Temptation Close

by Scarlett Rush

  That night at the wine bar she noted her neighbours were all breathing exactly the same as one another. It was his doing. Their inhalations and exhalations were all perfectly timed, so in came the air in one collective breath and then out it came again in synchronicity. It was more noticeable because of their excitement. They wouldn’t realise it but she did, because she knew to observe it. Vampires have the ability to match your heartbeat to theirs if they are in your company for more than a few minutes, increasing or decreasing it as they see fit. This means they can slow the rate of any potential victim, making escape ever harder. Or they can increase it to give the victim an impression of rising passion, of desire. They can make you think you are falling for them and need to be with them above any other. That was why her own heart had been racing that night, despite herself.

  But the biggest clue was in his aura, which proved her sixth-sense feeling of uneasiness around him to be well founded. Her psychic healer had helped develop her ability to see auras when she was still in her teens. She hadn’t used it for years, since it became confusing and showed you just how much anger and hatred and desperation there was in this apparently civilised world. Very few knew she had this ability. No one in this street did. Still, it wasn’t something any of them would ever ask, was it? They never tried to find out anything about her. They had no desire to go beyond face value. They didn’t care to search for her complexities or her depth.

  Which of them knew that her husband was too inarticulate for her and masked her true potential? Or that he was just someone who swept her away when she was too young to know any better, when she thought that happiness was all about revelling in the primary role of siring and raising the next generation? He was loud and they would hear only him, judge her by his standards and never think to search for her true self now buried under the weight of his stronger character and the strictures of motherhood. Her gravestone might be carved soon enough and when it was, all it would bear would simply be her name and beneath it a question mark, because no one now had the slightest inkling about her - not the ones who raised her, or married her, or lived next door to her.

  Imagine if they knew that she could see each of them so vividly. She could see each aura billowing red - the colour of attraction, greed and lust - when he approached them in that bar. Even the ones she thought more reserved, less inclined to such thoughts. Theirs was every bit as bright, every bit as swollen, reaching out to find him and draw him in. The soul cannot lie. His though, his was pure, tell-tale vampire. It was all darkness, and thin, because they don’t have the life in them to expand it further. Indigo and dark greens merge. Sometimes there is the red of lust-hunger, but it is so dark it seems almost black. This is when their aura is at its widest, just giving a hint that it might expand before being drawn back towards the body. It is so guarded, so defensive and protective, almost impenetrable. Everything is about keeping their secrets intact, about being irresistible whilst retaining poise and reserve. They give nothing of themselves away, but take everything that you are.

  It is the loud ones in this world who never know the answers, the ones who try to rule us and impose their ways on us all. She should know - she was married to one of them. Hunter spoke only when he needed to, when he needed to draw you out. Most of the time he just listened, keeping your gaze fixed upon him, trying to read your mind and controlling the beat of your heart. It is the silent ones who possess all the knowledge and the secrets. That is why the secrets still exist. Nothing you could do would faze him. Never would he lose control. He acted with precision. His deeds were sinister but utterly necessary for maintaining his existence, of feeding his never satisfied hunger. All was boundless passion, tangible enough to draw anyone in, from the second he first laid eyes upon you to the drenched sheets of the shocking, gorging, absorbing end. Everything he did would be purple or claret or black. There never would be any running from it.

  Still she could not understand how he had let her go on as long as he had. Why hadn’t he come for her? Maybe he realised she had no one to tell. It wasn’t like she hid herself away. Each day she went by his drive, completely at his mercy. She was out there on the streets while her daughters dawdled, there for the plucking. Or she was inside with the lights on, obviously at home, the back door unlocked. No, nothing would stop him when the time came. Her one hope was that she could get him to ravish her first, to force him to make her one of his kind and divert her from what could seem like inevitable oblivion. Once he had penetrated her he would know of her potential. He would see all that she was, as the vampire always can when he is inside you. He would know she was worth keeping, when no one else would even realise she was gone. They would find her body pale and empty and silent, and they wouldn’t even notice any difference.

  She would have to spread wide and be ready to take him. Usually vampires do not swell to their full thickness until they are deep within you, but still she would need to be wet. A few times over the last few days and weeks she had found herself scuttling into private corners, finding mere seconds of precious alone-time to rub and pinch herself down there, just to ensure she would be ready enough to take him if he surprised her. The knee-buckling zeal of these actions had her sobbing like a self-flagellant with the guilty desperation of it all. Instead, a couple of times a day she now squeezed lubricant on herself. Just a small coating, hurriedly applied, of one that was mint-tinged to tingle her lips, letting her know it was there, and that she was alive. If her husband ever caught her slicked up in readiness like this he might kill her himself, but there was no chance of that happening.

  Hopefully Hunter would come to her when she lay prone. Better still if she had been left with her legs splayed apart, her ankles tied to the bedposts, although there had been no chance of this ever happening when her husband had wanted her, let alone now. It would be better in darkness to hide the fearful sight of him, but when was she ever alone at night? Early afternoon it would have to be, as the darkest evenings of winter came down. That time of the day is always the hardest, when the sun seemed to draw hope and optimism down with it below the horizon. At least night had some element of cosiness.

  She had some knowledge of how to act, which would help. The feelings would hit her stomach as soon as he crept into the house. She wouldn’t need to hear him, just to close her eyes, give herself a few strokes with her finger and open wide. She wouldn’t be able to rise even if she wanted to. He could weigh her to the bed with just one look, with one single hissed baring of his fangs. The temperature would drop - another trick they used to numb your limbs and prevent escape. In pulling the bedroom door open he would suck all the air from the room, emptying your lungs, leaving you unable to scream. This is when most panicked and fought, allowing themselves to go under. The trick was to become his at once, to search out the lips and have them sink against yours and breathe his air, since he didn’t need oxygen to exist. As long as you stayed clamped to him you would stay conscious.

  Vampires have very little defence against their own sexual desire. If you are naked and open for him he would find you impossible to ignore. It wouldn’t matter about your imperfections, the fatness of your thighs or the roll at your belly. Such opulence of flesh only drives them on. They see only beauty, which is how they are able to make themselves so irresistible. Once he is inside you he cannot draw out until it is done. He swells within, forming a knot like a wild animal’s inside you so that he cannot be pulled clear. You must stay and let him do as he pleases, dying by moments as the air in his lungs diminishes. The panic of fading consciousness dulls your movements but enlivens your sensitivity a hundred-fold. The bliss of his swell against your nerve endings is like nothing you can imagine.

  When you feel the rip at your neck it is already too late. The air has gone and there is no more left to breathe. However much you will your end to come, the natural desire to cling to life intensifies the sensations beyond your earthly endurance. You feel the bursting terror at all that yo
u will leave behind, the fear of nothingness, of excruciating mental and physical agony. And then suddenly, like a dam breaking, elation replaces it as you realise that none of it matters anymore. He holds you and rides you and slurps the lifeblood from your body - a sensation that in itself feels like all the thrills you have ever had sucked from you in your life coming at once. In that waterfall of gushing joy your mortal self ends and for all the coldness at your core you know you are going to live forever. It will be a selfish eternity, propelled by desire and hunger. Nothing else will matter but oneself. It will be magnificent.

  The toy made an electronic quack as it was hurled across the room to land against the box Bethany put it away in each night. She roused herself from the daydream, her face colouring with the guilt of her distraction. The needs of her body were clouding everything. This lack of privacy was driving her to despair, this inability to find time to do to herself what her husband once used to do for her. Hunter had to come for her soon. She didn’t think she could hang on for much longer. He was the only chance she had, the one opportunity to make her relevant and avoid sinking into nothingness with obscurity. With him she would become something. Her potential would be realised. Please come for me soon, she thought. Please come for me now. Something flashed in her periphery, outside her lounge window. With fright shooting she turned to confront whatever it was, sure she would see his bloody eyes and ripping fangs hurtling at her prone flesh, his black shadow crashing unstoppably over her. But the street was completely empty and quiet.

  Eight Weeks

  Nesta looked at the calendar hanging up in her kitchen. Two months now since his arrival. This last couple of weeks had seen a flurry of sightings and some brief meetings. He had been loading the board on the car pretty much every morning she had come back from taking the kids to school. Conditions were ideal for it, apparently. The tides were higher at this time of year, he said. She got to thinking that maybe he was timing his preparations with her return. These meetings couldn’t take long as she only had a ten minute turn-around before she needed to be in her car and heading off to work. She had been late more in two weeks than over the last two years. Breaking off from each conversation had proved a lurch.

  So what had they talked about in their brief debates? Everything and nothing: the weather, current news items, film, a bit of politics, even a bit of philosophy, which was perhaps a touch heavy for nine o’clock in the morning but still thrilled her. As well as humour he displayed intelligence and understanding when he spoke. A couple of times there was even a bit of measured passion, like there had been that time he had spoken about the death of his wife. Nothing he said or did would ever be ordinary. You could surely speak to him for hours and it would flash by in what seemed like minutes. She held the memory of each separate conversation, trying to recall exactly how each went to keep them as individual episodes rather than one mixed blur of things he had said. It was like keeping the memories in a mental glass cabinet, to open and select one to examine in her free moments, as one might take out a treasured porcelain figurine to study and to give you pleasure.

  Light was beginning to be cast on his true character. He was entertaining to be with, first and foremost, and always warm-hearted. This still surprised her. For some reason she still expected him to be moody and off-hand. If you saw the gunslinger sat in quiet solitude at the saloon table, the big frame hunched to warn off approaches and the shot glass of whiskey looking tiny in his hand, the face lined with a lifetime of killin’, the brim of the hat down low but the snake-eyes still flashing to show he was always ready for anything, you wouldn’t naturally expect to be belly-laughing with him within minutes over the best lines from the new comedy series you both saw on TV the night before.

  After his unexpected showing at the wine bar a couple of weeks before, she had felt wary about him. To a lesser extent she still did. Something unspecified about him still suggested danger. External judges might have considered her wariness irrational, especially since they clearly got on so well and were now familiar enough to share private in-jokes. Perhaps if she studied her reasoning she might have found the answer lay in her suspicion at the way he was so open and friendly with all the girls, not just with her. She didn’t want to have to compete. It would have been way more flattering and easier to deal with if she had been his one and only favourite amongst them.

  That was the thing that still troubled her and had the heart beating fast. It was the fact that she might lose him to one of the others. She had absolutely zero intention of pursuing Hunter romantically, absolutely none at all. But that niggling thought that he might set his sights on one of the others wouldn’t go away. The two of them clearly had a connection. She could tell this from the amount of conversation she seemed to have had with him in relation to how little they’d had in reality. Information was therefore being transmitted between them on non-linguistic levels, through looks and laughs and body language.

  If she had known it was her and only her it would have been fine. Even if he had declared openly, to all, that he wanted her madly, then she could have coped. It would just have been a joke between them that was never pushed beyond this. She could have safely basked in his admiration and not wanted to do anything about it. However, knowing that she was only one amongst many, that just kept the niggle inside. It kept him forever on her mind, kept her wondering what she could say or do to put her at the forefront of his. It wasn’t that she was competitive - far from it. It was because subconsciously she thought out of all of them she deserved him most. She was the one closest in thought and humour to him. A bond existed that went beyond simple attraction. It was a romantic notion but one she thought had substance. With the others it would simply be a matter of lust: jealousy-imbuing, heart-shattering lust.

  It was a Monday, so she had a day off and more time to chat, plus she was armed with good reason to see him. He hadn’t emerged with his kiteboard first thing and then she missed him when he went off somewhere on his bike. Hopefully it was only a quick errand. She felt a little silly spending so much time doing idle chores in the kitchen, awaiting his return. This room had certainly seen more than its fair share of cleaning since he moved opposite. The only other room that overlooked his house was her bedroom and it would most definitely prove dangerous to lie in there thinking of him.

  When she heard his bike engine approaching she was up so quickly it embarrassed her. She tried to delay her exit but reminded herself it was better to catch him before he went in. It would look less engineered that way. She only just remembered to grab the bag from the side - her excuse for seeing him. The bike was in the garage and his crash helmet off by the time she reached his driveway, but he caught sight of her and stopped his movement towards the back gate.

  ‘Hello, Huntsman,’ she called out with a smile.

  ‘Good morning, Nest-Egg,’ he replied. He hadn’t once called her by her proper name after the “Fondant” incident that very first day. She advanced down his drive and strayed into the garage for a closer look at the Kawasaki.

  ‘So this is the Mean Machine I’ve heard about. It looks very dare-devilish. It must be able to do, what, a million miles per hour?’

  ‘A million and five actually,’ he said, deadpan. ‘Any faster and your whole face explodes.’

  ‘As much as you should never accept sweets from strange ladies, I’ve brought you some. You are hereby invited to a Halloween party this Wednesday evening at six sharp. It’s a private affair just for our street. The village has a rule that if you don’t put Halloween stuff outside your house then no trick or treaters are allowed to knock, so you can just stay in and be boring without being interrupted if you like. Or you can join us. It’s at Roni’s and a fair few of the adults come. It’s a pretty good night. The grown-ups have a few drinks and a chat. The kids perform a play and then come round for sweets as a reward. I don’t expect you to go out to buy sweets for my kids, so I’ve thoughtfully provided them all for y
ou. Now you have no excuse not to come.’

  ‘Apparently not,’ he said, with a non-committal smile.

  ‘Scary fancy dress is not insisted upon but I’m coming as a witch and if you don’t make some kind of effort I’ll have no choice but to unleash my spell to turn you into a great big twat.’

  ‘And presumably no one will notice the difference?’

  ‘Precisely, but don’t let that frighten you off. It’s for a good cause, namely me getting to drink heavily on a school night. Say you’ll come!’ She batted her eyes theatrically at this and forced another full smile from him.

  ‘If I’m not busy,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, yes - busy doing your artisting thingy. Tell me, they let you do a lot of painting in the army, do they?’ It sounded too patronizing and she regretted it. She wasn’t even sure why she was goading him like this. Somewhere deep in her mind was the unshakeable idea that all his claims were concocted to better aid his chances with members of the fairer sex, although why a man like him would need to lie was anyone’s guess, unless his past contained some truly hideous secrets. But, you know, just how did a man who had spent most of his adult life holding guns suddenly discover he could paint?

  ‘I got into art when I was in prison,’ he said. ‘I had plenty of time to learn in there.’

  ‘How long is plenty of time?’

  ‘Nearly seven years.’

  ‘Oh my God, I had no idea! That must have been awful!’

  ‘Well, it was a military-run establishment and the Officer in Charge was little short of deranged, so it wasn’t my preferred choice of accommodation. Fortunately the guards remained pretty constant throughout my stay and they proved to be a little more forgiving. We had a lot of time to kill and they were as bored as me. I taught them how to play poker properly and they taught me how to speak a couple of the local Bantu dialects with something approaching fluency - particularly how to curse in them. At times it was an almost passable existence.’