Red Grow the Roses

‘Look at this,’ chuckled Ben, brushing her turgid right nipple with his thumb; it was as swollen as if it’d been stung by a bee, and so sensitive that she gasped. ‘Just bursting with juicy goodness, aren’t you, love?’

‘Want another kiss, don’t you?’ Naylor lapped teasingly at her breast. ‘Let’s try something a bit different, heh?’ Then he sat back on his heels, took her thighs in his hands and spread them, lifting one to drape over his shoulder. He and Ben took her weight easily, as she was pulled on to the kneeling man’s mouth and he buried his face in her crotch.

‘Oh!’ she wailed reflexively, as his tongue broke the split of her sex, as he lapped and sucked at the juices welling there. She tried half-heartedly to struggle but her body wasn’t co-operating, and even if it had done the two men were far too strong. For a long moment the sensation of his mouth was just one of simple pleasure and she stopped twisting altogether. That was when he bit down, and his fangs pierced the mound of her pubis either side of her clit. She spasmed once – and that was the last time, the last vestige of any resistance that night, because the bite was all ecstasy. Pleasure took no prisoners. Naylor sucked and she burned, and soon she was coming into his mouth, blood and juices together, and Ben was biting at the back of her neck and her shoulders, feeding greedily, the stabs of his teeth no longer even painful as her climax turned everything to gold. She thrashed wildly in their embrace, crying out. Naylor’s eyes flashed with triumph. And she couldn’t stop coming, even after the first burst was over – he kept sucking and she kept rolling down the waves of orgasm, each lifting her to the crest of the next. She couldn’t even draw breath.

‘Jeez,’ said Ben, gasping. ‘Give her a rest, Naylor!’

Naylor dropped her. The deprivation was instant and vertiginous: she felt like the sun had been torn from the sky. He stood up and faced her, lifting her and crushing her against Ben’s torso as if the other man were a wall, and then he pressed into her and lifted her thighs apart and thrust his cock up into her pussy and began to fuck, fiercely. His face was knotted into a mask of concentration, his eyes narrowed, his lips tight over his monstrous teeth. Sophie’s inflamed sex responded with gratitude to the impaling pressure of his cock inside her, to the battering he was giving her clit, to the pressure from behind as well as before. She began to groan with each thrust, the air forced from her lungs. Ben helped by slipping his hands under her thighs and holding her up, splayed, for Naylor’s easier access, and she could feel Ben’s cock under her ass-cheeks, rubbing along the spread cleft of her behind as the two men sandwiched her and pummelled her between them.

Naylor slipped a hand round the back of Ben’s neck for better purchase.

Taking his cock only momentarily stilled the burning itch of Sophie’s clit. Her body was already primed and charged, orgasm throbbing just below the skin and ready to burst out under pressure, so she came first. For all the two men’s fierce lust she hit orgasm before Naylor did, and her screams sent him over the edge, pumping into her. She felt the gush – she’d never felt ejaculation before, not inside her – and it was cold, even colder than their sweatless inhuman skin. Then Ben bit her again, on the angle of her shoulder and neck, and that rolled her into orgasm and lifted her again, burning like the sun. She nearly passed out.

‘Fuck, that’s sharp,’ whispered Ben.

His ejaculation spent, Naylor stepped away and left Ben to lower her to her knees and let her fall slowly backward, her legs tumbling apart in disarray. Sophie’s head was swimming, and in the afterwash of her orgasm she felt faint. Too stunned to support herself, she hung limply at the full extension of her arms from wrists which were gripped easily in Ben’s off hand, and her head rolled back as black and red circles bloomed behind her half-closed eyes. His flexed arm didn’t even tremble. He took his stiff cock in his right hand and began to tug with the determined motions of a man who knows he’s ready to unload.

‘Open wide, love.’

Sophie parted her lips and in seconds his spunk jetted out to splash on her – the first squirts on her breasts, the final couple on her face. They kissed her skin like drips of melted ice cream. When she licked it off her lips she found he tasted like fresh-turned earth, with a metallic, coppery tang.

They’ll stop now, she thought weakly. They’ll have finished with me.

They didn’t. They hadn’t.

Ben’s erection didn’t even flag. He lifted her and flopped her forward on to her belly, then took her hips and pulled her ass up as he crouched over her. His teeth pierced the downy globes of her bum, first one side then the other, then he spread her cheeks and munched down on the hole of her ass, each bite a torment and then a beatification, each drawing no more than a single sucked mouthful of her blood. Sophie, her face lolling on the whitewashed floorboards, spasmed at each bite and tried to lift her head, but her arms felt as limp as dishcloths and she could hardly bring them up and plant her palms against the floor. As Ben stood, lifting her, and braced his thighs in a straddle so that he could slip his cock into her burning slot, she could do nothing but hang doubled-up from his grasp, spine and legs limp. It took Naylor sliding beneath her and pushing her up with one casual hand to lift her to even a horizontal position. And as Ben powered into her from behind, Naylor lapped at her dangling breasts once more.

‘Ah!’ gasped Sophie, as his mouth moved over the tingling ice-water splashes that Ben had left on her skin. Naylor laughed a low throaty laugh and bit her over and over again from below, Ben’s semen and her blood melting together on his tongue.

Both men laughed as she wailed and came once more.

The physically strenuous aspects of their recreation were easy for them: effortless. She was no heavier than a rag doll in their arms, and no more capable of rebellion. Her body drove them crazy, her blood intoxicating them so that they fucked her over and over again, as playful and heartless as young lions. Each time she came to climax they both bit her and drank, tasting the spike of her orgasm in her blood. Nor were they restricted, it seemed, in the number of their own orgasms, and in exchange for what they drank from her they washed her in copious outpourings of their own fluids. She took cock like she’d never taken cock before, until she felt like she was an empty sack they were trying to fill, until she was streaked and smeared and musky with come, her hair dishevelled, her make-up smeared.

They never fucked her mouth though.

At the end they carried her to the pile of dustsheets and snuggled up around her, all three of them on their sides, their arms a languid tangle. She liked that: they felt warm now and she was cold, washed in a dark sea. Ben embraced her from the front, his cock wedged up her pussy, while Naylor impaled her ass from behind for the third or fourth time. It didn’t hurt: nothing hurt any more. Every inch of her body was numbly replete from their bites. Together they rocked her in slow luxurious rhythm as they fastened their teeth in her shoulders and sucked slow and long. Sophie felt herself falling toward sleep, the room spinning about her as consciousness ebbed. She tried to speak, though her mouth was dry and she had no idea what she wanted to say, only that she was possessed by a strange sense of regret, not even dismay, only the faintest sense that she was unravelling, her soul frayed to loose red threads that would never be whole again. But only a dry croak escaped her lips as she dissolved into unconsciousness.

* * *

‘Whoa,’ said Ben, unfastening his mouth. His eyes were dark with repletion. He squirmed out from Sophie’s limp embrace and looked down at her. ‘Better stop.’

Naylor rolled away on to his back and squinted at her, sucking his teeth. ‘Let’s just finish her off,’ he grunted. ‘The dregs taste the best; you know that.’

Ben sat up on his haunches. His body was speckled and streaked with dark drops and he absently licked at a smear down the inside of his forearm. ‘Do you want to piss Reynauld off?’ he asked sweetly.

‘Well, now that you suggest it,’ answered Naylor with a switchblade grin, ‘that would be a bonus.’ He sat up though, and scratched at the little spills that had dried on his smooth chest. Ben snorted.

‘I’ll go drop her off on the embankment, shall I?’

Naylor waved a hand. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve finished here.’

‘What about these?’ Ben looked around at the pieces of sculpture. ‘They’re good.’

‘Estelle’s sending somebody to pick them up.’

‘Estelle?’

‘Yeah. Wants them for one of her clubs, she says. Let her worry about the red tape.’

Ben nodded, then as Naylor stretched and wandered off he walked over to the small pile of Sophie’s belongings and rummaged in her purse. First he extracted the bank notes, folding them between his fingers. Then, opening her cell phone, he thumbed the keypad three times and then held it to his ear, ambling about the room and shuffling one-handed into his jeans, hopping as he pulled them up over his legs. ‘Ambulance,’ he said after a pause.

Naylor necked a beer chaser.

After Ben’s first answer the woman’s voice on the other end of the phone connection kept talking, but he took no notice. He dropped the squawking phone on the sheets next to Sophie and looked down at her with a little smile. She didn’t stir. Pale as marble, she looked like one of Naylor’s sculptures. Her eyes were half-closed, showing crescent-moons of sclera. Her lips were blue, her features relaxed and peaceful. If there was no obvious movement of her ribs, the thready pulse at her throat – quite audible to him – attested that she was still alive for the moment. Her whole body was covered in paired puncture marks, everywhere but over the major blood vessels at the neck and the insides of her thighs.

‘Thanks, love,’ he whispered. ‘You were a blast.’

But Sophie heard none of that.

(Ben)

And this is Ben, the golden boy, youngest of the six vampires in the City. Young enough that he can still pass for human and that he can still go out in daylight, though he wears long-sleeved shirts and sunglasses then and keeps to the shade of buildings because direct sunlight stings him. His hair is cut fashionably short and quirky now, and his eyes are warm and direct. His skin is still tanned from the sun that shone in 1967, a year of wild fashion, wilder youth and chemical revolution. The year he died.

You wouldn’t know that Ben was different from anyone else, meeting him. Undeath hasn’t changed him much, not yet. His demeanour is relaxed and he likes a beer, and in fact it’s easiest to bump into him in a bar or a nightclub. Only in sudden strong light might you notice anything, because his eyes are so sensitive that he can see even in total darkness and under bright light the pupils contract to invisible pinholes, leaving his irises blank. But his eyes never were windows to his soul; even in life they were more like silvered mirrors, reflecting the gazer’s desire.

As a youth his aims were to have fun and chase tail, and in over forty years as a vampire they’ve altered remarkably little. His life revolves around sex and food, which are almost always the same thing. For vampires, there’s no distinction between thirst and desire. Blood-lust and fuck-lust come as a package, one engendering the other. He’s constantly horny, eternally obsessed with pussy. It’s one of the things he likes so much about his new life: he never has to stop. There are other advantages: he’s become faster and stronger and has keener senses, he heals cuts in minutes, his flab has converted to muscle and even his face has subtly changed, honed to a new beauty – but the buzz of rampant desire, the priapic stiffy that threatens to wear a hole in his pants, the heat that grips him every time he spots a potential target: that’s what he really trips on.

Being dead – What’s there not to like?

He’s vaguely aware that others of his kind are different, that things do change with time, but he doesn’t worry about that. Ben is young; still young enough to eat, even. Perhaps only a few mouthfuls a night – pizza and Chinese takeaway mostly, and hold the garlic because in the last couple of decades it’s started to turn his stomach – but he’s still capable of digesting some solids. That will be the first faculty to go, and he will miss it when it happens. The multiple flavours of life will be lost to him, the spices and the textures. All that will be left will be hot, sweet, infinitely appealing blood.

In a big city like this, a world hub, there’s no problem with him taking a different person a night as prey – so long as he doesn’t kill them – and enough places to hunt in that his face doesn’t become known. Notoriety would be a handicap, and Ben likes to fly below the radar. Bars are the easiest places to pull in: hothouses of exotic painted blooms. There’s never a problem if you look like he does, and everyone is awash with alcohol, and they’re all young and hot and eager to be plucked. He does a lot of plucking.

You might well meet Ben that way, particularly at night. But he is a seducer by nature rather than a hunter, and he’s surprised himself in recent years by discovering a taste for the more difficult target. The plainer girl – not the dull, slack-jawed type who’ll do it for a bag of chips or the cheery twinkly one who’ll do it for a laugh, but the buttoned-down type. Does that describe you? There are more women of that kind about than people think, though they’re invisible to so many eyes. Perhaps he’d find you that way, by daylight, when you’re least expecting it. He’s taken to haunting university buildings, parks, art galleries, even botanical gardens. He’s looking for the girls who wear sweatshirts even in warm weather, the ones who haven’t starved themselves or fried themselves orange on a sunbed or bothered to use hair-straighteners for that compulsory sleek look. Sweaters … Sweaters drive him half crazy with lust. Soft, pale, unfashionable girls. The ones who don’t actually believe that a man like him would hit on them. He can smell their defensiveness and the aching eagerness buried beneath.

Is that you?

It’s hard work to get past their disbelief. They often think he’s taking the piss, that he has a coterie of friends hidden nearby killing themselves laughing as he mocks their naivety with his attentions. Oh, but it’s worth it for the first bloom of their sexual scent, the rush of heat and wet, the look in their eyes as they tip from suspicion to hope to surrender. He’s prepared to work for days to get that.

So perhaps he’ll find you when you’re concentrating on something else entirely. At work maybe – your frustrating, claustrophobic job, the one you took just as that first stepping stone, the one that tides you over until you move on to something really worthwhile. Or perhaps he’ll find you in a line at a shop counter, or queuing up to hand in a form in some official waiting room. And he’ll catch your eye with his frank, humorous gaze, so warmly that you’ll wonder, ‘Is it me he’s looking at?’

Yes, it’ll be you. It’ll be hard to believe, but even harder to resist. You might be in a relationship, or you might be resigned to celibacy, but it almost certainly won’t make any difference – so long as there is a sexual instinct buried in you, he will bring it out and reel you in. He’ll use your own nature against you. He’s just too good-looking, too charming, to shrug off, and sexual heat radiates from his cold body like an aura. And you can forget morality or common sense: those things won’t save you. They don’t ever save anyone. Sex, when it kicks into gear – that raging appetite, that dizzy high of anticipation – trumps everything else. Don’t you know that yet?

He can be subtle or he can be pushy, whichever works best in the circumstances. In either case he is persistent. Before you know it, your head will be awhirl and your heart will be beating faster every time you see him. You’ll feel a cramping thrill every time he smiles, every time his hand brushes yours, every time he leans in a little closer. You’ll wonder what is happening to you. Reflected in his eyes, you’ll see yourself as if for the first time: beautiful, desirable and free.

And then, finally, you’ll let him cross the line. Because by then you’ll want nothing in the world more than the sight of his golden skin, his parted lips, his naked body. By then you will be weak-limbed, dizzy, breathless. Your skin will be running hot and cold chills. Your nipples will be so sensitised that the rub of your own clothing is almost painful. Your sex will be heavy with moisture, like a storm ready to break. When he takes you in his arms it will be like a profound pain has finally found release.

Where do you want him, when he takes you at last? In your apartment, in secret? In the park, under a full moon? Behind the shelves where you work, muffled and frantic and daring? He doesn’t mind, so long as he can fuck you. So long as he can have your sex juices and your sweat and your surrender, your cries and your tears of joy. Your bright and racing blood.