'HouseMates' - WIP Chpt One - m. vampire x m. werewolf (sfw) (Patreon)

I shared on Discord that I was working on an idea, and I've now got enough together to share a WIP Chapter One for you. The theme is 'enemy species to friends to lovers' rather than 'enemies to lovers' , and features a very out of touch vampire and a werewolf who's trying to rebuild his life after having been driven out of his pack and left alone in the world. 

Content warning: very brief mention of a werewolf attack (not by the mc) and the resulting trauma; familial rejection; risk of homelessness; antagonistic species

Wordcount: 4838

Come by the apartment at 6.30pm on Wednesday if that suits you.

Adam had been opening that text message to stare at it since the moment he’d received it the previous Sunday evening.

He’d been sitting on his friend’s sofa, with the rucksack containing all his worldly possessions stowed neatly on the floor between his feet, praying that this time his luck would change.

Wolves are pack animals, after all, and while some do well enough on their own, Adam knew he was not cut out for it. Even living with a human instead of a proper pack wouldn’t be so bad, and he couldn’t keep crashing at Katie’s.

She and her two partners had had to put up with his presence for long enough, and Amelia found being in the same apartment as a werewolf understandably upsetting, given her past and her scars. Adam had had nothing to do with the attack on her — hadn’t even been in the city when she’d been ambushed and nearly gored to death — but he hated the way the witch flinched when he walked into a room, and the pain and fear in her scent when she found herself alone with him.

It was neither of their faults, but it was an untenable situation for both of them.

So, he’d responded to an advert in the paper for someone looking to share an apartment; an advert that he’d only seen by chance when he’d set his newly-cleaned work boots out to dry on a piece of the weekend broadsheet. He’d long ago stopped believing in fairytale things like mates and fate and destiny, but this did feel like the universe was maybe cutting him a break after a really long run of bad luck.

At 6.28pm the following Wednesday, he walked up to the front door of a converted Victorian mansion, set back off a broad, leafy street and surrounded by simple but manicured gardens, and pressed the buzzer for apartment number four with a trembling finger, praying to the moon that this would work out.

He caught the faintest scent of something supernatural, something beyond the normal, everyday scents he was constantly and subconsciously filtering out, and he frowned, but before he could figure out what the wafting smell had been, the intercom buzzed and a clipped, male voice answered. “Yes?”

“Uh, it’s Adam Selhurst? Here to see about sharing the apartment?”

He hated the way it came out like a question; like his confidence was at rock bottom; like this was his last hope before moving out onto the street; because it was. All of it.

“Oh, yes…” After a pause during which Adam heard a little puff of breath that sounded anxious, that quietly-lilting voice added, “Of course. Come on up then.”

The lock clicked open and Adam pushed the sturdy, black front door open and wiped his boots on the coconut matting in the foyer.

An inviting miasma of cooking aromas wafted out from a ground floor apartment as he made his way inside and let the door close quietly behind him. His stomach growled and his mouth flooded with saliva at the thought of rich, hot, homemade food. He’d grabbed some rather stale, greasy tacos from a truck on his way back from work, but now he smelled celery and carrots, spices and minced beef in a rich stock, with the lighter, floury scent of pasta and béchamel sauce and a tang of cheese. Someone was making lasagna. His stomach rumbled again.

Ignoring it as best he could, he set his worn-out, steel toe-capped boot to the first tread of the stairs and made his way up the sweeping staircase to the second floor of the huge old house. All around him, the place creaked and seemed to breathe as the wood of the floors expanded as people turned up their heating at the end of the day, and pipes ticked and groaned contentedly. The place had character; soul.

“Don’t get too attached,” he told himself to try and ward against too much hope. “The guy might be a freak.” But heck, even if he was an axe murderer, Adam was tempted to take a room in his apartment anyway. He was six foot tall and as broad at the shoulder as a rugby flanker, and he was a werewolf. He could take on an axe murderer if it meant a roof over his head. Probably.

Fuck.

Once again though, behind the scent of furniture polish and floor wax and the enticing lasagna still drifting up from two floors below, he caught the scent of something… other. It made him think of the cool calm of a chapel crypt or the simple peace of a sepulchre, interwoven with the distant spice of incense and the faint tang of old blood. He’d smelled it before and knew what it meant. A vampire had been there.

Glancing around to check for anyone who might happen to see him behaving oddly in the hallway, he lowered his nose cautiously to the carved, wooden banister and inhaled again. Yes, a vampire had definitely touched it, and fairly recently for the smell to linger. The undead don’t leave a trace for long.

A floorboard creaked somewhere on the second floor and he jumped, straightening up and straining his hearing, but he heard no footsteps or heartbeats, and forced himself to relax. Just a shifting old house.

With a frown, he continued up the last few stairs and emerged onto the second floor of the old mansion. He passed by apartment three’s front door and turned right on the landing towards apartment four, which sat on the north side of the building and overlooked the grounds at the back.

The trace of vampire scent got steadily stronger, but there was no smell of spilled blood and he heard no signs of a struggle or distress. The scent was simply… there.

Adam knocked on the door and it opened a few seconds later.

At first, Adam was too struck by the beauty of the young man standing there to react at all.

Perhaps five foot ten or eleven, slender, and smartly dressed, his features were sharp, his expression stern and a little standoffish, with a pale rosebud mouth and glacially white cheeks. High cheekbones gave an almost gaunt look to his cut-glass jaw though, and his dark eyebrows pinched together at the sight of Adam standing there.

The man’s thick, glossy black hair was swept back off his face in an artfully dishevelled way, and it was the kind of hair that made Adam’s fingers ache to tug and scrunch his grip just hard enough to draw a moan. He looked like he was not long back from work, with his white shirt cuffed up to the elbows to reveal pale, lean forearms, and unbuttoned at the throat to show the delicate architecture of his collar bones. They made Adam’s wolf want to lick and bite, and he cut off that line of thought before it went anywhere further.

The man’s lip curled, his aloof expression turning suddenly hostile, and he let his black eyes rake up and down Adam’s body. “This isn’t going to work,” he said in that erudite, haughty baritone, and he made to shut the door in Adam’s face.

Adam’s stomach plunged.

Before the man got any further than the first twitch of his fingers though, Adam shot out his left hand and held the door open, barking, “Wait!”

The look of disdain he got in return could have shrivelled fresh flowers to ash, but he swallowed and gritted his teeth for a moment.

“Why not?” Adam said in the calmest tone he could muster. “Why won’t it work? You’ve only just seen me! You knew I was a guy, right?”

In answering the advert, Adam had told the man his first name and that he was in his late twenties, and that he had a job but couldn’t afford a place of his own.

“I knew that,” the pale man retorted, “But I did not know you are a werewolf. This absolutely will not work.” He hissed out the last three words emphatically and his features turned from living flesh to cold, unmoving marble.

“Wait, what?” Adam blurted in astonished shock and alarm at the man’s words.

Then the sepulchre scent struck him again in its purest form yet, and the penny dropped.

“Oh,” he said stupidly, his arm falling limply to his side, and then, again, “Oh.”

“Precisely. Thank you for your time,” the vampire said, and stepped closer, as if to shunt Adam out of his doorway like an overly-persistent salesman.

Adam’s brain began to scrabble for something, anything, that would save him. Without this, he’d be on the street. He’d pinned all his hopes to one last Hail Mary, and it was going up in smoke before his eyes.

“Please,” he hissed, breathing rapidly as panic began to cloy in his throat. “Please, I need this. I need this apartment. I need this to work. Please just give me a chance.”

The vampire looked a little taken aback by his determination. Or desperation. He fell still and then slowly raised one eyebrow. It was so sharp it looked like it had been inked by a calligrapher in a single, sweeping stroke. “You know our two species cannot coexist,” he said evenly. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Adam demanded with something akin to a growl in the word. “Why can’t we coexist?”

That seemed to stump the vampire. “We never have. History tells us over and over that we will be at each other’s throats within minutes.”

“I’m not going for your jugular,” Adam shot quietly. “Nor you for mine. And I’ve been here for at least three minutes.”

“This cannot end well. I’m sorry for your situation,” he said, “But I will not risk exposure – or the wrath of either of our kin – for you. Goodbye, Adam.”

Perhaps it was the sound of his own name — so personal, when he didn’t even know the name of the apartment’s owner — that set a dark current of disappointment spiralling through him, sucking him down with it. Or perhaps it was the realisation that this was it, and that even the supernatural world didn’t want him. Whatever it was, he stumbled mutely backwards and let the vampire close the door softly in his face.

His vision blurred as tears rimmed his lower lashes, and he turned unsteadily away and staggered towards the staircase. At the top step, however, all the strength left his legs and he just sat straight down and put his head in his hands and began to weep.

His wolf reared up inside him and he felt like howling; like tearing through his own skin and fleeing from the city and into the woods where none of this shit like houses and people and society and jobs and money mattered.

At first his desperate tears were silent, tracking down his cheeks behind his palms as he pressed his fingertips against his eyes until he saw a kaleidoscope of colours, but before too long, a heaving exhale left him. He choked out a feeble sob that turned from one to many in a matter of moments.

His pack had disowned him for falling in love with a human all those years ago, and when that hadn’t worked out and he’d tried to return to them, they’d driven him off. He still carried the scars all up his back, put there by his own mother as he’d run for his life. They ached now in time with his thudding heartbeat, adding salt to that day’s new wounds.

For a long time, Adam just sat there on the stairs, numb and dejected and weeping into his hands.

He didn’t hear a door open or the soft tread of footsteps on the floorboards, and he startled when a cool, firm hand pressed gently around his shoulder.

Jerking his head around and half-rising to his feet, he blinked blearily up and found the pale face of the vampire looking down at him. This time, those stern features had arranged themselves into something resembling curiosity, though it was hard to tell through the watercolour wash that Adam’s tears made of the man’s face.

The vampire crouched silently behind him on the landing and squeezed the joint of his shoulder. “You’re desperate enough that you would actually cohabit with a vampire?” he asked in a quiet, gentle voice.

“Who even says ‘cohabit’?” Adam asked in a scratchy voice, feeling a little hysterical around the edges.

That drew a tiny, unexpected smile at the corner of the vampire’s pretty mouth, and a low chuckle too. “Someone who’s birth year begins with ‘eighteen’.” Then the man sighed and stood, stepping back a pace. “Since you’re here, perhaps you would like to view the place?”

Adam nodded, pulling himself together and clearing his throat. “Yeah,” he rasped. Something small and inexpressibly fragile kindled between his ribs despite everything, and it tasted of hope when it finally fizzed on his tongue. “Yeah. Thanks.”

He cuffed at his puffy eyes and blinked rapidly, and the world came into sharper focus. Werewolf healing was good for a quick recovery at least. He levered himself up on long legs and grabbed the banister for support, swallowing thickly. The vampire was standing stock-still in the half light of the hallway, just watching.

“You sure I’m not going to make the place smell like wet dog since I’ve been crying?”

Again, the vampire’s mouth twitched with wry amusement at Adam’s self-deprecating humour. “I’m sure I can tolerate a little saltwater in the air. It’s holy water I have to watch out for. Come,” he said, and turned towards the open apartment door without looking back.

Adam followed the slim, silent figure, trying not to feel like a horrible cliche; like a stray dog brought in from the cold.

The apartment smelled clean, and completely without the scent of food that all homes carried in one form or another, and as he looked around at the open plan interior, Adam was surprised to find it sleekly modern. It made a sharp contrast to the fusty Victorian landing outside and the Gothic architecture of the building itself.

When he glanced at the vampire, he found the creature watching him with his unblinking, black gaze. It was like being stared at by a barn owl.

“What?” Adam asked. If he’d been in his wolf form, his ears would have swivelled nervously to lie flat against his head but as it was, his hazel eyes widened and he licked his lips.

The vampire smiled. “You seem surprised by what you find. Did you expect some macabre tableau, I wonder?”

He spoke so formally, so stiffly, and it almost seemed as though he’d accidentally stepped out of time in Victorian London and had lost his footing, ending up here in the modern day without having quite caught up yet. It was almost endearing.

“I don’t know what I was expecting to be honest. It’s nice though. You weren’t kidding when you said in the advert that you keep the house clean…”

“That won’t be a problem for you, will it?”

“I promise not to leave my chew toys all over the floor,” Adam retorted with another self-deprecating eye roll.

Oddly though, the vampire seemed perturbed by the sarcasm this time, and his spine stiffened. “Never having cohabited with one of your kind, I am uncertain of what to expect. Are there any… ‘needs’ of yours which will affect both of us? I do not ask to pry, you understand,” he added with a pacifying wave of one elegant, ghostly hand. “Merely in an attempt to accommodate.”

Adam blinked, still trying to parse his odd speech. “Uh… I don’t shift indoors —” and in fact after living with the victim of a werewolf attack, he hadn’t done it indoors at all in the past six months “— and I go out of the city on the full moon anyway. I don't think there’s anything else that would be different from living with a human.” A thought occurred to him and he asked, “How were you intending to make that work if I’d been human, by the way? I’m guessing you weren’t planning on confessing the whole… vampire thing…?”

“No,” he replied, folding his arms across his slender chest.

He looked like a model, standing there in his smart clothes with his perfectly-mussed hair. By comparison, Adam felt tired, gritty and scruffy, even though he’d showered after finishing work at the construction site. “So…?” he prompted.

With a sigh, the vampire shrugged. “I was going to tell them that I work night shifts, which is true, and that I am dead to the world between sun-up and sun-down, which is also true.”

“May I ask what you do for work?” Adam asked.

“I work at the hospital,” he said. “Trauma surgeon.”

“Fuck,” Adam exhaled. “And the blood doesn’t… bother you?”

Something hard entered his face again for the first time since discovering that Adam was a werewolf, and his tone turned acerbic. “If it did, I wouldn’t make a terribly good surgeon, would I?”

Adam held up his palms and fought the instinct to bare his neck to the guy. The end result was a notable twitch of his head. “No offence,” he added, “But if you’re a surgeon, why the fuck do you need a roommate? I mean… it’s not like we’re in the same pay grade…”

The vampire sighed and all the prickling hostility drained out of him.

Perhaps because the werewolf in him was attuned to reading even the most minute shift in body language, Adam watched the stranger’s figure go from defensive to vulnerable in the space of two heartbeats, and something cracked inside him when he read the intense sadness in those black eyes of his.

“I —” The vampire broke off and exhaled roughly, shaking his head.

In the low, LED light from the under-cupboard lights in the sparkling kitchen, his black hair gleamed like silk as it tossed gently from side to side, and again, it made Adam want to touch.

“I suppose…” the vampire continued heavily, speaking in barely even a whisper, “I suppose I wanted companionship after so long. It was naive of me, I know. This could never have worked with a human.” He fixed Adam with a level look and said, “I still don’t believe it will work with a werewolf either, but I’m willing to give it a try. Provided, of course, your family isn’t about to come tearing in here to part my head from my neck?”

Adam’s heart beat painfully for a few seconds and he shook his head, mumbling, “No family worth speaking of. You’re good on that front.”

“I’m sorry.” The vampire changed the subject and asked, “You said in our previous communication that you are in employment, but lacking accommodation. May I enquire as to the nature of your work?”

So stiffly formal, he didn’t seem real, and Adam nearly laughed. With the sound of it rolling around the edges of his words anyway, he said, “I work in construction. Rigging and scaffolding, mostly, but I do whatever’s needed on site.”

The vampire tilted his head, reminding Adam of a crow for a moment. “Fascinating,” he said, and he sounded genuine.

“Hardly,” Adam grunted, shrugging. “But it pays, and it gives me something physical to use up all my energy.”

“Werewolves have an overabundance of that, I take it?”

“Those who don’t shift on the regular,” he sighed and rolled out his shoulders unconsciously.

“I see.”

“Listen, are you really prepared to let me stay here?” Adam asked. “You seemed pretty sure a moment ago that we’d end up killing each other…”

“I might have reacted a little hastily,” he said, still standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “I have not had much to do with your kind over the years, and all I have to go on is the history between our species. My sire spoke often of the enmity between werewolves and vampires, and did not think highly of your kind.”

“Yeah, we get the ‘rabid dog’ treatment a lot from vamps…”

“As we receive ‘parasite and leech’ comments fairly regularly too, apparently,” he countered. “I trust such language won’t be an issue between us?”

“No. Can I ask where you get your blood from though? I’m assuming mine is off the menu if I’m paying for my rent with cash…”

The vampire looked sickened for a moment and actually took a step back.

“Werewolf blood that bad, huh?” Adam joked, though it fell flat.

“Actually, werewolf blood is extremely potent. It’s because of the magic that allows you the power to shift your form so dramatically,” the vampire said in clipped, terse tones. “But I would never dream of feeding from you, and especially not as payment for lodging here.”

Adam nodded and pretended not to be as relieved as he felt. “Cool. Just checking, you know? I promise not to shift and shed all over the shiny floors; you promise not to treat me like a Capri-Sun, and we’re square.”

“I… I don’t know what that means, but I swear never to drink from you without your consent. We can enshrine it in the tenancy contract, should you wish it.”

“No, that’s good. No point adding supernatural stuff into mundane contracts…”

“A salient point.”

A lull opened up in the conversation for a moment, until the vampire said, “Shall I continue to show you around? Then you can decide if the apartment will suit your needs.”

“Look, it’s got a roof that doesn’t leak and a space I can sleep in, and the rent is more than reasonable. I need to move out of my friend’s flat as soon as possible, and my other alternative is a cardboard box in an alley. As far as I’m concerned, I’m ready to sign.”

“Your situation is more desperate than I had appreciated.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think ‘really fucking desperate’ would look too appealing when I responded to your advert… but feel free to finish the tour anyway.”

Without further comment, the vampire showed him properly into the kitchen, which was fitted out with all the right appliances and crockery, but none of it had ever been touched. The microwave still had a plastic film over the glass from the store, for one.

The rest of the apartment felt hardly lived in too.

Adam noticed that the vampire’s scent barely clung to any of the furniture he passed, not even to the fabric of the sofa which was always a hotspot for people’s scent. There was nothing beyond an ambient settling.

“You’re not here much, are you?” Adam asked a moment later as he followed him out of the spare bedroom which had clearly never been entered by the vampire except for recently, perhaps to dust the surfaces, which all gleamed.

“No,” the vampire replied with a little frown. “I wake after sunset, shower, dress, and go to work. I return about an hour before dawn, or I remain inside the hospital depending on my shift pattern, and once I’ve showered again, I go to sleep.”

“No dates, no TV?” he asked carefully. No wonder this guy had never learned to adapt his speech if he never hung out with anyone. He didn’t even watch television. What his work colleagues must have thought of him was beyond Adam.

“No.” There was a long pause before he added, “I would appreciate it if you gave me warning in advance if you plan to invite guests over.”

“Of course,” he said. “I don’t really know anyone in the city though. I’ve been here for six months, and the only person I’m really friends with is Katie. I met her at work and she let me crash at hers when she found out I was sleeping in my truck. She lives with her two partners though, and one of them doesn’t like werewolves, so it’s not been… easy. For any of us.”

“I understand.”

As they made their way past the room that the vampire indicated was his own, without entering or opening the door, they returned to the open plan kitchen and living area and Adam chuckled. “So… uh, if we’re gonna be living together, I should probably know your name.”

“Oh, did I not give it earlier? Forgive me,” he said, and had he been able to, Adam suspected he might have blushed. As it was, he lowered his gaze and then looked up at Adam through his dark lashes in a most disarming way. “My name is…” he faltered, looking embarrassed, and then sighed. “My name is Valentine.”

Adam’s lips curled into a smile. “It’s beautiful,” he said, and Valentine blinked. “You don’t like it?”

“It… It has become antiquated, like so much else about me, but I cannot think of another to which I may answer, and I recoil at the idea of becoming ‘Val’.”

“No,” Adam snorted. “I don’t think that would suit you at all.”

The guy looked so inexpressibly sad for a moment that Adam had to fight the physical urge to hug him. After another sigh, Valentine asked, “When would you like to move in?”

“You’re sure about this?”

“We could begin with a trial period? Say, a month?”

Adam chewed the inside of his cheek and then nodded. It was something. “Ok.”

A key was sitting on the edge of the counter top, and Valentine crossed to it. He shunted it closer to Adam with a fingertip and then met his gaze, still holding the key in place on the dark stone work surface.

Only after a long, searching look at Adam, during which time all the hair on the werewolf’s arms and the back of his neck stood on end, did he withdraw his hand and step back. “Welcome home,” he said.

Adam picked up the key and slid it into his jeans pocket. “Thank you,” he said, “For giving me a chance.”

“Believe it or not, I’ve been where you are. I would wish that situation on no one.” Then he added with a wry smile, “Not even a werewolf.”

Adam smirked. “My stuff is in my truck. I only have one bag. I can go get it now, or I can come back tomorrow if you want some space.”

The tiniest smile twitched at the corner of Valentine’s lips, but he shook his head. “I thank you for your consideration, but no. We might as well start now. I have to leave for work shortly anyway. We will probably not see much of each other.”

He made it all sound rather cold and clinical, but Adam nodded.

“I shall endeavour not to wake you when I return before dawn.”

“That’s alright. Listen, is it ok if I go get some groceries and stuff? Put your fridge to use at last…?” He’d have to turn the bloody thing on for starters though.

The vampire nodded. “Please. It’s your home now too. I may be unfamiliar now with the requirements of the living, but I shan’t object to the presence of the things which… sustain you.”

Jesus, he sounded like he’d not spoken to a real person for at least a century, and his expression told Adam he knew it. With an amused little smile, Adam said, “Alright. I’ll go grab my bag, and we’ll take it easy. Anything I should know about living with a vampire? Should I go easy on the garlic next time I make pizza?”

Valentine smiled, looking a little relieved. “So long as I don’t actually consume it, garlic is tolerable enough. If you are religious, however, I would ask you not to wear any emblems of faith too openly or to put them up on the walls of communal areas… The faith of the living is somewhat… repellent to those of us who have cheated death… however unwillingly.”

“I’m not,” he said, wondering at that last comment. “Not religious, that is. The only goddess I worship is the moon once a month, and as much as I’d like to, I don’t think I can fetch you the moon.”

Valentine dipped his head as though hiding a blush his skin couldn’t muster, and then laughed quietly. “I don’t know why our species ever fell out in the first place,” he said.

“Eh, I feel like I’m a pretty good representative of my kind. You don’t want to meet my mother though.”

“Nor you my sire,” he said darkly and with much feeling. “Well, let me know if you have any queries, though I don’t tend to look at my phone while I’m at work.”

Having now met the man, Adam was surprised that he actually knew how to operate a mobile phone, but he kept that to himself, and set about making himself comfortable in his strange new home.

_

Hope you liked it! Let me know your thoughts. I've got a plan for this one, and hopefully it'll be about 3 chapters long... We'll see more of these two breaking down stereotypes and getting to know each other, as well as a threat from our vampire's past. There will also be a full shift protecc mode from Adam :)

There are very vague hints about their sexual preferences even in this chapter, but there will be some D/s dynamics, and there will be sexually explicit content. It will be tagged in the title, and in the 'tags' section.