You Already Know

by Charlotte Stein

  I actually let out a sound, as his cock jams firmly against that little bundle of nerves inside me. And then again, as he seems to become sensible of what he’s done, and lets his hips ease back down to the mattress.

  Of course when he does so, his cock eases back down with it. Though I’m beyond admitting that this isn’t incredible, now. I’m beyond anything, and that includes my own control it seems. My own control says, Be calm, don’t fuck him like this, don’t slap him harder, while my body squirms against that good, good feeling, and my hand lashes out to crack across his face.

  ‘You like that, huh?’ I ask, but it’s almost like I’m saying it to myself. And the second I realise this, I answer in my own head: Yes. Yes, I like your cock in me. I like seeing my handprint on your beautiful face, and I like knowing what it does to you.

  It makes him buck – that’s what it does. It makes him stop holding his hands above his head and start gripping my hips, so that he can grind me down harder every time my slaps connect.

  And God, they’re really connecting now. They’re directly related to the pleasure building in me, it seems, and the closer I get to that unbearable edge, the more viciously I do it – though he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s getting close too, I think – closer than he’d probably like to be – and there’s something about this thought that gets me going, too.

  Just the idea of him, holding off the bliss that’s coming. Just the idea that he’s struggling and straining with it, cock swelling inside me anyway, unbidden. All of the breath in his body caught somewhere inside his chest – the way it was for me, only moments ago.

  Then finally his words, God, his words.

  ‘Ohhh fuck I’m close – please. Please, let me do it. Please.’

  But I can’t. I can’t – not yet. I’m too cruel, I’m too full of feeling, I’m too not myself. I want to come first and, Lord, I know I’m going to. I can’t even hold it off now, never mind denying it, and, when it finally breaks, I don’t care about telling him so.

  ‘I’m coming, oh, my God, I’m coming,’ I say, because it’s true. But also because of the look it produces, all over his face. He seems almost in awe, for a second – as though he’s never seen a woman actually do it before, in the middle of weird encounters like this – and not even that thought can put me off.

  The pleasure coils tight in my belly and then unravels all at once, forcing me to tighten hard around his still working cock. Making me shiver and moan in the exact way he’s done for me all the way through this.

  I understand now, I think. I get it. And if he still seems shocked that I do, well, that’s OK. I can probably pretend that I didn’t, once this is all over – and it is nearly all over. He’s asking me over and over: ‘Can I? Can I?’ And though there’s some remnant of that cruelty in me, I don’t want to say no any more.

  ‘Do it,’ I tell him, and then I watch with my own kind of awe as he does. His back arches, his mouth opens. Near soundless cries of pleasure come out of him as his cock surges inside me.

  It’s almost a disappointment when it’s over.

  Almost.

  Because you know – this isn’t my real life. This is just something I had to do, to pay a mortgage I’m too behind on. To save myself from worse, like maybe sleeping on the streets. It’s not really something I enjoy, once it’s done and I’m picking up my underwear and telling him yeah, sure, I’ll be available again.

  I won’t be available again. I won’t be – not even after I’ve looked into his hopeful face and seen him smile for me, almost shyly. Because the truth is I have my thousand pounds now, and I never have to do this again. I never have to climb those stairs, and feel all of these strange, mixed feelings, and look into this man’s eyes while that surge of power goes through me.

  I mean, after all, I do find all of this awful and abhorrent. I do, I really do.

  Don’t I?

  Heavenly Shades

  Charlotte Stein

  I can hear the prickle of a needle on vinyl from all the way up here, but this time I don’t flinch. My heart doesn’t try to scramble out of my chest. Instead, I just let myself float here, in the tepid water now filling my bathtub. I drift, like an island of perfectly slick, pale flesh.

  While downstairs the music cycles up. First the violins, looping along one after the other. Then that crushed velvet voice, pouring out of the record player and all the way up to me. Heavenly shades of night are falling, the singer croons, as I let my hand flow back and forth in the water. It’s twilight time, the singer croons, and then I know for certain.

  He is here.

  It’s like his calling card, I suppose. The cue, for him to enter stage right. That shushering beat starts, and after it comes his footsteps on the stairs, one after the other. Heavy and slumberous, somehow, even though he is neither.

  He’s as quick as a snake and barely past six foot, body like a whip. Face like one, too. If I hadn’t seen underneath his clothes I’d think he was a pointed finger, muscle-less and mean. But I know different, now. I didn’t want to, but I do anyway.

  And I suppose that’s the way of things, with him.

  I don’t want to get out of the bathtub, and put on the nightgown he gave me, for such special occasions. I don’t want to wait for him in my bedroom, as pretty and clean as a picture.

  But I do it anyway. In fact, I do more than that. I dry my hair, and brush it out into one long spill down my back. And then finally I look in the mirror, as I always do, and try to think what makes my face the one. What made him look at me and think:

  It’s her I’ll do this to. Not sunny Kelli Fisher, from number thirty-six. Not Mrs Levine, who’s still lovely and lissom and not half as plain as me. My face is like a blank slate, empty of anything that could move a man to madness. My eyes are like stones, my mouth is a barely there imprint.

  And yet he comes to me, all the same. He’s there, when I pad across the hall and enter my entirely alien bedroom. It used to be a place of comfort, in here; everything in it used to be familiar to me. But now it looks like the funhouse version of that said same space, shadows striping things at odd angles. Pictures hung where they shouldn’t be. The full moon barely penetrating into the room, even though I know that shouldn’t be the case. I know its light should be more than this weak little blurred thing, that creeps over my carpet and scarcely touches my toes.

  It’s like he drives it away, somehow.

  It’s like he drives my will away, too.

  ‘Come and dance with me, my little bird, my little one in particular,’ he says, and I think of those words over and over, as I force my feet over the carpet to him. My one in particular, he always says, because I’m special, I’m so special.

  So why is it that I sob against his shoulder, the minute he takes me in his arms?

  Because I do. I make a sound like something dying and let myself sag into him, that strange wired strength in him holding me up, even as I try to sink down to the floor. I suspect he could hold me up if I was as heavy as twenty bags of concrete. I suspect he could lead me around like this, boneless and doll-like, if I fought with all of my might.

  I fought the first time, after all. All the way back then, when I had only suspected. He’d come over to borrow a cup of sugar, and I’d thought to myself, half-giddily: if he really is some kind of creature of the night, he won’t be able to come into the house—so don’t invite him in.

  And I hadn’t. Instead, I’d just tentatively passed the cup over the high holy threshold, waiting for him to reach forward and take it. And then when he had, I’d done the worst possible thing I could have. The thing that caused all of this, the thing that made it be so.

  I’d pulled the cup back at the last second, and watched him press his fingers to the invisible barrier blocking his way—as though to a pane of glass.

  It was too late for me then, I understand that, now. He knew that I knew, from that moment on, and from that moment on my only job was to evade him—and I did. I raced the daylight home every
day after it happened, but there’s always more twilight. There’s always more night waiting to descend on me at just the wrong moment, and it had descended even faster after he put that hole in my gas line.

  Because he’s clever, you see. He’s not like the ones you see in movies, who creek out of their coffins and hypnotise you in nightclubs. He has to use his wiles, rather than some set of hoary old mystical clichés. He has to rely on a serial killer’s tricks, to snare his prey.

  And he snared me well. I walked all the way home from the middle of nowhere, knowing what he’d done. Knowing, but unable to do anything about it. The darkness had fallen so fast, and I simply wasn’t capable of running the five miles home.

  Even if I had, I wouldn’t have made it in time. I didn’t make it in time.

  And so here we are, dancing to the music I hear no matter where I am, or what I’m doing. In the supermarket, trembling and near bloodless from the night before. Always tired now, always so weak, my mind drifting to the sound of that slowly dripping song, and his face. His eyes, like burnt syrup.

  ‘Please,’ I say. ‘Please.’

  But I’m praying to the wrong God. This one has hair like a raven’s wing and hands as cold as stones at the bottom of an icy river, and when I beg him to give me my life back he just murmurs shhhh, shhhh, in a way that should be soothing.

  And it almost is. Everything he does is almost soothing, almost tender—like a lover trying to coax me into the most sensuous bout of lovemaking. One hand pressed to my lower back, rubbing and rubbing there. The other in my hair, stroking so softly it makes me sob again.

  It’s so close to something sweet, I think. So close I could almost believe in it, if it were not for the true purpose behind the push of his fingers through the newly cleaned strands.

  He doesn’t like it to get in his way, when he gets a mouthful of me.

  ‘Oh my little one,’ he says, against the side of his face. But even without looking I know the teeth are there. I can almost feel the steely press of them as he comes close to kissing me, and as his breath ghosts cool and strange, all over my skin.

  ‘Don’t,’ I say again, but the word is small and fluttering and he is powerful, so powerful. I can feel the twist of those muscles, beneath the hand I’m pushing against his shoulder—though it’s more than that. He’s like a steel cage, in a way no man should ever be. He locks me in tight, and though he coos and murmurs and tries to calm me down, in the end he always has to force it.

  He holds me fast, that hand in my hair now like a vice. And though I know what’s coming, I still squeeze my eyes tight shut for it. I brace myself, and then there’s just his icy mouth against my throat. That eagerness in him, suddenly—despite the fact that he’s never eager for anything.

  He’s always slow, so slow and deliberate. After he’d caught me that first time, he’d stalked me like some crouching, clever beast that doesn’t actually exist. A raptor, I always think, but there’s nothing lizard-like about him—apart from the cold. And when you look at him, that cold isn’t there at all.

  He looks heated, primal somehow. His hips had practically rolled, as he’d backed me into a corner. And the second I tried to evade him by doing something stupid—like jumping into the swimming pool he never uses, of course he never uses it—he’d just walked right into the water as though it wasn’t even a step down.

  Where are you going, Francesca, he’d said, like I was so silly, to want to get away.

  And I suppose he had a point. There’s no getting away, from him. I just have to hang there helpless in his arms, as his lips part and that razor sharpness grazes my skin. Every inch of me waiting for the worst feeling—the one the movies never suggest.

  It’s like a crunch. His teeth slide into me and then there’s the strangest sensation afterwards … like he’s breaking my bones, somehow, even though I know he isn’t. There’s never more than two puncture marks on my skin, afterwards, and no side-effects apart from the lethargy.

  But that first shot of pain, so intense it’s almost like pleasure …

  It’s unbearable. It’s unstoppable. It’s like a side-effect in its own way, because even when I’m alone I can remember and feel it almost exactly.

  But the pain right now is remarkable, even by those standards. It’s narrows my body down to that one bright focus point, until I have to do something unbearable like, gasp harsh and guttural at the ceiling, tears spilling in an entirely different way, down my cheeks.

  This time they come like a reflex, with barely any sadness behind them at all. And if I say his name at the same time, well. Isn’t that like a reflex, too? Isn’t it like the begging I always do, before he sinks his teeth in?

  ‘Merrith,’ I say, because he’d told me it once, after the blood had made him lazy and satisfied. Vulnerable, I always think, but that’s not true at all. He just seems it when he cradles my limp body against his, and tells me things I’m sure he never tells anyone else. Everyone else thinks he’s Jimmy Brecker, but he isn’t really. He’s Merrith, just Merrith, as though he came from a time beyond surnames and Christian names.

  Maybe he really did, I think, as my life flows out of me and into him. And though it’s painful, this is the part where a different sort of sensation starts to take over. A pulling sensation, like he’s got a hand on some thread inside me and he’s just easing it on through.

  It’s as debilitating, in its own way, as the bone-crushing first bite. It turns my legs to jelly; it makes me faint and fearful of myself. Sometimes I almost drift off like this, and there’s the ever present terror that I’m never actually going to wake up again.

  But there’s something else there, too. Sometimes I come around and I’m clinging to him in the same way he clings to me—like a lover, not a victim. One arm looped around his shoulders; a hand stroking down over the perfect curve of his spine. Every sense I’ve got so aware of my own body, as it turns to water in his arms.

  By the time he’s done, I’m no longer standing. He’s holding me like this, with my pointed feet nearly all the way off the floor. And when he takes his first big breath—of the kind a little kid would do, after drinking too much lemonade—I feel his body shuddering against the whole length of mine.

  ‘So sweet,’ he says, once he’s capable of speech. ‘So sweet when you let me have you like this.’

  And though I try to tell myself not to, I think of the dual meaning of have. Of course I do—it’s like a compulsion, after all this time of his hands and his mouth and the music, rich and strange. I sag against his shoulder and think of those liquid eyes of his, always searching through me like a hand sifting through pretty things.

  ‘My one,’ he says, and then he just licks long and languid over the still bleeding bits of me—everything about the move so tender that my mind immediately goes to animals, and the way they heal each other.

  Is that what he is, really? An animal underneath, reacting to things in a blind, instinctive sort of way? And if so, is it really so bad if I do the same?

  Because it’s perfectly true that I don’t know what I’m doing, when I push my fingers into his thick, dark hair. It’s like I’ve lapsed into that heavy state of unconsciousness, even though I’m still awake. I understand that I’m still awake, as I hold that suddenly warm and wet mouth to my throat.

  Of course I expect him to resume that hypnotic pulling—or at the very least to keep licking me in that way I don’t like at all, I swear I don’t. But instead he makes this sound that I don’t recognise—as though I’ve startled him—and arches away from me. Gets my face in one long-fingered hand, so that he can look down into my eyes.

  ‘You want me to?’ he asks, and for a second I’m sure he means the other thing. The one that I never think of, when he gets his hand on that thread and pulls. But then he carries on in that startled and completely new tone, those eyes of his suddenly naked. ‘You want me to taste you?’

  And I think yes, yes, but not in the way you’re imagining.

  Of course I know i
t’s too late, then, for me. Like when I’d made the choice to try and catch him out, and his fingers had pushed against the invisible glass. I’ve pushed my fingers against an invisible barrier, and just kept on going right through to the other side, where my hands are full of his hair and my body is completely aware of all the things he never does.

  In truth I’m not even sure if he knows what those things are, anymore—instead there’s just a hole in him, where desire and lust and pleasure used to be. It’s like knowing someone who never needs to breathe. At some point, you expect them to want to. You expect them to suddenly jolt with the memory of something that once kept them living.

  But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even remember when I reverse what he’s been doing to me. He just hangs there in my arms, blankly staring, and lets me put my mouth on his. Lets me taste my own blood in his mouth, and come away just as he always does:

  Streaked with red, stunned by the sensation of feeding.

  But unlike him, I don’t let myself lapse into that oddly vulnerable state. I don’t tell him my real name—what would be the point? He already knows it. And I don’t let him curl against me, to chase away the confusion and hurt all over his face.

  I just do it again, in all the different ways I can think of to kiss. Open-mouthed and close-mouthed and soft and wet. Then maybe all of those things together, until he does something that shocks me more than his vampirism ever did.

  He kisses me back. He kisses me back, as though he does know how to breathe, after all. It’s just like riding a bike I think, deliriously, but there’s another simile just hovering on the edges of my mind. One I don’t want to think about, first, but then—isn’t that what I’ve been doing along?

  I’ve refused to think about those hands on my back, roaming and running over me in the way they do again, now. I’ve refused to think about the song, like the sort of thing you’d put on if you wanted to seduce a girl. I’ve refused to think of the word one, and what it usually means in romance novels.