The Twelve Hot Days of Christmas Page 9
“And I want you,” he answered back, holding me close now, the heat of the bodies around us making it almost feel like it could. Like it should. He moved against me ceaselessly, but he could not become erect without an infusion. “Let us see who we can find, shall we?”
He let me go and turned to scan the crowd of hundreds on the dance floor all around us.
Time was measured in four-beat bars, and I lost track of how many minutes passed while we each sized up the smorgasbord before us.
He scanned those at the edge of the crowd, those watching the bodies writhing, but not dancing themselves.
My eyes locked onto a blond boy coming toward me, his shirt tucked into the back pocket of his jeans as he stalked slow and pantherlike through the crowd, dancing, yet each step brought him closer to me.
I licked my lips, and the next thing I knew, he was dancing so close that I could feel the heat radiating from his bare skin. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the bit of color that had been his shirt fall from his pocket and disappear into the undertow of feet.
I wanted to touch him, to run my hands up and down his skin, to make his nipples stand up with the coolness of my fingers. I dared one touch, just a brush of my fingers over his chest, and he looked up with unbridled hunger in his eyes.
I glanced at Robert and found him watching. He gave an approving nod. I licked my lips again, and beckoned him closer with a twitch of my head. Now we’d find out if this incandescent little candle flame would flicker out if met with the prospect of the three of us together.
Robert came up behind him and we danced that way for a long minute, the boy sandwiched between us. I laughed at my own designation of him as a boy. He was certainly in his mid-twenties, and I got a feeling he might be older than he looked. Something about his eyes. Implacable like a swan’s. I reminded myself that he was to be a meal, perhaps a sex toy, and not more. Not one of my swans at all. Melancholy threatened to sweep through me, right there in the midst of the noise and energy of the dance floor.
Perhaps, I thought, I was finally tiring of eternal life. Even the early Christian mystics borrowed the pagan tales of swans and the afterlife. The Valkyries could turn into swans to bear the heroic dead to Valhalla. The Anglo-Saxons wrote in the Exeter Book of the swan being entwined with the metamorphosis of the soul after death. Pythagoras himself maintained that when great poets died, their souls were reborn in swans. Although the myth of the “swan song” is exactly that, only a myth, the romantic ideal of one final, soul-shattering performance prior to dying has been plumbed by all the great poets of English: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Tennyson.
Robert looked up at me suddenly, worry in his expression as he took in my woolgathering. He leaned close under pretense of kissing me. “We needn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re worried about. He seems quite willing.”
“I know,” I said, pulling myself together. Now was not the time to contemplate either my own death or the deaths of my previous lovers. I would surely feel much better after a little blood. “Where shall we take him?”
“I have a hotel suite,” Robert said and winked. He had clearly thought of everything.
** * *
In the taxicab to Claridge’s, Robert urged me to play. I put my hand over the bulge in our quarry’s trousers, and felt him pulsing with life. I rubbed him and he groaned, the bulge growing enticingly under my palm. Robert’s own hands circled under my jumper and pulled at my nipples. Unlike the men, I could muster some erect tissue without a fresh infusion, and I moaned softly, my fangs protruding nearly as much as the buds between Robert’s fingers. In the back of my mind, I realized we had all left our coats behind at the club, but I was too taken with my two lovers to give it much thought.
Robert and I had not stayed lovers long, when we had been before. Not every maker had such a relationship with those he or she turned. In fact, I had only had two relationships with vampires before: Robert, and all the way back when I had been newly made, with my own maker.
Robert was whispering in my ear, and I wondered if he truly could hear my thoughts. If he might have been listening to them all evening, since he had first caught the sound of his own name in my head. “You miss him still, don’t you, Mirelle?”
I swallowed a lump in my throat, squeezing the denim and flesh in my grip. “Yes. Yes, I do.” My longing for Nikolai, my rising arousal, and the undeniable tug of bloodlust made me strain toward the boy’s neck.
But Robert held me back. “Not yet, Mirelle.” He grazed my own neck with his teeth and I shivered in pleasure. “Almost there.”
He did not lie. I found it likely he had picked the place we went dancing based on its proximity to the hotel. We bustled in a side entrance and up an elevator, Robert interposing himself between me and the boy, who seemed to catch on to the game and kept peeking at me from around him with “come hither” looks.
The moment the door closed behind us in the suite, Robert began stripping me out of my clothes. The boy slipped his jeans off easily, his slim hips showing the blue tracery of his veins under his skin. He lay back against a luxuriously large bed, placing himself at the center, like the pistil of a huge cream-colored flower.
I crawled over him, every bit of my attention taken up by the morsel in front of me, under me.
I felt Robert’s weight on the bed behind me, but he did not touch. Just spoke. “Do you want him inside you? Scorching hot he’ll feel just now...”
I nuzzled the boy’s neck, intoxicated with the scent of fresh blood and the warmth of his skin. I rocked back and bent my head to his prick, slathering it until it was thoroughly wet.
They both made noises of surprise as I mounted him, neither of them quite believing, I suppose, that I would take Robert’s dirty talk so seriously. But there he was, seated deep in me, and then I bent down to bite.
I knew in just a bare moment before my fangs pierced him that all was not as it should be. But I had only that one moment to think—he has no pulse!–before my fangs and feeding instinct took over, and I bit into an enticing place.
His hardness surged inside me, thrusting up even as I tasted salt-sweetness, an ambrosial mixture of fresh human blood and a vampire’s essence. For this was no human under me, in me, but a vampire who had fed so well and so recently that he felt in all ways alive.
His flavor was heartbreakingly familiar. Nikolai...I clung to him, still feeding, but tears beginning to run down my cheeks.
“Yes.” It was Robert speaking, still. “I hope you can forgive me for leading you on, Mir...er, Sarah.” He finally remembered my current name. “But, well, Nik here has become such a chameleon, he...well...”
Nik couldn’t speak for himself, not while I was sucking at the join of his neck and shoulder and rocking against him, not while the instinct to rut had never left his body and he was thrusting more vigorously into me with each passing second. He could only moan.
When at last I raised my head, running my teeth over my fangs, his appearance had changed, and he was as I remembered him all those years ago, more than a thousand, sun-bleached and tanned. His name returned to me, though my voice was no more than a whisper. “Arkadios!”
“Melité,” he answered, nuzzling his nose in my hair and breathing deeply of my scent. “I never...”
But he did not finish his sentence, as a lustful sound took over his throat once more as I ground against him. Sex had not felt like this since—
I looked guiltily back at Robert and was surprised to find him perched on the edge of the bed, still fully clothed. He gave me a warm smile, his fangs showing as the scent of blood in the air was driving him close to the edge, too. He stood. “I’ll leave you two to get reacquainted.”
I could not protest, not for his nor for my own sake. Arkadios’s thumbs fitted into the hollows of my hips and he thrust again, taking my attention wholly for himself. “Bite me again,” he whispered, and I obliged, taking the other side of his neck this time, even as the first of many orgasms to wra
ck me that night sent tremors through me.
* * * *
It was only later, lying in the darkness of the December night with just the occasional hiss of a car going by or bursts of drunken Christmas caroling to break the stillness, that I began to cry. The melancholy that had bean threatening me all evening finally spilled over, now that I was sated and warm and reminded of how full life could be when spent in the company of someone I loved.
His fingers brushed at my cheeks and he held me tight until the fit passed like a summer storm. And then he tipped my head up to look at him. “You can tell me what’s wrong, you know.”
I shook my head, yet I spoke. “I think...it’s time I put an end to my loneliness,” I said in my misery, even as I was thinking that I would never get up the courage to go out to the desert or somewhere else where the sun would be inescapable.
“I agree,” he said softly, and when I stiffened at that, he clucked his tongue. “I know we always talked past one another, but this is ridiculous.” His tone sounded far from the angst-ridden one I expected. “Did I ever tell you why I made you?”
I shook my head, this time speechless.
“Because I could see even then that you were not made for the world of mortal men. Not in those days. It has taken all this time, a thousand years, for your sisters to finally catch up with you.” He pressed a kiss, his lips still warm and supple, against my forehead. “And yet, none of them can match you.”
My head was pillowed in the crook of his shoulder. “How many lovers have you had?”
“Thousands,” he replied, his voice heavy. “And yet, none like you.”
“Did you make others?”
“A few.”
I was silent for a few moments. “Robert...”
“I know,” he said. “And I know about your other swans. Robert helped me find you.”
I bit my lip.
“He wants you to be happy, Melité.”
“And you, what do you want, Arkadios?” I hadn’t meant for it to come out so bitterly, but it was still so hard to believe that there was an end to this road other than bitterness and the evil that would come with it.
He hushed me with a gesture rather than arguing with me. Instead, he reached for something in the side table, and then turned back to me. He put a small velvet box into my hand.
I looked up at him.
“Swans are not the only creatures tamed by golden rings,” he whispered, as I opened the box to reveal a pair of wedding rings.
“Oh, Arkadios...” I stared at the rings, then looked up to see the longing and apprehension in his eyes. He was afraid I would reject him. Robert’s jokes about the engagement ring in Harrod’s suddenly took on new meaning.
“Will you be mine forever?” I whispered, picking up the larger of the two rings.
“If you will be mine,” he answered, taking up the other.
I answered that the only way that seemed appropriate: with a kiss.
Eight Maids a’ Milking
by Jesse Blair Kensington
Last night, I dreamed of milk.
My most vivid dreams have always been about food.
Once, I had a dream about chocolate mousse swirling around my nipple. Another time I dreamed Brad Pitt was spreading warm honey on my body. He lapped it off me until I awoke shivering in orgasm. I also once dreamed of spreading myself over a table of desserts while being fucked by a masked stranger.
In my dream of milk, first I become a ladle in a bathtub full of warm bubbly milk. Someone is using me for stirring. Then I am myself, a naked woman, and someone is pouring the milk over me. Her hands are beautiful, with clean short nails, and long, distinctly feminine fingers. I struggle through the waterfall of milk to see her face, but as is the way of dreams, I can’t at first.
She gently and slowly pours the white liquid over my breasts until my nipples become hard. She giggles—and I know who she is.
She is Arianna, one of the women I am here with for the three-day holiday baking retreat. The laughter spills out of her like a fountain. I love the sound of it.
In my dream, she reaches for one of my nipples and pulls it, twists harder than I expect. I am flushed with excitement and embarrassment. A woman has never touched me like this before. I am strangely aroused and my body is so comforted by the frothy milk that I take pleasure in the stinging pain of her playful nipple teasing.
The next thing I know, she is in the bathtub with me. I see her face clearly now. Yes. She is Arianna, with long dark hair, deep brown eyes, and lips shaped like a porcelain doll’s with a full, upturned mouth. So different than my blond, blue-eyed self. Her hair is now speckled with drops of white, thick milk and as she looks seductively at me, she kisses me, her tongue probing deeper and deeper into my mouth.
Tongue? No, wait, it’s not a tongue, but a cock. It’s hard and long and suddenly shooting its hot, salty offering into my mouth. As the shaft slides from my lips, I realize it is Sanj.
Sanj, the teacher, the baker extraordinaire, the man who insisted we milk the goddamned cows to use for our cream. I hated milking them, hated the smell of the animals, and afterwards my hands ached—all that squeezing and pulling.
But it had ultimately been worth it. I had never had milk straight from a cow, unpasteurized. In all my years of cooking and baking, this was delightfully new and raw, and I simply wanted more.
In my dream, I am still in the bathtub and Sanj lifts my chin gently after releasing himself from my mouth. Still in the milk, he wraps his brown body around my pale, freckled one. His skin glistens with the pearls of the white liquid. He whispers in my ear, something I understood in my dream, but couldn’t remember when I later sat in class watching him stir the cream.
“You stop just when stiff peaks begin to form,” he was telling us. “Otherwise you will get butter.” We are making pastry cream.
We were all intent on our own bowls of the smooth fluff. I glanced up and saw Arianna looking at me and felt embarrassed. There was something about the way she looked at me. Was she checking out my breasts? Christ, that dream was really messing with my head.
My eyes went back to the pastry cream. I stirred it gently and watched as the yellow mound became white, which is what I wanted. Sanj came up behind me.
“Nice rhythm you have there,” he said.
I could feel his warm breath on the back of my neck, which made me involuntarily tingle. He reached over me to grab a towel and I was positive I felt his crotch brush my back.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“When you are finished, place plastic wrap tightly over the bowl and we will refrigerate it,” Sanj said, his Indian accent present, but barely traceable.
He wasn’t supposed to be here this weekend. We had all signed on for a weekend with Chef Ben DeFranco. But he had become sick just before and sent Sanj in his place. At first we were disappointed—then we got a look at him. Sarah had done some research on him. He was actually a doctor in India and baking was his passion. He was also a practitioner of tantric yoga—his family’s heritage extended back more than a thousand years. They were members of this increasingly smaller sect in Northern India who still practiced the ancient art.
“Milk is sacred to the Hindu,” Sanj announced. “In some parts of India, there is a belief that you must keep your cow happy because when you drink her milk, you are drinking her essence. Of course, you want to drink happiness.”
“Lord Krishna is said to have appeared five thousand years ago as a cowherd, and is often described as bala-gopala, ‘the child who protects the cows.’ Another of Krishna’s holy names, Govinda, means ‘one who brings satisfaction to the cows.’ Other scriptures identify the cow as the mother of all civilization, its milk nurturing the population.”
“I can relate to that,” Lydia said and laughed. Others joined in. Lydia had nursed three of her four children. One of them did not wean until she was three.
Sanj smiled and looked flustered. He went on as he helped Arianna with her stirring.
Most of us grew up in the city and still lived there—Pittsburgh, to be exact. We had never seen a cow close up, let alone milked one. I, for one, did not care to do it again. Arianna was new to the group. Since high school, our baking circle got together every year to bake and exchange cookies for the holidays. There had been seven of us, now eight.
None of us was married—anymore. We’d seen each other through marriages, babies, divorces, and deaths. Now we were all single—whether widowed like myself, divorced, or just never married. We ranged in ages from our mid-thirties to late forties.
It was Lydia who’d entered us into the contest to travel to Vermont and spend the weekend baking with the chef. Usually, we made the same kind of cookies year after year. Lydia made her poppy seed roll and I made poppy seed cakes. Janice made cherry squares; Karen made nut cups; Lucy made jelly rolls; Sarah, brownies; Marty, lady fingers; Jenna baked baklava; and Arianna made chocolate peanut butter balls last year, which was the first year she moved to Pittsburgh.
She was the youngest and certainly the most beautiful. If I told my shrink about my dream, I know what he’d say: “This does not suggest latent homosexuality. Arianna represents your younger self in your subconscious.”
It was pretty bad when your relationship with your shrink was so close that you could fill in his sentences for him and diagnose yourself. But Dr. Jenkins had been a lifesaver for me when Dan died, and I wasn’t about to change doctors.
Sanj was helping Sarah manage the plastic wrap and Lydia was cracking a joke. I was deep in the cream, looking at the swirls of it and remembering the way the milk felt in my dream—heavier than water, silky and smooth. I poked my finger in the white stuff and plunged it into my mouth.