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Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 00:21:56 -0500
From: Apache
Subject: Valentine Story
this one's for Jayel
**Human Factor spoiler**
one bad word, a sexy situation.
usual copyright disclaimers
Valentine
I think I knew it could happen the first time we made love.
She was so damn sure I'd never hurt her, and I was a fool in love.
We figured we were better off planning it, since we'd gotten so close by
accident a couple times.
The deal was clear: if I couldn't handle it, if it went too far,
I was to let her go. She made me swear, like that was an act that had
meaning for me. And fuck me if it didn't. If I wasn't more frightened
than I had been of anything in many, many years.
I fed like a pig beforehand, so much that I was sluggish and
uninterested when we started. I actually wanted to sleep more than
anything.
But only until... oh god. Her warm hands on my cool body, the way
we kissed, and the knowing-- not fighting it, not begging myself somewhere
inside to intervene before I killed her. Because she doesn't, never had.
She's so sure-- she says I've handed her her life five times already and
I'm too lazy to break the habit. It was the truth as a tease, a message
signed with her big goofy grin and those baby blues... damn her, I want to
say. Mortals-- they hurt you, they do nothing but hurt you, accursed food
that talks.
hurt you like: I love her so much it hurts... my whole body was
saturated with almost uncut human blood, and yet I barely made it into her
before I needed her blood, instantly, desperately, couldn't hear anything
else, feel anything else... needed the heat of her inside me.
And she was right: I didn't kill her. Nowhere near a drain. Not
hungry, centuries of control... and that damn love. I lay there with her
in my arms unconscious, listening desperately to the strong young heart,
feeling that essence of her inside myself, knowing it was no more than a
pint, maybe a little more, no more than they give away to each other out
of impersonal kindness... and she, my golden girl, put herself under my
teeth for love, and I lay there with my arms wrapped around her, feeling
her warmth not only beneath and around me but inside me, running down my
gullet into my gut-- diffusing into what might be my soul if I had one--
I counted two hundred and ten heartbeats before she began to
stir.... opened her blue eyes to my vampire eyes and smiled the wickedest
grin compounded of I-told-you-so and take-me-I'm-yours...
She's the kind of woman who will say "I love you" only after the
man says it first, and I am or was the kind of man who will say "I love
you" either in the first five minutes of an entanglement that will be very
short-- or never. But that night-- I tried this once or twice in the
early years, but could never do it without finishing-- too young, too
little control. And in those days it mattered so little... but that
night-- I called her beloved even in languages that have been extinct for
centuries--
So we did it again. And again. And I never took her heart, never
took those gulps when the heart fails and you feel the whole life sliding
inside you, the great heat of it. Each time I had her life there with me
instead, looking at me out of those eyes, wrapping itself around me with
legs like warm rope, warm hands and mouth that left no millimeter of my
cold body untouched. From the first, I would feel her warmth inside me,
savoring the curious sensation of it and it made me wonder...
The last time I really loved a mortal, I was one. Vampires... we
have passions for each other, and I've had my fair share of those-- maybe
more than my fair share-- but there's an eerie sweetness in mortal women
that simply doesn't endure the change. They say poetry is what gets lost
in the translation-- there's some quality of womanness that does, too.
The silvery laughter of mortal girls, the measuring, desiring eyes of
mortal women-- I have thousands of them locked in my memory, in my heart,
in my blood, but of those thousands there was never one to taste and leave
alive. There was no touch, or there was an ending: a death, a
bringing-over. Hearing stories of vampires who stayed with mortals for
their lifetimes, I scoffed; it's like keeping a dog for the span of its
natural life, I thought, but what kind of stupid love is that?
I'm finding out-- or thought I was.
And then there was the day I suffered some little cut I wasn't
thinking about, and bled. And kept bleeding, and then scabbed and
bruised, all the while looking with amazement at my skin, at the blue and
purple, and feeling the tenderness of a hurt place. And it infected and
stayed infected for a whole day until I used my fangs to tear the skin
open again, let it bleed, and wrapped the wound to keep it sterile.
I couldn't have imagined this level of disbelief. To be wounded, that
happens to us, but to heal slowly-- I didn't even remember the feeling.
She is weakening me and I don't know what to do with it. I'm a
vampire, mostly a bottle baby these days, as we all are, but a vampire. I
do not share Nick Knight's wistful yearning for a mortal life with its
mortal death, his dream of the Heaven the priests promised us as little
boys. I look at this mark of nascent mortality on my arm and know I don't
want to die-- but losing her would be a death. And I've gotten used to
the idea that I can have her. She came to my arms knowing I was death and
gambled her delicate life on my strength-- and was right. And now I have
to do it, risk what she did, death, and I find that something inside me
says yes, I will, yes. Because God curse me I love her.
********
Apache
