The Last Best Tip

by Cassandra Duffy

  Lucy made it a few steps toward the bar when something, almost like another presence, came knocking at the door of her mind. She recognized the essence of the intruder as Sasha, and so let her in, but it wasn’t like before where simple words were being exchanged. Sasha had something to show her. She let the vampire redecorate her mind, occupying the same thoughts and space within Lucy’s head. She knew her body was still walking, still going through the motions of taking drink orders, talking to customers, and running credit cards, but it felt far more like she was in the cabin of a great bartending ship on autopilot. Within her mind, she was in a circular bedroom, draped in red silk curtains, with the circular bed from her fantasy covered in the tan plastic sheeting she’d always imagined.

  “What is this?” Lucy asked.

  “A haven,” Sasha replied, her voice emanating from everywhere at once. “Most of what we do at work can be done with a fraction of our attention. The rest can be here, with me.”

  “I won’t randomly stare off into space or set a customer on fire accidentally, will I?”

  “No more than usual,” Sasha said with a smirk.

  “I see.” Lucy stepped closer to Sasha. Their similar height put them at the exact right level to stare into each others eyes. She was trying to be shy, coquettish even, as though seduction were something she had foisted upon her. Something about the vampire screamed ‘TOP!’ and Lucy was all too happy to play the submissive role in this case even if it wasn’t her preferred position. “What are we supposed to do now?”

  Sasha took a look around the room that was Lucy’s mind and smirked with her lips parting just enough to show a glimmer of fang. “This is your mind, but I think I can piece together what direction your fantasy was taking.”

  In a flash, Lucy was on the bed, bouncing breathlessly across the rubber-coated mattress. Sasha pounced on top of her, tearing at her clothes with clawed fingers. Her cargo shorts and tank top came away as little more than tissue paper. Lucy grasped as Sasha’s cold, pale body pressed against hers. She was trying to undress her with equal verve, but without the exceptional strength. Sasha’s lips came down to meet hers in a cool, intense embrace. When Lucy’s tongue made its first exploratory dart into Sasha’s mouth, she nicked her tongue on one of the vampire’s fangs, surprised at how long and sharp they had become. She pulled back from the kiss to find her mouth tasting of her own blood. Sasha dove back onto her lips, sucking harshly at her tongue for an intense, almost painful moment.

  Driven a little wild, at least that’s what Lucy assumed from the look in her eyes, Sasha finished undressing herself and Lucy with the same unearthly strength expected of vampires. The underwear, bras, and the shorts Sasha was still wearing tore away to leave them naked, squeaking across the rubber bed as they rubbed along each other. Lucy knew what Sasha reached for and her heart thundered in anticipation to feel it. The clear, plastic bottle, filled with clear liquid dangled above her chest. Sasha squeezed a long stream of the pleasant smelling baby oil across her chest. Sasha ran the trail of the slippery coating up and down Lucy’s body, drawing little concentric circles over her stomach that made Lucy writhe. The low light of the room, which seemed to be emanating from everywhere at once, caught on the oil, giving a wet glisten to her tan skin. Sasha rubbed the oil into Lucy’s skin not with her delicate hands, but with her perfectly round, white breasts. The feel of the vampire’s cold, perky breasts rubbing across her body through the slippery oil felt like pure heaven to Lucy. She took the bottle from her and began coating Sasha’s back. Soon they were slipping against each other, easily sliding across the plastic bed, their hair wetted together from the oil. Everything of Sasha’s that Lucy grabbed was slippery and every time their bodies made contact they slid lewdly against one another. Without friction, without an anchor, sex became a fluid act.

  Lucy grasped at Sasha’s pert behind only to find it sliding out of her grasp. Sasha pulled at Lucy’s rigid nipples only to have them slip from her fingers with a delicious tingle. The frustration of not being able to gather enough momentum or friction for any real sexual relief began to mount in Lucy. Sasha, sensing the frustration, giggled and slipped away even further, writhing across the bed on her stomach. Lucy pounced onto Sasha’s back, straddling her from behind, spreading her legs wide enough to gain purchase if only by leverage. Her clit, aching for attention, glanced across the slippery curve of Sasha’s ass and the dip to her lower back. Lucy’s body cried out for more of that exact electric sensation. She grasped Sasha by the shoulders, slipping several times before finally getting her hands to hold. She writhed up and down along Sasha’s back, angling her hips, spreading her legs and squeezing them together to rub herself along the oiled vampire. The supple, softness of her ass juxtaposed with the firm musculature of her lower back alternated again and again against Lucy’s tingly clit and outer lips until she was panting in the rhythmic riding of Sasha from behind. To aid in the riding, finally catching on what Lucy was doing, Sasha rolled her hips back up against Lucy with every push down against her until she felt Lucy’s heart thundering against the back of her upper shoulders, and heard the first cries of pleasure.

  Lucy became vaguely aware that her physical body was reacting to what she was doing in her mind. She flashed, however briefly, back to the bar where she was climaxing in muted screams without any real evidence for why. The entire bar watched her with rapt attention, but she was too far gone to care about anything but humping herself across Sasha until she climaxed. Finally, she came, with a scream that echoed from the real world through her head. The tickle of her clit across Sasha’s slippery skin quickly became too intense to keep going. She tried to hold onto the oiled vampire, but the vixen beneath her wriggled and giggled until she was free.

  “It is almost quitting time,” Sasha whispered huskily.

  “I’m not done with you yet,” Lucy muttered through heavy breathing. “I owe you…”

  “After work, meet me under our streetlight and I’ll show you where I take my blood,” Sasha said.

  The demand sent a tremble through Lucy’s core and she could only nod against Sasha’s shoulder in mental, sexual exhaustion. Returning to reality from the baby oil-lubricated sexual frenzy was a jolt that bordered on uncomfortable. The assembled swingers, who had all found their way to the bar to watch Lucy climaxing for seemingly no reason, plunked down enormous tips for the show, promising her more if she did the same the following night. Lucy, not nearly as embarrassed as she thought she would be, collected the money, said she would see how she felt, and bade them all a good evening. She found the Swing Set crowd was a lot more tolerable when she was mentally fucking the vampire bartender from across the way.

  After wiping down the bar, sweeping up the floor, and counting out the tills, Lucy practically ran from work, ignoring the obvious questions hurled at her by the rest of the staff, too keen on getting to the halo of light beneath the streetlamp to see what else Sasha might have in store for her. When she found the cement divide empty, she wondered if she’d only imagined the orgasm, the fantasy, if she might have finally been hit on one too many times and promptly lost her proverbial marbles. Her doubts melted away when she saw Sasha exiting her own bar, heading in the direction of the streetlamp. She was gone one instant, only to appear behind Lucy. She spun Lucy to press her back against the lamppost. She kissed her intensely, almost a mirror experience of the fantasy with a sharper, cleaner edge of reality to it. Sasha broke the kiss first, although her cold, insistent hands still worked their way up under Lucy’s shirt.

  “You’re taller in real life,” Lucy said breathlessly.

  “I’m wearing heels and you’re wearing sandals,” Sasha explained.

  “So I didn’t imagine it!” Lucy exclaimed.

  “You didn’t.” Sasha began pulling up the front of Lucy’s shirt, she wanted to object, to pull them hem back down, but she knew overpowering the vampire would have been pointless to even try, and she couldn’t be bothered to even feign modesty now. If Sasha had as
ked, Lucy would have stripped naked without a second thought.

  “You’re eager,” Lucy giggled, helping Sasha pull up the front of her shirt.

  “I hunger for you.” A tiny, jungle-cat growl accompanied the words, sending a shiver up Lucy’s spine that reminded her she was a prey animal in Sasha’s eyes and quite literally in that situation. She didn’t care; she wanted to be bitten, wanted to feed Sasha, wanted to repay the pleasure she’d been shown.

  “Taste me,” Lucy cooed.

  Sasha’s cool lips tickled across Lucy’s ribs, up toward the bottom edge of her bra. Gently, the vampire pushed up the bottom of the support cup leaving a little gap of soft breast along the side and the stiffer musculature over Lucy’s ribcage. This was where Sasha sunk her fangs, one in each hemisphere, half on the side of her breast, half off. Lucy had expected the sharp little pain, had expected the chilly wetness of her tongue, but hadn’t, couldn’t really, have known the pleasure that would jolt through her at the sensation of being fed upon. The only comparison she could possibly make harkened back to college when she’d broken her leg ice skating. At the hospital, she’d been given morphine to dull the pain; being bitten by Sasha felt nearly identical to a shot of medical-grade morphine. It wasn’t sexual so much as it was astoundingly soothing and pleasant. She floated on the warm cloud of being fed upon, unaware of the world beyond her own tingly skin.

  Sasha’s feeding slowed, bringing Lucy back to reality to find she might not have been receiving sexual pleasure from the act, but Sasha clearly had. Her curled lips were smeared with Lucy’s blood, one hand, the one that had pushed up her bra remained under Lucy’s shirt, cupping her breast, but that wasn’t the hand Lucy was interested in. Sasha’s other hand had stuffed its way down the top of her own shorts and seemed to still be working at something although without Sasha’s explicit attention.

  “Do you need some help finishing?” Lucy asked, leaning her floating head back against the lamppost.

  Sasha glanced down to her own hand and quickly pulled it from its unilateral work on her pussy. “No, I mean, I kind of already finished a few,” Sasha said. The close proximity to feeding allowed a fairly intense blush to shoot across her cheeks. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Mind? If I’d known that was a side-effect, I would have helped.” Lucy lifted Sasha’s formerly busy hand to her mouth and licked at her fingers. The taste was unlike normal women, cleaner, softer, almost like a mouthful of spare change. She shrugged and licked a few more fingers but the fleeting flavor was already gone.

  “I had no idea you had this kinky side,” Sasha purred, gently massaging Lucy’s breast still in her other hand. “I also noticed something in your work that might be interesting.”

  “Interesting, in my work?” Lucy murmured, losing herself every so slightly in the gentle caresses along her breast.

  “In the 1920s, we had a grift called the False Philanthropist,” Sasha explained, her hand never leaving its taunting work at Lucy’s pert breast. “It involves convincing a mark that if they give a little money, it will impress a much wealthier philanthropist to give generously to them; the mark was convinced it was an inside job, that they were in the know, but the beneficiary of their generosity was actually another operative. I believe you have something similar today with a software mogul and an e-mail chain or African princes. Anyway, a Double False Philanthropist is when two marks are set opposite each other, each believing the other to be the wealthy, generous one. They each give, thinking the other is encouraging the first to give more to show generosity to be paid back later in sort of a giving prisoner’s dilemma.”

  “My work made you think of that?” Lucy began playing with Sasha’s blond locks as she listened, mentally soaking them in baby oil.

  “We could modify the grift, run it on both our respective customer bases.” Sasha pulled her hand out from beneath Lucy’s shirt fairly abruptly and began pacing a bit at the edge of the cement embankment. Lucy sighed at the withdrawn hand and strand of hair she’d been playing with.

  “To what end?”

  “To make enough money to open our own bar,” Sash said, coming to a stop. “Your customers want new and different sexual experiences, and my customers want to become vampires. If we tell yours that my customers are vampires who want to have sex and tell mine that yours are vampires recruiting converts, we can charge both sides to set up dates.”

  “Won’t they figure it out when one side only wants to have sex and neither is undead?”

  “We tell your customers to dress and act like vampires to attract my customers, but not to bite or get bitten because vampires view that as a turnoff for sex, and then tell my customers not to have sex with the vampires because vampires don’t like to fuck their food. As long as both sides think denying the other side what they really want will help them get closer to their goal, they’ll all work to accomplish nothing but setting up more dates through us.”

  The plan made sense in a nefarious undead Madame sort of way, and Lucy liked the idea of having a secret with Sasha, especially one so requiring of trust and intimacy, but she didn’t know about becoming future business partners and didn’t like the sound of so many boundaries actually existing for vampires between sex and blood-drinking.

  “None of that’s true, is it?” Lucy asked.

  Sasha rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You could go down on me right now while I suck blood out of your inner thigh if you need proof. It’s a modified 69 called a Drinky-9. If vampires didn’t fuck what they drank from, we’d all starve to death, horny as hell.”

  The mental image was jolting and entirely appealing, but Lucy didn’t want Sasha thinking she needed proof. “No, no, I believe you. Maybe later though.” This was always Lucy’s problem, getting too involved too quickly, and then hating herself for months when she found out her idealized girlfriend was actually a complete disaster. Still, she wanted Sasha, she wanted to own her own bar, and she was beginning to not care how she came by either. “Yeah, okay, let’s do it. You pick your richest, I’ll pick my richest, and we’ll reconvene tomorrow night to set things up.”

  Sasha smiled, walking toward Lucy with a luscious sway to her hips. “When I saw inside your head, I knew you were special,” she said in a dropped sultry tone. “When I tasted your blood, I knew you would be the one.” As Sasha came closer, Lucy could swear she could smell baby oil. Sasha kissed her briefly on the lips, hauntingly soft and fleeting, before she vanished into the night.

  Lucy felt weak in the knees and light-headed, which she chalked up to a loss of blood and being desperately head-over-heels for a vampire. She needed to go home, see if she had any baby oil, and put herself to sleep with a little self-satisfaction. Tomorrow would be a big, lucrative day.

  ~€~

  The following night, Sasha and Lucy met under the streetlamp, exchanged information on their potential clients, and Sasha gave Lucy a brief script to memorize. The memorization, after five years of wasted SAT preparation courses, was a breeze, and Lucy felt more prepared by her single Acting for Non-Majors class than anything else in her life to that point.

  After her orgasmic show the prior night, Lucy had everyone’s attention when they came to the bar. She wondered if she wasn’t low-balling herself to offer the fix-up fee at $2,000 per couple, per date. Sasha had been clear on the number though, and Lucy assumed there was a reason. She selected the three irritating couples from the night before: the gin with bitters and vodka tonic, the cranes, and the wrestling role-reversers. With their newly piqued curiosity about vampire kink firmly entrenched by Lucy performing the hell out of Sasha’s script, the six of them wandered over to the vampire bar while three vampire hopefuls headed to the Swing Set to complete the exchange of dates for money.

  During the downtime between the first two parts of the grift, Lucy began to feel a little tawdry about the whole thing. It wasn’t pimping precisely; as Sasha had explained it, if they had sex, they were breaking the rules, and that would be on their own heads.
Still, it was lying and deceiving for financial gain, which had to be illegal in some sense. Her mind caught on the word illegal, rolling it around, considering it from all angles, holding it up to her morality like an entirely too slutty dress she was considering buying, and then deciding she rather liked the way the word fit. Tawdry, dirty, and illegal were all appealing concepts when paired with Sasha and copious amounts of easy money. Yes, she decided, she really wanted to be as tawdry, dirty, and illegal as possible with Sasha.