Eternity and a Year

by Ranae Rose

  “I said it’s all right.” She was speaking more to the pillow than to him.

  “No, it’s not all right,” he insisted. “I hurt you. I won’t do it again—I’ll be more careful.”

  Carrie quivered beneath his touch.

  “I think,” Brendan said tentatively after a few moments, “there’s something I could do to help with the discomfort.”

  “What?” she asked, curious.

  In answer, he lowered his head, and the softness of his mouth pressed against her right buttock. No sooner had his lips touched her flesh than it began to tingle, becoming pleasantly warm. A strange sensation followed, of blood flowing beneath her skin, as if new life had been breathed into the congealed bruises. She lay still, even when two tiny pinpricks pierced her flesh. An intense, steady suction lasted for a minute, then he stopped. He repeated the process on her left buttock.

  “How does that feel?” he asked when he’d finished.

  Carrie reached back and pressed a hand against her rear end. It didn’t hurt. She sat up—something that had caused little twinges of pain throughout the day—and still no discomfort, save for slight stinging sensations where the tips of Brendan’s teeth had pricked her skin. “It’s fine,” she said with surprise.

  Brendan smiled with red-tinged lips. “I drew out the blood that had gathered beneath your skin,” he said. “The bruises are gone. There are small puncture wounds, of course, but I think those will heal more quickly than the bruises would have.” He eyed her body as he spoke, his gaze resting on her breasts, which now peeked out from beneath the disturbed hem of her garment.

  He cradled Carrie in his arm and bent to press his lips to her breast, brushing the lower swell he’d bared. His mouth moved delicately against her skin, as if it belonged to a being that had wings, not fangs. Her nipple stood pointed and waiting as he brushed the skin beside it, as if anticipating its turn to be sucked. He moved on to the other breast without touching it, and she sighed. After a few more moments of his tender teasing, she tensed as his breath streamed around her nipple and watched as he descended on it slowly with an open mouth.

  His lips were warm, a pleasant after-effect of being pressed so long against her flesh. Carrie moaned as he covered her pink, hardened skin with his mouth, drawing it in as smoothly as he had drained her bruises. He used a force that grew steadily more intense, until the tips of his fangs broke the rounded surface of her breast and began to sink into the tissue on either side of her areola. She gasped and squirmed beneath him, but doing so only tugged uncomfortably against the anchors that his fangs had become in her flesh. He tightened his cradling grasp around her body and pressed a hand forcefully against the centre of her back, forcing it to arch. Her breast bulged in his mouth, and he drew upon it hungrily. Her nipple lay on his tongue, but the liquid he drank came from the puncture wounds he’d made on either side of it.

  “Brendan,” she gasped. He sucked harder, and her blood surged through her breast into his mouth. “Brendan! You’re hurting me!” she panted.

  The suction between his mouth and her skin broke with a small sound. Her nipple sat atop her pale breast like a cherry on top of a sundae, coloured by her own blood. Brendan stared down at it, his eyes wild, his mouth red. Rivulets like scarlet ribbons began to stream down each sloping side of her breast, and he bent to wipe them away with his tongue. Carrie braced herself for the sharp prick of his fangs, but he only mouthed the original wounds, licking them dry.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said, tearing himself away with obvious difficulty and collapsing onto the bed beside her. He pounded a pillow with his fist. “I’m sorry! I couldn’t stop myself!”

  Carrie stared down at her bloodied breast. Several drops had stained the snowy fabric of her wedding night attire. “It’s okay,” she said, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  He shook his head. “I thought a year would be long enough. I thought I’d be able to control myself by now. I was wrong.”

  Carrie stroked the soft, dark waves of his hair. “That’s why you avoided me for a year?”

  He nodded. “I had to stay away from you. I knew I’d lose control and kill you if I didn’t. But it was so hard… I almost did, one night.”

  She stiffened. “What do you mean?”

  “I watched you, some nights,” he admitted. “Sometimes I’d follow you as you walked home from work. Other times, I looked in through your window. There were several times I almost lost control, but one in particular…”

  “When?” Carrie asked, her voice tense. She had felt watched some nights, though she had written it off as wishful thinking—or paranoia, depending on her mood. Once, she had even thought she’d heard him say her name. Had it actually happened?

  “This past summer,” he replied. “I’d come to watch you sleep. You were sweating, and your hair was all damp from it. I thought it was just because it had been so hot that day, but then I saw you were moving under the sheets.”

  Heat flooded her cheeks.

  “You were touching yourself,” he said softly, a hard edge of arousal in his voice. He pressed himself suddenly against her, grinding his hips and the urgent stiffness between them against her thigh.

  “Your hand was moving, and your nipples were poking up against the sheet. It slipped down over your breasts as you arched your hips when you came.” He shuddered and grasped one of her breasts tightly. “I wanted so badly to come in and rip that sheet all the way off you and fuck you,” he breathed in her ear.

  Carrie took advantage of the opportunity to bury her face in Brendan’s cool shoulder. Maybe it would return her cheeks to their normal temperature and colour. Between the arousal and shocked embarrassment his story had incited, they must have become nearly as red as his eyes.

  “You don’t know how hard it was for me to walk away,” he said, holding her tightly against his body. He slid his hands to below her waist where slickness awaited them. “Now I can finally live out my fantasy.” A note of disbelief sounded in his voice, along with excitement.

  She tensed in anticipation as he bowed his head again to explore the slippery opening into her body.

  His tongue worked its way across her most delicate parts much more softly than she would have believed it could after the way he’d handled her the night before. She lay on the pillows with her eyes shut and his dark head between her legs, his soft hair tickling the insides of her thighs. It was just as it had been a little over a year ago, when she had been his bride-to-be and he had been human.

  Two pinpricks—sharp little starbursts of pain in a dark sky of pleasure—shattered the illusion. She cried out, jerking upright.

  Brendan’s head shot upwards, and he leant back suddenly from her body. She shoved her hands between her legs in an effort to soothe the stinging he’d inflicted there.

  He snarled, pressing his hands against the sides of his skull and grasping fistfuls of hair in frustration. “I’m sorry, Carrie! I didn’t mean to! I could just feel and smell so much blood flowing beneath your skin…”

  She placed a hand on his shaking shoulder. “It’s all right,” she said, “I’m all right. Shhh.”

  “No!” he snapped. “It’s not all right, Carrie! This isn’t right! I shouldn’t have come!”

  “What are you saying?” Carrie asked. “I’ve been thinking you were dead for the past year! I’ve been mourning for a year! Or at least trying to. I could never really get it right, because a part of me hoped you were out there, alive somewhere. Do you have any idea what that’s been like for me? Of course you should have come.”

  Brendan shook his head. “I can’t stand what I’ve become, Carrie. I hate myself.” Carrie took one of his large hands in hers and squeezed, but he continued. “You don’t realise what it’s like—what I’m like—yet. I’d do anything for a taste of blood—even hurt you, apparently.”

  His head was bowed, and he was gripping her hand so hard her bones ground against one another. She bit her lip and refused to let him know he was hurting her
again.

  She laid her other palm gently on his shoulder. “You’ll get better at controlling yourself,” she said, drifting her fingers down over his chest and hard stomach to the fly of his battered jeans. “I know you will. We’ve just been apart for so long, but it’ll get better.”

  “No,” he said as she unbuttoned his fly and slid down the zipper.

  Carrie ignored his protest and plunged her hand below the waistband, spreading her fingers so his erection, hard and smooth, filled her palm. He groaned. Carrie lowered herself and knelt before him, the rumpled bed sheets brushing against her nipples, which protruded from beneath her disturbed garment. Brendan groaned again as her mouth closed around his cock, and she pushed until it pressed against the back of her throat. He buried his hands in her nutmeg locks and balled them into fists, pulling tightly. He guided her as she slid away and forward again, his hair tickling her lips when she had gone as far as she could.

  She pulled free suddenly, releasing Brendan and eliciting a moan of regret from him. “What are those?” she asked, staring at his groin. Buried among the dark, curly hairs were two shining patches of deathly-white skin, oblong scars that rose a quarter of an inch above the rest of his flesh.

  He frowned and looked down. “Those—those are my conversion scars…from when I became a vampire.”

  Carrie couldn’t have hurt worse if he’d hit her across the face. In fact, that was very much how she felt. The scars rested neatly on either side of his penis, about a quarter of an inch above its base. Whoever had made them would have had to have his cock in their mouth to do it. “And how the hell,” Carrie said, as evenly as she could manage, “did you become a vampire, anyway?”

  Brendan looked up to meet her gaze. There were tears brimming in his red eyes. “After we fought,” he said, “I stormed out into the streets. I didn’t know where I was going, I was just so mad. I wandered around fuming for about half an hour. Then…she came up to me.”

  Carrie glared at him, and he reluctantly continued.

  “She bit me. She turned me into a vampire.”

  “Oh, I see,” Carrie said scathingly. “That’s a very clear explanation. Only one teeny oversight—you seem to have left out the part where you shoved your cock into her mouth.”

  Brendan’s shoulders wilted, and his erection was doing the same.

  “I’m sorry!” he said. “I’m so, so sorry! I was so mad, and you told me to leave—I know it’s no excuse—but I was just so angry, and…and I’ve never regretted anything more!”

  She glared fiercely at him, hoping if she narrowed her eyes enough it would hide the fact that hot tears were building up behind them. “You know,” she said, “I think you got what you deserved. That just proves that even when you were human, you were a monster, driven by whatever stupid, destructive impulse popped into your head.”

  Brendan flinched as if he had been struck.

  “And a liar, on top of it,” she added. “You left me to think you were dead for a year, then you came back and you lied to me.”

  “I—I didn’t lie!” he protested.

  Carrie drew back her hand and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. “You told me you hadn’t slept with anyone since you left!” she cried. “You told me that yesterday!”

  “It’s true! I didn’t sleep with her, or anyone else, I just—”

  “Get out, Brendan!” Carrie shouted, fighting to contain her tears. “Get out!”

  Brendan rose from the bed and drifted towards the door. He hadn’t even reached it by the time Carrie regretted her words. By the time it shut behind him, she was sobbing. There was a hollow in the mattress where he had sat. She settled into it and buried her face in a pillow.

  * * * *

  The next day at work was agony for Carrie. She tended shop automatically while her mind whirled with thoughts of Brendan. Where was he? What had she done? Would he come back? Could she find her way to the abandoned building to which he’d taken her that first night? The questions were dizzying. She very nearly lost her temper with a customer who came in complaining with a return. At lunchtime, her boss, Anne, confronted her.

  “Is something wrong, Carrie?” Anne asked her in the privacy of the store room. “You don’t seem like yourself today.”

  Carrie bit her lip and held back tears. “It’s…” She struggled with what to say. If she tried to play off Anne’s observations and pretend her morning performance had been normal behaviour, she might lose her job. “It’s Brendan,” she replied truthfully. No need to mention he had returned—as a vampire. Carrie was still having trouble stomaching that particular detail herself.

  Anne nodded. “It was this time last year when he went missing, wasn’t it?”

  Carrie nodded back. She had been working at the boutique for nearly three years. Anne knew all about the ordeal. She had been one of the first people Carrie had told about it, and one of the first to have her wedding invitation rescinded.

  “Listen,” Anne said, “why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”

  Carrie shook her head. “That’s all right. You don’t have to do that, I—”

  “Really, Carrie. Go home. I’ll be fine without you for the rest of the day.”

  Carrie nodded gratefully. “All right,” she said, feeling slightly guilty but mostly relieved as she plucked her jacket from where it hung on the hook against the wall.

  She walked home slowly, taking a longer route than necessary. She was reluctant to return to her empty apartment, where the bed sheets lay unmade, twisted and generally distressed after a night of sobbing, tossing and turning. The city streets were more appealing. Here, she didn’t have to be alone with her feelings of betrayal and regret. People surged around her, oblivious to her pain, but there nonetheless.

  Carrie’s thoughts turned to the run-down building where Brendan had taken her. Could she find it again in daylight? And if she could, would he be there? Was that where he’d been staying throughout the past year, in that dusty, dilapidated old structure? It was worth a try, she decided. His confession of betrayal had left her with an aching hole in her heart, but being separated from him only made it worse. She started in what she thought was the general direction of the building.

  Within an hour, she saw its flat-roofed brick top looming in the distance. She hurried towards it, as if it were a treasure chest rather than a condemned warehouse. Her heart pounded against her ribs, more from anticipation than exertion. She turned a corner and realised footsteps were echoing behind her.

  She stopped in her tracks. All was silent, save for the humming motors and screeching brakes on some nearby street. The back of her neck prickled, and her intuition told her she was being followed. She turned slowly to see who was there.

  The figure was a man, Carrie could tell that much, but his face was mostly obscured by the hood of his jacket. He stood a couple of hundred feet behind her, watching. His hands were buried deep in his pockets. A chill ran down her spine. She turned and took a deliberate step forward. Silence. She took another step. More silence. She began to walk. He followed, his footsteps loud to her straining ears. She cursed under her breath. What had she been thinking, coming to a place like this on her own? She could only hope all he wanted was her purse and its meagre contents.

  She stopped when she reached the abandoned building where Brendan had taken her. She was sure it was the right one—a hole gaped in the wall of the third floor, just where it could have shed moonlight on her and Brendan’s joining. She glanced to her right. Her stalker had entered the alley and was quickly moving towards her. Should she say something? Scream? Her heart stuck in her throat.

  The man seized her arm and she span, pulling against his grasp. He held on and jerked her to him, letting a string of Spanish expletives fly in a burst of foul breath. Carrie struggled, and he upbraided her. Though she didn’t understand Spanish, the threat in his words transcended the language barrier. Finally, she managed to scream. The thug hit her hard across the face, and silver s
tars blossomed before her eyes. She reeled, supported only by the man’s rough grip.

  Suddenly, her attacker whirled, shouting a confused-sounding exclamation of “Que demonios!” as he released her. Carrie fell, scraping her palms on the ground, as the heavy sound of vicious blows and half-uttered curses filled the air. She looked up to see her attacker bent double and receiving a nose-crunching kick to the face. Her saviour was a blur of pale skin and dark hair that gleamed faintly copper in the sunlight.

  “Brendan!” Carrie’s heart leapt as she recognised him.

  Brendan turned to face her over his victim’s crumpled body. His mouth hung open, as though he were breathing hard, and his long teeth gleamed in the sunlight. He squinted, reducing his eyes to narrow slits that hid the red of his irises. He dropped suddenly to stoop over the body of Carrie’s attacker, who was gasping for air. In less time than it took her to blink, he’d jerked back the man’s hood and sunk his fangs into his neck.

  Carrie pressed herself against the alley wall and watched in horror as the colour drained from the man’s face, turning him as pale as Brendan. “No!” she cried, darting forward, trembling. “Brendan, stop!” She seized one of Brendan’s shoulders and pulled with all her might, doubting she was capable of stopping him, but sure, nevertheless, she couldn’t just watch him kill someone.

  She was shaking by the time Brendan rose, finally giving in to her pleading and pulling. With crimson blood streaming from the corners of his pale mouth and her attacker lying unconscious at his feet, she no longer found it difficult to admit he was a vampire. Her heart beat faster in trepidation as he stepped towards her, and an alien sense of deep, primal fear gripped her.

  He staggered past her, seemingly oblivious to her presence. His eyes were completely closed. He stumbled blindly down the alleyway, eventually collapsing in the dirt and gasping as he drew his body up and wrapped his arms around his knees. A trickle of blood ran out of his mouth and was smeared across his face as he jerked.

  “Brendan!” Carrie exclaimed, gathering all her courage and approaching him. “Brendan, what’s wrong?”