Of Vampires & Gentlemen. A.R. Morlan

walls, dark furniture, swallow-your-feet-to-the-ankles-thick shag carpeting. Couldn’t see too much in the forty-watt bulbs she used in the lamps, but even if they’d been one hundred watts each, I don’t think the place would have seemed any brighter...it just smelled dark. Warm-dark, like blood and spices and burnt wood shavings. No radio or stereo played, yet the place was filled with sound; with each step, each movement of her head and arms, I found myself bathed in that metallic tintinnabulation until my brain echoed with the jangle and clinking noises, so much so that I had to strain to hear her instruction for me to sit on the sofa while she got her piercing kit, of her warning that “This’ll sting a bit.”

      I was expecting pain when the peroxide-soaked cotton ball hit my torn lobe, but the sensation was only another tiny nip, followed by a lingering after-burn that wasn’t as painful as it was...exhilarating. And the jingling around me seemed so loud I had to shout out, “You’re right, it doesn’t hurt at all,” but she didn’t seem to mind the loudness of my voice, for all she did was smile before snapping open the latch on her piercing case and withdrawing something that nipped and stung yet didn’t hurt-hurt once I closed my eyes and relaxed on that dark upholstered couch, letting her pull up flesh with shivery-cool tugs of her long-handled tongs and give it a little stinging nip before releasing the tongs and moving on to another untouched patch of flesh.

      The first thing I was aware of when I awoke was how...complete I now felt; that I was pierced didn’t matter because of what was now an extra part of me. Cool metal filled the still-throbbing holes in my flesh, tiny bits and loops and studs which rested against the surrounding nakedness yet somehow took away all previous feeling of vulnerability I’d associated with being bare and exposed. Even the spots which were usually the most sensitive hurt no more than the more typically pierced areas like my earlobes...and while I was no bigger anywhere on my body, the metal adornments made me feel larger, stronger, more complete in the fullest sense of the word.

      It was only after I’d found and caressed each new metal-plugged hole in my body that I began to remember, in tantalizing, maddeningly incomplete fragments, what she and I had done during and after the piercing...the sight of her pale, chain-crisscrossed nude body with the clanging, tiny loops of silver bisecting her nipples and inner and outer labia; the rough-ribbed sensation of her chains running against my own bare flesh, the individual links and studs grinding into my skin; the little white-hot nip of stimulating pain as she lifted up my penis and pierced the tip with...at that point, my memory was murky-vague, or somehow I didn’t have a clear mental picture of her holding anything at all in either hand even as I’d felt that exquisite pinch-and-tear—

      Turning over on my side on the well-padded comfortingly-shaggy carpet, I felt her sleeping beside me, her breaths coming up so softly that they were inaudible in the still-dark room, her ornamented flesh pleasantly warm under the cool ropes of confining chains...and when she didn’t stir as I slid my hand over and around the small patches of metal-free flesh, I felt confident enough to unclasp one of the chains from the ring adorning her navel, just so I could feel a little more smooth, unencumbered skin—

      And even though she began to writhe slightly while I worked to undo more and more of her chains, she said nothing so I felt confident that my actions were pleasing to her; by the time I’d freed her breasts and swollen labia, she began to moan softly, her breaths coming in short, moist hitches, so I quickly began unclasping the silvery bindings which imprisoned her cheeks, her rounded bristle-cover scalp...by that time, her back began to arch upwards as her legs spread slightly, invitingly, so I paused in my labors to begin kissing her unfettered flesh—

      —but as my lips touched her skin, it felt almost cold, not warm like I expected it to fell...nor was it as silky-smooth as I remembered it to be. As I pulled my lips from her, I could still taste the surface of her skin—and when I poked my slightly swollen, studded tongue out of my mouth and licked her be-ringed lips, I felt flakes of loose skin which didn’t come from my lips—

      My fresh piercings ached as I scrambled to my feet and felt my way across one wall, searching for the coffee table and lamp I thought were there; by the time I’d found the table and lamp, I knew I was bleeding in spots, but the pain still felt...good, in a way I now found too hideous to contemplate. And when I clicked on the lamp and yanked off the shade, I forced myself to look at the place where most of her still remained on that long, thickly-napped carpet, even as less and less of her stayed in my line of sight.

      Freed of the network of silvery bonds, her flesh wrinkled and pulled in on itself, even as she sank deeper and deeper into the carpeting, until only a soft shadow of pinkish-pale flesh remained, dappled with a peppering of black in a couple of widely-separated spots...no blood, no gurgling rush of decayed flesh, just a wrinkling flattening, lessening of her body—save for the silvery studs and circles and fish-hook curving prongs of metal, and those limp chains of silver which rested in ripples and S-curves of unfettered metal links on the thick tufted carpet.

      Loose, now useless chains of metal that somehow seemed...inviting to my pierced and decorated parts; inside, I was still reeling from what I’d seen, my heart thudding in time with my pounding brain (Some people claim silver’s a ‘dirty’ metal), but all those little metal-filled holes in me, all over me, they now ached with a different sort of pain. A pain that felt like little nips of longing, as if what had felt so complete to me only minutes before was now sadly lacking, sadly useless—

      That the chains themselves were free of...her, or lingering traces of her, was somewhat a blessing in itself, but the worst part of that morning was knowing that even if they hadn’t been so clean, so pristine, I still would have needed to attach them to my own studs and circles of shining, dirty silver.

      Not to have done so would’ve left me feeling so incomprehensibly incomplete, so deeper-than-skin-deep vulnerable—

      —although lately I wish I had a dollar for every time someone asks me if being pierced again and again like this hurt, as if mere pain was the only fear on my mind.

      AFTERWORD

      Midway through the 1990s, quite a few of the markets where I’d been selling my horror fiction started to shut down or become so overstocked that they were only opening up to submissions every couple of years or so; I’d begun to experiment with harder-core erotic horror and sf, which I soon began selling to markets like Circlet Press. But every so often a story would slide through the cracks—not quite “hot” enough for the erotica publishers, but too erotic for more mainstream genre markets. “Little Nips” was one of these stories...it was also one of my first stories which dealt with body modification, a theme which has popped up in much of my sf from the end of the ’00s. It’s darker than some of my earlier work, but milder than stories like “Dark Ladonna” or “Yet Another Poisoned Apple for the Fairy Princess.” But for what it is, it works, at least for me....