Underworlds: Tales of Paranormal Lust. Various

      It’s so close to something sweet, I think. So close I could almost believe in it, if it were not for the true purpose behind the thrust of his fingers through the newly cleaned strands.

      He doesn’t like it to get in his way, when he gets a mouthful of me.

      ‘Oh, my little one,’ he says against the side of my face. But even without looking I know the teeth are there. I can almost feel the steely press of them as he comes close to kissing me, and as his breath ghosts, cool and strange, all over my skin.

      ‘Don’t,’ I say again, but the word is small and fluttering and he is powerful, so powerful. I can feel the twist of those muscles beneath the hand I’m pushing against his shoulder – though it’s more than that. He’s like a steel cage, in a way no man should ever be. He locks me in tight, and, though he coos and murmurs and tries to calm me down, in the end he always has to force it.

      He holds me fast, that hand in my hair now like a vice. And, though I know what’s coming, I still squeeze my eyes tight shut for it. I brace myself, and then there’s just his icy mouth against my throat. That eagerness in him, suddenly – despite the fact that he’s never eager for anything.

      He’s always slow, so slow and deliberate. After he’d caught me that first time, he stalked me like some crouching, clever beast that doesn’t actually exist. A raptor, I always think, but there’s nothing lizard-like about him – apart from the cold. And when you look at him, that cold isn’t there at all.

      He looks heated, primal somehow. His hips practically rolled, as he backed me into a corner. And the second I tried to evade him by doing something stupid – like jumping into the swimming pool he never uses; of course he never uses it – he just walked right into the water as though it wasn’t even a step down.

      Where are you going, Francesca, he’d said, like I was so silly to want to get away.

      And I suppose he had a point. There’s no getting away, from him. I just have to hang there helpless in his arms, as his lips part and that razor sharpness grazes my skin. Every inch of me waiting for the worst feeling – the one the movies never suggest.

      It’s like a crunch. His teeth slide into me and then there’s the strangest sensation afterwards … like he’s breaking my bones, somehow, even though I know he isn’t. There’s never more than two puncture marks on my skin afterwards, and no side-effects apart from the lethargy.

      But that first shot of pain, so intense it’s almost like pleasure …

      It’s unbearable. It’s unstoppable. It’s like a side-effect in its own way, because even when I’m alone I can remember and feel it almost exactly.

      But the pain right now is remarkable, even by those standards. It narrows my body down to that one bright focus point, until I have to do something unbearable like gasp, harsh and guttural, at the ceiling, tears spilling in an entirely different way down my cheeks.

      This time they come like a reflex, with barely any sadness behind them at all. And if I say his name at the same time, well, isn’t that like a reflex, too? Isn’t it like the begging I always do before he sinks his teeth in?

      ‘Merrith,’ I say, because he’d told me it once, after the blood had made him lazy and satisfied. Vulnerable, I always think, but that’s not true at all. He just seems it when he cradles my limp body against his, and tells me things I’m sure he never tells anyone else. Everyone else thinks he’s Jimmy Brecker, but he isn’t really. He’s Merrith, just Merrith, as though he came from a time beyond surnames and Christian names.

      Maybe he really did, I think, as my life flows out of me and into him. And though it’s painful, this is the part where a different sort of sensation starts to take over. A pulling sensation, like he’s got a hand on some thread inside me and he’s just easing it on through.

      It’s as debilitating, in its own way, as the bone-crushing first bite. It turns my legs to jelly; it makes me faint and fearful of myself. Sometimes I almost drift off like this, and there’s the ever-present terror that I’m never actually going to wake up again.

      But there’s something else there, too. Sometimes I come around and I’m clinging to him in the same way he clings to me – like a lover, not a victim. One arm looped around his shoulders; a hand stroking down over the perfect curve of his spine. Every sense I’ve got so aware of my own body, as it turns to water in his arms.

      By the time he’s done, I’m no longer standing. He’s holding me like this, with my pointed feet nearly all the way off the floor. And when he takes his first big breath – like a little kid would do, after drinking too much lemonade – I feel his body shuddering against the whole length of mine.

      ‘So sweet,’ he says, once he’s capable of speech. ‘So sweet when you let me have you like this.’

      And though I try to tell myself not to, I think of the dual meaning of have. Of course I do – it’s like a compulsion, after all this time, of his hands and his mouth and the music, rich and strange. I sag against his shoulder and think of those liquid eyes of his, always searching through me like a hand sifting through pretty things.

      ‘My one,’ he says, and then he just licks long and languid over the still bleeding bits of me – everything about the move so tender that my mind immediately turns to animals, and the way they heal each other.

      Is that what he is, really? An animal underneath, reacting to things in a blind, instinctive way? And, if so, is it really so bad if I do the same?

      Because it’s perfectly true that I don’t know what I’m doing, when I push my fingers into his thick dark hair. It’s like I’ve lapsed into that heavy state of unconsciousness, even though I’m still awake. I understand that I’m still awake, as I hold that suddenly warm and wet mouth to my throat.

      Of course I expect him to resume that hypnotic pulling – or at the very least to keep licking me in that way I don’t like at all, I swear I don’t. But instead he makes this sound that I don’t recognise – as though I’ve startled him – and arches away from me. Gets my face in one long-fingered hand, so that he can look down into my eyes.

      ‘You want me to?’ he asks, and for a second I’m sure he means the other thing. The one that I never think of, when he gets his hand on that thread and pulls. But then he carries on in that startled and completely new tone, those eyes of his suddenly naked. ‘You want me to taste you?’

      And I think, Yes, yes, but not in the way you’re imagining.

      Of course I know it’s too late then for me. Like when I made the choice to try to catch him out, and his fingers pushed against the invisible glass. I’ve pushed my fingers against an invisible barrier and just kept on going right through to the other side, where my hands are full of his hair and my body is completely aware of all the things he never does.

      In truth, I’m not even sure if he knows what those things are any more – instead, there’s just a hole in him, where desire and lust and pleasure used to be. It’s like knowing someone who never needs to breathe. At some point, you expect them to want to. You expect them to suddenly jolt with the memory of something that once kept them living.

      But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even remember when I reverse what he’s been doing to me. He just hangs there in my arms, blankly staring, and lets me put my mouth on his. Lets me taste my own blood in his mouth, and come away just as he always does: streaked with red, stunned by the sensation of feeding.

      But, unlike him, I don’t let myself lapse into that oddly vulnerable state. I don’t tell him my real name – what would be the point? He already knows it. And I don’t let him curl against me, to chase away the confusion and hurt all over his face.

      I just do it again, in all the different ways I can think of to kiss. Open-mouthed and close-mouthed and soft and wet. Then maybe all of those things together, until he does something that shocks me more than his vampirism ever did.

      He kisses me back. He kisses me