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

Part 2 - Our Child

I couldn't stay with him the entire day, but Laurent let me stay with him in bed while my parents slept. That first day, when I came into his room, he took his ruby necklace off of his neck and fastened it over mine. He napped with me, my back pressed to his belly, my ear on his pillow, and I asked him, "What should I call you?"

"Ma perle," he said. My pearl.

We did not speak French at home except incidentally. "OK, ma perle," I repeated to him. 

"No, say 'Bien, ma perle," he whispered into my ear.

I did. 

"Comme il faut," he said. Properly. It thrilled me. It was like having a secret, which I had never been allowed to have at all. "They should let you grow your hair. From now on you are ours, and you will not go to school, and you will not be like other boys. How do you like this?"

"I like it," I said.

"Bien, ma perle," he said.

I was too breathless with happiness to speak, to be relieved of the pressure to be like other boys.

"Do you like swords?" he asked, picking at my cotton pajamas, as if cleaning me.

"No."

"Yes you do," he said. "Do you love me, little one?"

I burned with it.

"Then do as I say, and I will make you immortal and I will make you strong. How do you like this?" his voice was a velvet purring.

"Bien, ma perle," I said.

"Smart," he whispered. 

During that day he stole my father's keys and drove me into town to see "The Three Musketeers" with Lana Turner and Vincent Price, and he taught me to say "Vive le roi vive le roi!" and hiss at anti-royalists. He gave me twenty dollars and pushed me into a candy store so that he could stand outside and smoke as I encountered more sugar than I'd ever seen. I didn't buy anything and emerged with the twenty still intact, to which he patted my head and said he would get me a sword and turn me into a good little knight. 

I noticed the way that people looked at him. It was the same way people looked at me. I thought, if he can look so unusual and get the very same look, why should I not be unusual? When I voiced this to him he waved his hand and said, "Don't bother me with this, don't bother me with this."

I asked him if he knew Dasius in Boston, because I liked Dasius and I missed him. 

"Do you? You're a good boy," he said, fiddling with his cigarette case while I drank a milkshake in the diner on the square. When he saw me looking at the case, its reflective silver, he shut it with a snap and slid it across the table to me, and it was mine. 

"Can I be like Dasius?" I asked him, thinking of his cool intelligence, how when he spoke to people they listened to him, no matter who they were. 

Laurent said nothing to that, paid the check, and took me by the hand back to the car. 

That evening, after Laurent had gone with Leis, my father found me sitting on the velvet cushion in the sitting room's bay window, looking after the car. He said, "What did you get up to today, my love?" and took me into his lap so that we could sit together. I wrapped my arms around him and pressed my face against his shirt. He smelled of cedar and musk. The smell of him made me sleepy in an instant. 

Quinn's voice is a thin one, and hesitant. He wavers at any sort of volume, and is often therefore quiet even if he is passionate. I loved his quietness, and it soothed me to be close to him after the whirlwind of Laurent's presence and how it had made my heart beat. I held onto the lapel of his cotton vest, just above the first button and sucked on my pinky finger. He stroked the back of my neck and asked me again.