Oh hugs are so good he stops vibrating to hug.

Hug!!! Hugs are so good, even apparently when one is a squishy human hugging a vampire!

And then something occurs to her.

"Oh, um." She pulls away to look at him, looking serious. "You have my permission to turn me early in any kind of emergency situation. I'd like to get all of my affairs sorted, but if the alternative to fake death is actual death I'll obviously pass. Do you think you can pull it off at the drop of the hat, or do we need, uh. I don't know, a vial of spare venom and a syringe?"

"...syringe? Doesn't venom... melt things?"

"That's true. I don't know how actionable this idea even is. How quickly does it melt things? Are there vials that can contain it safely? I just want some way to emergency turn me in a pinch, since, uh. Squishy human."

"I can turn you. I'm pretty sure. I can be around... open wounds... just fine. I can turn you."

"Okay," she says, nodding. "Then I guess just hover around me and be prepared to teleport in and save me. Do you want to borrow some books for when I'm sleeping?"

"I... can't... read. I never learnt how."

This is the most tragic and depressing thing she's ever heard. He has lived for over 250 years, and apparently he never bothered to learn to read.

"..... Well, I'm fixing that," she sniffs, offended. "Hold on, I'll get paper and a pencil, we'll go through the Latin alphabet. If you um, want to learn."

"Yes," he says, and it's only 80% because this seems important to his mate and she seems like she will be happy with him for it.

"Okay," she says, nodding firmly.

Paper! Pencil! Careful explanation of the alphabet, with color commentary! (With such examples as: "It's not clear to me why capital and lower case letters exist when they're essentially the same thing, it just seems weird and inefficient," and "So 'T' and 'H' make a 'TH' sound because my ancestors were cruel and terrible," and "Why do vowels make so many different sounds? Because English hates you and the French ruined everything.")

He still has perfect, eidetic memory, so memorising those is pretty easy. The main thing he'll need practice at is... staring at letters enough to make words click in his head as a flow thing in themselves, if that makes sense?

It does! When he gets the entire alphabet (and numbers, she also shows him numbers just in case) and it's clear he just needs to practice:

"I propose we practice via cuddling on the couch and me reading to you while you look over my shoulder."

....he vibrates a bit for a second before nodding very very quickly.

She giggles, then picks out a book that she's still fond of, and cuddles up with him and quietly reads to him.

Alexei should... definitely actually pay attention to what she's reading rather than just to the feeling of her skin against his. He can mostly do that.

It's a pretty good book! And she's a good reader, even if she might feel a bit too slow for vampire sensibilities.

But she does eventually interrupt herself with a yawn. It was already evening when she was doing her repotting, now it's gotten quite dark outside.

Oh right humans sleep. "Are you going to bed?"

...can he come with?

"Yeah, I should. I have work in the morning." Yaaaaawn. "Um. Do you want a couple books to go? Or? I don't know what you plan to do while I sleep."

.......he vibrates in place again.

She blinks at him.

"Are you going to be okay, do you want to be around me while I'm sleeping and vulnerable?" Pause. "... We could cuddle?"

Nodnodnodnodnod—

Yvette giggles a little.

"Okay. Uh. Go out the front door and then meet me in my room with teleportation once I'm done changing? You'll be able to hear me even if I call you very quietly, yeah?"

"Yeah. I... need to have visited a place before teleporting there. Or at least seen it. Open a window?"

also can he watch her change

"Oh, I see. Yeah, can do."