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

Leis, part 5 - Cruelty

On the third day in his house, Laurent let me into his room and shut the door. He was wearing gold silk brocade to the floor, with a cloth of gold tassel at the waist, and nothing at all underneath. He had left his hair wild, unbrushed. In the low light of the room, he seemed painted in gold leaf, and young. It smelled of myrrh. I pressed my back against the door, where I had been an hour. The green wallpaper seemed black. 

He stopped pacing and regarded me, as if noticing me there for the first time. 

"Believe me, darling, he didn't mean what he said," I whispered.

He paused and parted his pretty pink lips, and closed them again, guttered the air a moment in his throat before breathing it out. 

"I have so wanted to see you," I said.

"I know it. I have your letter," he reproached me, very softly. "I got it some years ago."

"It? I sent you many letters."

"Only one," he whispered, blowing the breath away. His hands went to his hair, parting it and brushing the curls with his fingers. "Oh help me, I am coming apart. It is almost like he is here."

"I am here." I moved from the door to touch him, to take him in my arms, because he seemed lost, but he recoiled from me.

"Oh, don't touch me," he said.

I took his wrist and folded him against my body, to which he struggled, and cried out. "I love you," I pleaded. "Do not struggle."

"Oh, don't talk to me of love," he said, crying tearlessly, like a fox, "I have seen the way you love. I won't be your paramour. I told you that before. I only want to talk to you, and that is only why I have let you in. Oh, I don't want your love at all."

His curls pressed against my lips, and I kissed them. He was trying to slip down, to get out of my grasp, and I thrust my knee between his thighs so that he could not slide out. 

"Goddamn you, let go of me," he hissed darkly. "I have no desire to hurt you, but it is less than I can say of you. What you have done. Would I parade a lover in front of you and ask for your touch? I would never. Did I make a promise? Et vous? Je refuse de subir ce traitement." And you? I refuse to suffer this treatment. "Vous m'entendez?" Do you hear me? "Now let go of me, for the love of God."

I let go of him and he stumbled away. "I am not a stranger. Please don't speak to me like this."

"Oh but you are very strange. You seem sweet still, and yet you lie as if it were nothing at all. Did you tell him everything about me? How did you speak about me, that he thinks he can talk to me as if I were pressed beneath his foot? I will not suffer it. You will do what you have come to do, and I will let you leave without a touch. Hear that? I will not touch a hair on his head, and I do that for you, and that is all that I will do. And now I have said what I will say, and I don't want to talk to you."

"I didn't tell him anything about you. He didn't know about you. He doesn't know anything."

"Do you think that it impresses me?" he asked, picking up a candle by the window and blowing it out. He waved the rising smoke away with his hand, and the darkness was nearly total. "It does not. You cannot impress me. You are an insect. You are a blood-sucking flea, and I could pinch you between my fingers, but I won't. You are a parasite sucking on my good grace."

"It is too dark," I whispered.

"Are you afraid of it? Is that why you needed him? To hold your hand in the dark?"

"You are cruel," I said.

"You let me kiss you and welcome you back, and let me tell you that I wanted you for a lover, and no others, and do you think it makes me feel good to hear that it's me who is the cruel one? I don't like what your idea of love is. It's too human. I don't like this intensity. I don't want to be one above all others. I want your presence and that is all, but under your gaze I am just a whore whose body you can use, and him the one you sleep beside, and I will have none of it. I have been made into a whore before beside you, and I won't go back to it." He was invisible in the dark, but I heard him disrobe, and the fabric fall to the floor.