus, he's your dad's best friend.
so. there's no way he would ever like you back.
so you thought.
another year and a half passed.
now, you were twenty. still, nothing happend. you kept that stupid crush to yourself.
but one night, you sneaked over to his place. you had a stupid argument with your dad. you a ticking bomb. and to your surprise, joel did not make it better that night. said, you couldn't come over anymore that often. should talk to your old man instead of him. sort things out.
voices were raised. things were said.
you asked him why. and he said
"because i see how you look at me. and i can not stand the fact bein' in your presence and not be able to—"
he didn't finish the sentence. didn't need to. then you kissed him. he did too. and well, kisses turned into more.
now, six months later. here you are. fucking your dad's best friend.
to you, it was more than fucking. you loved him. god, you fell for him so hard. but you weren't official or anything. never talked about it. joel didn't either.
but, now for your 21st birthday, he finally agreed to doing something with you. alone.
and now, you're on this roadtrip.
you were singing out loud to a song in the car. windows rolled down. wind blowing through your hair.
you knew joel was rolling his eyes at you. but you also knew he smirked.
"y're impossible, y'know that", he mumbles under his breath with a light chuckle.
"oh? am i now? look, sorry i am just enjoying the ride and can not sit in silence", you remark teasingly.
joel just rolls his eyes.
"ugh, you're so judgy", you mumble under your breath as you lean over to him, placing your hand on his upper thigh to support yourself on it a little before you place a soft kiss on his cheek.
yes. of course you knew what you were doing with your hand placement.
and he noticed either.
"gotta concentrate on drivin', love", he reminds you. "don't get any thoughts"
you just chuckle, roll your eyes and sit back down on your seat. for now.
you both did not really exactly knew where you were going. you didn't at least. joel said he'll just take you some places.
"you do know that today's my birthday, right?", you remind him some time later. you knew that he knew. this was just to.. well, tease him.
for him to keep in mind to maybe let you get away with your teasing either.
"i do. ya' made damn sure i do", he answers in his thick southern accent. no further reaction.
you sigh dramatically. "well, where are we goin'?"
"you'll see.", he answers simply.
you'll see??? really?
this is like the worst sentence for him to say to you. especially you. the most impatient and nosy person on earth.
you sigh dramatically again.
"fine..", you breath out under your breath.
another half an hour passes by. you were now in the back seat, laying back there, reading a book.
you got bored eventually. you sigh softly. the book resting on your chest while you watch joel.
his side profile.
and there is the tingle between your legs already.
you slowly lift up your leg, touching his head with your foot softly, running over his shoulder, then his hair. teasing.
he didn't react. just gave you a quick glance into the front mirror to look at you, then looked at the road ahead again.
it was silent now. the radio playing very silently in the background while you climbed back in front. nobody talked. you just leaned over and started to unbuckle his belt.
joel started to get uneasy. his breath hitches slightly.
"darlin'", he warns.
but you ignore it. you open his zipper, and start to rub your hand over his boxers, right over his thick cock, which was already getting half-hard by your touch.
"not now.", he warns again. but he knew you were not listening.
you pulled down his boxers, grabbed his half-hard cock in your hand and pulled it out. just enough for you to reach.
"fuckin' hell- i said not no-", you cut him off by your mouth wrapping around his tip. you take a long lick from down to up, before wrapping your already wet lips around his thick length.
he groans, cursing under his breath. his hand finds your hair, grabbing it to guide you, while he kept his eyes on the road.
"ya' never listen, do you—", he growls as you shove his length down your throat as well as the current situation allows, beginning to move your head up and down.
you already feel some pre-cum on your tounge as he guides you a little faster.
"so fuckin— desperate for my cock— my girl can not even be patient- fuck", his breaths get faster. his grip around the steering wheel harder.
your eyes start to get blurry from some tears while not able to properly gasp for air. you want to make him cum in your mouth. already soaked during that.
"there ya go— good girl- just keep going like that", he praises you while gasping after air more.
his cock starts to twitch in your mouth. so, you keep going. flicking your tounge at his tip just right, sucking at the right moment and—
you feel his warm cum fill up your mouth just right as he groans, pushing up his hip just a little.
he was out of breath as you release his dick out of your mouth with a pop-sound. proudly swallowing down his cum and wiping your mouth with the back of the hand, while smiling at him
"you are out of your mind, young lady", he just says out of breath.
it turned dark already. you took a small nap but woke up from feeling the truck stopping.
as you yawn while opening your eyes, joel gets out of the car. "come on'", he just grumbles.
you smile softly, stepping out of the truck.
as you walk towards him, rubbing your eyes, you suddenly notice where you were standing.
up on a hill, able to look down on the beautiful countryside of texas.
and then, the sky.
the starts shining down on you, looking so beautiful since the sky is so clear.
"this is—", you breath out as you turn around to face joel.
he stand behind you, holding up a small candle.
"happy birthday'— know i ain't got a cake or anythin' but-", you cut him off immediately.
this was so sweet. so fucking sweet.
you immediately wrap your arms around his neck and fall into his arms, nearly jumping on him as you hug him.
"okay okay— easy girl", he chuckles.
his chuckle. gosh, it makes your heart jump.
you just look at him. your smile so bright, before you slam your lips on his.
not for lust. at least not yet. but for gratefulness. full of love.
"this is beautiful joel..", you whisper, already threatening to tear up.
his eyes soften.
"okay- no need to cry now— blow out your candle, love", he smiles and holds up the candle.
you knew he hates to see you cry. because it does just something to him.
you smile softly, closing your eyes, making your wish and you blowing out the candle.
even if joel was convinced he is not a romantic— he fucking is.
he set up blankets and all that stuff on the back of his truck, so you could watch the stars. the weather was just perfect either.
you were laying in his arms. listening to his heartbeat while you looked up in the sky
you wish you could stay like this forever with him. not hide. just.. be together.
"ya' know, my old man used to take me here. after we went hunting, and if he was in a good mood.. we went up here and just..", he suddenly says quietly. "just hope ya' like it here as much as i do"
joel never really did talk about his childhood. you just know it wasn't easy.
you prop your head up on your elbow, as you look at him, brushing your hand over his cheek.
"thank you, joel. truly. i mean it. for taking me to such a special place. this is the best birthday ever", you say like you mean it.
and you do.
he looks at you. truly does. then smiles, before you both loose yourself in a kiss.
you love this man to death.
after joel being sentimental, what he usually is not—
he was now on top of you, kissing down your neck while peeling of that sundress you were wearing.
as you were whimpering, his hands grab your breasts, softly running his thumb over your nipple.
"my beautiful girl..-", he whispers into your ear as his hand moves down between your thighs immediately. his hand runs over your soaked panties.
"fuck— look at you hm, already that wet for me?", he growls. you blush.
his fingers wrap around your waistband and pull them down. you gasp as the cold summer air hit against the hotness between your legs.
he slides two fingers in you, immediately crooking them just right to get to that one spot.
you moan, arching your back in response.
"oh joel—", you whimper as he starts to move his fingers inside of you. you can hear his fingers pump into you through that wetness.
"god baby, you already startin' to clench around my fingers", he chuckles teasingly.
yes. you were pretty fucking horny. you could already just cum to his voice at that point.
he pumps them in and out of you a few times more, before pulling them out completely. you let out a whine in response.
"nuh-uh, none of this.", he immediately correctes.
"please joel— i need you inside of me— fuck please", you beg. your pussy was currently clenching around nothing. that needed to change.
he gets off the back of the truck, pulls you at the edge of it and flips you on your stomach.
"so fuckin' impatient— but the birthday girl will get what she wants..", he mutters in his deep voice while you heard his belt unbuckle.
you bite down on your lip. giggling quietly.
"gonna fuck you till you see your own fuckin' stars", he growls as he positions himself behind you, pressing against your entrance.
no prep. just thrusts right into you.
you yelp, arching your back in response as he grabbed your hair, keeping that back arched.
"ya' want me to go slow or—"
"fuck me joel— just please— rough— hard-", you blabber, not even letting him finish.
you were so fucking desperate. it's not even funny.
you hear his deep chuckle, before he immediately starts to thrust into you.
his thick cock stretches you perfectly. the sound of skin slapping together echoed into the quiet night, followed by your moans and his groans.
"so fucking tight—", he groans as he delivers a sharp spank onto your ass, which makes you jump.
"my beautiful little birthday girl— taking me so well—", he talks you through it. he always does.
it didn't take long until you were clenching around him. "joel— im gonna cum-", you moan loudly, and then, you just do.
your body shatters, you roll your eyes back, clenching around joel just right, which could make him cum either— but
he didn't let you catch your breath. he pulled out of you, flipped you around and thrusts into you again.
you let out a scream at this point. "joel— i can't tak-"
"you can.", he just cuts you off while he keeps you spread open. his hands wrap around your hip, keeping you still.
you were a fucking mess.
"joel—", you whimper. tears started welling up in your eyes from the pleasure and the overstimulation.
his one hand goes down between your legs, his thumb meeting your clit, rubbing it in sync to his thrusts.
"gonna make you cum again— want you to cum right fucking now", he growls as his breaths get heavier.
you felt it. clenching around him again, your body tensing up, your toes curling.
and you do.
another wave of pleasure follows right after, clenching around him just right—
he shatters. you gasp as you feel his warm cum feeling you up. his cock twitching inside of you.
you were looking up in the sky as you were catching your breath.
Summary: With all the action behind you and an eternity ahead, Max and you have to figure out what's next. Well after the sex that is...
Warnings: domestic!Max, soft and caring Max that teaches you the pros of vampire sex, pinv (unprotected, because vampires cannot get STDs, didnt you know?)
Previous Chapter
Story Masterlist | my Pedro-Character-Masterlist
The softness with which Max touched you nearly undid you more effectively than the violence of the entire night ever could have.
Steam curled through the dim bathroom in pale ribbons, fogging the mirror and softening the sharp outlines of everything around you.
You stood beneath the steady warmth of the shower with your eyes half closed, letting the water pour over skin that still did not entirely feel like yours. Your ruined Halloween pajamas and bloodstained underwear lay discarded somewhere in the shadows beyond the tub, forgotten, while diluted streaks of red spiraled slowly toward the drain beneath your feet.
Max stood in front of you. Fully dressed and completely drained as well.
At first he had remained outside the stream of water, sleeves rolled up as he carefully cleaned the blood from your arms and face, but the awkward angle had eventually earned a quiet sigh from him before he had simply stepped fully clothed into the shower beside you.
Now his dark shirt clung heavily to his body, soaked through completely, his curls hanging wet against his forehead while pink-tinted water traced down the sharp lines of his throat.
You watched him in near disbelief as he moved the washcloth gently across your skin.
There was something deeply unsettling about how someone capable of tearing a man apart with his bare hands could touch you with such impossible care. Every movement of his was so patient, almost reverent, as though he feared you might crack apart beneath too much pressure.
Part of you suspected you already had.
The warmth of the water only made the coldness beneath your skin more noticeable. You could feel it now in quiet moments, the subtle wrongness of your body - your heartbeat absent, your breathing optional and your senses stretched too far beyond what should have been natural.
“When does it stop feeling strange?” your voice was barely audible beneath the water.
Max’s hand slowed instantly where the cloth moved over your shoulder. He dragged it lightly along your collarbone before lowering it entirely, his gaze lifting to yours.
“When do I feel like myself again?” you clarified quietly.
For a moment something painfully tender crossed his expression. Not pity exactly. Something sadder than that.
“You don’t,” he admitted softly. “Not completely. It changes eventually, though. Becomes... something else. Something you learn to live as.”
You lowered your gaze, absorbing the answer without really knowing what to do with it. Then, after a second, you reached for the cloth in his hand. Your fingers brushed, and Max’s expression softened further as you carefully began wiping the remaining blood from his face instead.
“If it helps,” he murmured, leaning almost unconsciously into your touch, “you still feel like you to me.”
To your own surprise, the words eased something inside you.
You decided not to linger there emotionally before you drowned in it entirely.
“Here,” you muttered instead, tugging lightly at the soaked fabric plastered to his chest. “Help me with that.”
A grin immediately tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Second time tonight you are trying to undress me.”
You flicked water at him in response. “Just trying to keep things fair.”
His laugh rumbled low in his chest as he peeled the shirt over his head and tossed it carelessly onto the floor outside the shower. Water rolled over bare skin and the fading marks where bullets had nearly ended him only hours ago. Your gaze dropped there instinctively while you ran the cloth carefully across the healed wounds, fingertips trailing after the movement.
“Better?” he asked knowingly, one arm braced against the tile beside your head.
“Much,” you admitted, entirely unapologetic.
The cloth drifted lower toward the waistband of his pants more out of instinct than intention.
Max’s eyes darkened with amusement. “Say no more, sweetheart.”
The nickname settled warmly beneath your ribs, familiar enough to make you smile despite yourself. He pushed away from the wall long enough to undo the button and zipper before stepping out of the drenched fabric, leaving it abandoned beside the rest of your ruined clothes.
You barely had time to properly look at him before he crowded close again, pressing you gently back against the cool tile. You remembered him perfectly from the night you had spent together before everything shattered apart, but now every sensation arrived heightened, sharpened nearly unbearably by what you had become. His warmth. His scent. The solid weight of him against you.
When he finally kissed you, it hit like drowning.
Your arms slid instinctively around his neck, fingers disappearing into wet curls as you pulled him closer. The restraint dissolved quickly, mouths parting, breaths mingling even though neither of you truly needed them anymore.
“We should sleep,” he managed eventually between kisses, voice rough and low against your mouth. “We’re exhausted.”
You laughed breathlessly against his lips. “Who says I’m staying here?”
You felt his smirk before you saw it. “Good luck finding sleep in your own bedroom without blackout curtains then.”
Before you could answer, he reached behind you to shut off the water entirely. The sudden absence of sound left only the quiet drip of water and your uneven breathing filling the bathroom. Then, without warning, Max lifted you effortlessly from the tub.
You instinctively wrapped your legs around his waist, looking down at him through damp strands of your hair.
“Then at least -” you started.
Max cut you off with another kiss, deeper this time, his forehead briefly resting against yours afterward while his voice dropped into something almost wrecked.
“For the love of God, Ashley,” he murmured against your mouth, “stop talking and let me fuck you.”
Their first time together had been born from tension sharp enough to cut through skin, from suspicion and adrenaline and weeks of resisting.
This felt entirely different.
The apartment remained wrapped in darkness, every curtain drawn tight against the full morning while the city beyond the windows slowly drifted toward another ordinary day. Max carried you through the quiet flat without hurry, his hands steady beneath you as though he feared rushing even this. When he lowered you onto the sheets of his bed, you barely had time to settle before your fingers curled into him again, pulling him down into another lingering kiss.
And for once, Max let the moment breathe.
There was no urgency in the way he touched you now. No frantic edge beneath it. Instead he moved with impossible patience, as though relearning you slowly mattered more than anything else in the world.
You lay back against the pillows while he kissed his way across your skin with deliberate care, starting at your mouth before wandering over your jaw.
When his lips brushed the thin pink line along your throat where Torres had slit it open only hours ago, something in his expression softened almost painfully. He lingered there longer than anywhere else, pressing slow kisses over the scar as if affection alone could somehow erase the memory carved into your body.
Then he continued downward.
His mouth trailed across your collarbones, over the curve of your chest, the faint scrape of his beard against sensitive skin making you shiver beneath him. Warmth pooled low in your stomach while his kisses traveled lower still with maddening slowness until he reached your side and you jerked with sudden laughter.
“Good to know,” you gasped between giggles, twisting slightly beneath him, “that being ticklish is still a thing.”
Max grinned against your skin, the expression warm and entirely too pleased with himself. “Oh yes, heightened senses are definitely an upgrade for your sexlife.”
His mouth wandered lower again, lingering at your hipbones while his hands slid beneath your legs, drawing you closer to him inch by inch. You propped yourself slightly on your elbows to look down at him, damp hair spilling around your shoulders while anticipation flickered openly across your face now.
“You’re making some very ambitious promises,” you warned lightly.
Max answered with that familiar boyish grin that always looked dangerously out of place on someone capable of so much violence.
“Sweetheart,” he murmured against the inside of your thigh, voice roughened by amusement and want alike, “trying to work on the promises I make.”
You snorted softly at that, though the sound dissolved quickly into a shaky exhale when his tongue wandered over your center and gave your clit a teasing flick.
“You’re ridiculous,” you breathed.
“Mm.” His eyes lifted briefly to yours, gold catching gold in the dim room. “But rarely disappointing.”
Your fingers tightened in his curls the moment he shifted against you, but instead of letting him disappear between your thighs again, you tugged him insistently upward. He gave you two more slow strokes with his tongue, enough to make your breath hitch and your stomach tighten around the anticipation already coiling there, before he finally surrendered to the pull of your hands.
You wriggled beneath him, sliding lower against the sheets until you could cup both of his shoulders properly, your palms warm against damp skin as you drew him back over your body.
“Kiss me,” you breathed, the plea leaving your lips with such fragile urgency that it almost sounded painful. “Please.”
Max did not smirk this time or tease you for begging. Something in your voice stripped the humor clean out of him. He simply came back to you instantly, bracing himself above you as his body pressed fully against yours, all heat and muscle and the lingering scent of soap, water and blood still trapped faintly in his curls.
One hand slid beneath your neck while the other cupped the side of your face, thumb brushing along your cheek as he kissed you with a slowness that captivated you more effectively than anything rough ever could have.
Your hands wandered restlessly across his shoulders, down the broad line of his back. Your fingernails dragged lightly over him and a low rumble vibrated through Max’s chest at the sensation, swallowed between your mouths as the kiss deepened. You could feel the hard length of his cock pressing against your pelvis and every slow roll of his hips against you sent another pulse of need spiraling low through your stomach.
“I need you, Max,” you whispered.
The words surprised even you. It was not simply lust clawing through your body, although there was plenty of that too. It was deeper, rawer, as if something fundamental inside you had cracked open the moment you died and only now, here beneath him, it began stitching itself together again. The hunger, the rage, the grief, the disorientation of becoming something new - it all quieted when he touched you like this.
“I got you,” he murmured against your lips.
The words were quiet, but you felt the weight behind them. Felt it in the way he kissed you again like he was trying to pour every unspoken thing into your mouth instead. Your legs parted instinctively beneath him as his hand drifted lower between you. He stroked through your slickness once, twice, and the small sound that escaped you at the sensation made something heated flash across his face.
Then he guided himself into you.
No rough thrust, no sudden claiming. Just a steady push that stole the breath from both of you. You arched beneath him immediately, welcoming him with a softness that made Max’s eyes close briefly as he bottomed out inside you inch by inch. Your warmth surrounded him completely, tight and impossibly addictive, and for one suspended moment neither of you moved at all.
Max opened his eyes again only to find you staring back at him with an expression so open it nearly hurt to look at.
“This is…” you exhaled shakily, your brows knitting together in disbelief as one leg wrapped tighter around his hip, drawing him impossibly closer. “…something else.”
A quiet laugh escaped him, rough around the edges. “Told you.”
He rolled his hips once, slow enough to make your mouth fall open against his shoulder. Your fingers dug into his back immediately, your entire body reacting before your mind could catch up.
“Holy fu-”
“There’s nothing holy about this, love,” Max murmured against your jaw before kissing his way down your throat again.
Then he began to move properly, setting a rhythm that was neither hurried nor gentle enough to spare you, and you could only cling to him as the world narrowed entirely to the feeling of him inside you.
Max felt the shudder move through you the instant he pressed deeper, your muscles tightening around him in uneven pulses that made restraint suddenly feel like the hardest thing he had ever attempted.
You buried your face against the curve of his throat as though grounding yourself there, your breath hot against his skin, little broken sounds slipping from your lips every time his hips rolled into yours again.
He had spent decades existing with heightened senses, decades learning how overwhelming pleasure could become for his kind, but this was different. Nothing in all those years compared to the way you felt beneath him now, every reaction amplified until it nearly drowned him in it.
He forced himself to keep the pace steady despite the instinct clawing at him to lose control completely. It was too intoxicating watching you come apart like this, watching tension melt from your body. Your fingers dragged helplessly over his shoulders and back while your thighs tightened around his waist as if you physically could not pull him close enough.
“Max…” His name left you in a breathless wreck of a sound, barely coherent, but he already knew. He could feel it in the way your body clenched around him, in the sharp hitch of your movements whenever he drove into you just right.
His hand slid into your hair, easing your head back enough so he could look at you properly. Your pupils were blown wide open in the darkness, lips parted, cheeks flushed despite the coldness that now lived beneath your skin.
“That’s it, sweetheart,” he murmured, his voice rougher than before. “Don’t hold back. Let me feel you.”
He pressed into you again, deeper this time, his chest slick against yours from the steam and lingering heat still clinging to both of you. For one irrational second he wanted to taste every inch of you all over again, wanted to chase the salt on your skin with his tongue just because he could. Instead he kept his gaze locked onto yours, completely consumed by the sight of you unraveling beneath him.
You could no longer separate sensation from thought. Everything blurred together into overwhelming warmth and motion and him. Since waking into this new existence, every emotion had been too sharp, every sound too loud, every instinct too violent, but this eclipsed all of it entirely.
It flooded through you like light breaking through deep water, burning away the cold that had settled inside you since the moment you died. Your hips rocked against his instinctively and when his lips crashed against yours again, the moan caught in your throat dissolved into the kiss as the orgasm finally tore through you.
The force of it nearly dragged Max under with you.
A breathless laugh escaped him, half disbelief and half pure overwhelm, because seeing you like this - open, trusting, completely lost in him - felt dangerously close to happiness.
The devotion in the way you clung to him shattered whatever restraint he had left. He buried himself deeper inside you as his own release hit moments later, his forehead pressed against yours while both of you struggled to catch breaths neither technically needed.
For a long moment neither of you moved. The city outside remained distant and muted beyond the blackout curtains while the room settled into silence broken only by the occasional creak of the old building and the soft drag of your skin against tangled sheets.
Max stayed above you until your trembling eased, brushing his thumb lazily across your cheek as your eyes fluttered open again.
You blinked up at him dazedly before a slow grin tugged at your mouth.
“Okay,” you murmured hoarsely, “that definitely belongs on the pro side of becoming a vampire.”
Max laughed softly against your lips, relief loosening something tight in his chest at the sound of you joking about any of this. “Yeah, that was a first for me, too.”
He rolled onto his side then, immediately pulling you with him so you stayed tucked against his body. One arm wrapped securely around your waist while he scattered absentminded kisses along your shoulder and the back of your neck, unwilling to stop touching you now that he finally could again.
You caught his forearm and tugged it tighter around yourself before twisting slightly to look back at him, amusement glittering in your tired expression.
“So,” you said lightly, “does this mean I’ve popped your vampire-sex cherry?”
Max buried his grin briefly against your shoulder. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Turns out I’ve been seriously missing out.”
Your laugh came softer this time, heavy with exhaustion finally creeping in now that the adrenaline and hunger had faded. You settled back against him fully, eyes drifting closed as you relaxed into the mattress and his warmth behind you.
“Well,” you mumbled sleepily, “good thing we’ve apparently got eternity to practice.”
A quiet chuckle vibrated through his chest. “Something tells me my nights are about to get a lot busier.”
“Obviously,” you murmured. “You’re the one stuck teaching me vampire survival now.”
The teasing faded slightly from his expression at that. His fingers brushed slowly over your arm before he spoke again, quieter this time.
“Would you actually let me do that?” he asked. “Help you through all of this?”
You gave a tired hum that bordered on a laugh. “Considering you dragged me into this mess?” Your hand found his beneath the blanket, squeezing lightly. “Yeah, Max. Least you can do.”
His eyes closed at that, forehead resting briefly against the back of your shoulder. “Careful,” he murmured. “You keep sounding forgiving and I might start believing I deserve it.”
Outside, day slowly overtook the city in brightening light, while inside the darkened apartment two exhausted vampires finally allowed themselves the first real rest either of them had found in a very long time.
Summary: It is a long way back to Brooklyn but time flies when you have entertainment. Max tells you about his most memorable nights after you both survived the last one.
Warnings: just fluff and banter and due to your appearance still mention of blood
Previous Chapter
Story Masterlist | my Pedro-Character-Masterlist
You should have been falling apart.
By every rational standard, you knew that. The last forty-eight hours had ripped your life apart piece by piece and stitched it back together into something unrecognizable. You had been abducted by your partner, murdered by someone you trusted, turned into a creature you still barely understood, and forced to kill a man you had once admired. Somewhere in between all of that, your entire understanding of the world had collapsed beyond repair.
And yet none of those emotions sat at the forefront in this moment.
Instead you sat beside Max on the rocky shoreline with your fingers loosely tangled through his while laughter kept slipping out of your chest in helpless bursts as he told you about some vampire he had apparently met in the early two-thousands.
“I’m serious,” Max insisted with complete sincerity. “The guy chipped both his fangs in a motorcycle accident outside Vegas. Completely ruined his life.”
You looked at him in disbelief. “You’re telling me there’s a vampire out there surviving exclusively on stolen blood bags because he face-planted off a Harley?”
“He didn’t face-plant,” Max corrected immediately. “He got hit with a folding chair during a bar fight with motorcyclists.”
“That somehow makes it more pathetic.” You laughed again, louder this time, the sound carrying out across the water while dawn slowly crept over the horizon behind you. Max watched you with an expression you pretended not to notice, something softer than amusement lingering in his tired features.
“There are actual people who need those donations, you know,” you said, trying and failing to sound scandalized through your grin.
“So does he,” Max shot back defensively. “Poor bastard couldn’t even bite into an apple anymore. Had to drink everything through straws since then.”
You shook your head, still smiling as you blinked against the changing sky overhead. You hadn’t even realized how much time had passed until now. The blackness of night had begun dissolving into muted shades of violet and gray, the first pale traces of dawn slowly bleeding into the edges of the world.
For a moment you simply stared at it.
The sunrise.
Or at least the beginning of one.
A strange sadness settled in your chest at the realization that this might become the last one you would ever comfortably witness.
Beside you, Max hissed quietly under his breath.
“This,” he muttered, squinting toward the brightening horizon, “is about to become a problem.”
Your head snapped toward him immediately, genuine alarm flashing across your face. “Hey, you specifically told me sunlight doesn’t kill us.”
“It doesn’t,” he assured you quickly. “But there’s a difference between surviving daylight and enjoying it.”
You remembered then. Every forced daytime meeting you’d had before all of this. The sunglasses. The headaches. The irritation hidden beneath his sarcasm whenever sunlight got too harsh.
“You’re feeling fit enough to move?” you asked, your gaze instinctively flicking over the places Torres had shot him.
Max stretched slightly with an exaggerated groan. “Depends.”
“On?”
“How committed are you to carrying me all the way back to Brooklyn?”
You snorted immediately as you pushed yourself upright, still refusing to let go of his hand and therefore forcing him to rise with you. “Absolutely zero chance.”
“Cruel woman.”
“Get moving, grandpa. Before you burst into flames dramatically.”
He grumbled something under his breath about disrespecting elders while you brushed dirt and loose gravel from your clothes.
You had already turned toward the path leading back through the field when Max’s hand suddenly tightened around your wrist, gentle but enough to stop you.
You turned back toward him instinctively, caught off guard by the sudden closeness as he stepped nearer.
For one suspended moment, uncertainty curled low in your stomach.
Because you knew what that look could mean.
And you weren’t entirely sure yet where your boundaries with him existed now. You had allowed closeness tonight, yes. Allowed comfort. Allowed him beside you despite everything. But a kiss felt different somehow.
Your gaze flicked briefly to his mouth before returning to his eyes.
Max, however, only studied your face for a second before reaching up to brush strands of hair away from your cheek, his finger dragging lightly through one of the dried streaks still staining your skin.
“I think,” he murmured softly, “we should probably wash some of the blood off our faces before rejoining civilization.”
You stared at him for a second longer than necessary.
And suddenly you had a clear answer on what you wanted him to do.
Max wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the expression on your face.
There had been something soft in your eyes for a second too long, something that made him painfully aware of how close you stood. Rather than testing whatever fragile line existed between you though, he simply guided you down toward the water instead, both of you crouching near the edge to wash the remaining blood from your skin as best you could.
The harbor water was freezing against his fingers.
You hissed under your breath the second another streak of pale morning light spread over the horizon. “Jesus Christ,” you muttered, shielding your eyes as you straightened again. “Why is it already so bright?”
Max glanced upward with an expression that mirrored your annoyance. Dawn had barely begun, the sky still painted mostly in deep blues and bruised purples, but already it felt offensively sharp against heightened senses.
“There goes my dream vacation to the Maldives,” you groaned.
Max let out a dry chuckle while rubbing at one eye. “Yeah, tropical islands are probably off the table now. On the upside, I hear Scandinavia is beautiful six months out of the year.”
You barely seemed to hear him. You squinted around the waterfront like someone developing the world’s worst migraine, jaw tightening more with every passing second.
Max was just about to suggest you start heading home before the sunlight got worse when you suddenly turned on your heel and started marching back up the slope toward the trail.
“Ashley - hey.” He stumbled after you instinctively.
You lifted one hand without even looking back, stopping him immediately. “Stay here. I’ll be back in a minute.”
And somehow, absurdly, that was enough.
Max watched you disappear over the rise and felt absolutely no fear that you wouldn’t return.
A few hours ago he would have. A few hours ago he would have expected you to vanish into the city and never look back. But now?
Now you had sat beside him through the entire night. You had held his hand. Saved his life. Laughed with him under the stars.
So he stayed where he was.
The shoreline had become almost peaceful in the growing dawn, the dark water shifting in slow silver ripples beneath the pale sky. Max tipped his head back and took a long unnecessary breath, eyes closing briefly against the cold breeze rolling in from the bay.
Never in thirty years of undeath could he have imagined a night ending like this.
Not after Torres. Not after your death. Not after the look you had given him when you walked out of his apartment hours ago, furious and shattered and certain he had destroyed your life.
And yet somehow you had ended up here instead.
He was still trying to process that impossible fact when movement caught his eye again.
You came jogging back down the hill toward him, slightly out of breath now, a wide grin spreading across your face. Something dangled from one hand as you closed the distance between you.
Max blinked once before barking out a laugh.
“Oh no.”
You held them up triumphantly: two of the ugliest pairs of sunglasses he had ever seen in his entire existence. One pair looked aggressively neon. The other resembled something a retired marathon runner would wear during a midlife crisis.
“They absolutely will not be joining my collection,” Max informed you solemnly while taking the less horrifying pair.
“They better,” you shot back, still breathless. “Do you have any idea how hard it is convincing random joggers to hand over their sunglasses to a woman covered in blood?”
Max slid the glasses onto his face and immediately winced at the design. “You forgot to mention the Halloween pajama pants. That probably complicated negotiations.”
You looked down at yourself before glaring at him over the oversized frames now perched on your nose. “I’m sorry, are you giving me fashion advice while dressed like a divorcee from 1995?”
Max grinned despite himself.
And as the first real sunlight finally began breaking over the horizon behind you, while that reluctant smile still lingered on your mouth, he realized with painful clarity that he wanted nothing more than to kiss you again.
The city had always known how to look away from people who appeared a little broken around the edges. In a place like New York, bloodstains, exhaustion and strange behavior barely ranked high enough to earn more than a passing glance, especially not in the gray-blue hour between night and morning when the first commuters drifted through the streets half awake and wrapped tightly in their own lives.
A few people looked twice as you and Max emerged from Church Avenue station, but nobody stopped you. Nobody asked questions. A woman in scrubs hurried past with coffee in hand. A delivery driver cursed at his phone. Somewhere farther down the block, metal shutters rattled open for the beginning of another ordinary day.
Beside you, Max adjusted the atrocious sunglasses perched on his nose and glanced over with the faintest trace of amusement. “Wish I’d brought my camera,” he said with a grin. “This whole look we’ve got going on deserves documentation.”
You peered at him over the rim of your borrowed glasses and instantly regretted it as the early dawn stabbed into your eyes like needles.
“Trust me,” you muttered, squinting hard. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget this night even without photos.”
Even sitting across from him in the nearly empty subway car earlier had felt surreal enough to burn itself permanently into your memory. You had occupied opposite benches in silence for stretches at a time, the train rattling beneath you while fluorescent lights flickered overhead. Max had lounged back, arms stretched casually across the backs of the seats, ankle resting atop one knee with effortless confidence that should have looked ridiculous considering the state he was in.
Instead, it had only made him look more himself.
His curls were stiff with dried blood. The fabric of his shirt had been torn open where the bullets had hit him, stained brown-red and ruined beyond saving. There were shadows beneath his eyes that no healing could erase immediately, and yet he had still carried himself with that same infuriating ease, studying advertisements above the windows as if he hadn’t nearly died only hours ago.
You had caught yourself staring longer than intended.
“Definitely top five most memorable nights,” Max pulled you from your thoughts.
You snorted softly while you crossed the quiet street toward your building. “Only top five?” you asked, walking backward for a few steps just to keep looking at him. “Wow. I’m offended.”
“What can I say?” Max lifted one shoulder. “LA was a deeply irresponsible place.”
“Before or after the vampire thing?”
“Both.”
You reached the front entrance first and leaned against the wall beside it while Max stepped close enough for the scent of him to wrap around you again, warm despite the cold morning air. He pulled his keys free, caging you loosely between himself and the door without seeming fully aware he was doing it. Or maybe entirely aware.
At this distance you could see the tiny cuts already healed across his face, the faint exhaustion still lingering around his mouth, the way dawn light softened the sharper edges of him. Your gaze dipped briefly to his lips before you could stop yourself.
“Need to hear your top five now, obviously,” you said, and hated how breathless your voice sounded.
The lock clicked open beneath his hand.
“Oh, easy.” His grin deepened as he nudged the door inward. “Fifth place definitely goes to a house party in 1978 where somebody accidentally set an indoor fountain on fire.”
You blinked. “You can’t set water on fire.”
“That was also my understanding at the time,” Max replied solemnly as you stepped into the dim stairwell. “Turns out cocaine and homemade electrical wiring can achieve incredible things.”
A laugh escaped you before you could stop it, echoing softly up the stairs.
Max glanced back over his shoulder, satisfaction flickering briefly across his face before he continued upward beside you. “Anyway, by two in the morning somebody had stolen a police horse, there was a drummer passed out in a bathtub full of oranges, and I distinctly remember escaping through a window because the host’s girlfriend tried to stab me with a fondue fork.”
You stared at him in disbelief. “That sounds made up.”
“It absolutely does,” he agreed. “Which is why it only made fifth place.”
“What’s fourth place?” you asked as you climbed the stairs, nearly missing a step because you were too busy watching him instead of where you put your feet. Your hand caught the railing at the last second, and Max glanced back with immediate amusement.
“My turning, probably,” he answered after a moment of thought. “I don’t remember much of the actual event, but there was definitely a party involved. Feels wrong not to rank it somewhere.”
You hummed softly. The answer settled strangely inside your chest. The wound of your own turning still felt too fresh - too raw to touch directly - but you supposed he was right. Whether you liked it or not, that night would probably carve itself permanently into the architecture of your existence too.
“Fair enough,” you said quietly before forcing a lighter tone back into your voice. “Alright, then what’s third? And please tell me it involves less dying.”
Max laughed under his breath as you reached your floor. “No dying. Technically a felony, though.” He paused dramatically while fishing his keys from his pocket. “Me and a couple school friends broke into the zoo when I was maybe eight or nine. We stole a penguin.”
You stared at him. “You what?”
“I have to say he seemed excited to come with us.”
“That poor animal.”
Max opened the apartment door and held it for you with effortless familiarity - and equally naturally you stepped inside without waiting to be invited.
“I’m telling you,” he continued while closing the door behind you, “I had a solid plan. We had a perfectly functional refrigerator.”
You kicked off your boots near the entrance and snorted softly. “Your mother must’ve loved you.”
“She threatened to send me back to the zoo with him.”
The warmth of the apartment wrapped around you instantly, dim and quiet compared to the cold dawn outside. You removed the hideous sunglasses with visible relief and wandered toward the small brass mirror hanging beside the door. In the softened light you could finally properly see yourself again: dried blood still shadowed the edge of your jaw despite your attempt to clean up by the water, your hair an unruly mess around tired golden eyes that no longer quite looked human.
Behind you, Max slipped off his coat, draping it over the back of a chair. His reflection appeared in the mirror a second later, close enough that you could feel his presence before he even spoke.
“So,” you murmured while rubbing at the stubborn stain on your skin, “tonight only gets second place?”
“It was a strong contender,” he admitted easily.
You looked at him through the mirror. “And first?”
For a second he simply watched you. Then his mouth curved slowly into that infuriatingly smug grin you already knew far too well.
“I assumed that one was obvious.”
You turned fully toward him, brows lifting in confusion as he stepped closer. The distance between you dissolved with dangerous ease until he stood directly in front of you again.
“You played a pretty significant role in it,” he said softly.
Realization hit you all at once, and a breathless laugh escaped before you could stop it. “Wow. That memorable, huh?”
“Life-changing, honestly.”
His hand lifted to cup your jaw, thumb brushing softly across clean skin this time instead of blood. The touch sent warmth unfurling low in your stomach so fast it almost startled you.
“Maybe my memory needs refreshing though,” he added, voice lower now, teasing threaded through the exhaustion.
Your pulse no longer existed, but your body still found ways to betray anticipation. “Remind me,” you whispered, “are there any more rules I should know about?”
Max leaned down slowly, lips ghosting against your cheek without quite kissing you, and goosebumps erupted along your arms instantly. He lingered there for a moment before stopping just shy of your mouth, his gaze fixed steadily on yours.
“Only one,” he murmured. “I’ve had enough blood for one night.”
His fingers slid gently through your tangled hair before he offered you the faintest smile.
Summary: Max and you need to have a talk. But before that you have to make sure Max lives long enough to survive it.
Warnings: after a good amount of blood and angst, lots of talking, a little more angst and some bantery fluff
Previous Chapter
Story Masterlist | my Pedro-Character-Masterlist
The sight unfolding before Max felt almost unreal, as though the pain hollowing him out had finally tipped him into hallucination.
He had seen and experienced hundreds of feeds. Frenzied hunts in filthy alleyways. Elegant seductions in velvet-lit penthouses. Brutal bitings fueled by starvation and instinct. He had participated in enough of them himself that blood and violence had long ago stopped carrying any illusion of divinity.
But this?
This felt biblical in the most unchristian way possible.
Through the haze crowding his vision, you remained impossibly clear. You knelt over Torres beneath the crimson rain, your teeth buried deep into his throat while blood streamed over both of you in dark rivulets.
Wet strands of hair clung to your cheeks and throat, framing a face that only moments ago had burned with rage so intense it seemed capable of setting the entire room ablaze.
Now all of that fury had dissolved.
What remained was something terrifyingly calm.
Your lashes rested low against your cheeks, expression softened into almost peaceful surrender as you drank. The violence existed only in the reality of what you were doing. In every other sense, you looked transcendent.
Max thought he had forgotten what awe felt like.
Apparently not.
Even with agony tearing through his side, even while blood soaked steadily through his fingers where he pressed uselessly against the gunshot wound, he could not drag his eyes away from you.
The moonlight spilling through the shattered windows overhead mixed with the red downpour until the entire gymnasium seemed suspended somewhere between dream and nightmare.
And at the center of it was you.
Beautiful enough to ruin him completely.
The realization settled heavily into his chest as his strength continued slipping away from him in slow, steady waves. Every movement hurt now. Every breath scraped through him hollow and wrong.
Torres’ traps had already left his senses battered and overloaded long before the bullets hit him, and now the blood loss dragged relentlessly at what little stability remained.
He somehow knew the feeling, inexplicably knew exactly what it meant.
The darkness gathering at the corners of his vision was no longer temporary.
Strangely, he found he did not fear it.
Not really.
Because despite everything, despite the betrayal in your eyes when you had walked out of his apartment, despite the certainty that whatever existed between you had shattered beyond repair… you were alive. Somehow.
Alive and strong and magnificent.
The devotion swelling painfully inside him nearly eclipsed the physical agony.
Because he knew in the same terrible instant that he had both saved you and lost you forever.
Max let his head tip weakly back against the soaked floor, his unfocused gaze still fixed on your shape across the room while his body gradually surrendered to exhaustion. Your name slipped from his lips almost soundlessly, carried more by feeling than breath.
“Ashley…”
The sound cut through the haze enveloping you instantly.
The bliss vanished.
One final swallow slid down your throat as Torres’ pulse stuttered and disappeared beneath your lips completely. His body slackened under your hands, emptied in every possible sense, and suddenly the intoxicating flood filling your system fractured apart beneath the quiet rasp of your own name.
You lifted your head sharply.
Blood stained your mouth, dark against your skin. Your pupils widened as you looked across the gym and saw Max curled against the floor several feet away, one arm stretched weakly toward you while the rest of him remained frighteningly still.
For one horrible second, he looked dead.
Ice flooded straight through you.
You were at Max’s side instantly, dropping hard to your knees and pulling him upright into your lap. His body felt heavy, lacking the impossible strength that had always seemed inseparable from him.
“Max?”
Your voice cracked harder than you intended. One hand slid against his cheek while the other steadied his head against your shoulder.
“Hey,” you snapped, panic sharpening the edges of your tone. “No. No, don’t do that.”
His eyes stayed shut.
You slapped his cheek lightly once, then again, fear rising fast enough to make your chest ache.
“Wake up.”
At last his eyelids fluttered weakly open.
Relief hit you so violently it almost made you dizzy.
“Don’t you dare pull this on me,” you hissed immediately, anger rushing in to cover the terror beneath it as you shifted him higher against you. “You don’t get to die before we have this conversation.”
A weak cough tore through him, followed by something that almost resembled a laugh.
“Honestly,” Max murmured hoarsely, “not convinced I’d survive that conversation anyway.”
You let out a breathless, bitter scoff.
“Yeah,” you muttered. “Me neither.”
Carefully, you slipped both arms beneath his and forced you both upright with unbalanced effort. Even with your new strength, stabilizing him proved awkward; Max half-collapsed against you immediately, one arm draped heavily across your shoulders while you adjusted to the unfamiliar balance of supporting someone who usually felt untouchable.
“But if anyone gets to kill you,” you said tightly as you staggered forward together, “it’s going to be me.” Your eyes flicked briefly toward Torres’ body lying motionless beneath the bloody rain. “Not him.”
An exhausted silence settled between you.
You guided the two of you slowly across the ruined gym floor while Max limped beside you, weaker with every step. The adrenaline that had carried you through the fight still thundered through your veins, making you feel almost invincible now, but beneath it all another emotion pressed harder against your ribs.
Grief.
Not for what you had done.
For who you had done it to.
“Are you okay?” Max’s voice had lost the humor entirely this time.
You shot him a look of disbelief. “You have at least two gunshot wounds,” you said flatly. “And you’re asking me that?”
But you understood immediately what he actually meant.
You passed Torres’s body and felt yourself swallow instinctively as your gaze caught on the stillness of him. Blood continued pooling slowly beneath his neck, diluted by the red rainwater flooding the floor.
Max watched you quietly.
“He deserved it,” you said at last, the words coming cold.
“Maybe,” Max answered softly. “Doesn’t mean it can’t hurt anyway.”
You stared ahead for a long moment.
Then finally you gave a small nod.
“No,” you admitted. “But it sure as hell makes it easier.”
Your grip tightened slightly around him before you forced yourself to look away from the corpse entirely.
“Come on,” you muttered. “Let’s get out of this godforsaken shithole.”
Max was not particularly light, but carrying him through the dark expanse of Floyd Bennett Field proved far less difficult than you would once have imagined. The fresh blood still humming through your system flooded your limbs with unnatural strength and relentless energy, smoothing over exhaustion before it could fully settle in.
The farther you moved from the building, the quieter the world became.
The old airfield stretched endlessly around you beneath the moonlight, all vast open paths and shadowed grasslands interrupted by skeletal remains of structures long abandoned to time.
Somewhere far in the distance, Brooklyn still existed - all its noise and movement and sleepless life somewhere beyond, but here at the edge of the borough, wrapped by dark water on nearly every side, the city felt impossibly far away.
Only the wind remained.
It swept softly through the empty recreational trails and rattled the tall grass lining the paths where joggers and dog walkers would return once morning arrived. For now, though, the darkness belonged solely to you both.
After everything that had happened inside the gymnasium, the silence felt surreal.
Peaceful, even.
You kept moving until the trail opened toward the waterfront. At last your legs gave out beneath the delayed strain of adrenaline and emotion, and you lowered both of you carefully onto the rocky shoreline near the water’s edge. Max exhaled sharply the second he sat down - pain pulling tight across his features despite the weak attempt he made to hide it.
The bay stretched out endlessly before you, black water rippling beneath fractured moonlight. Across the distance, faint lights shimmered along the far shoreline like scattered stars fallen onto earth.
The water lapped quietly against the shore only feet away, steady and rhythmic enough to almost resemble breathing.
But you had no eye for the eerie beauty of this nightly scenery. Your eyes were scanning Max.
“Show me.” The words came more as an order than a request, your hands already moving toward the blood soaking through his shirt.
Max managed the faintest crooked grin. “Wow,” he muttered weakly, “at least buy me dinner first.”
You shot him a glare so sharp it could have cut glass. “You want that engraved on your tombstone?” you asked flatly. “Because I can arrange it.”
His smile lingered despite the exhaustion dragging at him from every angle, but he obeyed. With your help, he peeled the ruined fabric away from his torso, revealing the wounds beneath.
Your expression tightened instantly.
The gunshots looked catastrophic.
One had torn through his side, jagged and blackened around the edges where whatever Torres had used had clearly done more damage than ordinary bullets ever could. The second sat frighteningly close to the center of his chest, blood still seeping sluggishly from the wound despite the healing already fighting to close it.
A human would have died instantly.
Max merely looked like he stood at death’s doorway arguing with it out of spite.
You swallowed hard.
“What do I do?” Your eyes snapped up to his. “Tell me how to fix this.”
Max leaned his head back slightly, exhaustion hollowing out the sharp lines of his face. In the moonlight, his skin looked almost translucent beneath the streaks of drying blood.
“I’d suggest praying,” he murmured. “Though God may be the wrong address.”
“There has to be something.” Frustration crept into your voice. “You said we heal.”
We.
The word slipped out before you could stop it and you felt it land between you immediately. Max noticed too. You saw it in the faint shift of his expression, something softer flickering briefly through the pain.
Still, he only sighed.
“Believe it or not,” he said, “this is my first time dying too.”
The attempt at humor barely masked the weakness in his voice.
Without thinking, you shifted closer when he sagged against you slightly.
You allowed the contact - his weight leaning into your side and the familiar scent of him wrapping around you despite everything that had happened between you.
The anger remained somewhere inside you. But right now, fear sat heavier.
Your gaze drifted toward the dark shoreline around you before an idea surfaced suddenly and violently enough to make you straighten.
“What if you feed?”
Max blinked slowly away from the empty waterfront, overlooking your surroundings.
“Unless I missed a very determined jogger,” he muttered, “I don’t see many options.”
You hesitated only briefly.
“You fed me,” you said carefully, your eyes returning to his. “Didn’t you?”
You did not know how you knew it with such certainty. The memory itself remained fractured and blurred by death and transformation, but something deeper inside you understood the truth instinctively.
Max’s expression shifted.
“Ashley -”
“So maybe…” Your non-existent pulse quickened despite itself. “Maybe it works both ways.”
He gathered enough strength to straighten slightly, one hand pressing harder against his wounded side.
“No.” His brows drew together immediately. “I’m not asking you for that.”
“You’re not asking.” Your voice sharpened. “I’m offering.”
The wind stirred your damp hair across your face as you looked back out toward the water briefly, gathering yourself before meeting his eyes again.
“Please,” you said more quietly now. “I really don’t want two deaths on my conscience tonight.”
For a moment he only stared at you.
Then finally - reluctantly - Max gave the smallest nod.
You moved closer until barely any space remained between you. You could feel the warmth radiating from him despite the blood loss, could smell him beneath the copper and salt and cold ocean air. Weakened or not, his presence still pulled at you with terrifying ease.
Holding his gaze, you lifted your wrist slowly toward your mouth.
Max’s free hand rose instinctively, brushing a damp strand of hair away from your face before settling softly against your cheek.
Pain bloomed briefly as your teeth pierced flesh, followed almost immediately by the metallic taste of your own blood spilling warm against your tongue.
Then you pressed your wrist carefully to Max’s mouth.
At first his touch was featherlight.
A kiss more than a bite.
Blood stained his lips slowly while he let only the smallest amount pass between you, restraint etched into every movement despite the hunger flickering visibly behind his tired eyes. But after a moment his hand slid from your cheek to the back of your wrist instead, holding you there more firmly as he drank deeper.
The sensation that flooded you nearly stole your breath.
Warmth surged through your body in slow, pulsing waves. You could feel something passing between you beyond blood alone, something deeper and older than language, life itself shifting from one body into another.
And beneath it all came understanding.
This was what he had done for you.
Max had not simply saved you.
He had shared himself with you.
Max’s mouth moved carefully against your wrist while the night wrapped itself around you both, endless and quiet except for the water breaking softly against the shore. Time seemed to stretch strangely there beside the bay, the moment lingering suspended between grief and intimacy until you could no longer tell whether seconds or hours had passed at all.
When Max finally managed to pull himself away from the intoxicating warmth of your blood, it felt less like regaining control and more like dragging himself reluctantly from the edge of something sacred. Strength already pulsed back through his body in steady waves, threading warmth through limbs that moments ago had bordered on useless.
The relentless ache in his chest and side had dulled enough that he could breathe without feeling his body splinter apart with every movement.
His lips slipped from your wrist and before he could stop himself, he pressed the softest kiss against the healing wound.
The skin beneath his mouth had already begun knitting itself back together, smooth and warm under the lingering trace of blood. For a second he allowed himself to remain there, eyes shut, forehead nearly brushing your arm.
Then you carefully pulled your hand back.
“How are you feeling?” you asked in hushed tones.
There was caution in your voice now. Not fear exactly, but awareness. As if you still did not fully understand what existed between you after everything that had happened.
Max noticed the slight distance you created immediately.
And despite the instinct screaming at him to close it, to pull you against him and bury himself in the comfort of your presence after nearly losing you twice, he forced himself not to.
Pushing too hard now would only drive you further away.
So instead he leaned back slightly and offered you the faintest smile, sadness lingering stubbornly beneath it.
“Well,” he murmured, brushing a drop of your blood from the corner of his mouth, “apparently we’ve got miracle medicine running through our veins.”
To his relief, the corner of your mouth twitched upward ever so slightly.
It was small. Brief.
But it existed.
“Give me a minute,” he added softly. “Then we can get the hell out of here.”
You huffed lightly through your nose, drawing your knees closer to your chest. “Bold of you to assume I’m sticking around to wait for you.”
For a second he genuinely could not tell whether you meant it.
Then he caught the faint dryness beneath the words and allowed himself the smallest exhale of relief.
“Wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t,” he replied.
This time the humor faded quicker.
His gaze drifted away from you before he could stop himself. Looking directly into your eyes had become almost unbearable now. Those golden irises still stunned him every time he saw them, not only because they marked what you had become, but because he could still remember exactly how soft they used to look when you watched him before all of this shattered between you.
Now every glance carried distance.
And guilt clawed through him every single time he noticed it.
So instead Max looked out over the dark water stretching endlessly before him while you sat beside him in silence. He could feel the wounds inside him continuing to heal slowly, strengthened by what you had given him. Gratitude sat heavily in his chest alongside the guilt, so immense he barely knew what to do with it.
After what he had done to you, you still chose to save him.
You could have left him bleeding out on that gym floor without hesitation. Hell, after everything, he would have understood it. You had gone there for Torres. For revenge. For answers. You could have easily decided that one dead monster beside another solved all your problems at once.
Instead -
“Thank you, Ashley.” The sincerity in his own voice startled him a little.
There was no grin attached to the words. No sarcasm softening them. No deflection hidden behind charm. Just raw honesty laid bare beneath the open night sky.
He kept his eyes fixed on the water because he could not bear seeing whatever expression crossed your face in response.
“You’re welcome,” you answered after a moment.
Max swallowed once before speaking again, though the words barely made it halfway out.
“I cannot -”
“You know,” you interrupted softly, “it wouldn’t actually have changed anything if you’d killed Torres instead of me.”
The sentence hit him immediately, but he stayed quiet and let you continue.
“I never asked for any of this.” Your voice remained calm, though exhaustion frayed the edges now. “Not to become the target of a serial killer. Not to wake up as…” You gestured vaguely toward yourself before letting your hand fall again. “Whatever the hell I am now.”
At last you turned toward him fully.
“And definitely not to become part of your redemption story.”
The words hurt because they were true. You let out a hollow little laugh, one entirely devoid of humor.
“Funny, isn’t it?” you murmured. “Both of you were so busy trying to save me that neither of you bothered asking what I wanted.”
Max closed his eyes briefly.
Because there it was.
The ugly truth at the center of everything.
Torres had tried to save you by killing you.
Max had tried to save your life by changing it forever.
And somewhere between those choices, you yourself had been stripped of any voice at all.
“You both decided for me,” you continued. “And maybe your intentions were different, but the result still feels pretty damn similar.”
The wind shifted strands of damp hair across your face while you turned back toward the water, resting your chin against your knees. Moonlight silvered the sharp line of your profile, softening your expression despite the ache threaded through every word.
“You both took pieces of me I can’t ever get back.”
Max stared at you for a long moment before lowering his gaze.
“I know,” he said finally.
And he did. Far more now than he had in that apartment while holding your dying body in his arms and convincing himself there had been no choice.
“There’s nothing I can say that fixes it.” His voice roughened slightly. “Nothing that gives you your life back.” He paused carefully before continuing. “But I’ll spend however long you let me, trying to make this easier for you.”
You stayed silent.
Max folded his arms loosely across his knees and forced himself to say the part that hurt most.
“And if you decide you never want to see me again after tonight…” He swallowed hard once. “I’ll understand that too.”
The thought alone hollowed him out.
Because despite everything, despite the guilt and the blood and the violence, he loved you with a depth that terrified him now more than ever before.
And if losing you was the price for saving you -
Then maybe this was simply the punishment he deserved.
“You know what’s funny?” you asked after a beat. “I always hated night shifts. Not because of the sleep schedule, although that part absolutely sucked too.” A small laugh escaped you, real enough to make something tighten painfully in Max’s chest. “But because everything that happened at night always felt worse somehow. Darker. Like the city stopped pretending.”
The wind moved through the tall grass behind you in soft waves, carrying the scent of saltwater and asphalt from the distant city.
You tilted your head back to look at the sky, and Max followed your gaze instinctively. The glow of the city swallowed most of the stars, but farther from Manhattan’s endless glare, a few constellations still managed to survive. Pale pinpricks of light shimmered weakly overhead, scattered across deep black.
“I think I hated nights so much,” you continued after a moment, “that I stopped noticing how beautiful the city looks under the dark sky.”
Max watched you more than the stars. Watched the moonlight catch against the strands of hair still clinging to your neck, the softened lines of your face now that rage and grief weren’t consuming every inch of it.
Slowly, you leaned back onto your elbows, eyes fixed upward as if trying to relearn the world from scratch. Max mirrored you again without thinking, lowering himself carefully beside you despite the lingering ache in his chest.
“That’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it?” you murmured. “Making the best out of it.” Your mouth curved faintly, though the expression never fully became a smile. “As far as I understand it, I’ve got a very long time ahead of me to figure this whole thing out.”
Max let out a quiet breath through his nose. “Took me hell of a lot longer to understand that, really. But yeah, because otherwise, what’s the point, right?”
You glanced sideways at him. “Quite the philosopher wasted on you,” you smirked.
“Maybe I am not at the top of my game at the moment,” he grinned weakly.
“Or maybe,” you countered, turning your head toward him, “you just suck at explaining yourself.”
Max huffed out a faint laugh and let his gaze drift back toward the stars. “That too.”
Silence settled more comfortably between you after that, no longer sharp enough to cut. He wasn’t sure if he could already dare his next words but he tried anyway.
“You know what else sucks?”
You turned your head toward him fully now, one brow lifting in cautious curiosity. Slowly he let one canine drag over his lower lip before flashing you a grin that was just arrogant enough to be familiar.
You stared at him for exactly one second before a completely unfiltered laugh broke free from your chest. You hit his shoulder hard enough to make him wince dramatically.
“Your jokes definitely do.”
“Cruel,” he murmured solemnly.
“Honest.”
But your hand lingered after the shove, resting against his arm for a brief uncertain second before sliding lower. Max went completely still beneath the touch, not daring to move, not wanting to risk breaking whatever fragile thing existed between you right now. Your fingers brushed against his hand once, tentative at first, before threading fully between his.
“So,” you said softly, your thumb brushing once against the back of his hand, “since we’re apparently stuck waiting here while you stop dying… why don’t you give me the full Vampire 101?”
summary: joel has been working a lot lately and not properly been paying attention to you, at least, that's how you feel during ovulating. so, you come up with a plan, which leads to him scolding you for wearing a short dress like that. and more.
trigger warnings: age gap (joel in his 50s, f!reader in her 20s), jackson!joel, possessive, oral sex (m receiving), rough sex, breeding kink, spanking, dirty talking, light praise kink
words: 2,2k
a/n: hii guys, im currently laying in bed sick with a fever, but I thought, there's no better time to write some smut again. credits to povsmommy28 on tiktok, because i saw this pov and i thought this is an amazing idea hihi
he was just at work. on patrols. doing construction work here and there.
you know he is very important to the town. and you knew from the beginning he is an workaholic. even before you got together a year ago. but still, the last few weeks, you got no real attention from him.
because of all his work, you barely even fucked. yes, there was some lazy making out, but mostly, you were already asleep when he got home. also, you were on your period a week and a half ago, so you were in not a good mood, there was nothing going on, but now, you were fucking ovulating.
and you felt it. just instantly at the thought of him, you were fucking soaked.
you tried to initiate intimacy with him two days ago, and it wasn't even that he didn't get hard.
oh, he did.
but then suddenly tommy knocked at our damn door, because there was some kind of emergency with that one construction side at the end of town.
whatever.
now, you came up with a plan. you 'planned' a girls night out with your friends from the clinic you were working at. but what joel didn't know, there was no girls night out. you already had a lovely brunch with them the day before.
but you knew joel. and besides that he's pretty possessive, he has a soft spot for short dresses.
plan was, get his attention, tease and argue with him, which then leads to him fucking you till you can't think right.
so, you got all dolled up. hair down, some soft blush on your cheeks, and wearing your short white whimsical dress, which was just right over your butt a little, leaving a bit to the imagination.
joel was downstairs, just came home like fifteen minutes ago, and was on the couch, cleaning his shotgun.
he looked up as he hears your soft steps running down the stairs. you didn't look at him, but hell, you could already feel his eyes burning right through you.
"where are you going all dolled up like that?", he asks. deep, thick.. oh, and warningly.
"going out with the girls'— believe i told ya about that yesterday?", you play dumb. innocent. as you start to put on your cowboy boots.
"m'not recalling that'", he remarks.
silence.
then you hear his weight shift as he got up from the couch. you turn around to look at him. your heart was pounding. your legs weak. his shleeves were rolled up and he had his hair back. he was looking at you like a predator watching his prey.
fuck, he's so hot.
"well, i do need to leave so—"
he cuts you off.
"you're not wearing that.", he grunts.
the fish caught the bait.
"excuse me?", you raise an eyebrow.
"you heard me." , he growls.
god, you could already give in. your body was definitely.
"i told you that i will be going out with them. maybe, if you would've been around more, you would remember.", you sass.
"well, and i am not changing—", you shrug as you turn back around to the front door.
he puts his hands on his hips.
"you want everybody starin' at you? eyeing you like you're a fuckin' piece of meat? i know the men around here—", he says with his deep, thick southern accent.
"oh, like how you're eyeing me right now?", you say as you turn back around, crossing your arms in front of your chest.
yes, you had a death wish.
his gaze darkens. he clenches his jaw.
"careful, love", he warns.
you sigh. "look, it's not that big of a deal— i like that dress, and i think it looks good on me, so, I'm gonna wear it"
you were about to turn back to the front door again, but he grabs you at your wrist, spinning you towards him.
"you do look good. fuck, you look fuckin' amazing in that dress. but it's only for me to see. you want everybody to see your cute lace panties huh—?", he takes a deep breath.
"so, now, you're gonna do as you were fuckin' told and you're gonna change like a sweet and nice girl you are.", he growls.
you were literally melting for him.
"well, maybe i am not a sweet girl today.", you whisper teasingly, biting your lip.
he looks at you. like really looks.
then, you feel his hand wrap around your neck and pull you into a hard kiss.
mission successful.
"well, im gonna damn make ya one'", he growls into the kiss, crowding you against the front door, one hand around your neck and the other besides your head. you pull him down to your height at his shirt, obviously kissing him back until your lips are slightly swollen.
"you're a damn tease, ya know that?", he whispers as his kisses travel down to your neck, leaving marks.
"and got a hell of an attitude either", his hand runs down to your breast, squeezing it hard, while he runs his thumb over your clothed nipple.
a small giggle slips out of your throat. he looks up at you, his breath and yours out of sync.
"oh, now she's giggling huh? you think this is funny?", he growls.
"i guess i haven't fucked you properly the last few weeks huh? and that's why you're dancin' out of line, are you?"
you just shrug with an innocent smile. you try to lean in back for a kiss, but he pushes you back with one finger at your chest.
"get your ass upstairs.", he commands.
"what about my-", you try to argue, still keeping up your plan, obviously.
"i said, get your fuckin' ass upstairs. when im done putting you back in line, you may go afterwards.", he tells you. then, you gulp but slip out of his grip and tiptoe upstairs. with him slowly following.
gosh, you were so fucking desperate. he's gonna ruin you. you already know.
you were already standing in front of the bed as he walks through the door into your shared bedroom.
he chuckles slightly at the sight. he steps towards you. closely.
"first, im gonna make you properly apologize to me for mouthing off—"
"i wasn't—"
"get on your knees."
and you do.
he sits down at the edge of the bed, tilting up your chin, his thumb running over your swollen lips from the kiss before. you were practically drooling.
as you sit on your knees, your thighs were completely bare, your short dress pooling right over your hip. revealing your soft pink lacy panties a little. joel opens his belt, opening his zipper and pulling down his pants.
through his boxers, you can already see the outline of his dick.
"gonna put your mouth to better use than arguing with me", he growls as he watches you pull down his boxers and getting out his thick hard cock.
you lick your lips, before you take his length into one hand and take a long lick from bottom to the top. precum was already leaking slightly, tasting slightly salty on your hot tounge.
"there you go..", he breaths. he grabs your hair and guides your head down. his thick length goes down your throat. he groans softly. then, you speed up. he kept his hard grip in your hair as you bump your head up and down, taking his whole length. you were pushing back on your gag reflex.
his breaths fill up the room. "fuckin' taking me like that— shutting you up real good huh", he groans as he pushes your head down. your vision gets slightly blurry by you tearing up, not able to really gasp after air.
he's truly shutting you up.
you could feel his dick start to twitch in your mouth. you wanted to make him come.
"hey— easy, girl- easy-", he says with a shaky breath. he pulls your hair back and lets his cock out with a pop. you gasp after air, with a soft whine and a disappointment look.
he grabs you by your arm, hauling you up onto his lap, bending you over it. his dick pressing against your stomach.
"look at that, your dress is so fucking short, I don't even have to lift it up to see your ass huh", he chuckles as his hand runs over your butt, tracing over your lace panties.
you gasp as he delivers a hard spank onto your ass. "gonna give you a damn good spanking so you remember how to listen—"
in the following, the room echos with the sound of his hand coming against your bare ass, turning your cheeks pink. "god, i can practically feel you dripping on my lap, darlin'", he says.
"im sor— ah-", you yelp as you feel another hard spank against your butt. right after, you feel his fingers pushing away your panties and pushing two of them right into you spoaked folds.
you arch your back, moaning loudly. "now you're sorry huh? you're fucking soaked— have I been neglecting you for that long huh?", he observes.
he pumps fingers in and out of you, but as you were just starting to clench around them, he pulls them out. but before you can protest, he hauls you up onto the bed, leaning over you.
he rips off your panties, grabs your legs and puts them over his shoulders. "gonna remind you who you belong to— and who you are to fucking listen to-", he growls and then thrusts right into you.
you moan loudly, your dress now pushed up around your stomach. he doesn't let you adjust. he starts right thrusting into you, while he kept you legs over his shoulders.
"so fucking tight..", he groans as the room feels with the sound of skin slapping together.
"joel..", you moan his name as you roll your eyes back. you already started clenching around him, not far away from already coming.
"already—?", he chuckles. he noticed at the change of your breath, the change of sound in your moans, how they got louder and louder. you blush immediately.
yes, it's been a while. and fuck, you could just already cum by him touching you briefly.
"joel.. im gonna cum— please", you moan louder. he speeds up. the wet sounds filling the air, as he talks you through it.
you finally feel the long awaited wave of pleasure coming over your body, as you tense up, your legs shaking.
he rides you through the orgasm, but he does not let you catch your breath. he pulls out of you, turns you onto your belly, grabs your hair, so your head was buried in a pillow, before he thrusts into you again from behind.
you whine. you were so overstimulated.
"joel— it's too mu—", you whine as you gasp after air, already feeling another orgasm building up between your legs.
"you're gonna fucking take what i give you— and then the next time you can decide if you're gonna argue with me or not—", he growls into your ear, while he places some soft kisses onto your shoulder blade.
you could feel his dick twitch either in you. he was close. as you started to clench around him again, one hand of his slips around you, and finds your clit, starting to circle it.
"joel—", you try to squirm away from the overstimulating feeling, but he fully caged you in. him leaned over you, his other hand in your hair, keeping you in place, while you were laying flat onto the bed.
"gonna fill you up, baby—", he groans, as he keeps up his thrusts while circling your clit, you squeezing around him more and more.
some tears of overwhelming pleasure run down your cheeks, as you let out a scream at this point, as you cum a second time.
as you clench around him, as you cum, you feel his warm cum filling you up. you gasp.
you were totally spend.
mission successful.
you both remain in that position for a little bit longer as you both catch your breath. as he pulls out of you, the warm liquid mixed with your wetness slightly runs out of you. he turns you onto your back, pressing soft kisses on your cheek, kissing away your tears.
"im gonna tell you again now..", he whispers as he catches his breath, his hand brushing over your cheek. "you're gonna change, yea?", he raises his eyebrows, looking at you.
your smile turns into a smirk.
you were never going anywhere.
and he realizes.
you can see it.
"there was no girls night, was there?", he mumbles as he raises his one eyebrow.
you shake your head. "nope."
you smirk.
"you were gone so often and i figured that was the easiest way to get your attention..", you reveal your intention.
he sighs. rolling his eyes.
"neglected you that badly, huh?", he asks with a small grin.
you nod dramatically.
he chuckles softly.
"well, guess im gonna make it up to you then", he whispers as he disappears under the blanket, between your legs.
you arch your back and moan as you feel his tounge on your pussy.
Summary: Torres turns out to be a much bigger problem than Max had anticipated. He is out for the kill. Luckily, so are you...
Warnings: blood, like, a lot of it, physical violence, gun violence
Previous Chapter
Story Masterlist | my Pedro-Character-Masterlist
In Max’s defense, he had never been hunted by someone like this.
In three decades of existing in the margins of the world, he had seen the aftermath - bodies that hadn’t simply died, but had been ended. Vampires reduced to husks, their unnatural resilience stripped away by someone who knew exactly where to strike and how to finish it.
Back in Los Angeles, those encounters had been whispers more than reality. Rare enough to dismiss. Rare enough to convince himself they were anomalies rather than a pattern.
And since leaving the West Coast, that illusion of safety had only deepened.
Vampires were scarce. Creatures like him moved carefully, kept their heads down, avoided unnecessary attention.
And those who hunted them? Even rarer.
So when Max had picked up Torres’ trail, he had done so with the confidence of a predator who believed himself unchallenged.
That had been his first mistake.
Because he hadn’t been tracking a cornered killer. He had been walking straight into the territory of someone who had been preparing for this kind of fight for years.
And now he was paying for it.
Max pressed his back harder against the rusted frame of a forgotten equipment trolley, the metal cold against his spine as his hand clamped down over the wound at his side. The pressure did little to ease the damage, but instinct demanded it anyway. Blood still seeped through his fingers, slower now, thicker, but not nearly fast enough to be reassuring.
Healing was working. He could feel it - faint and struggling to keep pace with the injury. That was the only reason he wasn’t already sprawled lifeless across the cracked flooring of the training hall.
But even that gift had limits.
Especially when he hadn’t fed properly due to the fact that a nosey beautiful neighbor had interrupted his very last meal.
Now there was nothing left to sustain him.
But what made it worse - what truly tipped the scales - were the traps.
Max’s jaw tightened as another distant ringing echoed faintly in his skull, a phantom reminder of the earlier detonations. They hadn’t been large, not enough to bring the structure down, but they didn’t need to be. The enclosed space amplified every sound, turning controlled blasts into disorienting shockwaves that rattled his senses and blurred his perception.
One wrong step had nearly cost him everything.
He had only avoided the worst of it by sheer luck, moving at the exact moment instinct screamed at him to do so. Even now, the aftereffects lingered - his hearing skewed, his balance subtly off, the world not quite aligning the way it should.
Torres had designed this place to break him down before the real fight even began.
“You know,” Torres’ voice carried through the space again, measured and deliberate, echoing from somewhere just out of sight, “without her, it would have taken me a lot longer to figure you out.”
He was closer now.
Worse: he was circling him.
Max exhaled slowly through his nose, forcing himself to focus despite the pain radiating from his side. He shifted just enough to glance down at the wound, his expression tightening at what he saw.
Yeah, not great at all.
His gaze lifted again, senses straining to track Torres’ movement or pinpoint his location.
“Yeah?” he shot back. “Did you tell her that before or after you cut her throat?”
There was a flicker of silence. Then -
“It was you who ruined her.” The raw hatred in Torres’ voice was unmistakable now. “You dragged her into this. You corrupted her with your very being and seduced her.”
Max let out a short, breathless snort despite the way it pulled painfully at his injury.
“Seduced her?” he echoed, incredulity threading through the words. “What century are you living in?” He shifted slightly, testing his balance, ignoring the way his body protested. “She didn’t need any seduction. She just fell for the guy next door. Happens all the time.”
“Enough!”
The crack of the gunshot split the air a second later, sharp and violent, the bullet embedding itself somewhere behind him with a jarring impact.
Max stilled, muscles coiling instinctively despite the disadvantage.
“You contaminated her,” Torres continued, his voice rising with conviction. “I was just in time to save her.”
That did it.
A disbelieving laugh broke free from Max before he could stop it, edged with something dangerously close to hysteria. The sound echoed strangely in the hollow space, almost as distorted as the logic it responded to.
For a fleeting moment, the temptation surfaced - to tell him. To throw the truth back in his face. To make him realize that Torres’ very own actions had led to the one thing he had wanted to protect you from becoming the thing he hunted.
But the thought died just as quickly.
The wound was too fresh.
The betrayal still too raw.
That wasn’t a weapon he was willing to use - not like this.
Unfortunately for Max, Torres possessed an entire arsenal of weapons he very clearly intended to use - tools designed not merely to wound, but to dismantle every advantage a creature like him relied upon. And the worst part was not the pain. It was the unfamiliarity. The terrible realization that he did not fully understand what was happening to him until it was already too late to counter it.
Max pushed away from the cover of the equipment trolley, teeth gritted as he forced movement back into his body. His instincts screamed at him to close the distance, to end this before Torres could tighten the trap any further. But the second he shifted forward, another sensation crashed violently into his already overloaded senses.
Blood.
Everywhere.
A harsh metallic groan echoed overhead before the old sprinkler system sputtered violently to life. What should once have released water instead unleashed a dark, heavy downpour that hammered against the training hall in wet, uneven bursts. Thick droplets splattered across the floor, across the walls, across him.
The smell hit instantly.
Not human but animal, probably pig’s blood, if he had to guess - but the distinction barely mattered. The sheer volume alone was enough to send his senses spiraling. The scent flooded the air with suffocating intensity, hot iron and salt saturating every molecule around him until there was nothing else left to breathe.
One part of his mind still clung desperately to focus, to the sharp edge of the hunt, to the rage driving him forward toward Torres. But another part - older and fully instinctive - reacted with something far more primal. Hunger surged through him with humiliating force, sudden and impossible to ignore.
It wouldn’t matter if he had fed recently. Didn’t matter that he had more pressing concerns than appetite. Blood on that scale bypassed reason entirely. It hit the mind like temptation carved into instinct itself, the same irresistible pull as food set before someone who swore they weren’t hungry until the smell reached them.
Only this was worse.
Much worse.
The crimson rain drenched him within seconds, soaking through his clothes, plastering dark curls against his forehead and temples as droplets streaked down his face. The world narrowed beneath the assault of scent and sound until coherent thought became slippery and fragmented.
And in that haze, Torres moved.
Fully advancing now instead of retreating. The hunter closing in on wounded prey within terrain built for him.
Somewhere through the ringing in his skull and the relentless pounding of blood against concrete, Max heard it - the unmistakable metallic click of a gun being readied.
His head snapped toward the sound instinctively.
Too slow.
The shot exploded through the hall a heartbeat later, deafening in the enclosed space as the muzzle flash tore through the red-soaked darkness.
The gunshot cracked through the night like a rupture in reality itself.
You stopped dead in your tracks.
One second you had been moving through the skeletal remains of the old training grounds with growing certainty, following the trail that had led you here. The next, every muscle in your body locked as the echo rolled through the empty corridors and settled deep beneath your skin.
Torres.
You had known he would come here the moment the idea surfaced in your mind. Floyd Bennett had been too symbolic, too steeped in memory for someone like him to resist. Their first years at the academy had unfolded inside these walls. Long nights. Endless drills. Bruised knuckles and exhausted laughter over vending machine coffee. Back when you had still trusted him enough to put your life in his hands.
The irony of that nearly made you sick.
But there had been something else too. Another trail you had caught halfway here, one that had gotten to you when another violent wave of hunger had torn through your body hard enough to make your knees weaken. In that moment of forced stillness, while your senses sharpened painfully against the city night, another scent had threaded itself unmistakably through Torres’.
Max.
At first you had assumed it lingered on your clothes, buried in the fabric of the oversized pajama shirt you still wore. Confused and irritated, you had actually lifted the collar to your face, inhaling like that might explain it away.
It hadn’t.
The scent had been in the air itself.
And now, stepping fully into the abandoned training building, there was no mistaking it anymore.
Except it was nearly drowned out by something else.
The smell of blood hit you with such force it felt physical, like slamming into a wall at full speed. It saturated the air in suffocating waves, thick and metallic and overwhelming enough to make your stomach twist violently with need. Instinct roared awake inside you immediately, sharp enough to hurt. Hunger clawed through your body with renewed desperation, every nerve suddenly tuned toward the scent flooding the building.
But beneath that hunger came something colder.
Everything about this felt wrong.
You forced yourself forward before instinct could fully overtake reason. Your sprint echoed through the abandoned corridors as you followed the fading reverberation of the gunshot deeper into the structure. Cracked tiles blurred beneath your feet. Graffiti flashed along rotting walls. Somewhere overhead old pipes groaned faintly beneath the strain of age.
You didn’t think. Didn’t plan. You simply followed the pull of it - the blood, the fear, the unmistakable collision of two scents you now knew too well.
Then you saw the double doors reading BALCONY. Without hesitation you shoved through them at full speed.
And stopped so abruptly it almost hurt.
The sight below looked less like reality and more like something torn from a fever dream.
The massive training hall spread beneath you, instantly recognizable despite the years of decay that had hollowed it out. Once it had been the pride of the academy. Now it looked abandoned to rot. Paint peeled in long strips from the walls. Mold crept through corners. Sections of the flooring had warped and cracked with neglect.
And from the ceiling, actual blood rained down in relentless sheets.
It poured from the old sprinkler system in dark streams that splashed across the gym floor and gathered in spreading pools, turning the entire hall into something grotesque and surreal beneath the pale wash of moonlight filtering through the upper windows.
Two figures stood in the center of it.
One of them was unmistakably Torres.
Even from above you recognized the rigid line of his posture, the broad set of his shoulders, a gun clenched steady in his hand. He stood upright despite the carnage around him, composed in a way that made your stomach churn.
The other -
Your breath caught.
Max.
Except standing was generous.
He looked barely held together, hunched forward as one hand pressed hard against his side. Blood soaked through him, impossible to distinguish now beneath the crimson pouring from above. His movements lacked their usual certainty. As Torres advanced another deliberate step, Max staggered backward awkwardly, like his body no longer obeyed him correctly.
Even from this distance you could feel the shift in Torres as he opened his mouth, clearly preparing another self-righteous speech or threat.
You didn’t let him speak.
Whatever fury burned inside you toward Max, whatever betrayal still sat raw and bleeding between you - Torres did not get to decide his fate.
“Stop! Police!”
The words tore from you automatically, pure instinct and muscle memory overriding everything else. It was absurd. Meaningless. Maybe even technically untrue now. But the command still carried authority sharpened by years of use.
And it worked.
Torres’ head snapped upward.
At the same moment Max stumbled fully to the floor, collapsing hard onto one knee before catching himself with visible effort. His gaze lifted too, dazed and unfocused for a heartbeat, like he genuinely thought he was hallucinating you.
But Torres looked worse.
He looked haunted.
“Ashley…?” Your name cracked apart in his throat, disbelief stripping all certainty from his voice.
“Drop the gun!” you shouted back, gripping the railing so tightly your hands ached beneath the pressure.
His arm lowered slightly on instinct, confusion momentarily overriding aggression. “How are you- ?”
Movement below interrupted him. Max shifted weakly, trying to rise again. Torres reacted instantly, snapping the weapon back toward him with renewed panic.
“I said lower it!” This time rage bled openly into your voice.
“He’s a monster, Ashley!” Torres shouted back. “You don’t understand what -”
Then he stopped.
His eyes flicked from Max to you and back again.
You actually saw the realization happen. A horrible little click behind his gaze as the pieces aligned.
“What did you do…?” The words came quiet, trembling slightly as he stared at Max.
Max moved like he wanted to answer, but whatever response he intended dissolved into pain instead. His hand clamped harder over the wound at his side.
Torres stepped closer and the gun rose again, unmistakable intent behind it.
Your eyes darted wildly across the balcony. Stairs - there, on the far side - but too far away. Too slow. You wouldn’t reach them in time.
Below you, Torres’ face twisted with fury.
“What did you do?!” The scream echoed violently through the hall.
Then came the click of the safety releasing.
You didn’t think after that.
You moved.
In one fluid motion you vaulted the railing. The drop vanished beneath instinct and momentum. You hit the floor hard enough that it should have shattered bone, rolled through the impact effortlessly, and came up already sprinting. Distance collapsed unnaturally fast beneath your feet. The world blurred into blood and fury.
You barely remembered crossing the space between them.
One second Torres stood aiming the gun.
The next you slammed into him with enough force to send both of you crashing violently to the ground. The shot discharged somewhere in the chaos, deafening at that range, but you didn’t see where it went.
All you knew was impact.
Momentum.
And then Torres beneath you as you hit the blood-slick floor together, ending above him with brutal force, pinning him down.
“I thought you were dead.” The words left Torres in a shaken breath, and somehow that was the worst part of all. There was no triumph in his voice, no cruelty, no satisfaction. Only genuine remorse, as though he believed he had failed you personally.
You stared down at him in disbelief, rain after rain of dark blood cascading from the broken sprinklers above you. The copper stench was unbearable now, thick enough to coat the inside of your throat, mixing with sweat, gunpowder, fear and the sharp electric scent of Max’s wounded body somewhere next to you.
Torres tried to speak again, apology already forming.
“Save it!” you snapped before he could finish.
You kicked the gun from his hand just as his fingers twitched toward it again. Your voice cracked through the ruined hall with enough force to silence even the echoing drip of blood from above.
“I have had it with you and your twisted words!”
Torres looked up at you from beneath and somehow he still looked at you like he pitied you. Like you were the tragedy here.
“Ashley you have to understand”, he looked up to you, pleadingly and not even making a move on getting away from you as your fingers dug into his shoulders. “I wanted to save you.”
You laughed once, breathless and bitter.
“Like you saved Samantha?” you shot back. “Keira? Lara? Abigail?” Each name landed like a strike. “You saved them too?”
Torres hesitated, and that hesitation was enough for your anger to spike. You shook him hard, fury blazing through your gold-lit eyes.
“The only monster here is you,” you hissed. “And I trusted your words for far too long.”
You could hear everything now. Every frantic beat of his pulse hammering beneath your hands. Every sharp inhale scraping through his lungs. Fear poured from him in rich, intoxicating waves. It filled the air alongside the copper stench flooding the gymnasium until your body reacted instinctively, your mouth watering despite the hatred twisting through your chest.
“You don’t deserve a trial,” you said then.
Your eyes flicked toward Max.
He was still several feet away, collapsed against the ruined floor. Blood soaked through his side in dark sheets, nearly black beneath the crimson rain falling from above. He had managed to push himself partially upright onto trembling arms, but only barely. His face was pale beneath the streaks of blood, jaw tight with pain, eyes locked entirely on you.
Your name formed soundlessly on his lips.
And that single moment of distraction was enough.
Torres moved violently beneath you. You barely had time to react before he twisted hard, throwing his weight sideways and sending you crashing onto your back against the soaked floor. Pain jolted through your spine as he rolled over you instantly, pinning you beneath him with desperate strength born from pure survival instinct.
The world blurred for a second beneath the overwhelming sensory chaos around you.
You saw the gun lying only inches away.
Both of you lunged for it at once.
Your fingers brushed cold metal -
Then Torres slammed his forearm across your throat.
The pressure did not choke you. You no longer needed air for that. But something about the compression still disrupted your senses instantly, sending static across your vision and dulling the sharp clarity you had only just begun learning to navigate. The edges of the room smeared into darkness as his weight crushed down harder.
The gun scraped against your fingertips again but Torres reached it first.
You froze as the barrel swung toward your face. For one terrible second, everything stopped, only the sheets of crimson rain continued to coat you both. Torres looked down at you with unbearable sadness etched into every line of his face as his trembling finger tightened against the trigger.
Then suddenly he was ripped away from you.
Max hit him like a wrecking ball.
The collision sent both men sprawling across the soaked floor, Torres losing grip on the gun as Max tackled him sideways with what little strength he still had left. But the effort cost him immediately. You heard the broken sound tear from Max’s throat before he collapsed hard onto the floor, coughing sharply as pain bent him nearly double.
Meanwhile Torres recovered faster. He rolled onto one knee and snatched the gun back up, swinging it toward Max -
You moved before he could fire.
You hit him with enough force to send a sickening crack through the hall as your foot connected with his arm. Torres screamed, the gun flying free once more as bones shattered beneath the impact. You didn’t stop. Another kick slammed into his chest hard enough to launch him backward across the soaked floor.
He crashed flat onto his back.
You followed immediately. Your foot planted against his chest with crushing force, pinning him there.
“Don’t you dare touch him,” you hissed down at him, every word trembling with fury as your heel dug deeper into his chest. “Don’t you ever touch anyone again.”
Torres stared up at you through pain, blood running from the corner of his mouth now. His expression twisted somewhere between horror and heartbreak as he searched your face for something that no longer existed there.
You could feel your hunger roaring now, louder than thought itself. Your tongue darted to your canines.
“I hate you,” you snarled, “for what you did to all of them.” Your eyes darkened. “But I despise you for what you condemned me to.” The hunger inside you roared alive completely. “And that,” you whispered, leaning down toward him at last, “is what I want you to be your last thought: You failed me and this failure will be your end.”
The skin of his throat tore instantly beneath your fangs and the sensation of fresh blood flooding your mouth numbed everything around you - the splattering of the heavy wetness from above, Max’s strained breathing and most of all:
