But there was no point evoking other New York memories, of women, of bodies, of heartbreak: jerking myself off at three in the morning in a hotel bed would, I knew all too well, bring me no relief. It would not banish the thoughts, the images, the faces and cunts (every single one so different, so unique I could lose myself in a whole novel of genital descriptions, a journey through craters, gashes, crevices and infinite deeps of soft, ridged alluring flesh …). I needed reality, a body, eyes looking into mine as I caressed her skin, the smell of tobacco or food on her breath, the fragrance of a woman’s sweat, the beating of heart deep inside.
So, I’d placed an ad online under Casual Encounters: “Visiting English Writer Seeks Companionship and Tenderness”. Within a few hours there were three responses: Sarah just wanted to exchange mails about books but was reluctant to meet; Becky, who worked in a museum in Brooklyn, joined me for a sushi in Greenwich Village the next day but was too young and thick-waisted and just kept on talking about her college boyfriend; and Carmilla. Of course, I’d read LeFanu and the name and its vampiric allegiance appealed. There was a sense of danger about her. “I am available,” she said, and the smile on her jpg spoke of sensuality and a curious sense of destiny. “If you enjoy taking risks.”
“I’d not enjoy life if there were no risks to face. Risk brings you alive,” I replied in my e-mail.
Little did I know.
We met.
She was even better than in the photo.
Her eyes like pools of black soot.
It was night. A small bar near Bleecker Street.
Within minutes I knew I had to have her.
I was surprised by the dry coldness of her flesh when I soon undressed her – we had wasted little time on preliminaries or undue conversation; somehow an exchange of meaningful glances, signals and silences had been enough to confirm that the No Strings Attached encounter we had both been seeking was going to happen right there and then that same night. But she sheltered quickly within my embrace and my external warmth migrated across the maddeningly smooth landscape of her flesh and spread its comforting tendrils. The scarlet lipstick that illuminated her features soon stained my lips and my own skin. Her small, hard breasts with night dark nipples sharp as blunt razors were grazing my chest, and even with the hotel room’s main light off the delta of her cunt was like a deep primeval forest shining like a beacon in the heart of the darkness that surrounded us. We fucked. As soon as I was inside of her, I knew this was where I had always aspired to live, sheathed within her tightness, sliding effortlessly against the ribbed texture of her damp walls. Our mouths savagely vacuumed the contents of the other’s lungs in unholy communion. I came quickly. Exhaled. But her cunt still gripped my cock like a vise and would not allow it to go soft. She arched her back under me.
“Do me again,” she asked me.
I shifted, the tip of my penis now moving against her cervix. The coldness inside her drew me in even further. Her nails scratched my back and the pain felt good. It all felt good.
It was primitive, no doubt the way our ancestors first mated in deep forests under a pockmarked moon. It was right. It made us both feel so abominably alive.
Later, she took me inside her mouth, licking the primordial soup we had jointly created and which I had already tasted with relish after I’d gone down on her and savoured our combined and now intermingled fluids and secretions. As I expected we were a totally perfect cocktail even if at first my tongue delving into her had drawn back from the unaccustomed coolness of her insides, even after the repeated and frantic sex we had enjoyed. Her own tongue was at first as cold as ice but it only served to conserve my hardness. She licked and nibbled and allowed her teeth to teasingly draw sharp, hard lines against my aching, bulbous and purple head.
“I want to bite you,” she remarked, her voice flat, neither in jest nor in lust.
“Somehow, I don’t think I’d even mind,” I responded with a smile. I was hoping my joke would make her laugh, but instead when I looked down at her face, there between my thighs, her red lips still voraciously sucking on my cock, I noticed a single tear running down her cheek.
I chose not to comment.
Finally, we exhausted ourselves. We were both raw, aching in all the right places, coated with a patina of sweat and God knows what else and we must have fallen asleep simultaneously.
When I woke up some hours later, it must have been daylight outside, but the curtains were drawn. She was sitting on the opposite edge of the bed, with her back to me. The shape of her naked body was like a knife stabbing my heart: she was so fucking beautiful, every pale curve silhouetted against the muted light trying to enter the room was like a symphony of harmony, balance and grace. From the fall of her dark straight hair against her elegant shoulders, the shadow of her delicate breasts, the arch of her vertebrae straining gently against the skin, the faint down in the small of her back, the upper moon of her white ass; every body part reminded me of other women I had known, loved and pined for, Gina’s ass, Kathryn’s breasts, Aida’s hair … But here they all came together in perfect harmony. My heart skipped a beat and my cock hardened yet again.
She heard me move and turned her face towards me. Her shoulders swivelled and I saw that her nipples were still as pointy and hard and aroused. And she had put her dark glasses on again.
We ordered breakfast with room service. There was no way we were leaving that bed and I guessed anyone looking at us that morning would have read every visible sign of debauchery and excess all over the two of us like an open page. She only wanted fruit juice. I also had a bagel with salmon and cream cheese. I was famished from our exertions.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I queried.
Her eyes looked down at the mess that were the sheets in which we’d drowned our lust. “No.”
There was a finality in her tone.
Soon after we pushed the breakfast tray on to the hotel room floor and she lowered her head towards my lap and again took my cock inside her mouth. The coldness and the fire returned. An uncanny duo of emotions and feelings.
Later, “Have you met many other guys this way through the Internet?”
“A few … It’s the only way I can satisfy that hunger inside, you see,” she remarked matter of fact, in no way apologetic.
“I think I understand,” I said.
And so the next few days went on. In a whirlpool of madness, flesh rubbing against flesh, mouths drowning in the thin air from which we’d sucked all the oxygen in our frenzy of desire, body parts inflamed, stretched obscenely. We drew the worst out of each other, as if never before had we even skirted those dark borders of absolute need. We had no shame, no limits. I fisted her, hurt her even, but she begged me to push harder, further. She squatted over my spent body and urinated over me as I rubbed the cool ambrosia that stemmed from her innards all over my skin. Had she asked, I would have drunk from her cunt lips.
I don’t know when we crossed the frontier from which there is no going back. Possibly the day I was scheduled to fly back to Europe and blithely missed my flight.
The more we stayed together, tested the very limits of our bodies, the more we knew we could never part. We now inhabited another world.
She scratched me badly one morning. Not deliberately. It was in fact surprising that the inherent violence in our movements, our coupling, had not caused more damage before. Sprains, bruises, cuts. The blood welled over my shoulder blade. Her sad features turned somehow even paler than usual as she watched the solitary drops of blood she had summoned lazily slide down over my chest like dark pearls.
“I feel like licking you,” she said quietly.
“I wouldn’t mind,” I remarked. “Maybe the right way to celebrate our unholy union …”
“No,” she said. “I would want you even more if I did.”
She despatched me to the bathroom to clean up. But her eyes said something else.
Another morning, I cut myself shaving and again the look that spread across her fe
atures was an unsteady blend of hunger and utter despair.
She walked towards me with all the burdens of world weighing down her steps. Stopped just an inch away from me. Watching the minute flecks of blood on my chin. Her mouth opened. Her eyes clouded.
It’s right then it all finally came together.
Her unnatural pallor.
The ambiguous clues she had unwittingly provided me with.
The ever present dark glasses and nocturnal life.
The origins of her name.
Why I never saw her eating food.
I asked her.
And she told me her story.
The tale of a beautiful vampire adrift in the confused life of a world in which she could never belong truly. How she survived. How sex could sometimes act as a substitute for the blood lust that kept her alive. But was never enough.
I’d read the innumerable books; heard of the countless legends.
“And if I allowed you to taste my blood, bite me … what would happen?” I asked her.
“You know,” she said.
Yes I knew. I would die. But awaken anew as a monster. Another freak who could only survive the madness by feeding on the blood of others. As she had done for centuries.
But I loved her now. Of that I had no doubt. And I wanted us to stay together. Forever.
Now we had met, now we had come as one, neither of us could ever bear the loneliness of being apart again.
“I will,” I said.
I maxxed my credit cards and we took a flight to Venice.
Our hotel is a converted palazzo and from our windows we have a half glimpse of the Grand Canal and further upstream the stillness of the lagoon. Maybe I’m too much of a romantic, but I wanted it to happen in a place like this.
On a day like this I have asked her to kill me so I can live forever and roam the land of death with her until the end of time, both now renegades, lovers in the blood, vampires.
The Woman in his Room
Saskia Walker
Luke had a woman in his room.
I could hear the familiar sound of his voice – gravely and seductive – as it filtered out of the partly open bedroom door. I paused on the landing and listened. There was music playing in the background, something sensual and rhythmic. Then I heard the woman’s laughter, and something inside me altered.
The small part of me that was still immature balked because it was some other woman, and not me. But the part of me that was a young woman who was becoming more deeply aware of her own sexuality – the part that had been stimulated by my exposure to Luke in our home – responded altogether differently.
Desire, and the sure knowledge of my own needs, flamed inside me. The crush I had been nurturing for Luke changed. It wasn’t an ethereal emotion cloaked in sighs of longing and wistful glances anymore. It was hardcore lust. And I liked it.
I liked this feeling of being a woman who had physical needs that were more powerful than her daydreams. I could just as easily be that woman in Luke’s room. I wanted to be that woman, it was as simple as that.
I’d wanted Luke since the day he had moved in, three weeks earlier. I doubt my father would have let his business partner stay over after his wife threw him out had he known that I would develop an obsession with him. Dad thought I was far too busy at college. Too busy to notice a man like Luke? No way.
“You’ve met Luke, haven’t you, Karen?” my dad had said when Luke walked into our house that first night, a suit carrier flung casually over one shoulder, an overnight bag in the other hand. I remember being glued to the spot, thinking that I’d surely have remembered him if I’d met him before. Apparently I had, briefly. Four years earlier. I guess I’d been different then. I’d been fifteen and a tomboy. Now I was at college, and my focus was on the adult world, with all its risks and discoveries.
Luke had set down the bag he held and put his hand out to me. “You’ve grown up,” he said under his breath and looked at me with an appraising stare that made me feel hot all over.
I managed to put my hand in his. He held it tightly, drawing me closer in against him. I looked up into his wickedly suggestive eyes, and it made my pussy clench.
My mother disapproved of him. Why had his wife thrown him out? she demanded of my dad, when Luke was out of the house. Dad wouldn’t answer. I made up my own reasons, fantasies that featured me in a starring role. Maybe he left his wife for a hot younger woman, me. The truth was that Luke moving in had made something shift in my world. He was a man, a real man. Sex with him wouldn’t be like the fumbling bad sex I’d had with a guy I met at college. As soon as I saw Luke, I knew that it wouldn’t feel like that, not with him. Sex would be exciting, maybe even kinky. The idea of it fascinated me.
Luke wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he was attractive in a bad boy sort of a way. Tall and leanly muscled, his body suggested athletic vigor. His features were craggy, his hair cut close to his head. He had a maverick quality about him that appealed to the dark side of my imagination. At night I’d lie in my bed and imagine there was no wall between our rooms and that I could reach out and touch his body. I’d imagine him responding. He’d climb over me and screw me into the bed, teaching me what it was like to be fucked by a real man.
During the day when he was out I would go into his room and touch his things. Sometimes I even lay down on his bed. I would close my eyes and breath him in, getting high on the smell of his body and his expensive cologne, the experience building up a frenzy of longing inside me. What if he walked in and found me there? The idea of being caught by him made it even worse. Sometimes I’d push my hand inside my jeans and press my panties into the seam of my pussy, massaging my clit for relief.
Then my parents went away for a fortnight, leaving me in Luke’s care. Oh, the irony. If only they had known how much the idea of it excited me.
It was our first night alone, and I had been thinking about him all evening, barely aware of the blockbuster movie I’d gone to see with my friends. I wanted to get home, to see if Luke was there.
But now he had a woman in there with him, and that woman wasn’t me.
I was intensely curious, and it struck me that I was getting hot just thinking about him having sex, even if it wasn’t me he was having it with. The push-pull reaction of the unexpected situation had me on edge. Torn, I glanced at my bedroom door. He probably thought I was in there, asleep. Like a good girl. I looked back at his doorway and saw a shadow move across the room beyond.
His shadow.
I couldn’t walk away.
Luckily I hadn’t switched the landing light on. I was glad of the darkness, glad that I was standing in the gloom and that his door was open and I could see into his room. I’d had a couple of beers earlier. That probably helped, too. I stepped farther along the landing, until I could see him.
He had his shirt off. I’d seen him seminaked before, in the kitchen in the mornings. He’d have a towel round his waist, his body still damp and gleaming from the shower. I managed to muster up an early morning conversation so I could watch him pouring out coffee, stirring in three teaspoons of sugar as he chatted to me easily, watching me all the while. Watching me in a way that made my body feel womanly and alive. That’s what he’d done to me; he’d made me feel alive. And although I remember saying something in response to his early morning conversations, it wasn’t what I was thinking. What I was thinking was X-rated. I wanted him to bend me over the breakfast bar and introduce me to real sex.
The woman was sitting back on his bed, and he had his knees pressed against hers. As I watched, he bent over her and pushed her silky red dress up along her thigh, exposing her panties. Craning my neck, I could see that they were very small, a narrow strip of sheer black fabric. Luke stroked the front of them, and when he did her hips moved on the bed, rocking and lifting under his touch.
My pussy ached to be stroked that way. My pulse was racing. Would he strip? Would I see him naked, as I longed to do?
He spoke to her in
a low voice. I couldn’t hear what he said. Then he straightened up and she also moved, into an upright sitting position. The light was obscured and before I knew what was happening the door opened wide and Luke’s shape filled the frame, a dark silhouette against the light behind him.
My hand went to my throat, but there was no time to try to escape.
“Well, hello,” he said. He didn’t sound surprised. Did he know I’d been there, watching?
“I was at the cinema, just got back.” I could hear my own breathlessness. The light was behind him, but I could see that his fly was open, the belt on his jeans dangling suggestively down his thigh.
“I knew you were out here, Karen,” he said more quietly. “I heard you come in. I was waiting for you to get back.”
I stared at him in stunned silence. He knew I was here. He knew … he knew I wanted to go into his room and be with him, that was what he was insinuating. I could hear it in his tone. Did he know I’d already been in there, on his bed? I could feel my face growing hot.
He pushed the door wide open. The woman was sitting on the bed looking in my direction with a curious expression. Perhaps it mirrored my own. Even from here I could see she was pretty. She had jet black hair and a smile hovered around her ruby painted lips.
“Come in, join the party,” Luke said. The casual remark was powerfully suggestive. It went right through me, thrilling every ounce of me. He lifted his hand. He was holding a glass, and I heard ice chink as he shifted it from side to side invitingly. “You know you want to.”
I did want to. That’s the moment I addressed what was inside me, what I was becoming – a woman who could be proactive about her desires. I had a choice, but I knew what I wanted, and he’d invited me closer to it. I stepped past him and into the room, my entire skin racing.
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