Daniel looked round and smiled at me. "I can get you that too, of course," he said. "As much as you want, whenever you want."
"Right now I need a cigarette."
"In your shape? Allow me to be maternal—no smoking until after you've eaten something. I don't want you puking in my car. I have some Nat Shermans. You're welcome to them after dinner."
I followed Daniel out. A glorious sky greeted us over the ragged brick tops of the buildings—furious orange and sleepy violet, streaks of an ineffable azure. The sun was gone, as if swallowed by the murky Los Angeles skyline, only beginning to light up for the night. There were only a couple of cars on the narrow street outside, no pedestrians, no discernible human activity. I took a look behind me at the building we'd just come out of. It looked deserted from outside—sagging and cracked like an old wedding cake, mottled with graffiti, the windows blocked off with dust. "My God," I said, "what happened to this place?"
"Northridge quake," he said. "Just enough to shift the ground under the foundation. It's mostly safe. The ceiling's only fallen in on about three rooms."
I was aghast. "This ought to be condemned," I said.
"It is," Daniel said with great pride and affection. "Der Verfaulenhalle. I have a friend in city planning who makes sure that no wrecking balls ruin my palace. Well, I mean, look at it. It's about average for this neighborhood. There's plenty of money in L.A.—but none of it's here, that's for damn sure. It's easier to ignore than to fix up—there's plenty of space." He said this without a trace of irony. "For them, and for me."
Across the street was the back exit of a rock club—a young woman with big blond heavy-metal hair stood outside emptying the trash, and she looked up without emotion as we walked past. At this time of the evening, the parking lot was still largely deserted. On the far corner as the block ended, a huge black gas-guzzling monster Cadillac Coupe de Ville waited, gleaming, whitewall tires and tiny-spoked hubcaps shining purple in the dying light. "Please tell me that's not your car," I said, smiling helplessly. This was getting better by the minute.
"What's the matter with my car? I think she's beautiful." Daniel brandished a ring of keys and unlocked the driver's side.
"I bet you have a name for your car, don't you," I said.
"Dolores," Daniel said, climbing in.
I shook my head.
He unlocked and opened the door. "Get in, already."
The interior was even better—red glitter vinyl upholstery, bucket seats, a rearview-mirror mobile made up of rosaries, Playboy garters, Mardi Gras beads, and what looked like a dismembered Barbie. I laughed until I felt the healed rips in my chest start to stretch. I leaned back and tried to catch my breath, wiping my eyes. Daniel was smiling at me. "What? You think I'm a big goober, don't you?" he said.
I shook my head. "I just didn't expect you to be like this," I said. "I expected… you know, Klaus Kinski. Some kind of baby-chomping monster." I fell silent and he started the car, smoothly peeling out of the parking lot and joining the artery of traffic. He turned the stereo on, quietly playing some harsh industrial music I'd never heard before. "I didn't… Daniel, tell me why I'm alive right now."
"I saved you," Daniel said, eyes on the road. His eyes were narrow, heavily shaded with thick sparkling eyelashes, a brilliant dark green color like liqueur. "You were bleeding all over the place, in the back of that cab. You were wearing some awful lavender suit and it was completely black, dripping. The cabbie up front was dead—brain fried, bleeding out his eyes. Good thing too. Your fare came to nine hundred bucks."
"He drove me all the way here?"
"It's not like he had a choice. Once somebody as old as Ricari puts that mojo on your ass, you do it even after you're brain-dead. I wish I knew how he did it."
"I can't believe he let me live," I marveled. "I was pretty sure I died. How did you save me?"
"Fluids," he said. "We brought you inside, and we gave you some plasma, and then I kissed your wounds. I sweated into you. I masturbated, and smeared you with my semen." He darted me a sly, unsmiling glance. "By the end of the night you were starting to heal up. They put you on an IV with glucose and saline, just to keep you up till you regained consciousness. In the meantime I kept you asleep with my mind, so you'd heal faster. Worked out all right, don't you think?"
"You jerked off on me?"
"No, I jerked off, then I caught it in my hand, then I put it on you. Why?"
I didn't have an immediate reply. I looked at him for a while. Then I looked at the strip malls and palms and costume shops of Hollywood Boulevard streaking past. "I guess I should thank you," I murmured.
"I can jerk off on you if you want," Daniel said. He caught me staring at him again. "Just kidding," he amended. "Tell me about Ricari. How is the old son of a bitch?"
"Pious," I said. "Confusing."
"Repressed? He hasn't changed. I bet he's worse now."
"I can't believe he sent me away like that," I said.
"Hmm, I can't either. Anybody with good sense would have just killed you instead of going through all the trouble to hail a taxi, do a Jedi Mind Trick on some poor cab driver, and write me a nice note explaining his reasoning. He must really like you." He pulled the tape out of the stereo and replaced it with one that sounded almost identical. "He damn well didn't leave me a note when he ran away from me."
"He had nothing nice to say about you," I said. "He said, for one thing, that you were no great beauty."
"I'm not," Daniel said. His features, each alone, were well-formed, even classic, but put together they did not quite form a coherent whole. He had a long, large-nostrilled, noble nose, cheekbones for days, narrow almond-shaped eyes, and a wide, pointed, wicked mouth painted blood red. He was a perfect incubus. All he needed were horns and a lion's tail.
"I think you're OK-looking," I commented.
Daniel's jaw dropped with wounded vanity. "Oh, geez, come now, you will smother me with praise. Stop it this instant. You're OK-looking too, honey, especially now that we've gotten the puke out of your hair."
"Thank you for stimulating my appetite."
"Go on and tell me I'm beautiful," he said. "It's OK. My ego can't get any bigger than it already is." He glanced over at me and continued driving without looking where he was going. He was still going twenty miles over the speed limit, changing lanes like a man determined to win the Indy 500. "Would it help if I told you that you were a knockout even covered in blood and puke and all I could think about was how much I really wanted to—"
"Daniel, could you maybe please look at the road?" I said through my teeth.
At length we arrived at a typical Cali restaurant with big ferns outside and little ones inside. I felt like my belly had been left somewhere back there, eight or nine lane changes ago. Daniel, in his fishnet shirt and alligator vinyl jeans, stalked in like a supermodel and worked the place. Everyone stared at him, with dislike or lust or simple incomprehension, and by extension, at me too. I wanted to throw a tablecloth over my face. What a change from Ricari, who slipped into places so quietly that waiters were startled to see him! Daniel eventually stopped prancing back and forth as if looking for more beautiful people, and we got settled into a booth in the back of the restaurant.
"Are you crazy?" I whispered.
"What?" Daniel guzzled water from his drinking glass, licking his red lips.
"You just don't care, do you?"
"I like to give people something to look at," he said, running his fingers through his shock of thick, spiky, jet-black hair, hanging uncut down to the nape of his neck.
"But what if they guess… ?" I darted my eyes around the room, my heart hammering in my chest. I could feel it against the scars too, from inside.
"Guess? Oh, please!" Daniel shook his head patiently. "No one'll guess. This is Los Angeles. I look less undead than half the producers' wives in town. Look…" He stretched out his hands to me. His fingers were not as exaggeratedly long as Ricari's, but they were bright and bony and tipped with lo
ng, slightly curved fingernails, painted with black lacquer. The effect was extremely freaky. "Does this look human to you? No, it doesn't. But people don't care one way or the other. They wouldn't care if Jesus Christ himself came staggering through that door, nor Satan neither. Half the kids in Burbank have fangs. Dental porcelain. Looks just like the real thing." To demonstrate, he touched the tip of his tongue to one shining ivory spike.
"How do I know you're the real thing?" I asked as a matter of course.
He smiled at me, and instantly I felt the seat and the floor and the earth drop out from under me. I was falling at a thousand miles per hour without moving at all, without the jade coins of Daniel's eyes ever leaving mine. I would have thrown up, had there been anything in my stomach; as it was, I let out a little scream and gripped the table with my arms.
In another second everything was normal again. I almost began to cry in relief. "What the fuck was that?" I moaned.
"Very simple. I just fiddled with the part of your inner ear that handles your feeling of falling. Vertigo. A child could do it."
"That's bullshit!"
"So am I real?" Daniel pressed, his smile like that of a wicked child giving Indian burns.
"Yeah, yeah, OK. I believe you." My heart had barely had a chance to stop galloping after the experience of driving there.
He pouted, suddenly contrite. "I'm sorry," he said. He picked up my hand and kissed it, then got up and slid into the other side of the booth with me and put his arms around me for a while. His body was very warm and firm, his touch on my damp hair gentle, and I lay my ear against his chest. I heard his heart beating quite solidly, distinctly. I hadn't known until then that vampires had hearts.
A waitress finally came, sparing me any more dramas, and Daniel ordered food and hot tea for both of us. When she was gone, he asked, "Should I go back to the other side?"
"No," I said.
He kept holding me, cheek pressed against my hair.
"Why are you so warm? Why does your heart beat so loud?"
"Because," he said, "I am genuine. I do not deny myself anything."
"You mean you're a killer."
"I take what I want," he restated.
"You gonna kill me?" I looked up at him. It must have been seductive, and I didn't even mean it that way, but I looked up at him through my curly lashes like he was some kind of Superman who had just saved me. Kind of disgusting, now that I think about it.
"That's up to you," he said. "I like you. I don't want you to die. I saved your life. I want you to stay with me for a while."
The food came.
"Your heart's still beating so hard," he murmured against my temple. "I don't think that's fear happening now." I pushed him away then, and cleared enough space between us so that we were no longer touching. He smiled down into his vinyl lap disturbingly.
We ate. God, it was weird watching the vampire eat people food; he ate mostly with his fingers, except for the soup, continually licking bits from between his fangs and his first set of molars. "Do you have to floss?" I asked curiously.
"No," he said. "My teeth don't decay. I sometimes floss, just for the hell of it. I can't imagine why so few people do it regularly. I think it's a blast. I mean, who ever came up with this concept, dragging a little thread between your teeth? He must have been one crazy son of a bitch."
The food both strengthened me and made me sleepy. "Can I go back to bed?" I asked in a small voice, leaning against Daniel as he played with spilled salt on the table.
"Why?"
"I'm tired," I said.
"Well, you don't want to go back to that wretched infirmary. That's just for folks who need it."
"Do you get a lot of those?"
"Nature of the beast, I'm afraid. Sometimes I go a little too far."
"So, what, do you have this little tribe of medical gnomes at your beck and call to fix up people you've 'gone too far' with?"
He laughed faintly. "Not exactly," he said, not volunteering more. "You're very welcome to stay at my apartment, in my bed. It's nice, I have a groovy wave generator across from it, it's very hypnotic. I won't disturb you. I must go ranging afield tonight anyway."
"Yeah, I think that'll be fine." I was fading already.
He paid the sizable tab, and half carried me back to the black Coupe de Ville. He even changed the tape—he ditched the industrial for the soothing nonsense of the Cocteau Twins. "You have good taste in music for a ninety-year-old guy," I murmured.
"Some people are simply born in the wrong era. I am lucky to have lived long enough to get to some music I can stand. I wasn't very impressed by music I didn't make myself until I saw the Doors at the Whisky in 1968. I thought I was going to lose it." He seemed deeply amused by my comment. "A hip ninety-year-old. I never thought of it that way before. I'm a pretty happenin' senior citizen. Maybe I'll move to Palm Springs."
His apartment complex was built in a horseshoe shape, of lovely old red brick, with a marble fountain in the center. At eleven o'clock, it was completely quiet except for the faint tones of someone playing a piano. "Ah—Mozart," Daniel ascertained, "that crazy fat Austrian bastard. Will I never escape him?" He unlocked the door of number three, and led me in.
Inside was dark except for the wave generator, a transparent Lucite rectangle with some viscous blue fluid inside, slowly forming tides and then waves against itself, rocking back and forth ever so gently. It was completely stultifying, and Daniel had to tap me to get my attention. "Ariane, darling, get in bed."
I sat on the edge of a black-flannel covered futon, and stared up at him. He was changing his shirt. The clean lines of his shoulder blades became complex further down the back, and the six faint swells of his belly shone out for a brief second before a black polyester cowboy shirt covered them. "You're welcome to anything," Daniel said, tucking the shirt into the waistband of his wacky jeans. "If you need me, pick up the phone and press one, star. That'll ring me. If you get hungry, there might be something to eat in the fridge, and there's some pepper vodka and some lime juice and tonic in there, and there's cable, and you can call phone sex or psychics all night if you want, I never pay my phone bills anyway… you OK?"
"Thank you," I said, my throat feeling slightly tight.
I saw his eyes moisten slightly. "That's all right," he said. "You need me."
I crawled under the cover, wriggling out of my dress and socks. I heard him leave and close the door. The piano played on softly, coordinating with the blue waves as I fell asleep.
I slept; I dreamt; of what, I've forgotten now. I half woke, then went back to sleep, sliding myself out of my cotton panties, rubbing my pubic fur against the sleekness of the flannel. The temperature was perfect—the bed was just slightly cooler than my body, the pillow hard under my chin, chilly like spring rain. I know everyone has had moments like this, where you are overtaken completely by the sensuality of a comfortable bed and an erotic dream; you diffuse, your sensuality fills the room, every sensation of comfort is taken as sexual stimulation. I was all wound up—I wanted to come, but for some reason it was not quite possible. I needed help. I thought to myself, I should wake up and masturbate.
When I woke up it seemed that I already was—a hand was stroking my cunt in exactly the way I do it when I don't want to get off right away, but want to prolong the pleasure for as long as I have time. But both my hands were under my chin. A warm sleek smooth body was pressed against my side and I felt lips caressing my neck, my cheeks. I turned over and embraced the body, pulling it tighter to me. The hand squeezed me, and I felt a claw poke gently against my anus. I held up my own lips to kiss, and they were kissed.
I felt for identifying genitals. A penis; thick and full, mostly hard, rooted in very dense, smooth hair. I heard a faint hiss in my ear, and a whisper of a chuckle. "Careful." And more kisses against my mouth. The mouth tasted sweet and salty at once, quite pure, clean. A sharp point pricked my tongue and almost brought me out of my fog, but it didn't quite. Salt became the dominan
t flavor in our mouths.
The hand below paused in stroking me, and instead spread the lips apart. I heard the moist smacking and it aroused me further. I had a firm hold on the cock now, bringing it near. Just before it brushed against my belly, I opened my eyes.
Daniel lay against me, half on top, his skin slightly imperfect this close; he had open pores on his forehead, a trace of a scar coming down out of the hairline. His eyes were focused on my face, the pupils clicking open and closed, like the sphincter of a camera shutter. "I heard you dreaming," he said. "I thought you might have some need of me."
I kept my eyes fixed on him as together we helped his cock find its purchase inside me. I felt like I was being stabbed slowly—the pain was sharp at first, then slackening. His face transformed with pleasure. Gone was the cynic's slight smile, the brightness of the observing eyes; now he was all one purpose. I rocked upward until we were completely joined. He paused with his back arched, poised for a second; then all at once, he had gathered himself and thrust in again.
I was wracked with orgasms almost immediately. He didn't stop fucking me; rather he kept a hand down with a fingertip pressed tightly against my clitoris, trapping its retreat, making it face one defeat after another. He understood the female orgasm probably better than anyone I've ever known—that it's not simply a function of the cunt and cervix, nor a purely clitoral event; the entire system ought be be involved. After a few minutes our thighs were bathed in liquid.
He let me be for a while, and concentrated on the work. He didn't seem to be working to any particular goal; he was like a man taking a class for the fun of it, rather than for credit. I could not have come any more if I wanted to. I was content to hang onto his sleek back, admiring his nubile form, his delicacy, his tendency to fuck to four corners inside me. I didn't doubt that he had made Ricari violently jealous.
We stopped for a moment so I could have a bathroom break; then we resumed again, tangled in the sheets. We giggled and wrestled, and he pulled me on top of him, the covers over us. Dizzy in the stuffy hot air, I protested, but he murmured, "Sunlight coming through the blinds," arching his hips in a drowsy, but professional, motion.
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