I have a feeling this is really cheesy, but I'm not really sure. Sorry about all the explaining that goes into the first few paragraphs, and sorry it turned out so long. I honestly didn't mean to do that.
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“So…how do you do this?”
“I, ah…I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I’ve never done this before either.”
“Come on. Surely it’s no different from doing it with an animal?”
We were sitting side by side on the edge of my bed. I was staring down at my feet, fighting back my carnal thoughts, but that was nearly impossible to do with him sitting right beside me and egging me on the way he was. “It’s very different,” I mumbled.
“You’re just stalling.” He tugged at my arm, a purely friendly gesture. I jerked away, quicker than I’d intended. Glimpsed a flash of hurt in his eyes. “Why are you holding back? You need this. You’re practically dying now.”
He had no idea, no idea how much I wanted it. If he knew, he surely wouldn’t have insisted on helping me. I was thinking of anything and everything in order to control myself, but I was completely intoxicated by the smell of his blood. Ever since they’d started cutting down the woods where I used to hunt at night, the prey had all but disappeared and I found myself seeing everyone around me as a potential meal. As the days and nights passed, my eyes grew sunken, my ribs began to show, my hair started to fall out. I no longer had as much energy as I used to. I was slowly becoming a waif of my former self. Even though he knew what I was, I never mentioned any of these troubles to him, Eros, my best friend and the “love” of my life. But I didn’t have to. He noticed. “I don’t want to feed from you,” I muttered. “I might hurt you.”
“We’ve been over this already. If you start to go overboard, I scream at the top of my lungs.”
I couldn’t help but smile a little. Looking at him, you might wonder exactly what I found so appealing about him. He wasn’t particularly attractive, at least not attractive in the usual sense of the word. He had a pale, bleached face from too many hours in doors. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. His hair was dirty-blonde, and probably hadn’t been brushed at all that day. In school, people made fun of him and called him Cupid because of his name. He wasn’t any good at socializing with others and kept to himself as much as possible. Not that I minded any of this. In fact, I had practically all his bad habits and social defects. We’re so alike in that area it’s almost scary. The only difference is that I’m was a vampire and I knew it. Whenever someone tried to put me down, I remind myself that if I wanted to, I could have them writhing in my grip within seconds and I could slash their neck wide open with my fangs. It may not seem like much, but it helps. A lion isn’t going to take crap from an antelope, so I’m not going to take any from humans either.
We’d been friends almost since the beginning of that school year. We had the exact same schedules, so whenever a teacher assigned us a project that required a partner, Eros and I always got paired together because no one wanted to work with either of us. Apart from that, however, we rarely spoke to each other until about a month and a half had passed and we realized we actually had a lot to talk about. Soon we’d become friends, then best friends. Since Eros started hanging around me, no one messed with him anymore.
I remember how strange it felt to have someone to talk on the phone with in the afternoons after school, someone to make plans with to meet on the bookstore on Saturdays. When I realized I was beginning to have feelings for him – feelings that could be a danger to his life – I knew I had to tell him what I was. Naturally, he was pretty freaked out about it at first. He told me he’d always known there was something weird about me, but he’d never guessed it went that far. Nevertheless, he was comforted by the fact that I only fed from animals and didn’t let my vampirism scare him away completely. But I’d been too afraid to let him know that I dreamed of feeding from him at night, so he had no clue about exactly how much will-power it would take to stop myself from going overboard, assuming I could manage it.
“Please hurry up,” he punched my shoulder playfully. “I’m getting ready to back out…” He waited, but I still wouldn’t do it. Laughing, he jumped on top of me and pinned me to the bed. In an ordinary situation I would have fought back, for we roughhoused quite a lot, but in this case I just lay there, which I knew would embarrass him and make him get off. You see, another reason why it would never work between us is that I am, well, not his type.
When I entered puberty, instead of growing into the usual female figure, I became basically androgynous. Over the summer I sprouted several inches so that I towered over most of the girls. My chest stayed perfectly flat. My shoulders broadened somewhat. My voice even deepened a bit. Usually I am mistaken for a boy, especially when I introduce myself by my middle name, Felix (I much prefer to use it over my first name, Wren). However, I experimented with some of my mom’s clothes one day and discovered that if I were to where women’s clothes, I could definitely pass for a girl. I’m fairly certain this has to do with my vampirism because in some legends the vampire appears to be neither male nor female in order to be able to attract prey of either sex.
I explained to Eros some time back that I was really a girl, and he was genuinely surprised when he learned of it. Mostly because whenever he began staring longingly at some young hot thing nearby, I was always looking in the same direction. We’d even sat in the café in the bookstore one day just to take side-glances at the collage students who came there to study. At first, for me anyway, it was only a kind of admiration of their beauty, but so what if I now find them attractive in the more passionate sense? But that’s not the point. Eros likes girls, as far as I can tell, and I don’t think I fit his definition of one. Hell, I even slept over at his house one time. A couple of times actually. What kind of a girlfriend does that with a guy unless they’re together?
“God, Felix,” Eros muttered, removing himself from the awkward position and flopping himself down beside me on the bed. “You’re a pervert.”
“So are you.” I moved over a couple of inches, not wanting to touch him.
“What are we going to do? Just lie here?”
“Yup.”
“You’re the most pathetic vampire I’ve ever met.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it.”
“I mean seriously. Dracula was never this uncertain.”
“Dracula can stick it up his ass.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d find it pretty easy to believe you’re afraid of the dark.”
That got me. Eros hadn’t meant to, but he’d struck a shameful chord inside me. What he didn’t know was that I was very much indeed afraid of the dark. This very recent and very knew development hadn’t hit until about two weeks ago, due to a series of strange, demonic events I won’t go into here. It shames me beyond words to admit it.
“Dude, that is not funny,” I snapped, propping myself up on my side to glare at him.
“What? You are afraid of the dark?” Eros stared at me, surprised. “Wow. Felix has officially come out of the coffin.”
“Damn it.” I rolled over onto my other side with my back to him and brought my knees almost up to my chest. “Don’t do this to me, man. It’s hard enough already.” Even more shamefully, I felt my throat begin to tighten. I felt like some secret part of me had been exposed.
“Hey.” He apparently saw that I hadn’t been kidding. “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know…” He rolled over as well, and touched my shoulder. I stiffened impulsively as if his fingertips had sent a jolt of electricity through me, then let myself relax. “I mean you’ll get over it, right?” He asked worriedly.
Several moments passed before I answered. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, Felix.” To my surprise, I felt his arm snaking around me, as if in an embrace. “Consider it an advance in your imaginative powers. Your own mind has finally figured out a way to scare the shit out of you.”
I sighed shakily. I didn’t turn to face him yet because I didn’t want him to see that I was fighting back tears. “It’s really bad, Eros. I feel like I don’t know my own hunting grounds anymore.”
He was silent for a while, and I sensed that he was thinking. “I’ll go with you one night maybe. Yeah. Maybe it won’t be so bad then.”
I started to decline, but then I realized that it really might help. It wasn’t a bad idea actually. He didn’t live that far away either, at least no distance he couldn’t cover on bike. “That would be great,” I said. “Heh. Maybe it’ll even be kind of fun to take you with me.”
“Yeah. Hey, maybe you can even show me how to catch animals with your bare hands.”
I was highly aware by this time that he was pressed very close to me. The arm he’d thrown over me was lying almost protectively across my chest, and I could feel his breath panting warmly on the back of my neck every time he spoke. I could even very faintly hear his heartbeat. Now the urge to cry had passed, I decided to experiment. I rolled over onto my back and tilted my head to face his so that our faces were hardly an inch apart. A few seconds passed, during which I found myself staring deeply into his eyes and trying to see what lay behind them, then he was laughing nervously and even blushing a little, to my amusement. “Jesus Christ, it’s scary when you look like that.”
“Like what?” I grinned, showing off two tiny, dagger-like incisors filling the gaps in my teeth that ordinarily stayed clear. My fangs, when not in use, stay inside little nooks on the roof of my mouth. They unfold whenever I’m about to feed, or sometimes just whenever I smell blood and my body reacts to it. Since the recent unavailability of prey, they’ve unfolded several times during classes, and I’d have to keep my mouth shut tight and think about anything except blood until they retracted. It gets embarrassing sometimes.
“Uh, um, like you’re trying to…” He halted mid-sentence as emotion drained from his countenance like water through a strainer. What was left was the blank, even dead appearance of one who has been hypnotized by the light of bloodlust. The light which now danced brightly in my eyes.
Ordinarily, I didn’t have much hypnotic power. What I did have was just enough to attract small animals like rabbits and even raccoons or foxes, but things more complex could resist. Again, many changes had come with my starvation, including the heightened power of hypnotism. And now that I had him like this, completely immobile with his life in my hands, there was no way I could stop myself.
“Eros,” I whispered, pushing him so that he lay on his back. “Be still. It will be all over with soon.” This was completely unnecessary, but I felt I had to say something. All at once and with none of my previous hesitations, I climbed on top of him, and kissed him on the mouth for a moment, even though I had no idea if he would remember it or not once he came out of the spell. Then, with that out of the way, leaned into him, into the warm skin of his neck, and punctured it with my fangs.
What happened next is sort of foggy to me now, but the ecstasy and love that was in it is undeniable. If I close my eyes and imagine hard enough, I can still bring up the sensation of that first spurt of blood gushing into my mouth. I was so completely swept up in the moment I could not keep track of how much of his blood I drank.
“Suh…stop…stop…” A weak croak broke through to my consciousness, but I couldn’t stop, not yet, oh, his sweet blood, his warm and gushing blood…
“Felix…”
He twisted and turned beneath me, struggling like a fly caught in a spider’s web, I didn’t take any notice, I just kept right on drinking. Then, groaning sharply, he heaved his whole weight off the bed so that we both went sprawling to the floor. Needless to say, that brought me back to my senses immediately. “Oh God, oh my God,” I gasped, detaching myself from him. I felt my chest tightening in a scream of panic, I knew I’d killed him, I’d killed my love, but he moved, forced himself up into a sitting position with trembling, languid arms.
“Shu’up” he said, his voice badly slurred. “You’ wake the whole neighborhood.” He swayed slightly as he said this, even though he was sitting. His skin was completely drained of color, and blood continued to ooze from the two small gashes on the side of his neck
“We need to get you to a hospital!” I cried.
“I b’okay. I jus’ need a li’l ress.” But I didn’t hear all of this, for I had already jumped up and run from the room to get some gauze and alcohol. When I came back, he was lying face up on the floor, his stomach slowly rising up and down.
“Eros…” I knelt down beside him. He only grunted in reply. Cursing myself for ever letting him go through with this and for giving in, I set to work wiping away the blood from his neck and bandaging the wounds. It took me a while because tears kept blurring my eyes and I’d have to stop to wipe them away.
“Don’…cry…”
I started at the sound of his voice, barely above a whisper. I don’t know how he knew I was crying. “How can I n-not? I’ve almost kuh-kuh…” I couldn’t bear to say it. My voice became too choked with sobs and I had to quit trying.
“Don’…tha’ would be the saddes’ thing eva, you cryin’…”
“Goddammit! Goddammit all!” I gritted my teeth, squeezed my flooding eyes shut, but it was hopeless; I was too overcome to stop myself now. “If this is what’s going to happen every time I love…every time I love someone the way I do you, what’s the point of it?”
“You…wha’d you say?”
“Ah…” I opened my eyes, only realizing now what I’d just said. And I figured, well, now that I’ve lost the paddle, I might as well tip myself over. “I love you Eros,” I babbled. “I love you in a way I’ve never loved anyone before. I’d give you the moon if you asked, and the night, and the stars to go with it, I’d give you my soul and my blood…” I stopped as realization suddenly dawned on me. “My blood…” All at once, I remembered all the books I’d read and the movies I’d seen, and I knew what I had to do. Quickly, I put my wrist to my opened mouth and bit down on it. I held it over Eros’ parted lips and aloud my own blood to stream into his mouth until the flow stopped. Then all I could do was sit back and wait. If it didn’t work, he was most certainly going to die, and I don’t know what I was going to do then.
Five minutes passed, and he continued to lay there, silent except for his light breathing. But slowly, the color started to come back into his cheeks. His eyes flickered open, he flexed his fingers and toes and wiped the blood splatters away from his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt. He looked at the smears they left on the cloth, and his eyes widened in shock. Apparently he hadn’t known what it was that had been dripping into his mouth.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Fine. Great, actually.” He replied, sitting up. “Amazing what a little vampire blood can do.”
I felt myself relax all at once. He was going to be all right. He was going to live. I could hardly believe my good fortune. I wanted to jump up and praise God, Buddha, or somebody, and at the same time I wanted to break down again. But I did none of those things. Instead, I only reached out and touched his hand, to make sure he was really there and I wasn’t hallucinating this happy ending.
“Say, what was that about earlier?” He asked, grinning at me. “That really cheesy line about giving me the moon?”
“Oh, you wish I’d said that, mortal,” I growled playfully. “I know you would have been just tickled pink.” We both shared a nervously joyous laugh. He knew what I’d said, and I knew he knew it, but there was time later to bring it up again. For now, we wanted only to enjoy each other’s company and the afternoon sunshine that was still left.
.
