Ko Yamori wants to become a vampire. In order to do so, he has to fall in love with one: specifically, Nazuna Nanakuza. Therein lies the central conflict of the story: can he?
The inciting incident of the story is not Nazuna finding Ko while he's wandering the streets at night and luring him back to her lair. Rather, it goes back a bit further: a girl in his class confesses she has a crush on him, and his response is "so?" (I don't feel like digging up quotes, so any in this post are just paraphrased from memory.) Ko admits he doesn't get what it means to have a crush, the girl's friends harass him for that, and he flees into the night to avoid facing them.
Right from the very beginning, Ko has been pretty upfront that he doesn't understand love. Sure, he's 14, and a lot of nuance comes from experience. But it certainly seems like he's at the age where all his peers are trying out dating for the first time, and he feels left behind.
Ko and Nazuna become close friends pretty quickly. They try going on dates (and not just the stereotypical one Seri forced them to try) and even get physical (kissing). But throughout all of this, Ko doesn't get how it's different from what they normally do as friends: hanging out, having meals together, platonic physical contact. There's some je nais se quois he doesn't feel, and the vampire curse must agree, because he never transforms when Nazuna feeds on him.
He's not the only one. In the second arc, we meet Kyoko, Nazuna's first friend from when she tried going to high school ~10 years ago. She was upfront from the start about being a lesbian. As we learn about her terrible home life, she expresses her hatred for her parents' failing relationship and all the systems in place that mean they can't do anything about it. Once she learns Nazuna's secret and decides to give up on mortality, the two even joke that she might not have the right feelings for it to take, and we see that they're right. It wouldn't be accurate to say her parents' problems caused her to reject romance, but it likely didn't help.
In both cases, these are characters that like Nazuna and actively want to become vampires, but even when they let Nazuna feed on them, they can't turn. In contrast, we see a lot of explicitly romantic relationships, both human/human and human/vampire, but none of them end with a happy couple. The human/human ones, like Kyoko's parents, tend to tear themselves apart. The human/vampire ones are even worse, usually leading to one or both parties killing the other. Even the "best" outcome, the vampire turning the human, still leads to the end of the romance.
In the end, neither Ko nor Kyoko achieve the freedom in immortality they initially wanted, but instead they find happiness. Ko realizes he had friends all along, and makes a bunch more, and he's even grateful for his long-distance situationship with Nazuna in the end. Kyoko's journey was a lot harder, but she manages to move on from her past, reconnect with Nazuna, and even get a support system with the other vampires.
The vampire "curse" establishes a single way to achieve immortality and implied happiness: love. But even Nazuna admits in the first arc that after a mere four decades, she's stagnant and bored out of her mind. Ko and Kyoko, immune to vampirism by virtue of not feeling that kind of bond, instead find true happiness, in life.
He had a growing feeling that he wouldn’t last after not being with anyone for so long, he was doomed to finish before even getting you close, but he was so increasingly captivated by you he couldn’t stop his hips from moving steadily - the tight and wet feeling of you, your warm skin against his, your sweet scent, the emotions from losing you, regaining you but at a distance, being the cause of your hurt and the worry of becoming so lost without you again accumulating in his heart, transferring him into a state of barely being able to know what to do with himself, his hands grabbing at you in every place he could, trying to remind himself it wasn’t one of the repeated dreams he had of you where he would wake up alone and in pain, but that you were real, that you were lying below him, begging for him, releasing his name from your throat over and over, like it was the only thing you knew.
He stretched his arm to support him, hovering above you as he looked down at you, his hips grinding into you, the muscles of his stomach prominent at every thrust, his hand cupping your cheek softly causing you to look up at him and meet his stare before it moved to your throat, holding on to you softly - every movement his hips made sent a shock through your lower body, resonating in the rest of your body.
Hey, how are you? If it’s not too much, I was wondering if I could be added to the tag list for You Need Us. I just finished reading part 3 and I’m so hooked. You’re an amazing writer. Anyways, keep up the good work and have a good day ☺️☺️💜
Aaawh, my little heart. 🥺💜
I'm doing as well as I can, I hope you're doing good too! I'll certainly add you to the list, not a problem! Thanks so much for reading, please look forward to the next part! 🙏💜
