Of Vampires & Gentlemen. A.R. Morlan

because Mother Gothel was so good to Persinette in her time of confusion (the pain of the birth alone was enough to convince the young woman that unusual sources of pleasure had most unpleasant consequences), once the secret places within her had healed, and longed once more for pleasure, Persinette gladly let Mother Gothel partake of her sweetness and ripened juices, for now she was truly a woman fit for the tasting, which Mother Gothel did most gladly and gratefully.

      And so it came to pass that the two women shared the task of caring for the aged persimmon tree which had brought both of them such gladness, and such fruitful times of pleasure and because the blood and bones and flesh of the fine young man nourished the persimmon tree so well, it too enjoyed its most fruitful time of life, giving forth sweet berries which bore a glistening red-orange hue, each of which was savored by Mother Gothel and her sweet love Persinette.

      AFTERWORD

      This story originally appeared under one of my erotica pen names, mainly because at the time I felt it was a little too out there for my main audience. Looking it over now, I think it is a slightly better fit for this collection than for any of my purely erotica e-books over at Circlet Press.

      I came up with this after reading through a volume of unedited/non-bowdlerized Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which included an appendix of supplementary material in the back—in it, I learned that an early version of the Rapunzel story had different character names, which I used here. In many ways, I’m not totally sure why I wrote this; I suppose I was trying to approach fairy tales form a different point of view. I think it may have been written for one of those slightly-more-adult fairy tale anthos which were published back in the 1990s, but I cannot remember for sure now. At any rate, it wasn’t accepted if I did write it for that antho....

      I suppose being sexually abused by my grandmother may have had something to do with this; I’m not 100% crazy about this story, but it’s here, and I figured someone might like it, or at any rate might find it of some interest....

      LITTLE NIPS

      “I wish I had a buck for every time someone has asked me that same question.” She took another drag on her half-spent cigarette, holding the smoke in as if it were a joint instead of a hard-pack menthol, then letting it out through her nose where tiny wisps of steam-fine smoke filtered out from the piercings above each nostril even as the rest of the smoke billowed out from the pair of there-from-birth nostril-holes—and she smiled again when she noticed my slightly appalled stare. When she smiled, the ball-tipped studs in her lower lip, tongue-tip and upper lip winked in the bar’s neon beer-sign lights like miniature Christmas tree bulbs strung across the bottom of her face; tiny winking orbs of flashing green, blue and red, joined by thread-fine chains of silver rather than the usual plastic wrapped green wire.

      Even after she became silent, waiting for my lame comeback, probably, I could still hear her, with each breath, each drag on her smoke, her face (hell, her whole body—or at least what was exposed in that smoke-filled, noisy bar on that smotheringly hot August evening) tinkled softly...a metal-touching-metal chiming/clanging sound that should’ve been swallowed up in the jabber of voices and discordant layers of drinking and eating noise...but wasn’t.

      The reflective web of chains that looped around and over and into places which were most likely pierced but hidden by her halter and shorts may’ve been eye-grabbing, but the thing about her which had caught my attention a few minutes earlier was just how those loops of chain-work were attached to her body.

      This woman who had sat down next to me at the crowded bar wore studs and bars and rings and sharp-pronged French wires in just about every spare bit of flesh that could be easily pinched up and pierced—plus a few places that defied reason or ease of puncturing with a sterilized needle. Tender, thin, vulnerable places, like the edges of her eyelids, or the flesh between her finger—places she nonetheless had pierced and subsequently adorned with hair-fine loops of silvery wire and linking chainmesh. And at the base of each visible puncture, I saw barely-healed, almost raw pinkish spots where the flesh was poked through and through, then adorned with circles and solid balls of shimmering silver. She wore seven earrings in each ear—four holes in each small lobe and the rest poking through the rounded top part. And each earring was chain-attached to some part of her face so that her pasty-pale cheeks were imprisoned by fine links of forged metal radiating from each ear to her upper and lower lips, her nose, and her eyelids and eyebrows. Plus an open-weave headpiece consisting of even more chains which looped over and around her buzzed-bald head so that the ropes of silver rested in a bed of eighth-inch high dyed-black stubble.

      And as I said before, that was just her head...more chains dangled down to her nipples, her wrists and between-the-fingers, and even some from her be-ringed navel to some spots below that just had to be pierced, too—why else would she have other chains descending into the waist band of her cut-offs?

      She’d taken another dragon-like puff of her cigarette before I thought of a suitable comeback to her non-answer to my question; rooting around in my jeans pocket with my free hand, I finally found a weathered, chamois-soft George Washington—which I ceremoniously placed on the bar next to her half-empty bottle of beer. That made her smile—and reveal a set of teeth dotted by inset specks of silver. By now, the sight of her drilled and filled front teeth didn’t shock me as much as it might’ve only a couple of minutes before.

      Picking up the faded bill with a jingling hand, she snubbed out her cigarette with the other before saying, “Of course it hurts...but the thing people never bother to ask is how much or just how bad. Or not; hell, some women can birth a baby and walk out of the hospital an hour later. It’s all a matter of what a person can stand above and beyond this”—she fluttered her hand, letting the rings and chains attached to her finger-bases and wrist-bone flash in the too-bright bar lights—“before you put the first stud or hoop in, you know?”

      “I faint when I get a splinter,” I tried to joke, but now that she knew my interest in her was at least marginally more serious than most of the people who gawked at her, she wasn’t about to let the subject drop. Reaching toward my head with her right hand, she smiled that glittering smile of hers and said as her thumb and forefinger made encircling contacts with my earlobes, “Let’s see if that’s true,” before pinching the dangling nub of flesh between her beige-lacquered long nails.

      The pain was short, sharp, but not enough to make me faint...more like a little nip from a small animal that’s been frightened.

      “See?” she smiled as she withdrew her hand, leaving me to rub my earlobe in annoyed silence (I wasn’t about to yelp for her, if that’s what she expected). But when I saw the blood-smear on my fingers when I stopped rubbing my ear, I began, “Hey, that’s not funny—” until she cut in, “Wasn’t meant to be. Just giving you your dollar’s worth.”

      “Too bad I don’t have an earring to put in there...feels like you’ve poked a hole in it,” I grumbled before finishing the last of my own beer. While my bottle was still upended, and the slightly warm brew coursed down my throat, she said, “I’ll bet it’d look good with a stud. Some gold or maybe silver...if you’re brave. Some claim silver’s a ‘dirty’ metal. But since you didn’t faint...maybe getting it done wouldn’t hurt so much either—”

      Wiping the foam off my lips with my free hand, I shook my head No Way before saying, “Sorry, I think I’ll just go find some peroxide or iodine to clean this...I’ve heard that professional piercers use needles....”

      “They do...say, I’ve got some antiseptic in my car. The least I can do is clean it up, ’kay? It’s on me,” she added before getting off her bar stool with a jingle and a metallic whisper of swaying chains, then padding off for the bar’s double doors without turning her chains-and-stubble-covered head to see if I was following her. A quick glance at the smoke-grimed bar mirror revealed that I was now sporting a huge, ruddy bead of blood on my earlobe so, after paying for my beer, I hurried after her, all the while assuring myself that I’d only let her sterilize the wound and not shove some hunk of metal through it—even as I patted my condom-carrying pocket in time with each step while picturing all the other places those chains and loops of silver might lead to.

      I pretended to believe her