We Mate in the Dark Read online

  I turned towards the sleeping men.

  One of them, of course, was Connolly.

  How could I have not guessed?

  Picked up a pitchfork and with no hesitation dug it deep into his gut. He woke up, a look of pain and despair spreading across his ugly face. I pulled the pitchfork out in one rapid movement and plunged it straight into his face.

  He never had the chance to say a single word.

  Not that I required any explanation.

  The other guy kept on dozing.

  He was sleeping on his stomach and I broke his neck with one savage stamp.

  I searched for a key to the handcuffs still holding the dead girl up but couldn’t find it in the dead men’s pockets.

  I couldn’t allow her to be found this way, strung up, defiled.

  There was can of petrol in the nearby garage. The whole place would be consumed before anyone in the area even spotted the fire. Better that way.

  I walked back to Dublin with bile in my throat.

  Yes, the Morgan sisters had been right. There had been a price to pay.

  Her Eyes Said Yes

  Until the day I met Eddie, I suppose I was just an average lover.

  I felt comfortable with the missionary position and minor variations thereof. I was attentive and tender, and dutifully went down on the women in my life the way I had observed studs in porno movies do. I had no complaints but I suppose I reckon I was also a boring man. Which is why too many affairs faded out of existence fairly rapidly. I did not know what passion was.

  The first time I fucked Eddie was in an hotel by an airport where I had booked a room for half a day only. I undressed her, caressed her most intimately, licked her, sucked gently on her clit as my fingers ventured inside her, feeling the familiar warmth and humidity of woman, of blonde. She moaned a little, she writhed with quiet pleasure on the edge of the hotel room bed and I was about to get off my knees and position her so I could enter her for the first time. For two months already we had been performing a hesitation waltz of unending conversation in pubs and after hour coffee houses, overtiming on kisses and deep sighs and meaningful looks, and finally we had both agreed to cross that fatal Rubicon. I rose. I was naked to the waist, my trousers still tightly belted around my waist. Eddie’s clothes were all over the place, her skirt raised to her midriff, her small breasts spilling from the B cups of her bra, her hair totally dishevelled. My eyes moved from her cunt to her eyes, marvelling yet again at the sheer porcelain pallor of her skin as my gaze travelled across her body.

  Our eyes met.

  And for the first time in my life, I saw a hunger there I had never experienced. It took my breath away.

  She moved closer to me, undid my belt and, in total silence, pulled my cock out and took it into her mouth. Needless to say, I was already hard. I closed my eyes.

  Some things you never forget.

  We would meet once a week, in hotel rooms, in empty offices after work, in bathrooms. Everything moved so fast. Whenever she was about to come, she would groan “Jeezussss...”, and I would somehow become even harder as I thrust inside her like a battering ram. Other women would say “Yes, yes, yes..” and others “Fuck me, fuck me”, but Eddie would invariably evoke Jesus; maybe it was her Irish background?

  As the lovemaking became more frantic and desperate, that look in her eyes silently begged for more. For me to be rougher, for me to be harder. I had read about submissiveness in women, but I had never come across it so blatantly. One evening I pinned her hands down behind her shoulders while I fucked her, and the fire inside us just exploded. The next time, an afternoon in Brighton I still recall, my hands circled her neck and pressed down on her throat as we fucked like animals on heat; her gaze did not weaken, as if she almost invited me to do my worse. Another time, I tied her hands tight together and later, as she failed to object, slipped a silk scarf around her head so that she was both blind and bound. I squatted over her prone and captive figure and forced my cock down her mouth, almost down to her throat and then turned her round like an inanimate object and took her brusquely from behind.

  She (or I) would never comment about the increasingly brutal mechanics of our fucking, but her silences were more than just acquiescence and her eyes, those dangerous pools of grey-blue water, spoke to me of this perilous road we were hurtling down in overdrive with no recourse to brakes. This was what she wanted. This was what I now wanted too.

  First, it was just a finger digging past her sphincter as we mated, but soon it was two, three digits until she was stretched enough to accommodate me. I knew that sometimes it hurt her, but she never said no. I could feel myself imagining a whole catalogue of future degradations as I used her body, soiled the whiteness of her skin, relentlessly attacked her sweet openings and it shocked me. This was not the man I used to be.

  Dressed again, in social situations, in conversation, we professed undying love and began to envisage a life together. Already I knew I could not live without her, that I needed her so badly that my heartbeat zigzagged wildly out of sync at the mere thought of not seeing her again.

  One day, we had made love two or three times and we were both raw from our exertions. We were taking a shower together, soaping each other, idle wet caresses and lingering fingers playing a tango of muted desire across our flesh, She bent over and under the pouring, tepid water from the nozzle, I tried to insert myself into her but failed. She looked at me, those eyes again, and wordlessly switched the shower off and squatted between my legs and took hold of my cock.

  “Do it,” she said.

  Somehow I knew what she meant.

  I drowned her face and body in my golden shower.

  A week later, as we fucked - this time it was a bed and breakfast in Bloomsbury, the only place we could find at short notice- her hands gripped mine and brought them up to her neck. I could feel her carotid under my sweating fingers. I pressed. Stopped. Her tearful eyes insisted I continue. Her breath grew ragged. We both came, with an unholy roar.

  As she dressed afterwards, I could still see the faint pink shadow of my fingers imprinted on her neck. I shuddered.

  We had reached the terrible border post of true love. Beyond this frontier lie the abominable.

  I have never loved a woman like I loved Eddie. With rage and utter desperation. But that was the last time we saw each other. Because we both knew inside that had we continued down that road, I would have ended up killing her. Because she wanted me to, as an utter proof of her submission. Because I thought I loved her.

  Communion of Blood and Semen

  On a day like this I held her tight.

  On a day like this, she put her head on my shoulder, said nothing but almost purred. It felt good. It felt right. She was wrapped up in layers of clothing, like in a cocoon as she sheltered herself from the daylight on this day like no ever. My gift wrapped impossible fuck.

  The sky was blue, not a cloud in sight and a chilly wind channelled its way down the city streets, insidiously digging its way through the fabric of our coats, freezing the bones all the way under the skin.

  Her hands reached for mine.

  “Your skin is so warm,” she said.

  Hers was as cold as ice.

  Had always been.

  Her eyes were shielded from the brightness by dark glasses. I’d never known her without the glasses, even at night. Maybe that’s what first actually caught my attention about her. I’d always felt that people who wear shades in all and inappropriate circumstances were pretentious, poseurs or worse. She’d been the exception.

  A yellow cab drew up on McDougall, responding to my arm signal.

  “JFK,” I said as we bundled into the car. We had no luggage.

  We’d met in Manhattan. On, in of all places, craigslist, the Internet Sargasso of obscene desire, barter, thievery, fakery and false identities. I was travelling on business and feeling lonely, as endless New York nights stretched on forever as both jet lag and the repeated assault of bittersweet memories co
mbined fiendishly to keep me awake most of the night with my hand not far off from my cock. Caressing myself aimlessly as I recalled the walk down from Washington Square to Ground Zero with Gina, and the rubber stamp embossed with the words ‘I Love You’ I’d bought along the way on a gift shop on Broadway: tendrils of lust rising through the thick trunk of my awakening cock. Remembering a night at the Gershwin Hotel where I’d, in a spirit of mad improvisation, crushed a few raspberries and pushed the pulp inwards with two fingers up the cunt of the New Zealand woman I’d picked up a few days before at Newark airport, and then followed the fragrant fruit with a square of chocolate which quickly melted in the furnace of her innards before I finally lapped it all up with my tongue before we fucked: my cock now becoming half hard and just that bit longer and sending a hundred volts of sexual electricity all the way through my groin. The apartment a few blocks up from Columbus Circle where I’d mounted Pamela, the wife of an experimental Armenian jazz musician, and breached her sphincter quite roughly as Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Candy’s Room’ from the Darkness on the Edge of Town punctuated our rhythmic thrusts on the record player: by this memory I was hard again, at last. But there was no point evoking other New York memories, of women, of bodies, of heartbreak: jerking myself off at three in the morning in a hotel bed would, I knew all too well, bring me no relief. It would not banish the thoughts, the images, the faces and cunts (every single one so different, so unique I could lose myself in a whole novel of genital descriptions, a journey through craters, gashes, crevices and infinite deeps of soft, ridged alluring flesh...). I needed reality, a body, eyes looking into mine as I caressed her skin, the smell of tobacco or food on her breath, the fragrance of a woman’s sweat, the beating of heart deep inside.

  So, I’d placed an ad online under Casual Encounters: “Visiting English Writer Seeks Companionship and Tenderness”. Within a few hours there were three responses: Sarah just wanted to exchange mails about books but was reluctant to meet; Becky, who worked in a museum in Brooklyn, joined me for a sushi in Greenwich Village the next day but was too young and thick-waisted and just kept on talking about her college boyfriend; and Carmilla. Of course, I’d read LeFanu and the name and its vampiric allegiance appealed. There was a sense of danger about her. “I am available”, she said, and the smile on her jpg spoke of sensuality and a curious sense of destiny. “If you enjoy taking risks”.

  “I’d not enjoy life if there were no risks to face. Risk brings you alive,” i replied in my e-mail.

  Little did I know.

  We met.

  She was even better than in the photo.

  Her eyes like pools of black soot.

  It was night. A small bar near Bleecker Street.

  Within minutes I knew I had to have her.

  I was surprised by the dry coldness of her flesh when I soon undressed her - we had wasted little time on preliminaries or undue conversation; somehow an exchange of meaningful glances, signals and silences had been enough to confirm that the No Strings Attached encounter we had both been seeking was going to happen there and then that same night. But she sheltered quickly within my embrace and my external warmth migrated over across the maddeningly smooth landscape of her flesh and spread its comforting tendrils. The scarlet lipstick that illuminated her features soon stained my lips and my own skin. Her small, hard breasts with night dark nipples sharp as blunt razors were grazing my chest, and even with the hotel room’s main light off the delta of her cunt was like a deep primeval forest shining like a beacon in the heart of the darkness that surrounded us. We fucked. As soon as I was inside of her, I knew this was where I had always aspired to live, sheathed within her tightness, sliding effortlessly against the ribbed texture of her damp walls. Our mouths savagely vacuumed the contents of the other’s lungs in unholy communion. I came quickly. Exhaled. But her cunt still gripped my cock like a vice and would not allow it to go soft. She arched her back under me.

  “Do me again,’ she asked me.

  I shifted, the tip of my penis now moving against her cervix. The coldness inside her drew me in even further. Her nails scratched my back and the pain felt good. It all felt good.

  It was primitive, no doubt the way our ancestors first mated in deep forests under a pockmarked moon. It was right. It made us both feel so abominably alive.

  Later, she took me inside her mouth, licking the primordial soup we had jointly created and which I had already tasted with relish after I’d gone down on her and savoured our combined and now intermingled fluids and secretions. As I expected we were a totally perfect cocktail even if at first my tongue delving into her had initially drawn back from the unaccustomed coolness of her insides, even after the repeated and frantic sex we had enjoyed. Her own tongue was at first as cold as ice but it only served to conserve my hardness, She licked and nibbled and allowed her teeth to teasingly draw sharp, hard lines against my aching, bulbous and purple head.

  “I want to bite you,” she remarked, her voice flat, neither in jest nor in lust.

  “Somehow, I don’t think I’d even mind,” I responded with a smile.

  I was hoping my joke would make her laugh, but instead when I looked down at her face, there between my thighs, her red lips still voraciously sucking on my cock, I noticed a single tear running down her cheek.

  I chose not to comment.

  Finally, we exhausted ourselves. We were both raw, aching in all the right places, coated with a patina of sweat and god knows what else and we must have fallen asleep simultaneously.

  When I woke up some hours later, it must have been daylight outside, but the curtains were drawn. She was sitting on the opposite edge of the bed, with her back to me. The shape of her naked body was like a knife stabbing my heart: she was so fucking beautiful, every pale curve silhouetted against the muted light trying to enter the room was like a symphony of harmony, balance and grace. From the fall of her dark straight hair against her elegant shoulders, the shadow of her delicate breasts , the arch of her vertebrae straining gently against the skin, the faint down in the small of her back, the upper moon of her white ass; every body part reminded me of other women I had known, loved and pined for, Gina’s ass, Kathryn’s breasts, Aida’s hair.... But here they all came together in perfect harmony. My heart skipped a beat and my cock hardened yet again.

  She heard me move and turned her face toward me. Her shoulders swivelled and I saw that her nipples were still as pointy and hard and aroused. And she had put her dark glasses on again.

  We ordered breakfast with room service. There was no way we were leaving that bed and I guessed anyone looking at us that morning would have read every visible sign of debauchery and excess all over the two of us like an open page. She only wanted fruit juice. I also had a bagel with salmon and cream cheese. I was famished from our exertions.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” I queried.

  Her eyes looked down at the mess that were the sheets in which we’d drowned our lust.

  ‘No.”

  There was a finality in her tone.

  Soon after we pushed the breakfast tray onto the hotel room floor and she lowered her head towards my lap and again took my cock inside her mouth. The coldness and the fire returned. An uncanny duo of emotions and feelings.

  Later, “Have you met many other guys this way through the Internet?”

  “A few... It’s the only way I can satisfy that hunger inside, you see,” she remarked matter of fact, in no way apologetic.

  “I think I understand, “ I said.

  And so the next few days went on. In a whirlpool of madness, flesh rubbing against flesh, mouths drowning in the thin air from which we’d sucked all the oxygen in our frenzy of desire, body parts inflamed, stretched, obscenely. We drew the worst out of each other, as if never before had we even skirted those dark borders of absolute need. We had no shame, no limits. I fisted her, hurt her even, but she begged me to push harder, further. She squatted over my spent body and urinated over me as I rubbed the cool ambrosia that
stemmed from her innards all over my skin. Had she asked, I would have drunk from her cunt lips.

  I don’t know when we crossed the frontier from which there is no going back. Possibly the day I was scheduled to fly back to Europe and blithely missed my flight.

  The more we stayed together, tested the very limits of our bodies, the more we knew we could never part. We now inhabited another world.

  She scratched me badly one morning. Not deliberately. It was in fact surprising that the inherent violence in our movements, our coupling, had not caused more damage before. Sprains, bruises, cuts. The blood welled over my shoulder blade. Her sad features turned somehow even paler than usual as she watched the solitary drops of blood she had summoned lazily slide down over my chest like dark pearls.

  “I feel like licking you,” she said quietly.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” I remarked. “Maybe the right way to celebrate our unholy union...”

  “No,” she said. “I would want you even more if I did.”

  She despatched me to the bathroom to clean up. But her eyes said something else.

  Another morning, I cut myself shaving and again the look that spread across her features was an unsteady blend of hunger and utter despair.

  She walked towards me with all the burdens of world weighing down her steps. Stopped just an inch away from me. Watching the minute flecks of blood on my chin. Her mouth opened. Her eyes clouded.

  It’s right then it all finally came together.

  Her unnatural pallor.

  The ambiguous clues she had unwittingly provided me with.

  The ever present dark glasses and nocturnal life.

  The origins of her name.

  Why I never saw her eating food.

  I asked her.

  And she told me her story.

  The tale of a beautiful vampire adrift in the confused life of a world in which she could never belong truly. How she survived.

  How sex could sometimes act as a substitute for the blood lust that kept her alive. But was never enough.