EPITHALAMION

by Apache

Content:
Het
Vachon
Implied or Graphic Sexual Situations
No Violence

She wandered lonely as a cloud, which in San Francisco is not hard because in any given year you can pretty much count the days without fog on your thumbs.  She was somewhere in North Beach, but who gave a fuck?  There was a dive.  It was down some stairs.  It was called Chat Noir, a name so endearingly tacky it had to be visited.

The place was full of revenant hipsters, like some time-warped hepcat dumping ground -- beatniks from the Sausalito era, hippies from the Haight's psychedelic glory days, drag queens from the pre-plague heyday of the Castro.  It was the Crossroads Inn of Lost Cool-Jerks, with a house band.  She loved it right away.

And besides, she was about to become a fucking relic herself.  Might as well check this out -- her future scene, right?  Last hurrah of the cool chick, before the Dyke-Bitch Kulchur Goddesses showed up and forcibly scraped the blue glitter off her nails and ripped the nose ring right out of her nostril with no sterile swab....  Sure.  No more stoned out faux-sushi post-post-Retro vernissages; no more twenty four hour couch pig bouts with Noir movies and cheap Rose to wash down those prawn and pesto burritos; no more Polaroids of Annie Sprinkle's precious inner pearl; no, she'd be shooting mini-cam footage of family luaus by the pool starting any day now...  Time to get wasted, once for the road.  She went in deeper, and came in sight of the noise--

It was a band alright, an ordinary bar band, which in San Francisco always means a pretty damn good band.  And with them, but not with them -- over on the edge of the stage and pointedly paying no attention to anything but himself -- some skinny hostile guy with long black hair and black eyes burning out of a pale-skinned face.  A guy with fingers that if they could do to a woman what they were doing to that old Gretsch....

Isabella, for that is the name of our errant nose-ringed princess, ordered a drink and settled in at the bar, perched on a barstool in a sprayed on chick dress of deepest, thinnest black, and sandals.  Like the guitarist, she had relic-of-the-Sixties Beat le bangs, and like him, she looked like she'd barely been born when the best of the Sixties -- Hendrix and Joplin and Morrison -- had hit the floor like puppets with cut strings.  Unlike the guitarist, she had howling red hair and all twenty of her nails were painted a shade of blue that could hold its head up proudly in a bowling alley.  She had a supple, slender body, and she poured it over the seat and rungs of the barstool artfully, profiling a little for the band.  For him.

He was so much better than the rest of the band, and the other guys were on such a cheerful, mellow high -- probably just weed and free beer from the house -- that they were letting him run.  They'd play a verse or two of some song and then give him the bridge to improvise on, letting him fly and playing follow the leader.  Even then, they couldn't really follow him.  Those fingers knew a lot.

Sipping at a drink, and then at another one, Isabella kept right on wondering how much more they knew, what other instruments they could pull a ragged, wild music from -- and often as not, when her eyes ran up from the fingers to his face, she'd find those black eyes fixed on her.  He probably noticed when I checked out that nice lumpy area in his jeans, she thought philosophically.  What the fuck.  Maybe he's even straight, who knows?

So it didn't come as a complete surprise to either of them that the guitar player slid onto the stool next to hers when the set ended.  He looked even better close up, which seemed like one of God's little mercies.

'If he says something incredibly stupid, my heart will break into a million cheap plastic pieces,' she thought.

But he didn't say anything.  He waved at the bartender, who wordlessly brought him a glass of red wine and didn't mention anything about paying.  Then he started drinking by delicately sniffing at the wine and tasting it lightly, meditatively.

What're you, checking out the damn bouquet?  Isabella thought.  You're worried that wasn't a good year for Chateau Russian River with the Cowshit Strained Out?  But she stayed quiet, and the man didn't say anything, and didn't seem to be performing a wine snob act for her after all.  They just sat there and drank next to each other for a long time.  He had a way of dipping his finger into his glass and sucking the wine off it that would have amused her if it weren't making her hotter than Chernobyl.  The man had the lips of a baby -- a staggeringly sexy, polymorphously perverse baby -- and Isabella was thinking hard about being that finger in her next life.

Which brought her back to her original line of thought, and made her look hard at his face.  He didn't say a thing, just looked back.  She was the one who couldn't take the heat, finally, though there was nothing in his eyes:  not welcoming, not teasing, not rejecting, not even bored.  Just there.  But pretty intensely there.  Isabella's eyes dropped, and she swivelled to rest her bare arms on the cool wood of the bar.

"I'm dead," she said sadly.

He liked this.  His eyes flared open with pleasure, flashing so wide you could see the whites all the way around what looked like pure black irises.  In fact, the whole man was a study that way -- chiaroscuro, dense black hair that ran past his shoulders and fabulous full eyebrows, dead white skin, black and white eyes, impossibly thick black eyelashes any sensible whore would kill for, pale white hands with shadows lining in and out as the long fingers moved, black clothes.  Only the lips altered the equation -- lush, red, young Elvis lips, Elvis way before the downers and the fatal constipation, the King from the era of oily hips and lightning in his crotch -- those kind of lips.

Her elbows slid out a little further on the bar, and the insides of her upper arms pressed onto the cold, waxy wood, giving her goosebumps.  The big, slightly bulgy eyes flashed again before the lids drooped back down, and he brought the glass to his mouth for a considerable swallow.

"Gettin' married," she said.  "Hitched.  Ball and chain.  'Hi honey, I'm ho-ome, what's for dinner?' 'Soup's on, pumpkin.' 'To the mooo000n, Alice.' Married.  Two point three kids of unspecified gender."

He smiled.  "Lu-cee, what have ju done?" he imitated, grinning. 

"Zactly," she said.  "Wind up in Mill Valley reading the Whole Earth Catalogue.  Planting seeds.  Something like peas or acorn squash.  I don't even know what acorn squash is... I mean, does it grow up to be mighty oak squash?"

"And what were you before you became dead?" he mocked.

"Painter," she said.  She wiggled the tips of her perma-stained fingers -- you could never get it all off, unless maybe you did water ballet in turpentine.

"Artist," he said in a slow whisper.  She thought she saw a red fire behind the black in his eyes for a second but he blinked and it was gone.  Trick of the light, she thought.

"I'll probably keep painting.... sitcoms.  Things with children with huge eyes and droopy diapers.  Fuckin' floral motifs."  She tried to think of the worst possible fate.  "Kittens and puppies," she said bitterly.

The smile got wider.  The eyes looked as warm as black eyes could get.  She felt encouraged.

"When what I really want is to grab some rock god by his hair--" she eyed him "-- his long, black, scruffy hair, and drag him off somewhere...."

"I think I can help," said the guitarist coolly, still smiling.  The eyebrows quirked upward and added a quixotic air to the reserved smile.  "See, I'm kind of dead myself."

~ ~ ~

He had a big Triumph motorcycle and enough consideration that he gave her not only the one helmet but also his leather jacket to wear. 

"Why aren't you freezing?" she yelled into his ear as they were blasting through the fog into a stinky warehouse district somewhere near the Embarcadero.

"Dead, remember?" he yelled back, flashing the extremely white teeth in a grin that created a very deep dimple that was etched very dark by the stubble of his black beard.  Isabella was definitely on her way to commit at least one of the Seven Deadlies; she hoped he was going to be as good as he looked.

He had a loft, if you wanted to call it that.  Another name for it might be abandoned storage space; they were down in the area that Izzy associated vaguely with huge mounds of fish and containerized cargo.  You could also call it a rat ranch, she thought, judging by the little pile of rat bodies she saw outside.

There was a car elevator with no walls, and it lifted them to a level of pitch blackness.  "Stay here," he ordered when the lift stopped, and moved off into the space beyond.  "No problem," she muttered.  One by one, candles flared in the dark, and her guitar god eventually came back, holding one of them, to lead her towards the center of the giant room.

Inside, there turned out to be an area curtained off with oriental rugs slung over twine that was strung between vertical structural members, and inside that there was actually a little furniture.

Isabella looked around.  "You got anything to drink?"  This clearly was not your ordinary first date, but jeez....

"Nope," he said cheerfully.

"Not even water?"  He mouth was suddenly very dry.  Headlines were drifting through her memory, and they all started "*Girl Found...*"

He frowned.  "Uh..." and went off between the rugs, returning a moment later with a gallon bottle of designer water.  "I brush my teeth with this," he offered.

"Oh yeah?  Let's see," she said capriciously.

This produced that flashing grin again, and the sexy big dimple.  She got up from the scruffy couch and walked over, setting her fingertips to those lips-- "open wide," she said mockingly.

He was looking at her funny -- hey, you started it, she thought -- but let her push the lips ups.  A full set, very bright, and no cavities... now that was weird.  What'd he do, floss in the womb? 

"My, what nice big teeth you have, grandfather," she murmured.

"The better to eat you with, my dear," he responded obediently.

Now she grinned.  "Go-o-o-od," she purred, and gave his ear a little nibble before pulling back.

The guy just froze, standing almost bizarrely still, looking at her very intensely.  The water bottle suddenly looked stupid in his hand, out of place, wrongly normal in a tilted world -- and yet...

Fight fear with fire, she thought.  "After all, you can't be a true rock god unless you can fuck me senseless," she murmured, while some Donna Reed voice in the back of her head remarked that this was not the most ladylike approach to a new gentleman, now was it, dear? -- Or was he gay?

He went John Wayne:  "Wa-al, ma'am, I b'leeve I can oblige yuh," he drawled.  She smiled.  That did it: Not gay... and... his posture had unlocked and become a kind of slouch -- but a *ready* slouch, if there was such a thing...

"My heroes have always been cowboys," she said ironically, then cracked a smile -- but it was time for a kiss, fuck the quote-fest.  She reached out and snagged his hair to pull him over -- hell, he's a rock god, you can do what you want with him...

The lips-- they felt like they looked.  Big, soft, puffy pillows that her own sank into as comfortably as a road-weary trucker dropping his ass into the armchair at home -- and his tongue -- cold, cold mouth like he'd been chewing ice cubes, but maybe it was from sucking in the foggy wind and besides who cared, tongue like an otter, an eel...

"Oh babe," she breathed when she came up for air, "I have *got* to know your name."

This amused him.  "Why?"  He was hanging on to a strand of her red hair, running it between his fingers.

"Because I am going to be the president of your fan club," she murmured.  She'd had enough oxygen by then, and reattached herself to those cumulus lips, thunderheads, pouty stormclouds to float on with icy electric fire inside-- now he pulled off, but only to lick and nibble his way to her ear.

"Javier Vachon, at your service," he whispered.

"Isabella Saddler," she whispered back.  "Very pleased to make your acquaintance, and don't stop now--"  Her hands were on his back, running down the thin shirt, pulling the tail out of his jeans, following the flat curve of his ass down to his legs --

He had lean, sinewy, long muscles, snaky or seal-like, and he was turning out to be pleasantly flexible, judging from the way his hips were undulating, scraping back and forth across hers-- he was getting hard, and she'd been hot before they left the bar , and fuck foreplay, she thought, how fast can I get this guy out of his clothes?  Because there was a brass bed with enough blankets to take the chill off the night, and it was *right there*...

She peeled his shirt up and reached around for the belt on his Levis; except for another flash of the large eyes, he fell to passively letting her do it; once the jeans were falling he reached down and began to slide the slinky chick dress right up her body, never mind a zipper, never mind anything, and peeled her naked in seconds-- rock gods, she thought, they get a lot of practice, and on the next breath she gasped out-- "wait, protection--"

"Clean as a whistle, ma'am," came the John Wayne voice low in her ear, and for some fucking stupid reason she was sure he was actually telling the truth... One hand went behind her waist to pull her close then, and the other slid down to part her legs, to reach for her cunt and lay its long fingers along the hair, then curl them in, then begin to rub and probe -- she brought her leg up over his forearm just for fun and bent the knee to wrap the calf around his back, drooping the other knee to rub her hips against his cock, which actually didn't seem to need any encouragement --

Cold, the guy's whole body was cold, but he was making her so hot inside by now she didn't much care, lunging forward on her toes onto his hand and to get up to his face again, to his lips.  She fastened onto his mouth like a feeding tube, forcing back into him the hot passion he was giving her, reaching down between their bodies to wrap her hand around his cock, grab it, scrape at it, caress it, cradle the balls below--

With a groan he lifted her all the way off the floor, his mouth finding and closing around one of her nipples with a hard hunger, suckling and then sucking air in around it to make it cold and impossibly tight.  The strong, slender guitar fingers explored her cunt almost tentatively and then suddenly he slammed the heel of his hand against her clit, jamming his fingers into her hard, clenching his hand as if about to pull something out of her, some rabbit, some magic, and it was as good as magic because she came, violently, moaning into his ear which she was also lapping in the odd moments when she could remember who she was, what she was doing, and how to be more than just some receptacle for a blinding white inner fire of pleasure...

And then the hand came out of her and the sticky fingers let her slither to the floor; he crouched with her as she slid down, the mouth releasing her nipple and moving to the other, not with vicious need but delicately, teasingly, coaxing the last waves of orgasm out of her for a long minute while she simply bent her head over his shoulder and dug her face into the soft messy nest of his hair.  Eventually, he rose to his full height and she tipped her head to look at the black eyes -- dancing and burning and far away all at once, eyes like a kaleidoscope where no single thing is the truth-- but the head bent to kiss her again, and the hand on her ass had not let go; he was backing up, they were going to the bed... oh good, thought what was left of her to be coherent.

He wanted her on top right away, fine with her, and she started to settle onto him but he grasped her hips and pulled her forward, held her cunt over his mouth and lowered her, investigating the inner architecture of her body, tasting labia, nosing the soft froth of her pubic hair and pushing through to find the skin of her cunt lips and part them, the inner labia and part them, licking them separate and going past, entering her with his tongue, finding the clitoris, teasing and slurping, and dropping her down onto his mouth to suck hard until she was screaming with it, feeling the liquid heat of her coming even in the cramping soles of her feet -- And then, still holding her hips hard, he flipped them both over, easily, abruptly, so that she was on her back and he was lying between her legs, his own legs sticking out over the edge of the bed, his face still buried in her cunt, still sucking so hard she could barely feel, now lifting her ass well off the bed and tilting his head to come in below her, one hand holding the weight and the other pressing on top of her as if to hold her down, as if she might give up even a second of this and try to move away; there was another pang and more sucking and another great rush of heat; she could feel his hair draped over the tops of her thighs, his hands curled around her ass and her hips and his mouth pressed harder, inward, and the sucking was harder and hotter and he was growling in his sucking like an animal, a deep slow guttural growl that was like a purr played basso profundo, a sound of infinite pleasure and satiation as his mouth surged against her and his tongue and his body pulsed with ecstasy, and she groaned again like it was the last noise left in her body--

Somewhere in the middle of the blind deaf firework of her coming was a sharp pain and she didn't know if it was outside or inside, some pull or bite or the discovery that a ragged fingernail had scraped inner skin off the vagina-- she didn't really care and anyway couldn't see; in the second when her eyes flickered open and looked there was only the rise of her pelvis and his black hair splayed across her legs and her crotch, vivid against the red of her own hair, nothing to see but the top of his head like it was part of her own body, moving against her, rocking slightly where his mouth was learning things about her anatomy God and her fiance had never learned, pulling, and sucking, and the hot rush... and now there was the warm sensation of a trickle, and the gentle tip of his tongue following the trickle between her lips, between and around the inner labia, catching everything, lapping her up like a cat with a soft, wide tongue, no a teasing, darting small tip of a tongue, and the flowing of the heat and an ache at the clitoris where he'd been pulling hard, hard, and the big soft lips coming back to fully envelop the cunt, lick away the last of everything as the wild orgasm began to actually end and his resonant growl faded to silence... He took one of his hands away from her then, the upper one that had been holding her hips cocked at an angle, and she heard a little grunt from him and then a small smear right where she was sore, right above the little hot button of clit, just a small warm smear-- the only warm thing about him so far -- and the tentativeness of it made her want again, want more, more, want to be filled, want to have the intimate combat and dance of a man inside her...

And now he let her hips down on the bed, eyes closed, sliding his hands up her body, following them blindly to come above her, pulling forward on his arms to lie down along her, stretching the slender body to match the length of hers and simply lie down on top of her.  She began to explore him by feel and sight, running her hands over his sides, his back, his ass, up to his shoulders that were still somewhat tense, onto his neck.  The skin of his face was completely saturated with her fluids, and she obliged him by lifting his head in her hands and giving it a little tongue bath, finding her pubic hairs sticking to the stubble of his beard, tasting herself on his cheeks, his nose, his chin.  She licked his lips but he wouldn't open them, nor his eyes, letting her lap at his eyelids and suck at the furry black eyebrows without even a flicker of looking of his own, his lips pulling into a small, happy smile but refusing to part for a kiss.  When she followed the angle of his jaw to his ear, he fell down onto her again, heavily, pressing every inch of himself against her length as if feeling every bit of her equally, his face buried against her neck, his breathing strangely cool on her ear... and now he kissed it, kissed the lobe, kissed behind the ear where there is a patch of bare skin before the hair starts, kissed the join of her jaw and her neck.... soft, feather kisses, almost gratitude or kindness kisses, not burning... but then came the nips, and the sound of a little snorting laugh right next to her ear, as if he'd read her mind and knew damn well she wasn't done with him, was saying, 'nor me with you, babe, not to worry.' She pushed him off her, then, to get a better look at her very own rock god.

He was pliant, willing, and rolled off on his back and just lay there with his eyes closed as she sat up a little and took a good long look.  Pretty skinny, but that was the pot calling the kettle black, and well muscled anyway, thin skin, almost no subcutaneous fat except on the legs, which meant that everywhere there was a bone or a muscle, there was texture, and a shadow, and something to feel... Her eyes took him apart and put him together like something that could be painted, second nature to her, finding where the light was on him now, knowing what the light would do to him if he moved or stood up, half unconsciously translating him into sunlight or fluorescent light and thinking candles were right for him, candles or the red and blue cheapo lighting on the stage at the club, light he ignored like he'd ignored everything, even the rest of the band-- everything until her.  Under her hands, his gut rose and fell with a deep breath, a cool sigh of contentment, and his eyes cracked open for a split second to look at her as she loomed over him, watching in that second, his slitted eyes catching a yellow flare from one of the candles as it dropped a gob of wax, then snapping shut.

She liked that, and her hands roved his torso, riding the rises and falls of pecs, ribs, gut, groin, checking the soft bristle of a plot of flat black hair over his breastbone, the thin line that led to his navel and flared out again over the gut, and narrowed to run down his groin.  He lay there and just let her do this, never opening his eyes, never opening his mouth again, once or twice making a sound of "mmmm" but never again the fierce, sexual growl.  And then her fingers went exploring at his genitals, the cock that had slackened as if he'd come with her though she hadn't felt that happen (yeah, like I would have noticed, she thought), the soft balls, the wiry pitchblack hairs above the cock and on the balls... he groaned again, a little deeper, and Izzy bent her head to his cock.

Just a tongue at first, following the vein, investigating the glans, foreskin... not circumcised, that was fucking rare these days but fun to play with, rougher skin, textural, coarser than the silk of the shaft that was filling out again.  She licked at the base to encourage the blood to flow; she was going to have uses for this erection, it had better be a good one --- and again he groaned, and his head arched back into the bed, pushing his neck up, and his lips parted, but she didn't see, not yet; she had tipped her head to taste his balls, all of him salty, even bloody, she realized, little streaks here and there -- she must have scratched his back open without even realizing it, raking those blue toenails down him as she came and came and came... the thought made her grin.  President of your fan club, count on it, she thought drowsily, amusing herself by trying the weight of his balls against her nose... another pleasurable "mmmmm" from up north; he was liking this.  His hands came awake now, tangled into her hair, pulled her head up, her mouth back to his cock-- she got the message, but bit it lightly just to remind him that she was not his fucking slave, and his hips twitched -- he felt that, yup.

Except, frankly... she smiled inside again.  For this, slavery might be a viable option....  Her mouth came down on his cock, playing with the strangeness, cold and soft, sliding it onto her tongue, past, tightening her mouth to suck gently at first, then giving him a little more, a little harder like he'd given her, rubbing her lips and the veiled pressure of her teeth along him, though she knew she didn't want him to come in her mouth, no, she had plans for this cock... her tongue slipped around the skin, feeling the big vein, feeling the smoothness, straight, not too thick, not too long... juuuuuust right, she thought, like the little bear's chair...  that made her Goldilocks, right?  She hummed against his cock, letting her lips carry the vibration to the skin, and was rewarded with another groan.  His hands came up to grasp her waist and hips, pull her down, stretch her out, and she splayed a leg across his chest, noticing a sore twinge again; well, worry about that later --  because his fingers were doing that guitar magic on her cunt again... uhhhhh

She pulled her mouth away from his cock, sat up, swiveled, and lay down again immediately, face to closed-eyes face... 'who's he imagining?' she wondered with a flash of inner pique, and it made her lean forward and bite him along with the nuzzle she'd started... "if you don't come inside me right now, I'll die," she whispered, bad porno movie dialogue but who the fuck cared, it was the exact truth, and they were both already moving, she to throw a demanding leg over him, he to roll between her legs, find her with his cock, find the wet gate into her heat... He slid into her with a long single move, and pressed to the fullest depth of his length, jamming against her until even her breath was forced out and then jabbing hard with his hips so that she cried out, pleasure/pain, pure fucking... That was what it was between them then, the simplest kind of fucking, teenagers in the back of a fifties Chevy who didn't know shit, had never seen anything but a chaste peck between their parents and maybe a fade-to-black screen kiss between Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis...  nothing, they knew nothing but their bodies had such desires, slamming against each other with pure need...  It was the most ferocious pleasure she'd ever had, this plain vanilla missionary collision of bodies, the hottest sex she'd ever imagined, the purity and want of it...

She started to come again, wanted to kiss him, wanted to see him, her eyes slid open and saw him above her, a little raised, elbows on the bed but the long slender fingers curved round her shoulders, head thrown back in concentration and pleasure, the thick black hair falling to his shoulders and sticking in places to his neck with moisture, the billow of his upper lip pulled a little separate from the lower lip, and....  fangs. 

"Haaaaaa..." came out of her in terror, but there was no moving, she wasn't going to get to run, his hands were on her shoulders and her convulsion that was not a coming was all for nothing; he was so strong, his pinning of her so effortless it was as if she hadn't even tried to move -- but he'd noticed.  He pushed deep, deep, all the way inside her once again, the strong hips compressing the clitoris with that stab of pleasure/pain and holding--- and now his head tilted down and at long last he opened his eyes.

They were bright yellow.

"Isabella..." he whispered.  The motion of his lips to say her name showed her the fangs again... tiger fangs.  No.  Vampire fangs. 

"You're a vampire," she whispered, shock carrying her to that Wonderland of slowed time and false calm where she could converse rationally with a monster.

"Yeah," he said.  And as she watched his head reared back, the mouth opened wide, wider, huge, and held for a second of gasping, hissing breath, and then snapped down on her throat, an impression of black hair flying all around with the garish yellow eyes and needle teeth moving at the center--

Then pain, the exact feeling of animal teeth cutting through the sensitive skin of the throat, digging for what they wanted, feeling for a split second that lasted forever to find the vein, and forcing into that-- and then came the sucking.

The first gulp hurt, felt like some piece of her throat was being ripped away-- and then the sensation changed.  He had convulsed, his whole body arching with a terrible tension, and the rumbling growl resumed, so close to her ear now, a resonant deep slow purr that echoed in his throat -- and he began to move inside her again.

And this was like a wave, there was a rhythm to the surge of his body on hers, the hard cock pushed deep inside her and the pull at her throat; it felt incredible; it hurt like fire; the angels were weeping with envy; she was dissolving in boiling acid..  ..  He was taking at the throat and giving at the cunt, his cock hard and silken and cool inside her;  his hips rising and falling and hers meeting them with instinct and desire, fill me, make me feel it, do it, do it more--- She heard her own screaming:  pain/pleasure/pain-- more! -- she was coming and yet inside that beautiful fire she felt her death rising, not coming from outside but rising from inside her own body like a little locked box that had been sucked open in this hurricane, tornado, firestorm of fucking, vortex and flame of pure sensation----

"No-o-o-o," she screamed with the last shred of self left to her -- and the mouth pulled away, the body was gone--

She was barely conscious, gasping, pulling air into her lungs desperately, straining to stay conscious, to keep seeing the burning candles -- where was he?  Where was the demon that had been killing her with ecstasy seconds ago --?  She lifted her head and, fighting the wave of wooziness, saw him, naked, beautiful, still erect, streaked with bits of blood and drinking wine straight from a bottle and few feet away.  He said he didn't have anything to drink, some irrelevant corner of her brain complained.  Selfish bastard. --  She tried to lift her head higher, and that was too much: abruptly the world was just gone.

~ ~ ~

When she drifted back up, she couldn't tell if minutes or hours had gone by -- same dark warehouse, same bed, same oriental carpet walls, and she was lying flat on her back and naked on the bed with a naked man -- vampire -- lying beside her and watching as her eyes opened.

"Welcome back to the world of the living."  His voice crackled with irony.

She tried to get up, and completely lacked the strength.  "You really are--"

"Oh yeah," he said.  "Let's skip the scream, okay?" 

"I don't scream," she said with annoyance.  "Well, spiders, maybe.  Really huge hairy spiders that can swallow a cop car.  But not at you." 

The tough chick 'tude relaxed him.  "Good," he said with an easy smile.  "You're gonna be okay, but it'll take a few hours before you should move.  I'm going to get out of here...."

"You're going to leave me alone?"  More annoyance.

"Oh, it gets better," he said cheerfully.  "Once you're able to move, I'll be back to erase your memory."

"Fuck you," she said eloquently.  He shrugged.

"How do you know you can, anyway?"  Tough chick bravado.

A smile.  "I knew that before we ever left the club," he said gently.

Her tone changed.  "Hey -- I want to remember this.  I want to remember *you.* My date with the undead.  A real live demon lover.  How the hell else am I ever going to get on Geraldo?"

He shook his head slightly, and gave her a smug smile.  "I could let you, but then I'd have to kill you," he joked.

"Really?" she said.  "I have to forget *everything*?"

The smug smile stretched a little wider.  "Actually, no," he said.  "You're going to have these," his fingers brushed her thigh, rubbing gently at a tender place, and rose to gesture at her cunt and her throat.  She lifted her head enough to see a bruise, and two neat little fresh scabs.  "Great," she muttered.  "Been there, done that, got the festering sores...."

 "So you're going to remember your rock god."  The smile stretched into a quick grin.  "You're going to remember that he gave you crabs."

"Oh shit!" she said, torn between horror and laughing.  She found she could lift her arms, though they felt like they were weighed down with rocks.  She waved her hands.  "No, anything but that!" she said feebly, but laughing.

"Hey, if it really is a fate *worse* than death..." he started in a teasing, gravelly voice.  But the eyes were -- well, not joking. 

"Oh--no," she whipped out.  "No no no..."

He nodded.  "Think of your resulting disgust, and your newfound devotion to fidelity, as my wedding present."  The smug smile reappeared, and he leaned back, looking at her from under half-closed eyes.

"Basss-tard," she said.

"Vampire, ma'am," he said as John Wayne.

Fuck, she liked him.  He'd taken a Jumbo Slurpee's worth of blood out of her body, plus she was going to feel like raggedy shit for at least a week, plus he was going to make her believe she'd caught crabs from some randy rock god in North Beach (how the fuck was she going to slide that one past her betrothed?), but she really liked him.  Izzy, she told herself sternly, it is time to seriously up the meds.

"Never see you again, right?" she said, kind of wistfully.

The smile decreased, and he reached up to stroke her chin.  "You wouldn't live through it."

"Downer," she shivered.

His grin flashed again.  "Not for me."  He leaned forward and kissed her softly, nibbling at the lower lip, licking as if at some tiny taste of what he'd been gulping.  She parted her lips and his head came down on hers harder, his cool mouth opened to hers and they began to share another of those let's-check-your-tonsillectomy kisses -- and he pulled away, yellow-eyed and reaching for the bottle, which he finished.

As he got up and walked away to get another bottle, she noticed he was hard again, or still, and her mind flashed back for a second to the astonishing, devastating, brain shattering pleasure of that sex.  "It might be worth it," she murmured, then gasped as he turned with the speed of a blur to look back at her.  He froze again, like he had earlier when she'd first nibbled at his ear, black eyed, his face hard and frightening.  This time, seeing the stillness, Isabella realized it meant something had rattled him behind the mask and watched, fascinated, as a preternatural being stood in front of her as itself and nothing more.  Long seconds went by before his body relaxed back into something human.

"Don't invite a vampire to kill," he said in a tense, soft voice, and pulled the cork out of the second bottle.

But curiosity was making her crazy.  After all, he was standing there in front of her with a stiffy; vampire or not, it had to mean something. "Don't you ever get to come?"

His eyebrows climbed up again, and he came back to the bed and sat next to her.  "With the kill," he said easily.

"Oh shit," she said.

"Or with another--"

"--vampire," she finished, her wonder so violent she couldn't just think it.

"Mm-hm."  Completely matter of fact.

"Fuck," she said.  'Shit' wasn't strong enough for this revelation.  Stunningly original repartee you're offering, said the cool chick inside her.  No wonder he let you live, eh?

"I'd like to," he said, flashing that criminally hot dimpled grin again, and reaching out to run his hand along her chin, down the line of her hair, over the strongly marked collarbones. "But-- not this time."  He smiled, and he looked like every fabulously cruel alien ever on 'Star Trek' who suffered a moment of weakness and did something kind.  He moved an arm to the other side of her, and leaned over her, looking down at her body almost abstractly.  Isabella wished very much that she had the strength to get up... and knew she didn't.  And some traitorous part of her said, if he bites again, make me not care...

"Not this time," he repeated, and yet one hand began to move over her naked body again.

"Sweet breasts," he murmured, brushing the back of his hand over them.

"I'm surprised you could find them," she said jokingly.  "They're microscopic."

"They're-- a mouthful," he said, blinking.  His face softened with a smile that turned crooked and half-cruel as one of his fingers traced the blue line of a vein down to the nipple, and then his head bent to taste it again, suckling lightly, tongue teasing as the nipple stood hard and taut, then sliding down to suck harder, greedily.  His eyes opened to look up at hers, and they were vivid yellow between the thick black outline of his lashes, just for a second holding her image in their burning depths, and then his mouth opened again, wide, wider, long soft black hair and perfect mouth lowering onto her body again....

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