TheVampireandtheMouse (3 page)

Over the next month, Ben came to me every night.

We walked together in the light of the moon and
streetlights. He held me when I cried about what I’d done and he told me it was
all okay. After two weeks, as though he’d been holding himself back, he
caressed the back of my head and guided me toward him and kissed me
passionately. I moved my hands across his strong back and felt the muscles as
our lips brushed hungrily. I realized I had been holding back too. Wanting him.
Needing him.

He wanted to do more, but I told him not yet. I wasn’t
ready. I had only had two lovers in my life, and I had only been with each of them
a few times. I was inexperienced, and being with somebody like Ben filled me
with anxiety that made me feel timid and weak. Each night, as he walked me
home, he’d say, “Invite me in.” And I’d say, “Not tonight.” That was the good
thing about vampires, I had to invite him in each time he visited; otherwise,
he was physically incapable of crossing the threshold. He could defy physics,
but it turned out physics could defy him as well.

* * * * *

One night, as the moonlight framed his shadow, casting it
into my threshold, almost as though part of him were allowed entry, he said, “I
ask every night only because I want to be with you. I’ve watched you so long
from afar, it is strange to actually be with you here, in person. Strange but
amazing. So do not think I am trying to force anything on you. I just…” It
seemed as though he were about to say something, then he trailed off. “I just
want to be with you,” he finished.

“I understand,” I told him. “But it’s hard for me. This is
all so new to me.”

He reached his hand out to me and I stepped onto the
concrete and took it. I rested my head on his chest and he stroked the back of
my head, moving his hand through my hair. I looked up, and I could see that his
eyes were fixated on the inside of my house with a sort of obsessive stare. I
adored him for that stare—adored how much he wanted to be with me.

I looked up and kissed him under the cheek, his shaved beard
bristling against my mouth. He kissed me on the forehead and held me close to
him. I would like to say I heard his heartbeat, but there wasn’t one to speak
of.

Just a warm place.

* * * * *

That month comes to me in smells and sounds and sights that
melt together and burn into my memory. Ben’s arms around me, warm, safe, as the
moon gleams down and its light bounces off car windows and reflects off
storefronts, and the soft patter of summer rain as we sit beneath the shelter
in a park, kissing and laughing and talking occasionally. It comes to me in
Ben’s sharp teeth, illumed bright white in the streetlights. It comes to me in
the longing I experienced during work, unlike anything I’d felt before, knowing
that when I got home, he’d be there soon, when it got dark.
Knock, knock
,
and there he was, smiling and saying, “I told you’d I’d come back.”

* * * * *

Once we went to the cinema to watch a vampire film. That was
when the absolute objective absurdity of my situation revealed itself to me.
Sitting in a cinema with a vampire beside me watching a vampire wooing a girl.
I
was
that girl, except she wasn’t a killer, and Ben was normal and nice
and funny, not creepy and repressed like this weirdo seemed to be. With Ben
there was no
I’m going to hurt you
. He had been a vampire for centuries.
“I can control my blood-urges,” he told me. “I’ve gone weeks without drinking
blood. It isn’t fun, but I can do it. Now I just hunt and kill when I need to,
to keep my energy up.”

When he talked about
hunting and killing
it made me
feel uncomfortable, but I never asked further questions. I could tell he’d be
okay with it by the way he looked at me, his eyes saying,
It’s fine, go
ahead
. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to know what he did when I wasn’t with
him. I suppose that says a lot about me, but I don’t care. I wanted my time
with Ben to be only about us, and anything else could go to hell as far as I
was concerned.

* * * * *

In the film the vampire made a speech about how he’d been
lost until he found the girl. Ben leaned across and spoke into my ear. His arm
was around me, cradling my shoulder, and I felt safe, content. “This film has
been rubbish,” he whispered. “But I think it’s redeemed itself with that
speech. Because that’s exactly how I feel. Before I met you I was lost. Now I
found you,
I
am found. I know how that sounds—”

“Cheesy?” I interjected.

He playfully nudged me, and I nudged him back. I giggled as
he tickled my armpits—a place he
knew
I was ticklish—and then he stopped
and I breathed heavily. People in the cinema looked around at the shrill noise
of my high-pitched giggles. But neither of us cared. We were too consumed with
each other.

“Cheesy, yes,” he said. “But just because something is
cheesy, it doesn’t mean it’s not true. Before I saw you, I felt like an
outsider. I still felt like one, even after I saw you. Because I was only
watching
—”

“
Stalking
,” I teased.

He nudged me again. “But now you’ve accepted me. You are the
first person in centuries to accept me, and I-I value that more than I can ever
say.”

I kissed him on the shoulder and moved closer to him. He
brought his arms around me, and we watched the rest of the film like that, as
if we were curled up on the sofa. In that moment, I could feel the whole world
whirling by, and I knew we were oblivious to it.

* * * * *

After the film we walked through the streets as we always
did, going nowhere, not
needing
to go anywhere, just happy to be with
each other.

We were next to the lake that sat in the middle of the city,
overlooking it from the bridge. Lights from the adjacent buildings shone down
and lit the water so it looked as if it were on fire, innumerable electric
flames, swimming. The beauty of the moment, the lights, Ben’s mouth as his warm
breath flowed out onto my skin, overcame me and a tear slid down my cheek.
Embarrassed, I turned my head. But Ben only stroked the tear away with his
thumb and held me close to him. “I love you,” he whispered.

There it was, quick, stark. I hadn’t known he would say such
a thing. Feel such a thing. But he had and he did. And then I looked inside myself
and I saw that I loved him too. It was crazy and illogical and it made no
goddam sense. We had known each other for a month, just a month, but I think
the circumstances of our meeting had a lot to do with our feelings. We met when
I’d done something totally out of character, a transformative moment from which
I had emerged undeniably changed. I went into the underpass an
office mouse
and I came out… Well, I was still an
office mouse
, but I was now an
office mouse with a dark secret, one I couldn’t tell anybody, one only this
strange, mysterious, loving, strong man knew.

He was staring at me intensely, his eyes burning with sudden
feeling. I buried my head in his chest and wept. “I love
you
,” I said,
through the tears. “Thank you so much, for what you did, for everything. Thank
you for being with me, for letting me talk to you about what happened. Thank
you, Ben. Thank you so much.”

“Shh,” he said. “You don’t need to thank me. I did what I
did for you because I saw something in you. We are not so different, you know.
We’re both killers. We both have that instinct, that animal feeling that comes
over us. You know what I’m talking about. I believe I was unfit for this world
before I found you. Maybe you were too before—”

“Before I knew you,” I wept.

“Yes,” he said, and kissed me on the head.

I thought back to the underpass, only a month ago, and I
knew he was right. That feeling, the gruesome, intoxicating anger that had come
over me. The will to hurt, to cut, to watch the blood. The will to throw my
entire character away and take up something new. “The will to change,” I said
quietly.

“Yes, exactly,” he said. “It’s the will to change yourself,
your circumstance. It’s the will to be unafraid.”

“It doesn’t make it right,” I said.

“Maybe not, but right and wrong don’t matter to me.” He was
quiet for a long time, and then said forcefully, “I
love
you, Kirsty. I
know this is fast and I know it’s not normal, whatever the hell that means. I
know I’m a vampire and you’re a human and…I’ve done things in my life, things
that might make you hate me. But right now, right here, I am in love with you,
and your love is more important to me than anything.” He touched my face. “Than
anything,” he repeated, under his breath, as though it was a surprise even to
himself.

We walked down the streets until we were at my door. From
inside I could hear Blinky and Rocky mewing and pawing at the window, the
nail-on-glass sounds punctuating the otherwise silent night. “Invite me in,” he
said as he always did.

I coughed, cleared my throat, and then, with an effort that
confused me, spoke: “Come in, Ben. Come in, my love.”

He touched my hair and kissed me, breathing deeply and
pressing our bodies together. I breathed with him and then I was moving, and it
was only after he laid me down I realized he’d carried me to the bedroom. He
stood over me, sentinel-like, and took off his t-shirt. His skin was smooth and
black and covered in faded pink scars. His body was muscled and strong. I took
him in with my eyes and he took me in with his.

“Take off your clothes,” he said.

I fumbled with my bra. My heart was beating and my palms
were sweating. I was so damned
nervous
. I hated myself for the nerves,
but they couldn’t be helped. Fear of disappointment, I guess. I didn’t want to
disappoint him. Eventually my clothes were off and I lay there, naked, as he
gazed at me.

He went on his knees before me and bit my leg softly,
dragging his teeth along the skin. I knew that if he applied just a bit more
pressure, he could kill me. But I knew my Ben would never do that. I was
putting myself at the mercy of a vampire. Was that normal? In fact, did I care
if it was normal? Nope. His teeth caressed my skin, pleasure tingling up my inner
thigh as he got closer to my lips. The pleasure got closer and closer to it and
then withdrew, just as I began to ache with longing.

I moaned and nudged his head with my knee, surprising myself
with my insistence. I was hot and I wanted him to touch my lips but he kept
dragging his teeth up and down my leg, coming right next to it and then moving
away. Up and down, up and down, up and down. And then, when I was nudging his
head again and again, he pressed his tongue down on my clit.

His tongue was hot and wet. He pressed down hard, making my
legs spasm. He kept it like that for a long time, tongue pressed against me,
and then he moved it side to side and up and down and around. I couldn’t feel
the nuance of the movements, just a heat and a tingle. He grabbed my legs, his
powerful hands holding me in place, and pushed his head next to my clit and
sucked on it. He sucked on it hard and I closed my eyes and all I could see was
white-hot pleasure. I pictured him as he had been only minutes before, standing
over me, shirtless, scars older than anything, muscles tensed under his skin,
powerful, powerful. “Ah, ah,” I moaned, as he licked me harder. “Yes, yes,
yes
.”

He moaned as I moaned and I closed my eyes tighter and
focused on the heat and that image of him. He kept licking and moaning and
grasping my thighs so hard I could almost feel them bruising. I kept focusing,
heat, pleasure, heat, heat, heat.

“Yes, yes, fuck, yes,
yes
,
yes
.”

The orgasm surged through my body as a thought moved through
my mind:
This is a vampire doing this.
That thought urged the orgasm on.
It enveloped my whole body, a blanket of fire. I had not had an orgasm for more
than two months, and now I wondered why I had waited so long. This feeling was
amazing, sensational, otherworldly. There was nothing bad about this feeling. I
just wanted more, more and then it passed, as it had to, and I stared down at
Ben.

He stood up and pulled down his trousers, and his cock flung
up, huge. I smiled and looked at him. He looked hungry. I put his cock in my
mouth and moved my tongue around it. I could feel a vein going down one side.
It was so, so big. I wondered if it would hurt. But I didn’t care if it hurt. I
loved this man. And he was a vampire. If it hurt a little, it would feel good
too.

I grabbed his waist and moved my head up and down. I moved
my tongue back and forth and rubbed his cock with my hand as I sucked it. He
rocked with the motion of my movements, pushing in and out of my mouth.

“Touch yourself,” he said.

His voice was so full of commanding authority that to do
anything else but touch myself was absurd, unthinkable. I moved my fingers over
my clit and rubbed it softly as I sucked and licked him. I moved my hand around
the shaft, grabbing his cock. It was
hard
, ready to go inside me, but I
kept sucking because his moans were so full of pleasure.

I looked up at him. “I’m ready,” I said.

He stroked my cheek. “Okay,” he said.

Then he put me on my front and parted my legs with his knee.
He slid inside me. Pleasure exploded as he thrust into me. His cock pounded
into me and he kissed the back of my neck, warm, tingly kisses. I bit down on
the soft fabric of the pillow as he made love to me.

He brought his face close to mine as we made love. His cock
was pounding into me harder and with more passion than I had ever experienced.
I came. Only a little one. A shudder, heat, a pulse that moved over my skin,
and then it was gone. I don’t think he even noticed. He just kept fucking me.

I could feel his breath on my shoulder and the hard, cool
touch of his teeth against my skin. “When I come, I’m going to bite you, okay?”
he breathed.

“Yes, yes,” I moaned, only half listening.

He was like an animal set loose when I said that. His
thrusts got even quicker. I don’t know how he moved so fast. No human could’ve
moved with such speed, such
passion
. He rubbed my shoulders and thrust
into me quicker and quicker. “I love you,” I moaned into the pillow, but I
don’t think he heard. He put his hands on my bum and massaged the flesh and let
his whole, hard body fall upon me. He moved his hands over my back and through
my hair. His hands were warm and so was the pleasure between my legs. The
warmth joined together to create something electric that surged through me.

I bit the pillow and moaned into it. I reached my hand back,
not caring that the angle was awkward, and felt his fingers interlock with
mine. He pulled on my hand as he thrust, harder and deeper, and his moans, and
his breaths became more labored. I knew he was going to finish soon, and the
thought thrilled me. I wanted him to finish
inside
me.

Then a sensation not unlike a very hard punch hit me in the
shoulder.

I turned my head and saw that his teeth were in my skin, and
his teeth were coated in my blood. He was feeding on me, his eyes wild with
euphoria. I came again. Hard. When the orgasm passed, he pulled his teeth from
me and lay beside me, breathing.

“I love you,” he said tenderly.

“I love you too.”