Thus, Antoinne’s All-Night Salon was born, and was literally an overnight success.
Okay, okay, the fact that my best friend from grade school was also the society columnist for the twilight edition of the paper didn’t hurt, as Sophie’s quick to point out whenever she feels slighted by me or wants to blackmail me into performing some favor or another. Sophie knows me from back when I was plain old Tony Horrowitz before my current debonair reincarnation as Antoinne van Gelder, and is always threatening to reveal that little detail—among many other of my peccadilloes—in her column, whenever she’s trying to get me under her thumb.
We all know they’re just idle threats, but I play along with her, just in case one day she has PMS or something and decides she’s serious about trying to take me down a peg or forty.
Not that I think anything could hurt my reputation at this point. A little scandal might even improve it. After all, it’s hard for the journalists to think of new excuses to keep writing about me and my fabulous life.
Stefano spun me around and I fell into his massive arms. I love how I feel like a waif when he holds me like this. Although he wasn’t so much holding as groping, his tongue seeking mine as he struggled to get under my smock and pull down my pants. I wiggled an arm loose from his embrace to give him a helping hand, although it didn’t matter if he popped a button or five, since that’s what the houseboy was for. Well, one of the things, anyway.
Even after having been repeatedly drained of blood all night by customers, he still had plenty left over, if his pulsing erection was anything to judge by. After all the fumbling to get my clothes off me, his own had proved no problem; in the blink of an eye, they were gone, almost as if by magic. No matter, foreplay has its time and place, but this morning wasn’t going to be one of them. This was about raw sexual need, and my body was responding in kind.
Still locked in a kiss that left us half gasping for a single breath that we passed back and forth between us, Stefano gently bent me backward, like dancers in a tango, until my shoulders rested against the warm leather of the salon’s best chair. A moment later, still without releasing my lips from his own, as if my tongue were the anchor that kept him rooted to his humanity, he’d swept my feet out from under me, lifting me up by the knees so that my ass was exposed. As he leaned over my body, Stefano pumped the pedestal with one foot, raising the chair and my body until my ass was perfectly aligned with his waiting cock.
That’s one of the great things about fucking in salon chairs; they’re height-adjustable. It’s like being able to personalize a sling. Except that instead of cold rubber and chains, the chair Stefano had thrown me onto was fully padded and warm. Just because I like things a little rough doesn’t mean I don’t also enjoy my creature comforts.
One of the creature comforts I do need, though, is lubricant, and without even needing to open my eyes (I am a romantic at heart and close my eyes when I am kissed) I reached out behind me for a tube of hair gel. As the head of Stefano’s cock pressed its way against my asshole, I quickly squirted some onto my hands and reached down to slick his organ before it tore into me of its own accord. And a moment later, that’s exactly what it did, sliding inexorably deeper inside of me as I exhaled into his mouth, as if I needed to empty my lungs to make space in my torso for such large firmness.
In the state he was in, there was no way I could’ve stopped things to have him put on a condom, but it didn’t matter. We didn’t use them between us.
As part of his job, Stefano’s regularly having blood tests done. The agency he works for prides itself on only offerings its clients the choicest waiters or waitresses, by blood type as well as physical attractiveness. I always suspected that part of all the blood work was to be able to offer samplers to prospective clients.
At last, our kiss came to a breathless end as the rhythm of Stefano’s cock sliding into me began to pick up speed. I opened my eyes to look up at him, his lips looking almost bruised they were so full after sucking face for so long, his dark eyes staring at me with such longing and desire it made me catch my breath again. What had I done to deserve this? I asked myself for what must’ve the millionth’s time. And I surrendered myself up to our congress, letting him take from me whatever pleasure and solace he needed, however he needed it.
I didn’t know how many clients he’d served tonight, although he bore marks on both sides of his neck. I reached out to caress the scabs, and Stefano pounded into me with renewed vigor, as if my touching those bite marks unleashed some hormone within him.
There were days (we rarely had sex at night, since we both worked then) when we could spend hours fucking without stop, a give-and-take of pleasure. But this morning’s sex was of a different sort, a higher-pitched intensity, forceful and abrupt. I didn’t even touch my own dick, reaching up instead to pinch one of Stefano’s nipples, or to again touch one of the bite marks.
And moments later, Stefano was leaning over me, his mouth searching for mine, and as we kissed he suddenly began to come. We were locked together like that for what seemed an infinite moment, as if I were breathing life into him with each breath while he filled me with spurt after spurt of his seed, with sexual energy.
As our mouths broke apart, to let us catch our breath, even though his cock was still sunk deep up my ass, still hard even after he’d come, I tasted salt, and seeing the crimson stain on his lips, realized I’d bit my lip, or he had, or we both had. My glance dropped to the marks along his neck, then back to the smudge on his lips, and I smiled at the irony, as he began to shift inside me again, building up to begin fucking again, but in control now that the edge was taken off, fully human, and his hands dropped to my own cock to make sure he gave me pleasure at the same time as he took his own.
Possession
. It is a common enough word. We use it all the time for things, do we not? Yet almost no one thinks about what it means to be possessed, because we think of the term only in its twenty-first-century connotation. The first listing in the dictionary: “the act of having and controlling property.”
There are, of course, other definitions. Definitions that revert back to the fourteenth-century Latin origins of the word. Those are the ones I am talking about. Such as “domination by something (as an evil spirit, a passion or an idea)” or “a psychological state in which an individual’s normal state is replaced by another.”
I’m not sure exactly when it was that I became possessed by Raul Garcia, when my “normal state” was replaced by his extra-normal one, when I became dominated by him and his passion and—I still can hardly bear to say it—evil spirit, for ours is not the world of the benign vampire, but once I was, there was no turning back. I was owned, taken over. I would do whatever it was he asked of me. There was nothing too intimate, too lurid, too
outré
. I was possessed by my love for him, by the intensity of the heat between us, by the passion of sharing everything with him—from my very blood to my now-damned soul.
So when he pushed me against the wall at Carville, his hand gripping my cock through my cassock, when he jerked my arm up over my head and bit deeply through the thin fabric of my surplice, tearing the sheer white fabric, when he bit beyond the sacred cloth and into the vein beneath, I could have only one response. I could only acquiesce. I could only become whatever it was he was, whatever it was he wanted me to be. I was, then, no longer possessed by God but by Garcia. I had ceased to be a priest and had become Garcia’s—this vampire’s—acolyte.
*
No one ever fully describes the taste of blood. It is often referred to as metallic, which it is—a biting, coppery flavor. But no one ever talks about the texture or the savoring of blood. I have wondered over the years—and this comes of being far too studious a creature, I suppose—why it is that no vampire has written of the total allure of blood to…us.
It still galls me to include myself among them. I don’t think of myself as a vampire, still, despite having been one now for—well, the number of years does not matter, not really. I still look like a young man in his late twenties, and who is to say I am not? After all, one can now become quite worldly at a very young age. Not like it was when I was actually a youth. All that has really changed for me is the century in which I presently live. And of course, my companions.
But back to blood, my new holy water. As a boy, one tastes blood early. There are the schoolyard fights, the blood in the back of the throat as the just-right punch hits a lip or a nose. As men we become accustomed to blood early. I suppose women do as well, although for different reasons, but since women were never a part of my life, my mother having died in childbirth, God rest her soul, and my father having died soon after in the war and thus never remarried, I never really knew women. My uncle raised me and he preferred his women kept many and frequent and separate in a small private hotel in the Vieux Carré, or as it’s known now, the French Quarter. I entered the priesthood early, and in between there were other men who schooled me, not women. I never had a need for women. My needs were all, God forgive me, met by men.
And so blood never fazed me. One slices a finger chopping wood or runs a nail through one’s foot or is grazed by a bullet while hunting—these things happen and we men survive them. Men are brutes—we seem to like ourselves best that way. I have not seen that when we exclude women we become more refined, but rather more ourselves—and so blood is part of who we are. Because despite intellect, we are simply not that far from the cave and our most animal natures.
Yet we are not all vampires, clearly. But for those of us to whom blood is more than just the thing that pumps through our veins—for those vampires among us—blood is an aphrodisiac, it has a mesmerizing effect on us. The scent of it is intoxicating—we can smell it from yards away, begin to imagine the taste as one does when meat is cooking in a kitchen nearby. Blood has its own aroma. It isn’t a scent that most people find provocative or enticing, but I have come to yearn for it, to savor all aspects of it. And to associate it with him, with Garcia and with the way he awakened my senses even more than my formerly quite profligate ways had already done.
Blood is thick in the mouth, not thin as those who have never tasted it describe it. It is not like the juice that runs off a too-rare steak. Rather it is viscous—more like the roux we make down here in Louisiana, thickened, like a gravy.
Perhaps these food similes repulse you—I’m sorry for that. That is, of course, a nuance of sensibility. We each choose the foods we find sublime and the tastes we prefer to savor. Mine was once simply men—not their blood, but that other liquid, which it seemed I could not get enough of at one time. Now those things are one and the same: the men and the blood. Because that is the vampire spirit, is it not: all blood and sensuality and the dark steaminess of the night in which they commingle?
I cannot talk about blood or men without talking about him, of course, without talking about Garcia. Because it was my blood that beat for him first.
I don’t remember exactly when I began to long for the visits from Raul Garcia. I would sit by the window in the vestry behind the little chapel, my books open before me, and look out over what was once described upon one’s admission as “the lush and bucolic grounds of Carville, isolated discreetly beyond sugarcane fields and a veritable forest of live oaks.” That nineteenth-century-flourish in description was apt. The grounds were indeed bucolic and lush. And the place was certainly discreetly isolated.
What was really meant, the subtext behind the flourish, was that if you did not have a horse, a carriage, or later, a car, the sanatorium was far from the highway and still farther—twenty miles or more—from the city, which meant no one could just wander off, whether they were voluntarily committed like myself, or involuntarily so, as were the majority of the inmates.
But then I had never had any intention of wandering off—at least not before I met Garcia. When I settled in at Carville, I expected it to be for what would remain of my life. It was both a dedication and a penance. I thought I was renouncing all that had so inevitably led me there and in so doing would somehow mitigate all that I had done which I should not have done.
But my commitment was before I knew that I could have another life, a different life, a life beyond death, the life Garcia opened up for me just as he had opened up my vein on that evening as we walked in portentous silence to my rooms behind the chapel. Garcia was to be my savior, as I was once to be the savior of those I served at Carville. The distinction was, Garcia was indeed a savior and I, I was just a handsome young man new to the priesthood who had given himself over like Father Damien to the lepers of which we each knew ourselves to be one.
Before Garcia, it was St. Damien I had begun to venerate. Like me, he had come to care for the lepers in his youth. I doubt, however, that Damien shared my other youthful predilections. Nevertheless, I would pray fervently to him for guidance as I wandered the corridors at Carville. In his story I saw my own fate—he was not yet fifty when the disease killed him. I had become resigned and wondered if he had as well. I had re-dedicated myself as much as I could, attempting always to quell my desires and focus on the healing of souls as I was bidden to do. The service was no penance. I had always been drawn to service. My uncle told me that my mother, his sister, had been one to give of herself as well, and so I presumed it was something of her in me, my call to service. But the other—the pain of repressing my desires—that was something else again. That was, as they say, hell.