She ignored the dish completely and stepped closer instead, as if the blood already spilt there no longer mattered compared to the source sitting in front of her.
Soren barely had time to register that before she was standing between his knees, close enough now that he could feel the coolness of her body through the thin layers of cloth between them.
"Lilly—"
He did not get to finish.
She lowered herself carefully onto his lap.
Not hard, not hurried, but decisively enough that his breath caught anyway.
One of her hands landed lightly against his shoulder to steady herself, the other bracing against the back of the chair.
The sudden weight of her on him, the warmth of her thighs along either side of his lap, the closeness of her body as she settled there facing him, all of it hit him in one disorienting rush.
His mind blanked for a second.
Lilliana seemed no better.
Up close, he could see how wide her pupils had become, how intent her gaze was, not dreamy, not tender in any romantic sense, but bright with a sharp, excited hunger she was only barely containing.
There was embarrassment in it too, and the remnants of earlier vulnerability, but this was not the expression of someone falling in love.
It was the expression of a dhampir who had been offered something she wanted very badly and had only just managed to ask for.
She opened her mouth.
Soren felt rather than saw the shift first, a faint movement beneath her lips, then the gradual extension of her canines into proper fangs.
They lengthened with a slow, unnatural smoothness, not explosively, not violently, but in a way that made his spine tighten all the same.
The sight of them should have been alarming.
It was.
But it was something else, too.
Lilliana leaned in, her face near enough now that he could feel her breath against the side of his throat.
Her hair brushed his cheek, cool, silken strands slipping across his skin.
One of her hands came up, light and careful, to rest against the side of his neck, her fingertips just under his jaw as though she were steadying him, or perhaps steadying herself.
"Tell me if you want me to stop," she whispered.
Then she lowered her mouth to his neck.
The first touch of her lips was soft.
So soft, in fact, that for one disorienting second it did not feel frightening at all.
It felt careful.
Deliberate.
The pressure of her mouth against the side of his throat made his pulse jump hard enough that he was suddenly, vividly aware of how exposed that part of him was, how little there was between skin and blood and her waiting teeth.
He felt the point of one fang press against him.
Then the other.
The puncture hurt.
Not unbearably or with the sharp, tearing pain he had expected, but with a hot, concentrated sting, two precise points driven into the side of his neck that made his whole body jerk.
His breath caught in his throat, his fingers twitched uselessly against the arm of the chair, and an involuntary shudder ran down his back before he could stop it.
Lilliana made a small sound against his skin, almost like relief.
Then the pain began to change.
It did not vanish entirely, but it dulled so quickly that he barely had time to process the shift before something stranger replaced it.
Heat spread out from the bite, not exactly painful now, but intense, a deep, tingling warmth that sank under his skin and travelled down in thin, sharp waves.
When her tongue brushed the punctures, slow and instinctive, the sensation shot straight through him.
His back arched.
It was not a conscious reaction.
His whole spine lit up with something that felt almost electric, a tight, bright pulse that travelled from the bite down through his neck, between his shoulders, and lower still.
It left behind a trail of tingling awareness that made it suddenly difficult to sit still, difficult to think clearly, and difficult to separate discomfort from something far more dangerous.
His breath came out uneven.
Lilliana drank.
There was no other word for it.
He could feel the pull of it, slow at first, then steadier, the unmistakable sensation of something being drawn out of him through the side of his throat.
Every swallow she took seemed to drag another sharp ripple down his spine.
It was warm and wrong and intimate in a way that made his skin prickle all over.
The room felt quieter than before, but not truly silent.
He could hear her breathing against his neck, feel the small shifts of her mouth as she fed, the faint suction that should have made the moment uglier and somehow only made it more intense.
Her hand at his jaw tightened slightly, not enough to hurt, just enough to hold him there, and her other hand, which had first braced on the chair, slid slowly to his shoulder, gripping there instead.
Soren's thoughts blurred.
He was still aware enough to know that this should feel more alarming than it did.
He was aware enough to know that the sensation spreading through him was dangerous precisely because it made panic difficult to hold onto.
His body felt looser by the second, his head slightly light, his nerves over-responsive in all the wrong ways.
Even the coolness of her skin against him had become strangely vivid.
The weight of her in his lap, the line of her body pressed close, the brush of her hair against his face, all of it seemed magnified.
Then her tongue slid over the bite again, warm and slow, and another fierce shiver ran through him.
He inhaled sharply.
Lilliana made a faint, pleased sound against his throat, and that more than anything made the moment feel stranger.
Whatever had overtaken her now was not softness, not some sudden, blushing affection, but instinct, delight, and the sharp excitement of finally taking what her body had already decided it wanted.
That truth should have steadied him.
Instead, it only made the whole thing feel stranger.
His hands moved before he thought about them.
Maybe because he felt cold, maybe because her closeness had already dragged him into reacting rather than reasoning, maybe because some dazed part of him was still caught on the memory of earlier, of holding her when she cried, of trying to comfort rather than recoil from her pain.
Whatever the reason, he wrapped his arms around her.
Not tightly.
Just enough to hold her there.
Lilliana jolted in surprise.
He felt it immediately, the little stiffening of her body, the sudden pause in her drinking, but she did not pull away.
If anything, after that brief startled reaction, she pressed in closer, one slow inch at a time, her body relaxing back against his as though the contact had been accepted just as instinctively as the rest of this had.
That made the sensation worse.
Or better.
Or simply more difficult to endure without reacting.
Soren's hand came up to her back in a dazed, thoughtless repetition of what he had done earlier when she broke down.
He patted once, then again, slow and absent-minded, less from deliberate comfort now than from some half-fogged impulse to respond to the person in his arms.
Lilliana shivered.
Not dramatically, just enough that he felt it.
Then she drank a little deeper.
The pull at his throat sharpened.
Another bright wave shot through his spine, and his fingers flexed helplessly against her back.
His head had gone light in a way that was difficult to separate from the rest of the sensation.
The lamplight felt too warm.
Her body felt too close.
His pulse, trapped between her lips and fangs, seemed to hammer louder with every passing second.
He couldn't tell how long it lasted.
Long enough for the strangeness of it to settle into him.
Long enough for the initial shock to blur into something languid and dangerous.
Long enough that when she finally began to pull back, the loss of the contact registered almost as sharply as the bite itself.
Lilliana lifted her mouth from his neck slowly.
The air against the damp skin there felt abruptly cold.
He could feel the slight sting of the punctures again now that her tongue was no longer soothing them, though that only lasted a second before she leaned in once more to lick away the remaining blood.
The movement was slower this time, more deliberate, and each pass of her tongue over the sensitive skin left another tremor in its wake.
Only when she seemed satisfied that nothing more would spill did she draw back fully.
She looked at him.
Her lips were parted.
Her breathing was softer than before, but not steady yet, and the crimson in her eyes had not faded.
Up close, he could see the exact moment awareness started returning to her in proper pieces, the exact moment she fully registered where she was, what she was sitting on, how close they were, what she had just done.
The hand still on his shoulder tightened once in abrupt embarrassment.
"Uhm…"
She looked, for the first time since climbing into his lap, genuinely lost for words.
Soren, however, was in no better state.
His arms were still around her.
Her body was still on his lap.
His neck still throbbed faintly where she had bitten him, and every pulse of it seemed to echo through the rest of him in a delayed aftershock.
His thoughts felt cotton-soft around the edges.
He knew with uncomfortable certainty that if he were fully clear-headed, he would probably be much more embarrassed than he currently was.
Instead, he only looked at her and saw panic beginning to gather in her face.
So he did the first thing that came to mind.
"It's okay," he said.
His own voice sounded strange to him, softer than usual, a little distant.
Lilliana stared.
Soren kept patting her back without really meaning to.
It was only after doing it twice more that he became dimly aware of the fact that he was still doing it at all.
"I'm an adult," he added, because that seemed relevant, and because his head was too fuzzy to find a better phrasing. "And I said yes."
The colour in Lilliana's face deepened all over again.
She looked at him as if that had somehow made things worse rather than better.
Soren, still not thinking quite properly, continued.
"And it's fine if you need to again. You told me how important blood is to vampires, remember? So you have come to me if you ever need help."
That made her eyes widen in a way that was almost pained.
Not because she disliked the words, but because they seemed to hit some new point of embarrassment she had not been prepared for.
The excitement still lingering in her expression became threaded through with something tighter and more self-conscious, and it was then, finally, that she seemed to recover enough awareness to glance downward.
At herself.
At him.
At the way she was still sitting in his lap.
"Ren," she said weakly, then had to stop and try again. "Uhm… may I get up now…?"
That was what finally snapped him back enough to realise what he was doing.
He let go of her at once.
"Ah—Sorry."
Lilliana rose from his lap a little too quickly, then nearly lost her balance because of it and had to steady herself with one hand on the table.
By the time she straightened fully, she looked deeply, visibly embarrassed, though not in a way that suggested regret exactly.
It was more awkward than that, more human, tangled up with the obvious fact that the feeding itself had affected her thoughts just as much as it had affected his.
Soren lifted a hand to his neck.
The skin there felt tender, still warm, and the moment his fingertips brushed the bite, another residual shiver ran through him.
He pulled his hand away at once and frowned faintly.
'Why did I do that?'
He sat there for a moment, trying to understand why holding her had felt so natural when under normal circumstances the whole thing should have left him red-faced and incoherent.
The only answer his foggy mind could offer was that it had felt right in the moment, which was not helpful at all.
Across from him, Lilliana was trying very hard to look anywhere but directly at him for too long.
Her fangs had retracted at some point, though he had not noticed when.
Her eyes had returned to green as well, but the brightness in them had not fully gone away.
It was not the dreamy kind of look that would suggest some sudden emotional revelation.
If anything, she seemed newly energised and deeply flustered at the same time, like someone whose body was very pleased while the rest of her was only now catching up enough to be horrified by the social consequences.
"…It's getting late, so I think you should go back soon," she said at last, still avoiding his eyes more than usual.
Her voice was quieter again now, though the rawness from earlier remained.
"It wouldn't be good if anyone started rumours."
"Oh." Soren blinked, then nodded. "That makes sense."
The answer should have been simple, but even that felt faintly awkward now, as though the room itself had changed shape around them.
He rose to his feet carefully.
His legs were steady enough, but there was a slight looseness in his body that had not been there before, a vague weakness that made him very aware of his own pulse and the place on his neck where her mouth had been.
"When do you want me to come by next?" he asked.
Lilliana hesitated.
"I'm not sure yet," she admitted. "I'll let you know before Thursday, though."
"That's fine."
There was a pause after that.
Not long, just long enough to make both of them aware that they had reached the point where one of them needed to say goodbye and neither was entirely sure how to do it normally after… all that.
Soren cleared his throat.
"Well. Thanks for today, Lilly. I appreciate the help." He hesitated, then added more quietly, "And I appreciate you telling me about yourself."
Lilliana looked at him properly then.
Her expression softened at once, some of the awkwardness easing, though not disappearing.
"It's no problem. Please get some rest, Ren."
He nodded.
Then, because neither of them seemed to know what else to do, he turned and headed for the door.
The walk back to his dorm felt strangely long.
He kept circling back to the same confused questions, and every time he did, the answer refused to become any clearer.
Why had he held her like that?
Why had it felt natural?
And why, even now, did remembering the sensation of her feeding send that same sharp, electric trace down his spine all over again?
By the time he reached his room, he still had no answer.
————「❤︎」————