by Dani April
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” She hesitated for a second. “Only try not to get any of your saliva in my bloodstream when you bite me. It makes me want to have sex all the time, and it takes a long while to get out of my system. It was okay out in the desert because those guys were really nice, but here in the city I might not be so lucky. Up here I can’t just go around jumping in bed with the first man I meet.”
“But if I don’t use my saliva, you will feel pain.”
She sighed again. Why did he always have to make everything so difficult? “It’s all right,” she told him. “I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”
He sat up on the sofa and eyed her. She could tell he was hungry and thirsty to drink her blood. Only his feelings of love for her were holding him back from becoming the animal a vampire could so often become.
“Where would you like me to bite you?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Where would you like to bite me?”
He thought for a minute. “The best place is the femoral artery. It’s better for me because I can get more blood that way. And it’s better for you because the artery is close to the surface of your skin. If I don’t use any saliva, you’re going to feel some pain when I bite you. This way we can keep the pain you feel to a minimum.”
“All right, sounds good.” She nodded her agreement. “Where is that?”
His gaze roamed down the length of her body and came to rest between her legs. “Your upper thigh, near your groin.”
“Oh?” She felt a slight blush pass over her. But this was only a medical procedure and nothing more she told herself. “All right.”
She got up from the couch. At first she wasn’t for sure just how she was going to work things with him. He was staring at her with hunger in his eyes the entire time. Then she decided her hesitation was just plain silly. After all, Peter had already seen everything. She had spent a night making love to him as she never had with any other man.
She reached behind her back and unzipped her skirt. She stepped out of it and set it aside on the sofa. Her shirt fell down her legs, covering her white cotton panties.
She gestured down at herself. “Do you need me to take off anything else?”
“If you remove your panties, it will make it easier for both of us.”
She hesitated again, wondering if this was really necessary, but decided to go with his direction. He did look weak and sick, and all she could think to do was to help him.
“Okay, sure.” She reached down to her waist and slowly slid her panties down her legs. When they had fallen to her ankles, she stepped out of them. She could feel her pussy start to go wet. This was an involuntary reaction to the situation and she thought, under the circumstances, not very appropriate. But with him staring at her with such evident lust in his eyes, she just couldn’t help herself.
Once more her shirt fell down her legs, covering her from his eyes.
“Now what do you want me to do?”
“Lie down on the couch and spread your legs.”
“Okay.” She did as he instructed. Now her shirt fell up along her belly. She hiked up her knees in the small area of the couch, bringing them into the air. He hovered over her, and she opened her legs for him, exposing her moist pussy lips to his stare.
He got on his knees between her extended thighs. He knelt to her and brought his mouth down to her mons. She felt a quiver of excitement run through her pussy. This wasn’t supposed to be sexual. But, damn it, she could not deny that she had an attraction to him like none other she had ever experienced in her life.
“Just relax, Rebecca,” he whispered as he parted her knees even further. “It will be over in a minute.”
Then there was warmth on her upper thigh only an inch away from her waiting pussy lips. She gasped as she felt his teeth break the flesh. She didn’t know if he did it to try and ease the moment of pain or not, but his fingers had risen to her pussy mound and were stroking softly.
She could feel him draining blood from her body, but then one of his fingers had penetrated her pussy and was probing her. She squeezed her eyes shut, and before she knew what was happening, an orgasm was overtaking her, warm and sweet as it ran the length of her body.
He was right. It had only taken him a minute. Then he was finished and rising up from between her knees. She didn’t know if she felt weak from the loss of blood or from her climax.
He seemed drained from the effort as well. There was barely room for the two of them on top of the narrow couch. She moved aside and let him lie down on his back. His chest was still naked. When he was situated, she lay down on top of him, resting her head on his broad and smooth chest.
“Thank you, Rebecca.”
“Thank you, Peter.” He smiled up at her. He knew what she was thanking him for.
Both of their needs satisfied for the moment they fell asleep in each other’s arms.
* * * *
About a half hour before sunrise, Rebecca woke up. Peter was still asleep cradled in her arms beneath her. She felt completely rested. She wondered if maybe he had snuck in a little of his vampire serum into her blood last night. Then she decided that he hadn’t. He had promised her he wouldn’t. She just felt good to have him here inside her apartment and in her arms.
She looked out the front window. The sun would be up soon, and Peter would have to get going. She hated to wake him up because he was sleeping so soundly.
She played with a lock of his hair as it fell across his brow. She got a good chance to really examine his face for the first time. She couldn’t read his mind like he could her own. But she thought if she could all she would see from him would be strength and honesty. Those two words seemed to sum up this man better than any others she could think of. For the first time, she allowed herself to bask in a moment of pride that she had been the one he had chosen. Undoubtedly he could have had any woman in the world, and it had been her.
It was too bad he was a vampire. Because if he wasn’t…But she couldn’t allow herself to think like that. He was what he was and she was what she was, and nothing in the world could ever change that.
He stirred beneath her and opened his eyes. She gave him a smile. “I thought I was going to have to wake you up.”
“I have an internal clock of sorts. I always know when I have to seek safety from the sun.”
“How much time do you have?”
“I have a few more minutes before I have to leave.”
She laid her head back down on his chest. “Then let’s just stay like this.” He put his arm more securely around her body. He was still not wearing his shirt, and she was still without her pants. The living room was dark and only the hint of the soon-to-rise sun was peeking in through the window. “You know,” she whispered to him. “I think this is the nicest night I’ve ever spent in this apartment. Thank you for everything, Peter.”
“I am happy I could make up for some of the wrong I did you before.”
“Well, you really didn’t hurt me before,” she mused. “It’s always hard meeting someone you care about for the first time. You worry about doing something wrong and making mistakes. You worry about losing the other person.”
“Yes, I know.” Peter sighed. “I made my share of mistakes when we first met. I behaved like a fool.”
She looked down at him. He still didn’t look well. Not as well as she would have hoped he’d look after drinking her blood. “How do you feel this morning?” she asked him.
He hesitated. Then he did not even answer her.
“Are you sure you drank enough blood last night?”
“Yes. It was sufficient. I don’t need any more blood.”
She bent to his chest and opened one of the bandages of towels that covered his wounds. When she pulled back the cloth, she was happy with what she saw. The wound had all but healed overnight. Only a slight red blotch on his chest showed it had ever been there.
“Your wounds have healed,” she told him. �
��So I guess you didn’t get an infection after all.”
“I told you we are immune.”
“Then how come you still sound so weak?”
He shook his head. “I’m not really for sure.” She realized he was telling her the truth. He didn’t feel well, but had no idea why.
She thought back to her time spent out in the desert with him and the others. “When I had my little fling with Ramos back at your castle.” She laughed, the thought bringing back memories that now set apart by the passing of time seemed sweet and dear to her. “He told me that when he first met you it was in the hospital he worked at. He said you were sick that night, too.”
“Yes, that’s true. I was hesitant to feed on humans and didn’t have a good supply of blood from the hospital back then. I would often get hungry and weak. But you satisfied my hunger last night.”
“So what’s wrong with you now, then?”
He shook his head. Then he slowly sat up on the couch and looked out the window in front. It faced west, but already a glow could be seen in the sky.
“I have to go,” he told her, getting up and reaching for his shirt. “I took quite a bit of blood from you last night. You should eat a large breakfast with plenty of iron, and don’t exert yourself today.”
“I’ll stop off on the way to work and get something to eat,” she assured him. “I’m going to come up with an excuse to get off work early again tonight right around sundown,” she told him. “Will you be here when I get back?”
“If you want me to be.”
She got up off the sofa and went into his arms. She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Do you have to ask me that after last night?”
“I’ll be waiting out there for you.” He nodded out to the hall.
“Wait,” she told him. She pulled a spare key off her key ring from the front coffee table. She threw it to him and he caught it. “Let yourself inside. I’ll be here as soon as I can.”
“Until tonight then, Rebecca.”
“Yes, until tonight,” she said. “Get some rest today and get feeling better.”
Then he was gone in a flash. About five minutes later, the first rays of sun broke over the rooftops of the city, heralding the new day.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The next several months passed like a race through time for Rebecca. She felt like she was living on vampire time instead of human. Peter was waiting in her apartment every night for her when she got off work. Her schedule at the studio had her working until the ten o’clock newscast at times, but she was able to get her hours changed to the day shift. That way she got off from work right around the time the sun was about to set, and by the time she walked home, Peter was already awake and sitting in her living room waiting for her.
They did everything together. They went for long walks in Golden Gate Park and went out to eat. Of course Peter never ate, but he took Rebecca to the best restaurants in the city anyway. They attended plays, went to movies, concerts, and sporting events together. In short, they had almost the life of a normal couple in that brief span of time.
When Rebecca’s parents and kid sister came up to visit her in the city for the holidays, she introduced Peter as her friend to them. Peter was the gracious gentleman and charmed her parents and sister outrageously. Her sister even confessed to her she hoped Rebecca and Peter would get married. She told her he was a million times better than any other boyfriend she’d ever had. Rebecca told her kid sister to mind her own business.
The sleeping arrangements in Rebecca’s apartment even seemed natural after a little while. They slept together in Rebecca’s bedroom. Every few nights she would let Peter bite her femoral artery and take her blood. Whenever he did this, it always led to him going down on her pussy with his fingers probing and massaging deep inside her. Rebecca experienced deeply satisfying orgasms each time.
Peter would not allow them to engage in intercourse. Rebecca wanted him in that way, but was also afraid, and so she never argued that they should try. She also never allowed herself to kiss him on the lips. She knew what just a drop of vampire fluid in her body would do to her and had no desire to return to the lust-filled haze she had lived in for the week out in the desert. However, she didn’t need the vampire fluid to find sexual gratification or deep attraction to Peter. He made her feel all of those things without any outside help.
During this time, she stayed in touch with Ian via e-mail and chat. He was back in Australia teaching a double load of classes at his university and had no time to visit in the States. During the course of time, Tex and Ramos had gone down to Australia to visit him. They had liked it so well, Ian had procured jobs for both of them at his university, and they were now living permanently down under with him. Rebecca had to smile to herself because she could just imagine the three of them together. They were most likely scoring with every available female on the beach in Melbourne.
Early on in her renewed relationship with Peter, she wrote Ian the following e-mail to inform her Australian friend and one-time lover about her new situation.
Dear Ian,
Peter has come back into my life. Don’t worry. He doesn’t want to make a vampire of me this time. The two of us are actually getting along really well. He is sleeping in the basement of my apartment building during the day since it is below ground and has no windows. At night he stays with me in my apartment.
But, Ian, I am worried about him. He has some kind of sickness, and the troubling thing is he doesn’t even seem to know what it is himself. I see to it that he is drinking enough blood, and that does seem to help most of the time. But every now and then he becomes weak. I can see it in his eyes. It looks to me like during these spells he hardly has the strength to stand on his feet. I try and keep him close to his daytime resting place in my basement because my fear is that he will have one of these spells when he is far away from it and not have enough strength to get back in time for sunrise.
Peter tells me not to worry, but I can see the concern in his eyes. I know he is worried, too. The bad thing is, these spells seem to be getting more frequent, and every time they come over him, they leave him more drained than the previous time did. After a while, I don’t know how much more he’ll be able to take. I have begged him to let me take him to the doctor, but of course he always refuses, and actually considering he is a vampire, I’m not certain a doctor would do him a whole lot of good.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just being an overexcited female. He hasn’t had any spells for the last couple of weeks, and the two of us have been having a wonderful time together. I invited him to an office party one night last week, and you can imagine the reaction I got from my coworkers when they recognized Peter from the story I was supposed to do on him.
Please let me know what you think? If I’m just being dumb about the whole thing, then write me back and tell me not to worry, and I’ll feel a whole lot better.
Love,
Rebecca
The following day when Rebecca got to work and opened her e-mail, she found a letter from Ian waiting in her inbox.
Dear Beck,
I am happy to hear that you and that bloody vampire are making good together. You are both good people in my book, even though he isn’t really a person. You told me you’re making sure he’s getting enough blood. I don’t even have to ask where he’s getting that from. Just be careful and don’t let him take too much. I guess it works out in a weird way. He takes you out for dinner, and then you take him home so he can have you for dinner. Vampires are funny creatures. As long as you’re happy, then I won’t trouble myself overly much with worries.
You also asked me to tell you that you were being silly and to not worry. You know you’re not silly, Beck. You’re more levelheaded than most men I know and tougher by far.
I’m going to tell you something now, and you shouldn’t tell Peter I told you because I promised him I would never tell a soul. But I could read love in your words, and I think you have a right to know the truth.
Peter is sick. He has been to a doctor. I found him one several years back. The doctor I got for him knew all about his condition as a vampire and performed a mountain of bloody tests on him. At the time, things didn’t look so bad. We thought he had about another one thousand years to live.
He’s going to die, Beck. He may live for another hundred years, or he may not wake up tomorrow night. I’m not very encouraged by the symptoms you described.
I won’t go into the entire medical hocus pocus the doctor told us about. But the truth is, Beck, this is a terminally ill vampire you’re living with.
My advice is to take your happiness while you have it because nothing lasts forever, and that includes vampires.
Cheers,
Ian
Rebecca cried after she read this e-mail. But she felt confused. A hundred years, a thousand years, or tomorrow night, when would Peter be gone?
As time passed, she came to realize the earlier scenario was the most likely. He had another attack of weakness the following week, and it was worse than all that had come before it. She tried to insist that he drink more of her blood, but he had only fed on her the night before and refused out of concern for her health.
The spell passed, and they settled back into somewhat of a sense of normalcy. But nothing was really the same now, as Rebecca knew their days together were numbered. However, Peter started taking more interest in his business, and she took that as a good sign. He would often come home late from meeting with his attorneys and business managers. She and Rodney would wait up for him, and he would return from the meetings and fall into her arms. It was on those occasions she wished more than anything that she could take his lips and kiss them.
One morning when she was dressing to leave for the studio, she looked in the mirror, and she had to wipe more tears from her eyes. It dawned on her then that her and Peter could never have had a real relationship together whether he was afflicted with the vampire disease or not. It had been almost two years since they had first met. She was going to be twenty-seven soon. That was the same age Peter had been when he had been made into a vampire by Athena. She saw a wrinkle on her face in the mirror. She looked twenty-seven now. When she had first met Peter, she had been two years younger than he was. Now she was the same as he. In another two years, she would be two years older than him. In another twenty years or twenty-five years when he took her out to dinner, the other patrons would think he was her son.