Kirk quickly withdrew his fingers and broke the kiss. He gently placed his hands on Bradon’s shoulders and pushed Bradon’s body farther down the length of his own. When Bradon’s cool, smooth ass touched the hot head of his cock, he whispered, “It’s okay, baby. I won’t hurt you. Just take it easy.”
Bradon took another deep breath, then lowered himself slowly onto Kirk’s long, hard cock. It was still slick with his own saliva, and Bradon’s ass spread easily as it entered him. He moaned deeply as inch after inch went deeper inside him. The pain quickly turned to pleasure and he was soon thrusting himself backward onto his lover’s cock and riding him deliriously.
Kirk let Bradon find his rhythm and then picked up the pace a little. He loved watching Bradon’s sweat-slicked body riding his own. He loved seeing Bradon’s long, thick cock bouncing up and down between his legs as he rode his cock. He loved looking into Bradon’s eyes and seeing pure bliss and complete trust.
He looked toward the window and noticed that the sky was now a lighter shade of blue. He could easily see the leaves of the tree right outside the bedroom window. The air outside smelled fresh and clean, and the birds were beginning to chirp. If ever Bradon were to question his decision to go through with this, it would be now, when so much evidence of life and morning were beginning to present themselves. He did not want to give Bradon that chance to change his mind.
Kirk rolled Bradon onto his back and shoved his cock deeper inside him. As Bradon moaned with pleasure, Kirk leaned down and kissed him on the mouth as he continued thrusting deeper and harder into his clutching ass.
The first rays of warm sunlight splashed across Kirk’s back and ass just a moment later. It felt comfortable and assuring and warm and promising. And at the same time, it felt cold and threatening and ominous. The cool morning breeze wrapped more rays of sunshine around his body, and down his ass and between his legs. He felt the warmth envelop his balls, and farther between his legs, he noticed that Bradon’s ass and the backs of his legs were also beginning to warm.
Bradon moaned louder as Kirk thrust into him deeper and faster.
Kirk was so wrapped up in his lovemaking and concentrating on not shooting his load inside Bradon’s warm, clutching ass, that he failed to notice that Bradon had stopped breathing. He pulled out of Bradon’s ass suddenly and aimed his cock away from Bradon’s body. It was well after the third shot of his lust that he looked down and saw his lover’s white, still, unmoving face and body beneath him.
“Bradon,” he whispered in a hoarse pant. “Bradon, please look at me.” He caught his breath and let his body fall across Bradon’s. He leaned forward and put his ear to Bradon’s chest. He couldn’t hear a heartbeat; Bradon’s chest had no movement. “Oh, God! No, please don’t let this happen,” he cried out as he held Bradon’s still, lifeless body in his arms. “Please wake up, Bradon. You can’t die on me. Not here. Not like this.”
He shook Bradon’s body violently and then fell limp across the cold, white body beneath him. He cried for several minutes, and then leaned up to kiss Bradon’s cold, blue lips. He pried the lifeless lips apart and kissed Bradon long and passionately as his tears cascaded down his cheeks and fell onto Bradon’s face.
“I love you, Bradon,” he cried, as he continued kissing him.
Then there was movement. At first Kirk thought he was imagining it, and that he’d been mistaken. It started out just a twitch in Bradon’s upper thighs. Then a jerk in his arms. A moment later his chest began heaving and he was breathing.
“Baby,” Kirk cried out. He scooped Bradon into his arms, bringing him into a sitting position at the head of the bed.
Bradon coughed a few times, then slowly opened his eyes. He looked up into Kirk’s tear-streaked face and smiled. “Why are you crying?”
Kirk coughed out a laugh, and hugged Bradon tighter to his chest. “Are you okay?” he asked, as he rocked Bradon back and forth.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Bradon said, as he gained his strength and sat up in the bed. “A little sticky, though.” He wiped Kirk’s cooled semen from his chest and stomach.
Kirk laughed and cried at the same time, and fell limply into Bradon’s arms.
“It’s okay,” Bradon said, hugging Kirk’s quivering body closer to his own. “It’s over. I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?” Kirk asked, looking up into the bright turquoise eyes of his lover.
Bradon looked over at the open window. He stood up and walked over to stand naked in front of it. Warm, fresh sunshine splashed across his body, warming him instantly.
“Yeah,” Bradon said. He ran back to the bed and jumped onto it. He smiled when he saw Kirk’s cock was already swelling again. “Yeah, I’m sure.” He wrapped his body around Kirk’s, kissing his sweaty body all over.
DEVOURED
Jeff Mann
For John, who said, “Of course you can,” and
for the gay men and lesbians of Appalachia
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Andrew Beierle and John Scognamiglio
for this opportunity to recreate the world and
thus ease my cultural frustration.
“Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Every angel’s terrifying.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
“. . . it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction . . . of powerful instincts. This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings.”
—Sigmund Freud
Fog swallows the stars. It rolls in over the dark waters, and the firth breathes and sighs like a lover sleeping at my side. A restless sleep, the sleep of centuries.
I am Derek Maclaine, and this great lapping darkness is the Firth of Forth, a sea inlet just north of Edinburgh, Scotland. Though I miss the mountains of West Virginia, where I have lived for centuries, still it is sweet to be back here, the country of my birth, the country which once was home. It is sweet to cup the firth’s cold and salty waves in my cold hand, to watch misty lights blink across the water.
Tonight is May Eve, an ancient holy day dedicated to the new gold-green of spring and to all its appetites. Appetite drives me tonight. Hunger is like that claymore I once carried, the one that slipped between the ribs of Angus’s murderers. These are hunger’s double edges: that it gives meaning and focus, and that it always returns, the philosopher’s eternal recurrence, like the curse of these waves, lapping perpetually, without peace.
Peace is a grave, and that I renounced long ago. Over the black surf I speak these words to myself, to find some sense in appetite, to make some truce with my own insatiability. This is my history, written not in water, but rather in blood, like the contract Faust signed with Mephistopheles. Study the card of the Devil in old Tarot decks, lovers chained naked to the Horned One’s dais. I have not sold my soul to the Christians’ Satan. Rather, I am in bondage to the beauty of the earth, to the bodies of men.
For a time I walk in this fog drifting in from the sea, drink my fill of dark-cloaked solitude and its lyrics, relish the silence. But thirst always turns me back to the land, to the poetry of the human. Harder to find than the bleaker beauty of sea, of mist, of those pale stars, distant diamond grit visible for a moment, then swallowed by the chill gray. But if human beauty can be found, I am the man to find it. Tonight, when the Old Gods marry and mate, when the blade descends into the chalice and bloom breaks forth across the hills, I will take beauty’s blood between my teeth, lapping skin as the sea licks shingle.
The Star Tavern. I have hunted here before, this waterfront pub. The smoke rises from cigarettes, bubbles break in amber pints of ale. Many nights, all I have found worth devouring is the flashing image of a soccer player’s thighs on the television screen, and some nights that is enough. We older ones, we can wait. The thirst does not madden us nightly
as it once did. We become like Kafka’s hunger artists, waiting for the right food—the muscular curve of chest, the enthusiastic and intelligent eye, strong shoulders and furry forearms. Patient, we find strength of purpose in our own starvation, in this trust: that loveliness will return to us.
I will not starve tonight. I have called out over those dark waters, called the Hunter, the Hunted, the Lord of Wild Things, the God of spring’s new leaves, of youth’s ecstasies. I am his priest, and with this single malt I toast to Him. Light glints in the golden tumbler, and I take the honeyed fire on my tongue, praying for a sacrifice. Let tonight’s savior manifest himself.
See how the Scottish night answers. The door of the pub opens, and a young man in his mid-twenties walks in, trailing ribbons of fog. At my elbow he orders Scotch, then shrugs off his black leather jacket, settles at a corner table, rummages through his backpack for a notepad and book, and then begins to read, sipping single malt every other page.
I study him, and, as I have for almost three hundred years, I ponder the mystery of aesthetics. Why do I see beauty in what I do? Why am I fascinated by this sort of man? He resembles Angus a bit, true. But why did I love Angus in the first place? I have a penchant for asking unanswerable questions. It is a habit which keeps me awake. “Only that day dawns to which we are awake,” said Thoreau. Yes, I am a scholar of sorts, and good books have helped fill my centuries, though a day’s dawning is one pleasure I must miss.
This boy is recompense enough for the loss of sunlight, the way noon made of the waters of Lochbuie a blue-green satin, the way it ignited fields of poppies. His dark hair shines in the firelight, this pub fire flickering on a chilly and foggy spring night. Summer takes its time here, as it did in the mountains of my childhood on the Isle of Mull. I have never been back to Lochbuie, and, as close as I am—the width of Scotland—this time as well I may not have the heart to return. How many times have I come back to Edinburgh, have mused by the firth, or climbed the extinct volcano of Arthur’s Seat after midnight to look over the city’s lights, to look toward the Hebrides, only to leave Scotland again, my homecoming truncated, unfulfilled? All these decades, and I have never seen Angus’s grave.
Tonight, of all nights, I must not think of Angus.
Broad shoulders. Long hair pulled back in a ponytail. What is the book he pores over? Byron’s Poetry. I almost laugh out loud. Too easy.
“A Byron scholar? We have something in common,” I say, standing by his table. “Forgive the interruption. It’s just that I don’t every day see someone reading the Romantics, especially in a pub devoted to soccer.”
His eyes are blue-green, that color of Lochbuie under the spring sun. Those eyes, surprisingly long-lashed, meet mine, and I can tell what he sees he admires.
This is what he sees: a pale man in his mid-thirties, a little over six feet in height, with thick black hair, a close-trimmed beard, a powerful build not quite concealed by his long gray caped coat. Full lips, barely visible beneath the bushy mustache, and moderate cheekbones above the beard line. A steel hoop in the left earlobe. Small round glasses, giving his brown eyes a professorial and harmless look. Faded jeans, black harness-strap boots, a leather wristband, all a little incongruous beside the elegant coat.
He likes my height, he likes my silver-streaked black beard. Good. This one is too pretty to be forced. I want a willing sacrifice tonight, someone eager to be crucified. Already I can taste the rich roses of stigmata.
“Hey, have a seat. You read Byron?” he quizzes. My fang teeth begin to lengthen a bit, and on the sharp point of the right one I cut my tongue.
Seducing the smart ones, I like to take my time. Occasionally I even learn something, despite my distracted heartbeat, my stiffening anticipation. Chest hair, a chestnut brown, curls over the top of his T-shirt. Several days’ worth of stubble darkens his cheeks. Shrugging off my coat, I sit in the chair opposite him.
His name is David. He’s an American from Palo Alto, an exchange student studying literature at the University of Edinburgh. “Cool coat,” he enthuses, stroking the gray wool. “Isn’t that called an Inverness?”
“Yes,” I reply. “I grew up in the Highlands, and this garment reminds me of my youth. It’s an affectation I allow myself during visits to Edinburgh, though in West Virginia, where I spend most of the year, I’d look pretty odd wearing it, except perhaps at Highland games.”
“Reminds me of Dark Shadows! I used to watch it on the SciFi channel during my undergrad days. Ever watch that? The vampire wore an Inverness.”
“Yes,” I admit. “I remember Barnabas. He and Byron’s heroes have a lot in common.”
“You bet!” David says excitedly, sipping his single malt, his eyes gleaming. “So much of this I can relate to myself,” he admits, reaching for the book and turning to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. “Here, ‘the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind.’ Or”—flipping pages—“The Giaour, that poor bastard, a mind ‘like the Scorpion girt by fire.’ I’m glad he killed Hassan and died unrepentant.”
What intellectual enthusiasm. Almost as tasty as the way his chest curves against the gray fabric of his T-shirt. “Byron had such a longing for innocence,” I point out. “ ‘She Walks in Beauty,’ and all that. Though,” I add quietly, “I would change the pronoun.” Leaning back in my chair, I stretch my arms above my head, the gesture of an awakening animal. David can catch, at this angle, just a glimpse of the dark barbed wire tattooed around my right biceps and triceps.
Those sea-green eyes widen. I can see the blood pulsing in his neck. Beneath the table I rest my palm on his thigh, then ask, “Childe David, may I buy you another Scotch?” He nods and grins, leaning his other leg into mine. What a feast we shall share.
After his last mouthful of Dalwhinnie, he’s ready to leave. Outside the fog is still thick. We walk along the firth for a while, prolonging the delicious anticipation. He misses California, the hills of golden grass, the scent of jasmine, the farmer’s markets full of white peaches and avocados. Gay life in Edinburgh is tolerable, he explains, though he prefers big city bars in America like the Eagle, the Green Lantern, and the Lure. “Ah, bars to match your jacket,” I joke. “ ‘He walks in leather, like the night / o’er Scottish seas and starless climes,’ or something like that.” Despite that jacket, he’s shivering now in the spring chill, and, sensing no one else on the street, I wrap my Inverness-winged right arm about him.
“Would you like to come home with me?” he suddenly sighs, his brow creasing with suspense. As if anyone sane would ever say no to such an offer from such a handsome man. “I live just up the hill,” he continues shakily, “in the attic apartment of a big home I’m house-sitting for a year.”
I pull him closer, touch my lips to his neck briefly, place my left hand on his chest, over his heart. “Lead the way,” I whisper, and he does.
A small garden beyond the gray stone wall. Fava beans and gooseberries, blooming potato plants. “I love to grow things,” David says, touching the indigo of an early iris spear before leading me past the neatly ordered plants and into the back door. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives us tonight. I’d like to see him shirtless in the hot sun, on his knees, troweling up the soil, armpit sweat running down his sides. Instead I will settle, oh so gladly, for the sight of his body bare and sweat-lacquered in candlelight.
Up several flights, to a small odd-angled room under the eaves and overlooking the firth. My night vision is better than most. A narrow bed, a traveler’s-sized guitar. A desk, bookcases, laundry piled in one corner. A narrow closet filled with T-shirts, jeans, cowboy boots. A ceramic Green Man hung upon one wall. David slips off his backpack and jacket, then, in a charming gesture of old-fashioned civility, helps me off with my Inverness. As I’d hoped, there are candles positioned about the room, and he lights them one by one. “Uh, I’m a little nervous,” he admits—more inadvertent charm—“so let’s have just another shot of Scotch. You like Tobermory? It’s from the Isle of Mull, sort o
f hard to find. I save it for special occasions.”
Angus. How long I have searched for you in the faces and bodies of other men, in their beards, the hardness of their muscles, the scent of their groins, the softness of their belly hair. Pieces of you. Scattered, like the fragments of the murdered Osiris, the fragments his wife Isis sought around the world. I can never reassemble you, your breath, your life.
“Tobermory? Yes, please,” I respond almost inaudibly, browsing the bookcases beside his bed. Amidst a slew of literary titles—Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Greek Anthology, Swann’s Way—certain suggestive anomalies stand out: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Rough Stuff, and Urban Aboriginals. Just the clues I need.
For a time, sipping our whisky, we stand in silence before the window, where a hemlock, uneasy with breeze, moves its silhouette against the black expanse of the firth and the distant shore. I can hear his frightened heartbeat. How lonely he is. How badly he wants to be loved. How badly he wants to be hurt.
“The fog’s lifted,” I state matter-of-factly. “Take off your shirt.”
David turns to me. His eyes meet mine, then drop in submission. “Uh, okay,” he stammers.
I remember that litany of leather bars he chanted longingly down by the water. What he most wants is what I am most prepared to give.
Swigging the last of his Scotch, David pulls his T-shirt over his head, then stands meekly before me in the candlelight, eyes still lowered. Yes, this is the ritual we both want, this room our Beltane altar.
I take another swig of Scotch—the waters of Mull made molten—then step up to him. His chest is as furry as I’d guessed. I run my hands through the dark mat, over the mounds of his pecs, then brush his hard nipples. I tease them a bit, circling and flicking them before abandoning introductory gentleness. Between my thumbs and forefingers I pinch them now, increasing the pressure till he gasps.
Masters of Midnight: Erotic Tales of the Vampire Page 27