The light grew, showing the Winnie the Pooh clock broken, the door chipped and splintered, the rug glinting with missed shards of glass, Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner spattered with blood as he placed his hands on that old-fashioned bicycle.

Jesse knew the moment the sun rose over the distant hills, even though it couldn’t penetrate through the redwoods in their garden: he couldn’t move.

Walter’s face was soft with hope. “Okey dokey, pokey, this is it.” He put one arm under Jesse’s neck and the other under his knees and lifted him into a Pieta embrace. Jeremy, a grim doorman, held the bedroom door for him.

Jesse’s foot banged the door jamb. “Sorry, love, sorry, sorry,” Walter gushed as Jeremy led the way down the stairs.

Jesse, head cradled against Walter’s shoulder, saw tears and determined tenderness. His own heart seemed to catch like a sob, though of course it didn’t beat at all. He felt himself drifting back toward love and forgiveness. Should he resist?

The front door clicked and opened silently until the thin creak which it always gave in the last inch.

Jeremy gasped sharply. His voice came, tender and sad. “It’s right, I swear it’s right. I’m doing it for you, I’m, I’m better for you.”

Jesse expected Walter to ask who Jeremy was talking to. But Walter only walked down the last few stairs, intent on the healing that would come in seconds.

Jesse sensed a presence, almost like a little cat with fairy wings but he couldn’t turn his head to look.

The moment when Walter carried him into the cool gleam of the rising sun seemed to last for a lifetime.

Jesse relived every moment they had shared: old movies, gourmet food and kisses, the good sex and the bad. He saw Walter’s face, aware that Jesse had not yet forgiven him but seeing the shared memories, seeing Jesse wonder if he was strong enough to mean it if he said, you have one last chance.

Walter laid him down on the sidewalk. Jeremy gripped with bone-white knuckles the black railing that graced the three stairs to their front door. Hope brightened on Walter’s face as he saw the love returning on Jesse’s.

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Then Jesse felt for the first time the effect of sun on a vampire.

It healed him!

Sally Yan, who could have told Jeremy what the sun might do to KerriAnne, could also have told Jesse that sunlight had mended Lavinia’s mashed nose and sealed her torn skin. It could heal one and destroy another and nobody yet saw the pattern of why.

Joy poured through him like a slow bowl of perfect soup. It was something like love had been with Walter that very first time, both of them shy and excited, Walter ashamed of seducing a man so young. It was something like his mother’s fingers weaving and knitting, his gentle mother who had died when he was seven and he’d gone to live with his firebrand Grandma Katie Bell.

At first the healthy Adams apple and windpipe were ghostly, like the illusion where you try to pick up the penny on the top of a mirrored bowl. But soon his throat felt whole, a tapestry of sweet song.

To the crying Walter, the healing also looked like a cheap illusion, a special effect in a Roger Corman movie where they fade a picture of a wounded throat onto a picture of a whole throat. But the mend was strong enough for Jesse to bellow with orgasm.

Walter vowed fiercely never to betray Jesse again. More: he would somehow atone for what he had done to Jeremy five years ago. He looked at Jeremy to tell him so.

Jeremy’s face was a dam holding back a flood.

A flood of rage? Of joy at salvation?

But he just nodded and walked away.

Later, vowed Walter, he would find Jeremy and throw himself at his feet. For now, reporters were pulling up in squealing cars to ask a thousand questions. He would pull Jesse out of the sunlight and get him inside. He knelt, put his hand under his beloved’s red hair.

Their eyes met!

Human Sally had been pulled into erotic frenzy with vampire Lavinia. But now for the first time a vampire locked eyes with another vampire in the sun.

They ripped at away other’s clothes (only pajamas) and in a fleece of time, were pressed warm and nude together. Cries of “What the…” and “Oh jeez, wow,” pattered at them and fell away as Walter pushed without resistance into Jesse’s now-welcoming ass. They rode on air, only air.

Jesse writhed and spun them, raking nails across Walter’s back as Walter poured a honey sweet orgasm into him. Their legs and groins did a fairy lilt and Jesse shoved into him. They looked with amazement into each other’s eyes. A roar of air pushed at them and faded.

They never knew how close they had come to the blades of a helicopter.

They soared higher into rushing silence and the cawing of gulls. Jesse came in Walter like streamers of aurora but they couldn’t stop. Blue sky and cobbled earth spun crazily as they started again.

They had resolved nothing, but the sun powered them on and on.