Dark Passions

by Jeff Gelb

  I sure liked him. I was even contemplating the other “L” word.

  Then one night I passed out while blowing him.

  I revived right away, but he was pulling out and backing up and tucking it away into his underwear. Then pants. And then putting on his silky black shirt and leather jacket.

  “You’re going out?” My voice sounded sluggish and confused. Hell, I was confused. Men don’t leave blow-job queens. Did they?

  “I’m going out.”

  “Don’t go.”

  “I have to.” He jingled his keys, one of which fit into my apartment’s lock. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’ll explain when I get back.”

  I cried for a while. Then I shut up. I’m a self-sufficient girl, I thought. I’d get by. When I went into the bathroom, the mirror reflected a blotchy face and swollen eyes. It also showed my newfound planes and angles. My lips looked like lush, ripe fruit in the middle of all that lovely bone structure.

  I’ll be a pretty corpse, I thought as I gobbled a bottle of aspirin.

  Three days, one deliberately clumsy stomach-pumping, and a couple of exasperated psychiatric professionals later, Adrien sat me down. “We need to talk.”

  I’d just finished a huge dinner, trying to make up for the nasty hospital food I’d been subjected to.

  “About your other girlfriends?”

  “Yes.”

  I did a double take. He’d just admitted it. How could he just admit it? Didn’t he care I was suicidal? Maybe he wanted me to die.

  I guess I was feeling a little bit of shock, because he shook me slightly. “Valeria. Are you okay?”

  I started laughing. “Peachy. Now give me my key and get out.”

  He looked at me with admiration. I’m sure that was it. He heaved a big sigh and held up both palms: wait. Then he did a strange thing. He started unzipping his fly.

  “Whoa, buddy, I don’t do good-bye gobbles.”

  “I’m not saying good-bye.”

  “I’m the one who’s saying good-bye!”

  “No, you’re not. You want me. They always want me. Hundreds of years, and nothing changes but the names. I think it’s something in the semen. It’s truly a shame they get so skinny, so quickly. Even the overweight ones usually die.”

  “You aren’t making sense.” I felt cold.

  “I’m talking about being a vampire. The most miserable of leeches.”

  He didn’t seem all that miserable to me. I tried not to look at what he pulled out of his pants. “The cross ... the blood. You’re a vampire like I’m a werewolf. Exactly why do you feel the need to fuck with me?”

  He sighed. “You’re not going to believe me unless I show you. Suck my dick.”

  “Fuck yourself.”

  He grinned coldly at me, adult to child. In that moment he seemed every bit a vampire. Or some kind of predator, anyway. I wished it didn’t add so much to his appeal. “Okay, Valeria. Watch and learn.” His cock, which had always been strange looking, suddenly got a whole lot stranger. It writhed, like a grayish cobra dancing, and folded over on itself and then rose stiff and straight toward me, straining ... and then the head, with its G-spot-rubbing, wide-load helmet, shifted, and a new head pushed through it like a baby crowning and extended, tubelike.

  I froze.

  It extended. And extended. I shut my mouth with a snap when it nudged against my lips. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from its ruby red tip. It was a small, pursed mouth. The mouth puckered up. Kissed.

  I realized I was shaking my head in denial when his hands cupped my jaw. His cock was back to Adriennormal now. Even in the middle of my hysteria, I remember looking at the way it lay there so thick against his leg, ready to spring to action and pleasure me the way only Adrien could.

  I felt my nonexistent gag reflex trying to come back to life. I felt like I might blow chunks all over that alien cock. I’d had that thing in my mouth.

  My retching sounds had the most galvanizing effect on him. He sprang forward, slapping me across the face. “No! Don’t waste it!”

  “Waste it.” I rubbed my cheek. He was going to pay for that. “Explain.”

  “Vomit contains enzymes and acids that I need. Puke’s the price I have to pay for immortality.” Adrien laughed, bitter. “Anything else besides the very specific, balanced brew found within a stomach would give me great discomfort and possibly kill me. Real vampires—not the romanticized Draculas—are truly the most miserable of leeches.”

  “Why ... puke?”

  He shrugged. “Something to do with needing to destroy old tissue so the new can be regenerated. That’s as much as I can determine without subjecting myself to unpleasant scientific experiments for the rest of my long, long life. Which brings me to you.”

  My thoughts were whirling madly, all the recent memories rearranging themselves. It made sense. Veteran of so many stomach-pumpings, I couldn’t fail to recognize the sensation of a long tube vacuuming out the contents of my stomach, now that I thought about it.

  His long tube and my weight problem. Former weight problem.

  Of course.

  My mind finally caught up to the present. “What about me?”

  “I’ve chosen you for my companion. I can’t make you immortal, but I can partake of your stomach contents only sometimes. Just enough to keep you beautiful. Besides, you do have a delightful way with your mouth.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “Then I’ll leave you to get back to your fat and happy life.”

  I flinched. He could be brutal, my vampire. I couldn’t believe I was considering it, but the setup had undeniable benefits. Then I remembered.

  “What about the other girls?”

  He stroked my forearm soothingly, misunderstanding. “They won’t be missed, don’t worry. With so many women dropping dead from anorexia in this city, a few more each year won’t be noticed.”

  I shuddered, even as my skin pebbled under his soft caress.

  “I have to feed, or I’ll die. But eating isn’t cheating. I would be true to you in my heart.” His cock stirred. I looked at it warily, and Adrien laughed. “I can control it, Valeria. I look forward to making you scream with pleasure, night after night.”

  God, I was tempted. He was a beautiful, alluring, evil demon. My very own vampire.

  I tried to blank out the thought of all his other victims, those girls not as favored as myself. Their deaths. I tried hard, imagining myself with the best lover in the world, one who was a built-in Weight Watcher. But did he care for me personally, or was I just a meal ticket?

  When he started moving against me, my body itched for his.

  “I can tell you want me, Valeria. I love you.”

  Love? All my internal alarms went off. I was a self-sufficient girl, with a too-caring heart. It was a curse, that heart.

  I let his tongue and hands and rhythms seduce me even as I hid my tears. His cock was a miracle, and Adrien showed it had even more miracles to perform inside me, now that his secret was shared. I knew that the things he made me feel, as he worked between my legs, would make any lover after him pale spectacularly.

  After a while, I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

  When I came out, I grinned and licked my lips clean of Drano. His cock was hard and ready.

  Before I took him into my throat, I announced, “Dinner is served.”

  Magna Mater

  Cody Goodfellow

  It wasn’t in the nature of the place for anyone who worked at the Tender Trap Adult Books & Video to notice what went on in the #9 coin-op video booth. Real human contact was not what anyone came for, and of the perverts who frequented the porn shop, those who lurked and groped themselves in the booths were the most furtive, like ghosts sure to vanish under a good, strong stare. Violet was a quick study, having learned early in life the connection between vigilance and not getting hit, but she had her own problems, and it was only when those began to fade into the background that she noticed that many patrons who used the #9 booth
simply never came out.

  The Tender Trap was the last growth industry on J Street, the embattled border where urban renewal had given up the ghost and the stately Gaslamp District degenerated into seedy downtown.

  When Violet walked in a month ago, drawn by the Help Wanted sign, one of her eyes was still too swollen to see out of. She looked like what she was, but while waiting to speak to the manager, she caught a shoplifter stuffing EZ-Whip cartridges in his pants and was hired on the spot.

  Violet came in on the bus from Riverside. Wade would be gone a week, maybe a month, and when he returned, tearful and pleading if he remembered what he’d done at all, she had planned to be set up in a new town with her own home, job, and life. She had run away before and always came back to the trailer park within a day or two, so this start had gone better than most.

  She found no room at the Salvation Army Women’s Shelter, which was packed with women worse off than her and crawling with children. Wandering the streets, weighing the relative merits of going back to wait for Wade or sleep on the street, she found the Tender Trap. The rest—a room above the store to sleep in and a few people to talk to and money to save for something better—had come with it, and she began to feel safe.

  Then she began to notice about #9.

  The booths were a holdover from the pre-home-video era, when porno theaters and hookers thrived on the sailor traffic. While all kinds came into the store, only a few virtually invisible types used the booths. Those who had no home in which to watch porn often begged outside all day and night and used the booths as a kind of coffee break. Illegal aliens, filthy and shaking from exhaustion, often had to be chased out because they tried to catch a nap inside. Then there were the businessmen, the upright, solid-citizen types whose wives would never tolerate such filth in their homes.

  They were as broad a cross-section of masculine humanity as could be found in the city, but once they came in the door, they adopted uniform customs, darting past her roost at the elevated cash register to duck into the back of the store, stopping only to get quarters from the change machine. They stayed inside for a few minutes or an hour, then darted out just as quickly, while Lupe, a hunchbacked Latina crone who sat on a stool at the end of the row of booths, cleaned up the dregs of their ardor with paper towels and 409.

  Violet had no inclination to pry into the lives of the customers or the store, but just keeping her eyes open, she soon noticed how, every so often, one would fly into the booth alley and never come out. The Tender Trap had no back door, but Violet didn’t ask questions. She watched a little closer when she saw a customer go in. She came out onto the floor to straighten the bargain VHS carousel closest to the batwing saloon doors that blocked her view, glancing over them at the retreating masturbator. It took several of these spying expeditions to discover that only #9 held on to its suitors.

  After an hour or so of whatever went on inside, Lupe went to the booth and opened it with a skeleton key, sprayed down the interior, and shuffled back out, always carrying a bundle wrapped in towels in the crook of her arm, which she brought back to the closet that was her workspace and where, for all Violet knew, she slept. Lupe, the manager told her, was a Mayan Indian and didn’t speak a word of English or Spanish. Whatever language she did speak, Violet never once heard her use it, no matter how many times she tried to draw the cleaning woman out.

  She asked the other clerks about it but got nowhere. Merle, the defrocked carnival-ride operator who ran the counter through the dinner hours, eyed her warily and snapped, “What’re you, a cop?” Crayonne, the ugliest, gayest, blackest man Violet had ever seen, told her there were peepholes, if she wanted to watch them jerk off, then laughed at her the rest of the night. Judith, the early morning cashier, sighed in obvious relief. “Do you see them right now too?” she asked, sweeping her shaking bird-claw hands and jangling silver jewelry around to accuse the whole empty store. “I do ...”

  Violet did not ask the manager, Zoe, about #9. Zoe hired her and set her up with the studio apartment upstairs, asked no questions but seemed to understand everything. When she thought of bringing it up, Violet began to doubt that there was anything amiss but her own fucked-up nerves misfiring. Besides, every time she got deeper than surface chatter with Zoe, she was pressed against the ceiling of her own ignorance. After a few days of the job, Zoe had asked her how she was doing.

  Violet stuttered, “Doesn’t any of this stuff, you know, ever make you feel, you know, weird?”

  “How do you mean, honey?”

  “You know, being a woman,” she said, feeling a flush of shame fill her face. She wasn’t offended by the wares, but she failed to see what the pixilated video couplings and sterile rubber prosthetic plumbing they sold had to do with sex. Not that what passed for sex in her house would come any closer to a romantic ideal. “Doesn’t it, you know, objectify women?”

  “Oh gods, Vi, where’d you ever get such a big, dumb word?” Squat, doughy Zoe was about as sensuous as a garden gnome and acted like they were selling plumbing fixtures. “Men objectify women, Vi. They look at us and see machines to make them come, to fill their bellies, and we see them as machines to make us feel special and safe. This stuff—well, we should all breathe a sigh of relief that some men whack off to it and leave real women alone.”

  “I don’t mean, well ... You know, Wade, he used to—” And she shut up when she found she could not articulate her feelings or thoughts without Wade stories.

  “Men come in here for all kinds of reasons, Vi. We don’t judge. Nobody is beyond forgiveness.”

  So she let it lie. But night after night, she caught glimpses out of the corner of her eye, when she rang up a gross of nitrous chargers for a gay biker couple, or rousted drunken frat boys who tried to climb into the Swedish Swing, or when Cowboy Chuck Berry or one of the other street people came in to beg bus change or read her a poem. She would see a man dart in the front and vanish through the saloon doors, or she would only see them swinging.

  And then one day, she caught one.

  Above the sounds of sweat-slick hands pawing rubber and neoprene and leather, the whisper of licked lips and spastically blinking eyes, the idiot music of the door sensor jerked her out of her trance. He was already halfway across the floor to the booths, and Violet slid off her stool and banged her knees on the counter. She followed the phantom into the dank corridor and peered around the corner and, yes, the hunched figure stood before the door of #9 with a roll of quarters in one shaking fist.

  The full weight of the stupidity of her obsession sat upon her chest and struck her dumb. The plans she’d hatched as she lay in bed in the morning, wishing she’d had the brains to bring the TV from the trailer, scorched and fell away like film stuck in the gate of a projector.

  She reached out and touched his grubby flannel shirt, but the man jerked away as if her aura burned him. Only when he turned and faced her did she realize that she’d feared, hoped, he was someone else. “Excuse me, mister, you can’t use that one—”

  He was Hispanic, old drunk’s face like piss-cured leather, eyes bloody, melting marbles. He blinked at her as if she’d awakened a sleepwalker. His fist balled, his arm cocked and stopped inches short of smashing her face in. She looked long and hard at it, seeing just who she’d thought he was. Big as a billboard, the wall of knuckles before her eyes was scarred and swollen, bruise-blue and black, and red, red, red with blood and lipstick.

  If she was startled by the man’s reaction, he was thunderstruck. He looked at his poised fist as if it were only the last and least of his countless betrayers, then let it sag against his drooping gut. She thought he was hyperventilating, but as he grasped himself, she heard the razored breaths as prayers, though in what language, or to whom, she couldn’t tell. “I know what I want, puta,” he mumbled and ducked through the door into #9. The door music sounded again, and she retreated to her post.

  He never came out.

  Crayonne sat at the counter, shaking his head at her. Zoe called her
into the office. “You’d think you would know to steer clear of that type.”

  “What type?”

  “You know.”

  “How do you think you know—”

  Zoe pointed to the signs on the mirrored ceiling, where only a shifty customer would look, that said smile! you are on camera!

  “I–I,” she stuttered, making the truth feel like a lie, “I thought he was someone else.”

  “And if it was him, what would you have done?” Zoe’s round face was all laugh lines. She had rhino-hide skin: trouble never penetrated. But she must know what happens back there, in that booth—

  “I don’t ... You don’t even know me!”

  “So tell me what makes you different. Why did you run away, Vi?”

  She defended herself and attacked Zoe until her manager grumbled “Fuck it” and dismissed her.

  Maybe Violet had to be yelled at or blown off to open up, but she sat down and started talking about Wade and kept talking until Zoe told her again to get out. Shaky, Violet rose and went to the door, stopped. “What happens in there?”

  “You’re not ready to ask that yet. Ask yourself this first. If he came back tonight, could you forgive him?”

  Violet bought a little TV, some groceries, and a discreet, minimalist vibrator with her first paycheck. But when she tried to fall asleep watching her shows in the morning, Zoe’s words banged against each other in her head.

  She kept watching. In the week since their talk, four men had gone into #9. Neither of them brought it up. Once, thinking she’d caught Lupe in the act of cleaning up #9, she snuck back. She was not at her perch at the center of the labyrinth, and none of the booths were occupied.

  The other booths bore obscene placards on their doors, advertising the nastiness within—BLACK GLADIATOR STUDS IV, DIAPER PAIL HIJINX, SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMA, and so on.