When Tom finally emerged, Shana demanded to know what the hell took so long. “I was waiting for an eBay auction to end.” Shana didn’t even have time to tell him he could have waited literally anywhere else and would have only wasted his time. Shana had just enough time to shower, shave, and throw on a smart, crimson sundress with a subtle paisley pattern. Makeup was applied in the car while Tom drove, weaving in and out of traffic like a maniac. At the airport, Shana gave him a long kiss goodbye and then a smitten smirk. She pretended that when she looked back to wave, Tom wasn’t checking out a sorority girl.
Chapter Two
“Girl, you’re looking great! Why don’t you let me video chat you? I had no idea you were so fine these days.” Suze always knew how to brighten Shana’s day, even when they were kids getting grounded for styling the dog’s fur with Mom’s good scissors, or smoking cigarettes on the Haleys’ front porch.
“You look great too, Suze. I see those body combat classes are paying off.”
“Oh well you know, ever since Luke saw his old Mom getting buff, he’s been putting up a lot less of a fight about going to church.” Suze flexed her arm and indeed it was toned. She looked fit for 41, especially in a tank top.
“Is little Luke all ready for his big day?”
“He better be! We bought him the most precious little blue suit.”
Cleveland had not changed much in the past three years. Houses were still boarded up from the collapse, Miller High Life signs still flickered in tavern windows, waiting to get light bulbs replaced. Pot holes still littered the road and Red Rocket still had the cheapest breakfast in town.
Lake View Cemetery still had a grey cloud hanging over it. Why that cloud never dispersed, the people of Cleveland did not know. Why the cloud seemed to have the same basic shape and remain stationary throughout the daylight, the people of Cleveland did not know. What the people of Cleveland did know, though, was that there was never a day when the sun shone on a funeral.
But there was no grey cloud in Shana’s memories of Lake View. It was where she spent the best nights of high school, where she would go with friends to drink beer, and go alone to sort through her thoughts. It’s where she had her first kiss, where she would snuggle with Baker while leaning against whichever ornate gravestone took their fancy that night. If she ever fell asleep next to him, she would wake up alone, bathed in orange rosy sunlight.
Lots of black was worn in those days, lots of candles lit, lots of poetry written. She didn’t much like that poetry anymore. Most of them were about Baker, as she didn’t pay much mind to the boys at her high school. They mostly cared about playing football, skateboarding, and smoking pot. She didn’t.
Recently she had been thinking a lot about the black clothes and the candles and the poems, wondering why she had given those up for good. Likely because they made her think of Baker, and that was one thing she had no choice but to give up for good. But when Suze drove by Lake View, Shana didn’t think about all the reasons she had to quit Baker. Shana thought about the black clothes and the candles and the poems, and the way Baker’s most sincere words and tender invocations of love came in whispers. His hands were rough and cold, calloused and ridden with poor circulation from years of working late nights repairing machinery at the power plant. Some nights he would meet her still wearing his weathered canvas coveralls, which betrayed the slightest hint of his defined muscles chest, arms, and shoulders.
Bored and daydreaming, she would picture his body under those clothes. Did he have a hairless six pack, or a little patch of hair on his taught belly? Somehow his stubble was always ten days unshaven. Here was a man, she thought, who works his body until drained of the energy meals provide. She marveled that even though toil chiseled his body, he still had energy just before the crack of dawn to speculate on the drinking habits of Angela Badalamenti, May 30, 1877 to January 12, 1941, LOVING MOTHER, ARDENT SUFFRAGETTE, on the destiny of Rashad Harden’s children (October 9, 1779 to April 26, 1814 FRIEND TO ALL WHO KNEW HIS RHYTHM).
His hands raw were worked raw, yet he had a gentle touch. His life was hard, but he seemed to understand nothing besides love. Little mysteries that riddled her narrative of him with holes: where does he live? Why does he work the night shift? Why will he only meet in this hamlet of death and decay? In truth, the unknowns only made him sexier.
Yet, to this day, Shana felt that she never knew another person better. Sure, nothing ever seems as strong, as passionate, as significant as your first love, but why did all other loves pale in comparison to Baker’s? The other lovers and boyfriends seemed to hold some unspoken pact with Shana, one whose terms stated that enough romance and conversation and fighting and sex would somehow add up to enough love. And because this formula was always unbalanced, Shana found it best to compromise. Compromise is what adults do. You cannot build a life on wishes and desire not satiated, so you have to work with what you have and make the best of it. Shana’s life was good, her love for Tom strong. But Lake View brought that teenage desire bubbling up in ways that she thought had long ago disappeared.
Chapter Three
“You hear about the bodies turning up in the Metroparks?”
“No Suze, I don’t follow Cleveland news out where I am.” Absent-minded with busy hands, Shana played with the fringe on the linen place mats. Coffee grew cold as it sat neglected and fruit flies descended for moments onto the sisters’ scraps of rhubarb pie.
“All ages, all genders, no specific race. Nate’s buddy on the force says it’s probably the work of one person, but as soon as the police declare it a serial killer, the whole town will go into a frenzy until the guy is caught.” As Suze spoke, her face was animated with eyes that desperately craved the validation of contact. Shana was lost in the fringe.
“Pity.”
“See what’s weird is serial killers usually act with patterns. This guy just kills anyone he comes across, they think.”
Suze’s wanting gaze was met. “You afraid, Suze?”
Silence rode and Suze chipped at her pie crust with the rings of her fork, an absent gesture with no intent of eating, just of crafting a way to break that eye contact she so hungrily instigated. “Well how can you not be?”
A fruit fly landed on the chipped piece of crust.
Suze continued, “but if we’re going to talk about all the things there are to fear in this town, then we can start with the value of our house and Nate’s job security, then take it from there.”
There was no hint of a reply. Shana was elsewhere. Suze broke to brew more coffee, get some got liquid in those mugs.
Shana eventually piped up. “Does Nate get you off?”
Suze looked over, confounded. “You mean to tell me that you’ve been sitting here this whole time, tormented by the question of whether our not my husband gets me off?”
“Not tormented, just curious.”
“Hell yeah he gets me off. He’s been doing this thing with my behind lately. Not entering, mind you. Just about anything in wedlock is sacred but sodomy is a sin, plain as day. I don’t know where he got that, tell you the truth.”
Shana smirked a little and shook her head the smallest amount.
“Does Tom get you off?”
The pregnant pause before Shana’s reply said it all. “Yeah, when he feels like it, I guess.”
“When he feels like it? How about when you feel like it?” There was no response for this, with words at least. “That boy has got to learn if he’s going to be laying with my baby sis for all eternity. You gotta teach him. Force him a little.”
So many retorts flashed in Shana’s mind, everything from “He’s not some dog you can just train, Suze,” to “I’m not sure if he really even cares sometimes.” But all she could confess to her sister was,
“Well you know how affection goes.”
This puzzled Shana, and fortunately Luke bust in to prevent her from jumping into this emotional rabbit hole.
“Mom! Mike Haley told me that I’m actually eati
ng Jesus’ body and drinking his blood on Sunday. Is that true?”
“Why yes my love, of course it is.”
The boy burst into tears in a feeble manner that would have surely bought him a thorough whopping on the school playground. “I don’t want to be a canon ball and a vampire.” A web of snot spun from his nose.
“Oh it’s not so bad, hun. This is why he died for you, so that he could exist inside of you always. He’s one of those people who wants to get some teeth stuck in him!”
“But people taste gross!”
A quick smirk was shared between the sisters. Shana prodded, “Do you know that from experience, Luke?”
He offered a sniffling concession. “No, Aunt Shana. But why would people taste good? What kind of person would want to taste another person? Mom! What kind of person would want to get tasted?”
Chapter Four
It had been a decade and a half since Shana borrowed a car without permission. Suze wouldn’t care, so long as it didn’t get all banged up. Regardless, the adolescent thrill took Shana’s mind off whatever it was keeping her up that night. There was no particular fixation that ran laps around her restless mind. Instead it was a nagging dread that kept her staring at the ceiling.
Blown out industrial zones and boarded up houses provided serenity during Shana’s drive, reminders of the impermanence of the things humans create. Liberation lied in the destruction wrought by human neglect, an impulse which remains blind to the very abodes and workplaces that are so temporarily crucial to the waking lives of people. When Shana was in high school, these industrial parks, then only abandoned at nightfall, provided the perfect safe haven for her and the boys she didn’t feel much for. It was a private place to race those other girls through rites of passage. There, a boy put his lips inside her mouth when they kissed. Another fingered too vigorously as if informed less by his own instinct than by his older brother’s VHS porn collection.
The rust enveloping these warehouses’ loading docks, the tall weeds comfortably nestled in the pavement’s cracks were comforting reminders of how long gone that barely fulfilling teenage sex life was. But when Shana said to herself “thank God that’s over,” the dread that kept her up that night had decided to join her in the car.
As if driving through some wrinkle in a dream, Shana found herself pulling up by the wrought iron fence of Lake View Cemetery. Impervious to the bad vibes most feel at a burial ground at night, Shana hopped the fence and started on a stroll. The permanent gray cloud above the cemetery broke, as it always did, just enough to let strands of moonlight illuminate this or that tombstone. Some would have felt terror in the divine moonlight singling out the spot of an individual’s decay. She wandered by the graves of John D. Rockefeller and Elliott Ness. She wandered by the Haserot angel. She wandered by a hole from which a coffin was rudely ripped.
Soon, she stood frozen with something tickling inside her belly. Thoughts became muddled like a radio station turning to static. Had she been more sensitive to her body she would have felt perspiration leech into her socks, her feet growing chilly. But all she was aware of was a sense of dread turning warmer and this new urge to soothe the first erogenous zone her hand could touch. It was her neck, and she pressed the base of her palm against her pulmonary artery as she rubbed the top of her spinal cord with a crude, rough claw formed by her fingers. With each rub, her breasts grew tender. So sensitive were her lower lips that she could feel her pubic hair bristling against her clit, rendering her whole being a cloud of white electricity.
Hot breath streamed out of her mouth, remarkably cold air replaced it when she breathed in. Despite remaining clothed, some force penetrated deep inside of her, not simply like an protrusion in her canal. Instead, it was of some demonic, mystical proportion, pleasuring an entire inside world in some manner forbidden by the limits of human sexual knowledge. Again that white electricity, this time romancing her entire mass like a toaster tossed in a bathtub.
And with a snap of Father Time’s finger, she came to in an alien patch of grass between headstones marked in Latin. Sweat made her face cold, and when she went to wipe some away, she discovered that her hand was just as wet, scented with her secretions. It was all too surreal, and Shana wondered if she ever did take her sister’s car for a nighttime joy ride or if in fact that insomniatic dread made way for a slumber rife with vivid dreams.
But the sweat was all too real and the granite of the headstones all too rough. She remembered something Baker told her one night as they sat cross-legged in counsel with the bronze angel that guards Francois Haserot’s grave. It was the summer after high school graduation, a summer spent disregarding her imminent adult life: jobs, relationships, taxes, material things. Caressing the edge of the angel’s sword, bronze and erect against the earth, Baker explained to Shana the sexual magic that accumulates in a cemetery so large, so old. Not all spirits die fulfilled, and in fact many die repressed.
The Christian burial ceremony, he explained, is one that reduces souls to ashes and ashes, dust and dust. Could you imagine being laid in your final bed with an incantation decrying you a sexless pile of powder? Needless to say, there are spirits who take this as a challenge, molesting whatever living being they can possess long enough. There have been widows who suffer the most ecstatic orgasms while laying flowers on graves, priests who must hold the Bible in front of their semen soiled crotches as the congregation makes its solemn way post-funeral.
By the angel that night, Shana was privy to her true sexual awakening. She felt she had morphed from a fumbling adolescent to a woman with a body, losing sense for the bounds of romance and pleasure. Baker would treat his tongue like a feather, her nipples like wounds throbbing red around day-old splinters. The flesh of her belly was a text to study, a lush fabric to stroke, not just the pesky space between her breasts and vagina.
No part of her lower regions was off limits, with one long kiss starting just above her right knee, following her lower half’s parabola across her nest to the thigh just above her left knee, and concluding with a gentle, broad lick back up to her lips, with a curt flick of his tongue’s tip against her well-swollen hood.
Much like how she suddenly found herself in alien plot of cemetery tonight, Shana found Baker’s rigid cock in her hand, thick as a copper pipe and rigid as a goose three days dead. Somehow, it was colder than his hands. But she didn’t even notice that it should be full of warm blood, as she was too fixated by its splendor, by the fact that in her hand it felt as if she was holding some ancient scepter, a cherished relic of eons past.
Inside of her, the icy priapism stole her breath, and her moaning was muted as if she were making love in outer space’s immaterial vacuum. Their bodies existed solely in the service of their organs, and the organs in the service of celestial pleasure which makes any living being forget that they in fact exist. Every thrust was a boost further into an erotic fugue state, further out into a cosmos whose stardust was nothing but flecks of ecstasy. That was the night of a revelation, of a new kind of pleasure which she never imagined possible from a penetration so simple, so animal.
That was the night that Baker tried to draw her blood with his teeth. In the exact instant of the most intense climax of her heretofore short life, Shana had to fight off the very man who helped her actualize herself as a full woman. Today, she is still not sure how she deflected the undead’s hypnotizing will, and wonders if it was her pure ignorance of the force she faced. Somehow Baker was subdued, and Shana took her chance to run.
Shana stopped running after just a couple of dozen yards, and caught glimpse of the dejected lover sulking beneath the bronze angel. Drawn not by the sexual magic, not by her nubile urges, but by her own compassion, she approached the very man who just tried to rob her off her mortality. At this point, she had no idea that this is what Baker intended to do during coitus, she just thought he was getting freaky in a bad way.
But that was the night that Baker explained he was an eternal being, centuries old and dea
thless. That he fed on blood and desired nothing more than to feed on Shana’s. She looked in his eyes and he in hers, and when Shana kissed his cold lips, chilled by years of lifelessness, he did not try to bite her.
Something about this touched her in a profound way. She made herself vulnerable and was rewarded instead of proven idiotic. The clasp of her earring came undone by her fingers’ swift, dexterous instinct and she hiked her black floral skirt up and pantyhose down to draw the earring’s prick against her skin. The first time she only managed to scratch, so she grabbed Baker’s arm with her free hand and dug deeper. The pain betrayed by her yelp was not a wholly unpleasant one.
Presenting her thigh and its small crimson spring, Shana warned in a harsh hush, “tongue only, if I see your teeth exposed, I promise I’ll run. I will.” Naïveté is the only explanation for the denial of the fact that she just presented the beast with the stuff off its life. For close to ten tender minutes, Baker slowly lapped up her blood. The wound’s sting was soothed by the vampire’s sensuous leeching. Just as she started to grow lightheaded, the wound seemed to clot and Baker moved up her thigh, expressing his gratitude in the truest way he could conceive. Shana was still sensitive from before and that was the first night on her life that she came twice at the hands of another.
They lay on wordless glow, soaking in the final hour before the sun’s corona would peak over the Ohio horizon. The only utterance was the vampire’s flirtation with his prey, the cooing explanation of the fact that next time, he would not be able to resist taking her blood on his own. His promise was to turn her into his eternal mate. He pointed out the mausoleum he called home and said it would be theirs. What Baker did not account for was Shana’s unusually strong will, a set of instincts that somehow made her psyche impervious to a vampire’s seductive brainwash.
That early summer evening was the last night that they met. Shana told only a few of her relationship with Baker, and even fewer of that night they shared. But she had a recurring dream ever since that Baker sucked her dry through that wound inflicted by the earring, and in the moment that the final drop of her blood was drank, Shana’s orgasm delivered her to the afterlife. It was a flash of bliss that blinded her until she regained vision on the other side of the river Hades.
The Naughty Collection Page 6