The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Part 2 - The Bite

Those first days, we kept Leis on his side, while he slept. Laurent kept the wounds clean, and tended to his breath. He came and sat with me often, in my room, and held my hands in his without speaking. Often, his hands were blooded, and I sucked this from his fingers, to which he closed his eyes and moaned softly.

He liked to have his hands kissed, his wrists sucked. That to which he would close his eyes, and part his lips, and make quiet sounds of urgency. I would push up the lace at his wrists and press my mouth to his skin, and occasionally he would lean into me and whisper to me in his rough French dialect.

"Oh soft," he might say into my ear, distressed, "he knows what I like best. My head," and lie back, and tell me to undress so that he could touch my skin and steal the heat from my body. I did as he asked, always. Even more occasionally, once abed, he might kiss me, and stroke back my hair, and bite me ungently at the neck from behind, so that I could not touch him or make any other sign of imagined protest.

To be bitten at the neck brings about an instantaneous lightheaded delirium, which clouds the vision and relaxes the limbs. He would bring his arm up under mine, and touch me lightly at the collarbones, and it was so rare that I could not ever speak at all, which I think that he preferred. I have told you that he would often bite me at the hands, which is so unlike such a thing as blooding at the neck, but its own tortured intimacy. If I did not swoon away, he would press his fingers to my mouth again, his fingernails rough against my tongue, and kiss my ear, and urge me, "Sleep."

He liked to hear me softly sigh, or swallow against the bite, or listen to an unintended sound drawn out by the tension, and he liked those things in anyone. These were not born out of romantic love, but the familiarity between us, and he only ever bit me on a whim, and what do I know about his whims? He was good at surprising me. At times, he took an interest in my body, and my pleasure, but over two hundred and forty years, I recognized that these times were not indicative of change in any sense. As often, he might take my hand and remark that it was too dry and wearing on him.

"Why are your hands so rough?" he asked me, some fourteen days after the terrible thing, it being the first words he had said to me after ordering me home. He had me on my side, holding me from the back, and his body pressed against mine through his white robe. He investigated my hands gently.

"I have been doing your washing," I told him, and found it difficult to speak after his biting me so deeply at the throat.

"You took apart the red one?"

"The red coat, the black one, and both gold ones," I said, swallowing. Each of his frock and waistcoats needed to be unstitched to be washed. I would unstitch them, wash them, and leave them for him to reconstruct. They were too delicate to be handled roughly, and had to be dried quickly and evenly.

"You work too hard," he said, blowing on the wound he had opened. "Oh, it bleeds still," he whispered, fanning the punctures with his hand. He touched me then at the forehead, beneath my neck, my side, the loins, beneath my ribs, which warmed me and caused my eyelids to flutter with peacefulness, at his looking after my health. "Go out, sweet boy. Your presence disturbs him."

"I have promised to stop my looking in upon him."

"Do not defy me. But I am pleased with your lucidity."

"Kiss me, dear one," I asked him. "I am tired."

He stroked my hair back from my forehead. I wanted to dig my roughened fingers into him, push them into his flesh and gaze on him. I wanted to mount him and hold him still beneath me, kiss him harder than he liked because it was the language he understood. The hand rested there on my head as if he had fallen asleep mid-gesture.