After a few lifetimes I groaned, "Don't you ever fucking come?"
"When I want to."
I lay back against him, wondering how I was ever going to walk again. His cock was still stiff as a poker, curved up against his belly, covered in a pinkish sheen. We had fucked till I bled. When I showed him, he held me down and licked at my wounded cunt the way an animal licks at a sore spot. At some point determined by him, he stopped and pronounced, "All better. Your turn."
Without complaint I bent over his penis. Oh, Daniel's penis, what a work of art, it belongs in the Louvre, in the Guggenheim of genitalia; thick and longish, just on the verge of being too big, with a prow-shaped tip poking through the delicate veil of foreskin. His skin was so translucent that his erection was dark violet, like berry stains—and the taste—like a strange vegetable, raw, the juice from a broken stalk. Daniel seemed to drift into a contemplative reverie, and I almost thought he was bored, but when I began to slow down, he seized my head and forced it back down.
At once he drew in his breath tightly, and gave out a throaty, clear, sharp cry. His issue flooded my mouth in a great copious stream that dribbled out of my lips and splashed on his lean white perfect thighs. "Swallow," he commanded. I shut my eyes and swallowed what I had caught—a big mouthful, the flavor of dry white wine, the texture of last night's avoglemono soup.
It burnt slightly in my stomach.
I lay beside Daniel, who had his eyes closed. I glanced at a red-numbered digital clock—it read 2:45 P.M. "I don't think that was fair," I murmured against the skin of his inner arm.
"No? But you were dreaming about me."
"I don't remember dreaming about you."
"Your pussy was wet. You were in my bed. And you were as tight as a virgin—when was your last time?"
"Months ago. But that doesn't give you the right."
"What gives me the right," he said, opening his eyes, "is that you grabbed my Johnson, you sucked me off, you wanted me. Naughty child."
"You're pure evil," I said, tracing the halo of long dark fine hairs that ringed his aureolas, the only hair on his chest. He kissed my hair and trailed his claws gently across my thighs.
"Ariane, will you consent to start falling in love with me, so I don't feel like so much of an idiot for being in love with you?"
"What the hell are you in love with me for? All we did was screw." But I blushed violently.
Daniel kissed me. "I love the taste of my cum in your mouth. Has nothing to do with screwing. That was inevitable. There is more. I can talk to you. You don't take me seriously. Plus, we've both been through Ricari University. And there's more besides that. You have such perfect breasts, did you know that? And a perfect round belly. And a perfect ass… you have the kind of body that I like… a Theda Bara body. A surrealist body."
"Jesus Christ, Daniel."
"Tell me you'll stay with me. Please?"
"Is there a Denny's around here anywhere? I really want some french fries." I began wiggling away from him, into the comparative coolness of the air.
He gave a patient sigh. "We're going to buy you some clothes first. Then we can go to Denny's in West Hollywood." He slid out of bed and stood there in the semidarkness, gloriously nude, stinking of me, hair tousled.
"When? Now? But you can't go out in the sun."
"Yes, I can. I've got long sleeves, sunscreen, and a hat. I needn't be outside for long—I know where we're getting your clothes. I hope you like black. I hate just about every other color."
I shrugged. "You're paying."
We didn't bother to wash at all. I sat in my dress and my pool of drying honey and watched him pull on a long-sleeved black shirt, black Levi's, fine leather gloves, and a black ten-gallon hat. When he was done I stood up and kissed him ravenously on the mouth.
It was a bright hot clear day, but Daniel, behind his Jackie O shades and gloves, didn't seem to mind. He drove like a demon back through Hollywood, blasting Snoop Doggy Dogg from the car stereo, and fondling my bare pale thigh.
Sometime after we started driving, but before we reached our destination, I felt a change seep into me, slowly but growing more rapid, like a drug, or a glass of liquor after dinner. I thought of my old clothes—the gray fisherman's sweaters, the hiking boots, my favorite pair of blue jeans that I wore until the crotch needed patching—and I didn't miss them at all. I didn't miss my apartment, or my students, or my dead rats. They seemed like old TV shows that I used to never miss when I was a kid, but that I forgot as I grew up. I tried to picture John's face, or his body, his belly, or his penis—and I couldn't get more than an impression. He was gone. All of it was gone. And I felt light, slightly dazed, happy in a European way. I stared at Daniel until we reached a stoplight. Then he looked over at me and picked up my hand and sucked one of my fingertips into his mouth. "Will you stay here with me?" he said.
I said nothing. I smiled, stroking the velvet texture of his tongue with my pinky.
He turned back to the road and smiled to himself.
So he bought me clothes at some pretentious Gothic chamber of a basement boutique—five pairs of black jeans, some Tshirts, some short uncomplicated dresses, chunky black Doc Martens shoes—and then zipped off to Denny's in the orange afternoon sunlight.
We sat in a booth at the back where the sun didn't reach, and immediately began to grope.
You must understand that I never felt like this before. I was deeply in love with John when I first met him, but what went on between us was rarified, mainly verbal sparring, understanding, and sex that was comforting and delicious; we never had a time when we couldn't keep our hands off each other, when sex was continually threatening to jump out of the woodwork. Some will disapprove of such public excesses. Honestly, we weren't trying to gross out the other patrons of Denny's #45312 (or at least, I wasn't), those hapless travelers and Grand Slam diners who stared at us with naked distaste. There was simply an ectoplasm oozing out of Daniel, creeping over and enfolding me, tormenting me into making love with him in public. It didn't help that he kept up a running narrative of obscenities in my brain, which I shall not try to replicate. It doesn't sound half so nice coming from me.
The barely-of-age waiter came over and glared at us. "Are you, like, ready to order?" he snipped.
Daniel turned his smoky eyes on the boy, and I saw the waiter wilt, a sweat visibly breaking out on his forehead. Daniel's lust was fucking contagious. Daniel gave the yellow uniform a frank appraisal, then said, "Nothing for me. The lady will have French fries with ranch. And coffee."
"Are you ever going to let me order?" I whispered to Daniel.
"Should I?"
I answered him by locating his nipple through his shirt and biting it.
"You clean up real nice, baby."
The waiter lurched off to the kitchen, crippled by a sudden boner, and I sat back arid regarded my lover Daniel with a smile. He eased his hand up my skirt a few inches further. "I'll be honest with you," he said softly. "When you swallowed, I enslaved you."
"What?" I asked, laughing.
"It's a few steps away from my blood," he said. "You're mine now. I can talk to your mind. I can talk to your body. You won't want to leave me. You can, if you want, but you won't want to. It's the only infallible love potion I can think of."
"You serious?" The smile melted from my face.
He nodded.
"That's why I feel like this?"
"It'll wear off. But you are closer to me now, for a while, than you could be otherwise. I don't know how it works. Something, probably, on the cellular level. My cum… burns, doesn't it?"
"Yes. In my stomach."
He licked a curl of my hair. "I noticed it with Ricari."
"You—?"
"Oh, well, of course. He didn't know. I didn't either. I just wanted to go down on him. I was terribly, terribly attached to him—I had his semen all through my body, in my mouth, up my ass, everywhere, his sweat, his tears. Every drop of his body I tasted held me to him more and
more."
"I can't… imagine… Ricari fucking anyone up the ass…"
Daniel laughed. "Hmmmm," he said, raising his eyebrows. "I wasn't the first. Usually he was a taker, from what he told me. He hustled quite a bit in those back streets of Paris, did you know that?"
"I thought he mainly went with women."
"He wasn't that picky."
I shivered. Daniel stroked the gooseflesh on my arm until the fine brown hairs lay smooth again, kissed my hand where the green veins stood up, fat and nervous. "Orfeo and I… used to fuck… for hours, like you and I did. We did nothing else for days. I would run afield, and bring home young men for him to kill and feed upon, and then we'd make love with their staring bodies propped up in the corner. Sometimes they'd die right when we were climaxing. I loved it."
"How many people do you kill a week?"
"I don't know. On average?" He stretched along the booth. "Three?"
"Three people a week?"
"That's an average. Some weeks I don't kill anybody. Some weeks I kill twenty."
"Did you kill someone last night?"
"Only myself," he said, touching his hand to his chin poetically. He chewed gently on the back of my hand. "Eat your fries, my darling. I want to have you in the car during sunset."
He did too; in the parking lot of the Rotting Hall, while the sky went through its daily convulsions of scarlet and puce, he raised and lowered me like a flag on a pole, holding my hair out of my face so that he could watch me. Heavy-metal people passed within inches of the car without seeing us writhing around back there. "I'm going to come inside you," Daniel told me, half starting up, jamming himself so tightly inside me that I felt something nearly give way.
"No," I pleaded.
"You can't stop me. It won't hurt you." His fangs glinted at me. "I can't get you pregnant, I can't carry disease. I am safe sex."
"I don't wanna become any more obsessed with you than I already am!"
"I need you! You're in love with me! Admit it."
"Fuck you." I gasped. "Oh, my God."
"Come on," he said. "Come with me. Come on."
"No," I said, but I already was.
* * *
Chapter Seven
Another glorious terrible evening had ended on the mattress in Daniel's office on the top floor; I could feel the contours of Daniel's penis inside me as if my cunt were a sheet of metal hammered into shape. I had fallen asleep at dawn, exhausted, in the middle of a sweaty fuck, Daniel whispering Deutschen exhortations of love into my ear. I slept hard, too tired to dream.
Awakening many hours later, I lay on my side blinking at the cracks of sunlight creeping through the shrouds of garbage bags that covered the windows. The tape we'd been listening to all night still ran—David Bowie's Hunky Dory and some Nico thing on the other side; "Oh! You Pretty Things" was playing as I awakened. All was vague brownish polygons. My back was cold as ice. I snuggled closer to Daniel behind me, trying to gain warmth from the phlogiston of his body, but that was where the cold was coming from. I felt like my back was to a cold tile floor.
I rolled over, rubbing my eyes. "Dan?" I whispered.
A corpse lay there where Daniel had been; it had Daniel's hair, the black shiny shocks of it lying across the mattress cover, and Daniel's bone structure, the long Adam's apple, and the jutting Teuton cheekbones. But the eyes were sunken, the lips dark and lifeless, the luminous white skin gone gray-blue. His hands were curled into mummy fists, like the feet of a dead bird.
My scream echoed three full times. Before the last died down I was in the far corner of the room, a single droplet of nervous urine streaking down my leg like quicksilver. I couldn't get far enough away. And to think that I could still feel the sweet displacement of that cock inside me, still feel his hot shaky breath on my ear!
A boy came tumbling out of the bathroom, half zipped up, and ran over to me. I stared at him. "What's the matter?" he asked me quizzically, squatting down and regarding me like a curious bird. I couldn't say anything for a long time. The boy had very white skin, but a mortal white, with pink fingers and bare toes, and a slightly rounded childish belly; his head was shaved, but for a blond and black forelock that fluttered in the slight breeze coming from the garbage bags on the windows.
"Daniel," I managed to get out, and pointed.
The boy looked over at the grimy mattress on the other side of the room, half covered with clothes and black sheets, and then back at me. "What's the matter?" he asked again. "Haven't you ever seen him sleep before?",
"Sleep?"
He helped me stand up, putting his arms around me to steady me. I was buck naked, but I didn't even care. He led me slowly back over to the mattress, and had me kneel down beside it. The boy put out his hand to the blue shrunken body, and touched the shoulder. The impression of his finger stayed there. I felt nauseated. "He's fine," said the boy. "You've never seen him sleep. You never saw your other vampire sleep?"
I was beginning to breathe again. "No," I said. "He wouldn't let me."
The boy made a sound of understanding. "If he were dead for real, there wouldn't be anything left except bones—maybe not even that."
We looked at each other.
"You wanna shower?" he asked shyly. "I brought you some towels."
"Yeah," I said. "Thanks."
I somnambulated to the bathroom, and took a shower, The tiles in there were white and clean, but the grout between the tiles was black and shiny, with God only knows what. I soaped myself for twenty minutes, silently thanking Ricari for those small, ruthless mercies.
I toweled off with more stolen hotel towels, and put on a pair of new black jeans and a plain black T-shirt that the boy had kindly set on the tiles while I was in the shower. He was outside sitting in a folding chair when I got out, reading a comic book with one leg crossed over his lap. He was a beautiful morsel of a young boy—handsome legs, narrow girl-shoulders, a smooth flexible torso with a tattoo of a question mark on the belly and a crescent moon on the right shoulder. Both of his marzipan-perfect rosy nipples were pierced laterally with delicate steel barbells. He smiled at me. "Feeling better?"
"I don't think I ever want a shock like that again."
"Dan loves to shock people," said the boy. Politely he closed his comic book. "It'll be sundown soon, and he'll be waking up. I think we have plans for the night. Do you want to come downstairs with me and smoke some kind buds? I have some French bread and chocolate."
I followed the boy down the winding staircase. The formerly deserted building was now host to probably a dozen young kids, mostly dressed in black, from punky tatters and safety pins to elegant black lace gowns and silver buckles. They smiled at me as we went past, as if they knew all about it. I blushed my head off. They all knew. Had they all gone through waking up next to the graying horror and having their screams echo through the broken bricks? I felt like a royal idiot.
The boy led me to a smallish room three floors down, strewn with couch cushions, tapes, comic books, stubs of votive candles. He left the door open. "Do you have a cigarette?" I asked wanly.
"Of course." He had a crushed packet of black Sobranies, one of which he lit for me. He took a swallow from a plastic container of pinkish liquid, and busily began to pack a tiny purple plastic bong. "I'm sorry. Don't feel bad. They all look like that when they sleep. Or at least, Daniel does."
"Who are those people?"
"Them? They're just Dan's kids. You know. They follow him around. They hang out here. A lot of them saw Daniel's shows, and came here to find him. A lot of them, he picked up off the streets and brought here so he could take care of them, you know, have fun with them. Most of them ran away from home, like me." He handed me the bong.
I took a short, soothing hit. "What's your name?" I said, exhaling slowly.
"Lovely," he said. "Well, duh, of course that's not my real name. My real name sucks. The first thing Daniel said when he saw me was, 'Oooh, lovely,' so I decided that would be my name from now on."
/> "Do you know my name?"
"Sure," he said. "Ariane. Daniel told us a long time ago."
"What were you doing upstairs?"
He paused while the smoke worked its way around his lungs, then blew it all out with a mighty cough. He shook his head. "Daniel called for me," he said. "He wanted me to watch over you both. I've been there since about noon, just chillin', listening to Bowie and reading comics. I do it all the time."
I refused a second bong hit. "How long have you been here?" I asked.
"About two years now."
I smoked my cigarette, watching the tiny flames licking up the sides of the smooth black paper. "And how old are you?"
"Eighteen."
"You Daniel's lover?"
He nodded slowly. "Yep," he said. "Most us of are, or have been, at some point."
"And you all know… ?"
"That he's a vamp? Well, yeah, of course, why else would we be here? I mean, Daniel's hot, and he's talented and great, but there's one reason mainly why most people stay. Some people come around just to find out if it's all true, then they drift off. But a lot of kids stick around. He's real, you know. It means a lot to us."
"How'd you find out about… uh…"
"Your other vampire?" He smiled at me over the rim of the bong. "Daniel told some of us. His most important folks—me, Chloe, Mimsy, those of us who were there when we found you. Chloe was the one who actually did a lot of the fixing up. She used to be a nurse, I guess. We gave you plasma. I should say, I gave you plasma."
"What do you mean?"
"We've got the same blood type," he said. "She set us up on some tubes, and I dripped all this blood into you. Then I passed out. I missed the big ritual—Daniel's big laying on of hands and all that. I've never seen him so into saving someone's life before. But he showed us all that note that was stuck to you, and said, 'You know who wrote this? It was that bastard who changed me over. He's too chickenshit to do it again, so he sends 'em to me, like fruit baskets.' I'll never forget it for a million years. I could have puked laughing. So what was he like? Was he really horrible?"
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