by Wendy Nikel
“Are you going to go back to the barber shop?”
“It doesn’t seem like a good idea to even return to my apartment.”
“I can go for you. Pick up whatever you want. Just make a list, darling.”
The endearment makes the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, but not in a bad way. Something else starts tingling too. “Now?”
“Sure, if you want.”
“No, I’m too—” I squeeze John’s palm. The fragrance grows stronger. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“Too spooked?”
“No.” I don’t take my eyes off his as I drag his hand toward my dick. Its ache is altogether different now. It lengthens at his touch. “Too horny.”
John lets out a surprised and slightly uncomfortable laugh, but he doesn’t pull his hand back. “You’re not yourself.”
“Au contraire. I’m myself for the first time since I can remember.”
He stares at me. His breath picks up. His heart beats faster. His scent is better than blood.
He groans when I kiss him—a primordial, animalistic sound that shoots straight to my dick. He tugs at my shirt, ripping several buttons loose.
I push him back.
His hands fall still against my chest. “Oh, um, sorry, is that not what you—”
“I have a question.”
“A question?” His voice is high, bewildered. I can see desire and patience warring in his eyes. It’s a familiar expression, one I’ve seen almost daily for the past year. My cock leaks.
“Biting vampires—does it work the same?”
“Better, I’d say. There’s no guilt to contend with.”
“Good.” I nip his neck, fragrant and sweet. “It’s about time I tasted you.”
Originally published in Cwtch Press’s Blood in the Rain II
About Dale Cameron Lowry
Dale Cameron Lowry had a jagged forehead scar before Harry Potter made it cool. When not busy fighting evil, Dale writes and edits queer romance and speculative fiction. Come to think of it, those are ways of fighting evil too.
R.MICHAEL BURNS
The Eyes of a Stranger
I watched her across the crowded studio, and I knew—I felt it as I never had before. She was the one I sought. The one. After so very many years.
Heavy bass thumped like muted thunder, as though the room were a beating heart and all of us in it the blood being pulsed from chamber to chamber, while on stage the artists danced and flung their paints. The fluorescent colors glowed in bright splatters on the white plaster walls and their naked bodies. The intense black-lights made their skin look dark as rich, brown soil. The show was strange, fearsome, weird, and wonderful, the artists beautiful, dazzling specimens of man and woman. But my gaze kept wandering, creeping out among the spectators, finding its way back to her.
She didn’t have the classical Greek perfection of the splendid creature that cavorted paint-bright and with rippling muscles on the makeshift stage, yet she was equally beautiful—more so. Her body, when I could glimpse it through the shifting silhouettes that separated us, looked slender, narrow waist and long legs flattered by tight and torn blue jeans, slight breasts and long neck accentuated by her high, black coat collar and scoop-necked, red halter top. Lush hair, the color of red gold, the texture of fine silk, spun in long, tangled locks well below her fine shoulders. I’d seen more ideally proportioned women—there were a half-dozen or more in the room around me, as well as the undulating beauty on stage. But her face, ah! Her cheeks were full, her chin strong, her forehead high. She wore a scoundrel’s smile that was nevertheless terribly alluring, sweet. And—those eyes. They sparkled with such energy, such life as I scarcely remembered could exist. Those eyes spoke silently of a heart that knew the full range of human feelings, knew them to their depths and breadths and could speak them in poems or paintings or perfectly struck piano chords. In those eyes, I saw an artist whose beauty eclipsed that of the two naked people whose breathless performance had drawn the crowd to this tall Soho loft.
I leaned against a rough wooden post and watched her, forgetting the exhibition, the bohemian audience surrounding me, eventually even the rattle-window boom of the bass. Though she was all in shadow, lit only by the furtive violet shimmer of the stage lights, I could see her clearly—I could see nothing else.
I sensed more than saw that the show was coming to a close. The audience strained to see as the artists twisted their bodies together, thrust hips, flailed limbs, and writhed into a single senseless shape. Feeling the moment growing close, tasting it on my expectant tongue, I moved toward her, sliding between people with an ease I’d long since grown accustomed to, brushing past them cat-like and quiet, all but invisible, unfelt.
The stage lights blinked out with a final crash of percussion, and darkness deep as an ink well poured into the studio, filling it ceiling to floor. The audience drew a collective breath—as if the room itself had gasped—and then sighed it all out again. I was near her now, in the dark, seeing and unseen, my fingers itching to plumb the depths of her hair, to explore her shoulders, her throat—ah! But slow and subtle. Enjoy the seduction. Prolong. Savor.
White lights startled the room to illumination once more. Robed now, the man and woman, still dappled with bright colors, bowed slightly and then kissed one another. The bohemians applauded and snapped their fingers and cawed their approval.
The girl, so near now, stiffened, skin going cold all over, feeling me behind her. I smiled a little—how could I not?
“Hello,” I whispered, close to her ear—a private sound, all for her.
She turned toward me, as now the crowd around us began to mill and cluster and murmur. One eyebrow bent up, her radiant blue eyes shone like diamond chips, and she favored me with a smile, so slight yet so deep that for an instant it seemed that she was the seducer, the siren whose deadly song wound its way into my soul. I smiled at the thought—my soul. How droll. I looked into her face and felt myself regaining my command of this slippery game. Still—it had been a very long time since I’d known even a flicker of doubt at such a moment.
Thinking of it, I was all the more certain that I’d chosen well. She was the one, or all my carefully honed instincts, all my well trusted intuitions, were wrong.
“You look familiar,” she told me, her voice lilting and low, a sound like the music lilacs and velvet might make. “Do you go to a lot of shows?”
“Occasionally,” I said, feeling her intense eyes on me, knowing that she felt mine on her. “I’ve seen you before, as well. You were at one of my openings, I believe. At The Triangle, in Tribeca.”
“You’re an artist?” she asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow.
“Oils on canvas, mostly. Not as exotic as tonight’s exhibition, but rather more… enduring.”
“Yes, but it’s the impermanence of performance art that makes it powerful—it’s now, you know? Immediate, in the moment. And then gone. Forever. Just impact and energy that’s never static.”
I nodded, slightly, acknowledging her point without deferring to it. I held my features marble-placid, but my senses were tingling, singing. I could smell her, almost taste her, and despite myself I knew that the urge was uncoiling inside me, reaching out its claws, tongue ticking over eager teeth.
“The Triangle, hm?” she said.
Lost as I was in my deepening hunger, it took a moment for my mind to decipher what she meant.
“Yes,” I answered, feeling slow. What power this girl held me with—the bewitching magnetism of those brilliant eyes. Had I ever been so distracted, so off-balanced by any woman, by anyone, even in my sunlit days? Never that I could recall. How sweet, ah, how sweet.
She studied my face, eyes tickling, chilling me. She seemed to believe that my honesty could be measured in the curve of my cheek, the line of my jaw. Perhaps she was right, perhaps her eyes could read me as no others could. Better still.
“You’re—Jacob Hart,” she said as though this fact might surprise me. I
nodded once again. I often feel that silence is my most beguiling voice.
“Mmm. I remember that show. Your work is—brutal. Dark and brutal.”
Now I smiled again. “I paint what I see,” I told her, “what I witness and experience.”
“Nightmares on canvas,” she whispered, “murky windows into obscure corners of Hell.”
“You understand my work well,” I agreed.
“It’s—incredible,” she said, “horrid and—wonderful. Vaguely obscene. I looked into those pictures and saw a thousand unvoiced screams, agonies so deep that they wring tears out of our souls. Or my soul, anyway. I lost sleep.”
“It spoke to you,” I said, “in a familiar voice.”
Now she nodded, absently thumbing a wayward lock of strawberry-gold hair out of her face. She tilted her head and studied me more closely. It was—sweet torment. The shelf of her jaw, the hollow of her throat, so deep, long, soft, pale, were beautiful, maddeningly alluring. My fingers bent up, curled into knotty claws, all on their own.
“So. You’re the man, the artist.”
The phrase hung in the air between us like a plume of smoke.
I nodded once more.
We stood a moment, her wondrous eyes taking slow stock of me, mine swallowing her a bit at a time. Around us, the chatter ebbed and flowed, champagne glasses plinked, and tired floorboards creaked. The sounds fluttered around the empty space under the high ceiling like restless cooing pigeons. The crowd had begun to grow thin, and I shifted foot to foot, eager for the neon-sparkling darkness of the midnight streets.
Her eyebrows drew together slightly, and that scoundrel smile grew sharper, more wicked.
“How would you paint me?” she asked.
I blinked. Had I put the idea in her mind? I’d like to have, but I think it had been born of her own wistful wonderings without my least suggestion.
I glared down into her blue-diamond eyes, expecting to hold them as I’d held so many strangers’ eyes in the past, but found myself grasping, flailing, falling, lost in her gaze as I meant for her to be lost in mine. The struggle was brief—no doubt she scarcely sensed it—and then I recovered myself.
Now I had her.
“Come with me,” I said and, turning, started out of the loft.
She followed. She had little choice.
I squeezed a crimson curl of paint onto my pallet, poked at it with a fine brush, looked up.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
She stepped from behind the low muslin screen in the corner of my basement studio, into the bright wash of the footlights, arms loose at her sides, her skin just the color of fresh arterial blood in the glow of the red flood lamps. Seeing her now, I thought that perhaps I’d misjudged her body as I’d watched her earlier. I admired the subtle tones of muscle under skin, the way the light caressed her and turned her nipples into bright, black roses, her hair into a cascade of slick plasma around her long, shadowed throat. Ah… the smell of her, the sight—I hungered, I lusted, I wanted and wished. But—not yet. First, I had to paint, to preserve her just as she was now, alive and beautiful and vibrant, to make her immortal, if only in my uniquely hideous way—what more fitting tribute? And only appropriate, given my deadly intentions.
“I’ve never done anything like this,” she said, her voice easy, matter-of-fact.
“Are you uncomfortable?” I asked, knowing that she wasn’t.
“It’s quite liberating,” she answered. “How shall I pose?”
“You’ll find a gauze sleeve hung on the wall behind you,” I said, pointing with my paintbrush. “Pull it over your face—make sure that it’s taut.”
She slipped the translucent material over her face, tugged and twisted it until it took on a vague semblance of her features—brow, chin, cheeks, nose, all cast in subtle smooth curves, dark, red pits where her dazzling eyes belonged.
Those eyes, those eyes, they haunted me, tortured me. I couldn’t ignore them, as I’d ignored the eyes of countless young models before her. I’d excluded them because the horrors which sprang upon my canvases were to be blind, always and forever blind, no eyes, no gleam of humanity.
But not this time. Her eyes, so vivid and electric with life… To include them would make the final image all the more terrible. No—even that didn’t matter, not really. If I was going to douse that sparkle, extinguish it forever, then I would capture it here, once and for all, not for the world nor for her but for myself alone.
I approached her, all too aware of her closeness, naked and vulnerable and steaming with the heat of life. With the care of a surgeon, I used my pallet knife to slit open the much-used gauze hood, just enough to reveal those pale, diamond eyes. I hesitated and then returned to my easel to examine the image I was creating, to measure and consider it.
“Pull your hair out, over the top,” I instructed. She did so, and now she was almost wholly human again, except for her flawless, faceless eyes, now framed by long red-blond locks.
“Yes, good. Now—open your mouth wider,” I told her, “Scream—all the countless furies of your life. Silently.”
Her mouth gaped horrifically, a shallow, red pool in the muslin landscape of her mostly hidden face.
“Head back—farther. Yes. Stand as though you’ve just leapt, as though you were swan-diving into a chasm that might be dark with water or only jagged, black rocks.”
Her body tensed, arms swept back, fingers spread, chest out, making her breasts look slight against her ribs, her throat long and awash in ruby-bright hair. She rose up on her toes and hung there before me, suspended, eyes vivid and wide and brilliant. The effect was—immaculate. Sublime.
My brush began to flick, to fly, no—to dance. It gathered paint, kissed it onto the barren white canvas in a delicate ballet, now a swaying waltz, now a lusty tango. It moved on its own.
“You may rest,” I murmured when she showed signs of fatigue. I painted her fearsome specter from memory until I needed my muse. “Up again,” I demanded, and she leapt from her respite on the couch to return perfectly to her pose.
For hours, I felt, I saw, I knew—nothing.
Sometime later, conscious awareness crept back over me, awakening my vision. I saw her, naked and exquisite in the bloody glow, and felt my hunger bristle anew—and then at last, I saw the canvas and what my nerveless fingers had rendered there.
It was… flawless.
In my daze, my—epiphany—I’d captured every awesome, lovely detail of her, every delicate contour and subtlety of shading: the ruddy pools under the gentle swells of her breasts; the satiny delta between her smooth, flawless thighs; that magnificent arc of her neck; and the highlights of her silk-spun hair. But what seized my attention were her eyes—never had my brushes, my colors, served me so well, never had the canvas communicated its message with more clarity. It was as if, twitching my fingers just so, I’d captured the very light from the air, the very life from her eyes, and dabbed and dappled it into place, remaking her in thick pigments. The image as a whole was amazing—a beautifully nude girl, caught against a starless black background that was surely the sky of Gehenna, caught in the moment of starting a helpless fall into oblivion, the darkness reaching up to yank her, swallow her. She went to her timeless doom with terror to haunt one’s heart yet with perfect grace as well. And with eyes wide open, blazing with agonized, defiant life.
Looking at that work, which she’d done as much to create as had I, I could almost believe that my model knew what I meant to do to her. If there was any capacity left in my own heart for love, it stirred in me then, like a memory long repressed but never wholly forgotten. Such beauty—such life.
Overwhelmed, I stood in silence, wondering at the painting and its model… then seemed to wake up all at once. I was suddenly aware of the ceaseless sounds of Greenwich Village traffic beyond my velvet-curtained windows and of the thick quiet within my studio’s brick walls and of my own utter stillness. I settled into myself once more, taking conscious control of my actions again
. I jabbed my brush at the canvas’s lower corner and with four slashing strokes applied my signature: J H.
So—it was finished.
I looked at her once more, reluctant to release her from her daring-death pose once more, however well I’d captured it—I knew too well that such moments as these are always more painfully brief than the flicker of a candle or the beating of a heart.
“Rest now,” I told her.
Her body relaxed out of its stance a little at a time, shoulders falling slowly, her arched feet sinking back to earth, her rigid legs loosening again, arms dropping to her sides, back un-arcing, chest slouching ever so slightly. Watching her, I thought of someone waking from a long, deep sleep… or, more—of a cat stretching itself awake.
“It’s all done?” she asked, pulling off the hood, letting it fall to crumple on the paint-spotted cement floor.
“Yes,” I said softly.
“May I see it?”
I stepped back from the easel and motioned for her to join me there. She approached, not hurried but lithe, seeming all the more cat-like, all easy motion and instinctual, predatory grace.
She stood beside me and looked long at the creation we’d made together. She tilted her head, now to the left, now to the right, squinted, stepped back.
At last, still gazing at the painting, she said, “Do I really look like that?”
“Yes,” I said. I raised an eyebrow. “You don’t like it?”
She was silent a moment, and again I resisted the urge to act, to put the deed off no longer. Her eyes were registered in paint now, eternal… I could dim their light without remorse. She was so close—I could feel her, smell her. The fragrance of her lifeblood was so strong that I could taste it in the back of my throat. My hands ached to touch, to grasp that beautiful slender shape, now pale and white under my work lights, to hold her there and ravage her.
“I do like it,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything so… intense. It’s brilliant… but… it frightens me.” Now she folded an arm over her chest, draped another along the curve of her belly, as if suddenly remembering her nudity. “It’s like looking into my own grave—and seeing that it’s bottomless. Does that make any sense?”