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

Quinn, Part 9 - He, Himself

Here comes himself, thought I, in my bath of blood. Here comes him. Leis did not pause in the doorway but came with his head bowed in shame, straight brow furrowed. His little, pink, pursed lips give almost to a heart shape when he is troubled. I admired his long body as he advanced, the longer looking in straight pants and a buttoned shirt, which made him seem neat.  I lifted my hand from the bloody water and Leis sat beside the copper tub and took my fingers in his. His fingernails were buffed and his hands smelled like orange toilette. I smelled his hand deeply, rested my cheek against his soft, dry skin. He has the long hands of a piano player, and he does play a little when he gets the chance. 

"Take the pins out of your hair," I said, at length, heart beating rapidly from the smell of orange. "I want to see your curls."

"Why though?" he asked, very softly, and did as asked, unpinning his hair and fluffing it out with both hands. He dragged his finger through the curls to better form them. He wiggled himself like a dog. He leaned close and I patted his cheek. 

"Pretty," I said. I saw him recognize my condition as faintly delirious.

"I would like to say 'handsome', Darkling," he said, and he kissed my palm, at the base of my middle and index fingers.

It made me shiver and sit back in the tub, shut my rolling eyes. I turned my neck because I had to turn it, and to stretch as he sucked upon my fingers, which he loves to suck if I allow him to do it. He pressed his lips to their base and dragged up past the second and first knuckles, kissing my fingertips like the flutter of an eyelash.

"Does it help you, the blood?" he asked, again very quiet, as if speaking more loudly would disturb my ears, my head. "Did Dasius hurt you?" even quieter, and casual, as if inquiring about dirty magazines hidden beneath a candy store counter. 

I reached for him with shaking hand, found his shirt collar and pulled him towards me. 

"I've done you badly," he whispered, confessing what I already known at the smell of perfume on his hand, unbuttoning his shirt quickly. "I'm sorry."

"Shut up," I said, a hint of hysteria in my throat. 

He cast his eyes down and stripped to the skin, slipped into the tub beside me, displacing the water to the copper basin's lip. I pressed my cool body against his hot one and gasped, so well-warmed by his flesh. "Don't cry, don't cry," he hummed, and smelled the top of my head. He pulled me in closer with his leg, hooking his knee behind mine and tangling our bodies together. I've heard him say to other people that he thinks of us as one body. It swells me.

Together we'd had nearly one hundred a years by then. We had not yet gotten beyond counting such things. He had cared for me, and kept me as warm as he could. For quite a lot of that time I had been happier than I'd ever been in life, and he has given me of his heart and of his body more than at times I deserve. I cannot say that I haven't been cruel to him. He has been kind to me in his account of that time, as he quite often is because his love occludes the darker aspects of memory, but let me not be as kind. It is not even the worst that I am telling now.

I said, "Kiss me like you kiss him."

He began to protest, that to which the problem with obscuring the rotten bits of our relationship means he cannot learn from experience. "Please, Quinny. Do not hurt me," in such a small voice. "I'm sorry. We'll leave here. We will go tomorrow, when you are better. That I will promise you now. Dasius can't help us. I see that now. Please, Quinny." He asks for punishment often, but when it comes real his fear is terrible.

I said, "Kiss me like you kiss him, goddamn you."

The curse moved him and he took me by the chin a little roughly, and pressed his lips against mine. It surprised me, the force, the violence. He forced his tongue into my mouth and slid his hand down my neck, and really then I did hate him, for being so different. I pushed his head away so hard that he struck it on the lip of the tub, which sliced him at the cheek, and made him wail like a dog kicked. He moved to rise, to flee, but I pulled him down, and knowing full well what I was doing I pushed his face under the water so that he couldn't breathe. His fine fingers dragged against my body in desperation.