“The blood is the life” – Bram Stoker

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There is a joke that goes: what did the lesbian vampire say to her lover?

Well, here’s the answer. I owe you so many answers, and to give you what you deserve, I have to go back to the start.

I meet the Stranger years before I find you. 

He is the only man who has come close to evoking a stab of attraction. Until I see him standing in a dark nook of the club, a point of stillness in a sea of undulating bodies, my experience of kisses and caresses is restricted to women. I’d never been drawn to join the heaps of sun-browned bodies and tangled limbs that pile up in the corners of our commune. Free love, to me, is the freedom to find female companionship. This is more radical than any number of lazy, hash pipe orgies. 

But he sees me see him, and when our eyes meet, it is as if the other dancers transform into animate obstacles; fingers fondling invisible harp strings, bare midriffs shining with sweat, hips swaying, hair sweeping. His face, cut into angular, stretching shadows, is architectural in its immobility. My friends, if I had been able or willing to shout to them above the jangling guitar and shivering tambourine, might tell me this pull was a symptom of cosmic connection, a link forged with the strength of soul and the flexibility of a drug-addled mind. They believe in such things. I do not, but I know I have to go to him.

I weave my way across the club, swimming through joss-smoke air, warm from being sucked through hundreds of lungs. I cross a dance floor sticky with spilled beer and forested with writhing bodies, most of them half-empty, their souls lifted free by the music. I leave my friends in their circle, bracelets and anklets jingling; they will dance until they drop.

He hasn’t moved. As I come closer, I see how tall he is, how his face is marble-hard, the lips full as though pushed out from within, the eyes hooded, the nose flat-bridged, every plane of his skull defined as sharply as mason-chiseled stone. While we wear blue denim, white cheesecloth and chamois leather, he is all in black. It matches his eyes.

I lean in. “This is kind of wild, huh?” I say, all wide-eyed to make my blues bluer against the kohl.

He surveys the dance floor. “Hot, young blood,” he says.

I have to shout to be sure of being heard, but I understand him even though his lips barely move. His black hair is cropped to battlefield brevity. I wonder if he is on leave. My friends wouldn’t like that. They don’t have time for the military. I glance back to them, but they are too deep in the dance to notice me.

“Were you in ‘nam?” I ask, my stomach squeezing. He shakes his head and my spine unwinds. I notice the drink in his hand is down to the dregs.

“Thirsty?” I shout.

“Always.”

With that, he sets the spent glass down, takes my hand and leads me away. The club is humid with humanity, but his fingers around mine are winter cold.

I don’t know it, yet, but I am already lost.

*****

The Stranger rucks my skirt up and noses between my legs as I lie on the mildewed bed in an anonymous motel room. He hadn’t even taken my boots off. There are beige stains on the ceiling. The place smells musty. I’m not wearing anything under my skirt, so he licks straight through the tangle of my pubic hair, parting a way to my flesh with his tongue. The shock of his touch in my most tender, tight-folded parts makes me gasp.

“Shhh,” he whispers against my electrified skin, and then he pushes a chilly finger in. I am still quite dry; he doesn’t stir the easy, liquid desire that my girl-crushes provoke. This is something darker and harder.

He works his digit diligently, pushing deeper, and pauses when it meets resistance. He’s found the thin webbing of tissue that some people mistake for virginity.

This makes him smile with a strange, unsettling satisfaction. His nails are sharp, but I only appreciate this fully when he pierces through my hymen. I mute my scream between clenched teeth. The walls, I know, are thin.

I bleed a little, and the blood adds an audible juiciness to the movement of his fingers as they flex and play within my body. He licks them, sucking my blood off his thumbs as though they’d touched honey. Nothing about this strikes me as strange. I am deluded by desire. If his lips have grown fuller, his skin a touch warmer, I fail to notice.

“More,” he says, and he lunges onto me, pinions my cunt with his cock and drowns me in an iron-tainted kiss.

I am consumed, overwhelmed. He holds me hard, one arm wrapped around my back, his hard hand gripping the top of my arm, my head resting in his free palm. I am caged by his body. The only space between us is transient, opening up as he pulls his hips back, closing when he thrusts forward, driving his dick into my bruised vulva with a mechanical precision that never quite synchronizes with the frantic beating of my heart. He is impossibly strong, and that knowledge fills me with savage fear and febrile lust. The pumping of his buttocks is relentless, rhythmic in a way that no animal could replicate. This scares me, too. Each swoop and scooping movement is exactly as the last; he never misses a beat, never fumbles, never pauses. He fucks at a controlled frequency, unhurried and inevitable. I heave air through my nostrils as he drives into me, displacing my soft and trembling insides over, and over, and over again.

I haven't touched him. It is as though he has exploded into action from a standing start. The rigidity of his sollen cock is incontrovertible as it plunges in and withdraws, a piston pushing that drives me to an unexpected orgasm. It is sudden, heralded by a thin, keening throb, a sensation similar to a violin bow drawing across a high minor chord. The slender, silvery wires of my nerves blaze: a branching lightning strike surging up my abdomen. I convulse around him. It's so sudden I don't even have time to moan. My head lolls back, my mouth open in a stifled gasp. 

His face is too close for me to read. No shudders wrack his body, though I twitch, the muscles in my thigh flicking like a fly-bitten flank, my feet flicking sideways. He kisses me again, and his mouth tastes of nothing. I feel his eye teeth through the soft pad formed by our pressing lips. He isn’t out of breath. He’s barely breathing at all.

He continues long enough that I’m afraid he’ll never stop, and then, as the last threads of torn tissue give way inside me, he pauses at the crest of his movement, buried to the root, and then he pulls out.

I’m spilling, and he’s between my legs again, taking long, sucking sips. I lie, spread-eagled, belly and ribs expanding and contracting beneath my half-undone blouse as I pull in air.

An old girlfriend, a particularly radical and devoted feminist, once told me that all heterosex was, by its nature, violence against the female person. I am not so sure I agree, or surely I would not be lying, willingly, on a creaking bed in a drab, seldom-dusted motel with this Stranger. Still, I have a sense that I’ve survived something.

He applies his mouth to the wound, half-teasing, half-soothing. I don’t know if my whimpers are generated by the sharp pang of lust or by pain. I tense as he sets his pursed lips to the flow and laps. I lie in a swoon as he clears my cleft with hungry slurps.

As his spit dries on my lips, they chap. I rub them absently with the back of my hand. His tongue still swirls in my nethers but I am numb.

“Okay, okay,” I say. The word comes out rough and parched.

He lifts his head. He wears a beard of rusty blood. He is still stone-hard.

“I am your first,” he says. His voice, unlike mine, is not tattered or gasping. It is resonant and polished.

“Not exactly.” My laugh cracks at the edges.

He growls and dips his face again.

“More,” he says, into my aching cavity. But the flow slows, and he grows flaccid. Before I can peel myself from the damp sheets, he shunts his broad torso up so we are face-to-face and chest-to-chest. The thin, galvanized layer of his control is stripped away by the acid of his hunger.

I’m given no time to assent or protest. Sudden, piercing pain lances through the fog. Fangs. Sharp as sawteeth, they descend into the meat where my neck curves to my shoulder. My throbbing carotids would have provided a richer but brief blood-letting. But his bite meets muscle.

This time, the scream is loud and raw and he stuffs it back into my throat with his palm. I try to bite him in return but he clamps his fingers around my chin and cheeks and squeezes until my skull creaks. He suckles on the welling red.

His cock, which had lain tacky and soft against my thigh, engorges again as he gorges on me. With a twist of his hip, he angles himself, and then he parts my legs with a knee, and rams himself up my ass. A fresh howl meets his hand and he holds it in until it dies.

The entryway to my anus is slicked somewhat by our earlier sex, but I have to hold myself very still, afraid that if I flinch, my flesh will tear. I become a hyperboloid of hurt; the shape of pain far exceeding the borders of my body. Still, a small part of me finds all of this fascinating.

Such is the sensitivity of my abused asshole, I feel every twitch and surge of his cock. It swells inside me. The more blood he sucks, the bigger it grows and the harder he fucks. A delirious laugh batters against the gag of his hand; he is sodomising me with the essence of my own body. I feel weirdly euphoric.

The muscular curve that sweeps from his groin to his belly grazes against me, meeting my open and twitching cunt each time he drives into my rectum. It’s an odd juxtaposition, the straining, painful pressure on my sphincter, an object moving against the usual traffic of my gut, and the light, incidental and careless kissing of his smooth skin against my clitoris. It is this alienness, this profound contrast, I think, that wrenches another orgasm out of me. The sensation is too ambiguous and paralyzing to be pure pleasure. It’s a hollow kind of climax, my muscles clenching impotently against nothing.

He feeds and he fucks, and I lie helpless, perforated passionately at both ends. It isn’t long before he spills into me. Perhaps the process of rearranging my insides proves too stimulating, or perhaps it is a surplus of blood. Who knows? There is a new, momentary pressure as his cock stiffens and bulges, pulsing with a rhythm borrowed from the faltering beat of my heart. Then there is a gushing release. Burning liquid spurts into the ravaged cavern of my ass. It pulses up and around his proud flesh, running between my buttocks and dripping onto the sheets where it leaves little translucent puddles. A paroxysm seizes him and he shudders and gnaws, moaning, on my neck, but there isn’t much left to take.

The teeth withdraw and he falls from me, sighing like a satiated glutton.

He departs before I stop leaking, before my body builds those little walls that keep the rest of me inside. As he leaves, I sprawl, eyes half-lidded. I do not say farewell. My curiosity is sated. He, I know, will be my first and last man.

I curl up and drift off into a sleep as deep as death. The vivid tulip-red streaks on the sheets dry to the brown of autumn leaves.

The next afternoon, I wake late, shower in the damp, claustrophobic water-closet and scrub myself clean. I feel odd, disarticulated, as though I’m moving at an oblique angle to reality. I rearrange my clothes, run my fingers through my hair and collect my bag. It is only when I open the door into the car park that I realize how I am changed.

Everything outside is blinding white. I throw my arm in front of my eyes.

My skin tingles and then burns, blazing red. I withdraw from the light.

What have I become?

What has he made me?