But even though he thought these things, he remained rooted to the leatherette stool beneath his ass, drawn to the wan face and exaggerated cheekbones of his new companion, a companion from whom he knew instinctively to flee. Edward felt he was in addiction’s grip.
Terence leaned in, his mouth close to Edward’s. Edward thought he would faint. Terence whispered, “We should make a night out of it, celebrate? Don’t you think?”
Edward leaned back. “I had kind of thought of being on my own tonight.” Even as he said it, he knew his thoughts “of being on his own” tonight were nothing more than good intentions.
“Nonsense.” Terence’s eyes sparkled, even in the darkness. “Believe me, young man, I know how to celebrate. If nothing more, you’ll take me up on my offer simply as a learning experience. Besides,” and here Terence looked deep into Edward’s eyes, “there’s no refusing me.”
The thought should have angered him. But Terence was right, Edward realized with a mixture of dread and desire. He was powerless, and the smart thing to do was to recognize that and go along with whatever happened. How bad could it be, anyway?
“Where should we go next? I’m in your hands.” Edward gulped down the second shot and chugged his beer. “Completely.”
*
Edward placed a hand to his churning stomach. When he closed his eyes, the room spun. He had reached the point in his consumption of alcohol where he wished there was a chance for remorse, to take back all the Scotch and beer he had downed as he and Terence made a tour of all the drinking establishments, both heterosexual and homosexual, in Greenwich Village’s narrow streets. It was hard to remember the number of places they had been. Time was marked by the number of cigarette packages now balled up in his jacket pocket (two; he was working on his third). Terence had been an unstoppable guide to nightlife; Edward thought it should be Terence’s picture appearing in the dictionary next to the term “libertine.” In addition to all the drink consumed, Terence had pressed cocaine on him, showing him, in various, quieter men’s rooms, how to snort the fine white powder up off of Terence’s long pinkie fingernail.
Throughout the evening’s libations and inhalations, Terence had teased Edward with the promise of a more physical connection than he had previously allowed. He exchanged meaningful, soulful glances with the smitten and hungry artist. He allowed the brush of a hand, or the press of a body against another, to linger beyond what anyone could deem accidental. Terence had even let Edward, after snorting a mound of cocaine off of his fingernail, impulsively kiss him, Edward both thrilled and repelled by the cold, dry lips.
And now, Terence allowed Edward to rest his head on his chest. The public display was all right; they were at Luke’s. At this late night hour, the only other men in the bar were those who would approve or envy.
Edward had just about summoned enough courage to slur, “Do you think you could come home with me tonight? Couldn’t I just touch you?” He had imagined it would be enough just to sleep next to Terence. But Terence had other ideas. Before Edward could sort and collate the thoughts racing around his fevered brain, Terence asked, “What do you think of that one over there?”
Through bleary eyes, Edward looked in the direction Terence had nodded. In a dim corner, a pale, skinny young man, almost waifish, danced alone. Alberta Hunter crooned and the boy was lost in her smoky voice, singing about “my man.” He moved his hips slowly and had his arms wrapped around his lithe torso. It should have been comic, but it was provocative, probably because the boy was so lost in the music and his movements that his immediate surroundings, Edward was sure, had disappeared. The boy had straight black hair falling into his eyes and his short red shirt had risen up to expose a white belly, sharply defined by muscles undulating just beneath his skin.
Edward breathed in deeply, both troubled by Terence’s interest and intrigued by it. Even though he considered himself worldly, he had yet to engage in a ménage à trois. Would this be his first? Should he look at it as a gift from Terence? Even though Edward was pretty sure Terence wouldn’t allow him to make love to him, perhaps he wouldn’t mind watching him with the dancer, directing and orchestrating their movements. The idea had its appeal.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m intrigued by him, by his apartness from everything around him and his lack of self-consciousness. He’s quite beautiful, in a coltish sort of way. Don’t you think?”
Edward nodded. The boy had opened his eyes and was now staring at both of them with what looked like complete knowledge of what the two men were discussing. His eyes, even from across the room, were both a welcome and a challenge. “Yes,” Edward mumbled. “I do think he’s beautiful.” He nudged his head closer into Terence’s chest and lifted his arm to surround his waist. “Are you just asking for my opinion, or did you have something more in mind?”
Terence grinned. “I had a little something more in mind. What do you think? Should we ask him to join us? Do you think he can appreciate the pleasures of alcohol and cocaine with two gorgeous men?”
Edward stared at the boy, wondering if what appeared lithe in the murky light of the bar was really malnourished and what he was seeing beneath his skin were not, in actuality, muscles, but ribs. Would they be offering him an evening of debauchery and twisted fun, or would they be exploiting the weak? He knew it was the latter, yet it didn’t stop him from wanting to please Terence and to assuage his own curiosity as to just where this meeting could lead.
“I think he would appreciate shelter! The nose candy would be a luxury thrown on top of it.”
“Oh, don’t become a social worker on me. Do you want the boy or not?” Terence lifted Edward’s head away from his body, fingertips under chin. “Hmmm? I can procure him for you, you know. For us. Come on, Edward, be wicked. This is supposed to be a celebration. Let me go talk to him. I’ll set everything up. You won’t have to do a thing, except enjoy him. He looks like your type.”
Edward felt abandoned, yet somehow his penis was rising, making his pants tight. It was engorged with blood, diverting the flow of it from his brain to regions south. “What if I don’t want to?” His breath eluded him and his heart raced. But Edward knew things had already gone beyond choice.
“You do want to. It will be fun. I’ll be with you. We’ll do this together.” Terence leaned in, his face closer, closer, and kissed Edward deeply, his tongue exploring the inside of his mouth. Edward grabbed and held on.
When Terence pulled away, Edward was even dizzier.
“Yes?” Terence eyed him.
“Yes.”
Terence was off his stool quickly, almost as if Edward had shouted, “Go!” Edward watched as Terence crossed the room, elegant all in black, his pure white skin a sharp contrast. He approached the boy, hands on his shoulders, and leaned in to whisper.
To seduce? To entrance?
The two turned toward Edward. Terence smiled. The boy’s features betrayed nothing, only a kind of resignation.
He led the boy across the bar until they were in front of Edward. The boy suddenly seemed larger, heavier, as if viewing him from a distance had made him somehow a vision. Edward could see that his clothes were grimy and his dark hair, which had seemed so shiny, was really slick with grease. Why, he was nothing but a street waif!
“Shall we go?”
Edward closed his eyes and bit the inside of his lips. Powerless, he thought as he stood up, and took the boy’s other arm to guide him from the bar.
*
Edward swallowed, taking a drag off his cigarette, watching its tip glow orange in the darkness. His throat was burning and the little tar, nicotine, and tobacco-wrapped paper parcel tasted horrible: scorching and sour. His nose was clogged with thick mucous from the ingestion of a prodigious amount of cocaine, so clogged, in fact, he couldn’t exhale through his nostrils. He sat on the hard wooden floor of his apartment; outside the sky was lightening, its gray fingers grabbing onto his windowsill and hoisting themselves into his squalid room. The orches
tra of car horn, exhaust, street vendors, and footsteps was tuning up, building to a crescendo that would not cease until the wee hours.
His head felt like it had been placed into a vise that an outside force was turning slowly, tightening, tightening.
Edward turned his hand and looked down at the smoldering cigarette between his fingertips. Even though he had long ago passed the stage where he got any enjoyment from them, he kept lighting cigarettes one after another. They helped mask the taste that was underneath. He wanted to eradicate that taste, but it seemed no amount of smoke could burn it away.
The taste was an undercurrent, hinted at, yet powerful: a sharp, metallic tang.
Blood.
Edward closed his eyes, and red swam on the inside of his eyelids. He blinked his eyes open, and winced.
The remainder of the night with Terence had gone pretty much as he might have predicted, if he’d had the wits to predict anything, but his head was so fogged by scotch, cocaine, and lust he could barely predict where his foot would go next as the three men climbed the stairs to his apartment. In his dulled mental state, he had become a canvas Terence could stretch at his will, paint on at his whim, making Edward his own personal creation. Whether the result was art or not was difficult to say.
The boy, whose name was Ned, had been eager for the substances Terence offered, snorting lines of cocaine carefully laid out by Terence across Edward’s belly, drinking single malt Scotch in gulps straight from the bottle. Ned didn’t say much and his giggled responses spoke of someone who didn’t have many brain cells left. He was a desperate boy, living off men who exploited him.
Edward might have felt sorry for him and called an end to the escalating debauchery if he had been clear-headed, if he could have seen into the future and known for certain there was no sexual liaison waiting for him with Terence.
But, like the boy, Edward followed obediently as Terence called out instructions for the two. They were like models, creating tableaux for their rich benefactor’s pleasure. They became creations ripped from the imagination of the Marquis de Sade. Here was Edward mounting the boy dry, trying to shut out the boy’s whimpers beneath him as Terence clapped and laughed. Terence and Edward held each other’s gazes while Edward’s hips moved rhythmically, thrusting into the boy, never approaching anything remotely like a climax. There was Ned, on his knees before Edward, endlessly tonguing him with a kind of detached boredom. Finally, Edward exploded down the boy’s throat, but only after Terence had dropped his black pants, exposing himself.
But all of the sex was a pastoral scene painted by Monet compared to what followed.
“Have you ever tasted blood?” Terence leveled his gaze upon Edward, who was lying across the boy’s lap. Ned was leaning against the wall, legs splayed out in front of him, head tipped forward, and snoring.
Edward turned his head and looked at Terence dully, a disbelieving smile slowly making its way across his face. “What do you mean?” Edward closed his eyes in an attempt to stop the room from spinning. “Yeah. I guess so. When I’ve cut myself and I suck on my finger or whatever.”
Terence reached out and tousled Edward’s hair. “No, I mean have you ever actually tasted the blood of someone else? Have you ever felt the hot rush, the pump from vein into your mouth?”
Edward smiled dully. “You’re kidding, right? What are you tryin’ to say here, Terry?”
Terence said nothing for a moment, letting the nickname emerge and die in the air like a bad smell.
“What I’m trying to say is that I would like to introduce you to a whole new world of pleasure. What I’m trying to tell you is that there are realms of delight out there you haven’t even imagined, places I can take you that make pleasures like sex and drugs pale in comparison; pleasures that make those things seem pedestrian. And these pleasures can all be found in the hot, scarlet life of blood. Human blood.”
Edward blew out a sigh. “You’re sick, man.”
Terence lifted Edward off the boy’s lap and held him close. He whispered in his ear, “You want to be close to me? You want to share the ultimate in intimacy with me? Then you need to follow my lead.”
Edward watched as Terence laid the boy gently across the mattress on the floor. His lithe form and pale skin seemed almost neon in the darkness, a separate form rising up out of the mess of sheets and exposed striped mattress ticking. Edward wanted to concentrate on the alabaster form, how the skin, sweat-slicked, looked like stone. He didn’t want to think about what was coming. He tried to concentrate on the simple beauty of the prone boy, trying to ignore the pounding of his heart, the quickening of his breath, and the yammering in his brain—the one he had heard so many times when Terence was around—to flee.
“Let’s make this interesting.” Terence stood and began shedding his clothes, piece by piece, making a circle around Edward’s small apartment, dropping a silk shirt here, black twill there, a sock in the sink, another on top of the radiator.
Edward stared at Terence, mouth open, breathing hard. His body was flawless, like Michelangelo’s David, only better endowed. Terence was simply the most beautiful man (or should that be creature?) Edward had ever seen, and his beauty was like a shock to his system. He could scarcely move. He could scarcely breathe.
Terence squatted down beside Edward and Edward gazed dully into his dark eyes. He felt helpless, knowing every move Terence made was part of his seduction and he wasn’t even resisting enough to make the game interesting. Limply, he let Terence undress him, the long fingers moving expertly over his body, unzipping, unbuttoning, tugging, and pulling until Edward lay bare before him. “Kiss me,” he mumbled weakly, sounding desperate and hungry (which he was).
And Terence complied, giving him a deep, probing kiss that seemed to go on for hours, pressing his cool, smooth skin against Edward’s fevered flesh, sweaty and sour from all he had ingested during this night of “celebration.” Terence spread himself out on top of Edward, pressing him back against the gritty wooden floor. Edward maintained an erection, which was a particularly Herculean feat, considering the vast quantities of Scotch and cocaine he had ingested. He moved his legs apart, scissoring Terence between them and urging him further.
Terence sat up and shook his head, wagging a finger. “Now, now, my sweet. Don’t try to push for a greater advantage than I can give you. When I said we could be intimate, I didn’t mean in such a base way. I have better ways of penetrating you, my lad. You’ll see.” Terence stood and crossed the room to fumble in one of his pants pockets. He returned with the familiar-looking pipe and his sterling silver lighter, glinting from the moonbeams coming in through Edward’s window.
Edward propped himself up on his elbows and sighed. “I don’t know if I can take any more tonight. My head is already spinning.” Edward still wasn’t sure if that particular effect was due to the drugs or to Terence’s proximity and nakedness.
Terence fired up the bowl and drew in deeply. Holding in the smoke, he held the pipe out to Edward and croaked, “Take it. It will calm you and make everything…” Terence’s voice trailed off as he blew a plume of blue smoke into the air, perfuming it with the pungent aroma of cannabis. “It will make everything sacred, in a way.”
Edward rolled his eyes, but didn’t call Terence on the hyperbole. Like a pupil, or a slave, he took the bowl from Terence and drew in, imagining the smoke rolling deep into his lungs, drawing in deeper than he ever had before and resisting the urge to sputter, to choke—and waste the smoke. He knew how powerful this was, and he craved the oblivion it would bring.
Edward was numb. Terence stood and moved to the boy. “Now I’m going to show you. Now I’m going to share with you a way to elevate yourself above the world you have known until this night.” Terence put his hand beneath the boy’s neck. The boy stirred slightly at his touch, murmuring something. But he did not wake.
Terence held the boy’s head tenderly, gazing down at him.
And then he turned back to look at Edward.
&nbs
p; In spite of the pot, in spite of the dulling of his senses, in spite of this weird love he felt for this creature, Edward felt an electric jolt of terror go through him, singing along his synapses, making it impossible for him to hold in the shriek.
When Terence looked back and opened his mouth to smile, he revealed not the teeth Edward had grown accustomed to seeing, but rows of tiny fangs.
Edward gibbered, giggled with horror as Terence growled and then tore into the soft flesh of the boy’s throat, ripping his skin and unleashing a flood of black liquid that—in the darkness—looked like oil, a liquid quickly staunched by Terence’s hungry, sucking mouth. Terence made small noises of pleasure and contentment as he took in the blood that pumped in slower and slower ebbs from the boy’s dying heart.
Edward grew silent with shock.
Terence rent the flesh from the boy’s neck and his face, gobbling it, exposing the sinew beneath, the muscles that had made the boy smile, laugh, and swallow. The attack was so sudden the boy didn’t even have a chance to scream. A scream would have made the whole scene a little more real; the silence lent an even more disturbing edge. But quick, Edward supposed, was better.
Merciful, Edward thought.
And then Terence, his face smeared with darkness, moved back to Edward, who lay frozen as Terence came closer. As he lowered his face closer and closer to Edward’s, Edward could do nothing but lie still, a stunned animal.
The kiss that followed was savage, deep, and possessed of a depth and intensity of feeling Edward had never known. He felt he had gone somewhere else. He felt he had died. Terence let the boy’s blood flow into Edward’s open mouth. It was hot, tangy with metal, and mixed with Terence’s saliva, a potent drug.
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