Us

I remember the first time I had you. Cold spring downpour in the dark, under the sodium lamps. You in his arms, suicide blonde with the dark tips, eyes deepest blue like a cosmic, spectral Neptune. Drenched. Shivering. Thirsty for warmth. That look—part fear, part wonder. You were my newest obsession. Instant and all-consuming like a forest fire, I wanted to immolate myself on the pyre of your sacred love. I wanted you for my own.

That night, after the rain and the cold, after the fear and the wonder, was the first night you came back to my house. You broke your embrace with him for the last time, whispered something in his ear, and came to me—broken, but ready. Eyes set firm; you were determined.

Such a chance meeting, a thing of wonder, you and me. How had we come so far, so fast? Many days I lay awake marveling at how it even happened. How coincidence­—how fate—brought us here in this time, at that place, in that precise moment. How our paths ever crossed that first time. You were so much younger, so far away from where I started my own journey. I was so much older, so hurt, and so jaded.

That night, after you said goodbye to him and we took those first steps together, I knew I could never be without you and that I would do anything to protect you. Anything. To anyone. To keep you safe.

When you have a past like mine, when you’ve seen what humans are capable of—the cruelty, the insanity, the things they’ll do to each other—you learn that safety is relative and not to be taken lightly. Violence is a commodity, like oil or gold, to be traded and leveraged and even bet on, and if one is in short supply of that commodity, bad things happen. You can even lose the ones you love.

That will never happen to you. I will never lose you.

I am in no short supply of violence.

It was past midnight when we returned.

Rabid, hungry fumbling. Lips. Ears. Neck.

Up the walkway, through the stone arch in the garden, past the colonnades to the heavy wooden doors.

Keys jumbling. Lock tumbled. Door open.

Hands everywhere.

Into the bedroom, a trail of clothes like breadcrumbs as if we’d never find our way back. Satin sheets, blood red. Tender flesh moonlight silhouette, your skin dark like the night, still warm like the sun.

You froze, pushing away from my embrace. You asked me if what we were doing was right. I told you that there was no right or wrong. Morality was a fickle thing, arbitrary. That it only mattered what you could live with. Could you live with this? With us? This night, it was more than a night; it was a commitment, a commencement, a new beginning—for both of us.

You acquiesced and fell back into my arms, intoxicating like a drug. I laid you down and placed the most delicate of kisses on the most delicate parts of your body. Soft thighs, red satin straining in your clutch, the taste of you on my lips and in my mouth. I lived right then only to please you, to serve you. Only to be yours. At your command.

And I was yours and I would be yours—forever.

Later, bathed in the wan light of the moon, surrounded by dancing shadows, your Neptune-blue eyes peered deep into me, piercing through me. It was almost as if you could read my mind. Though I could feel you, your essence, deep within me, I certainly couldn’t read yours.

You asked me what it would feel like…after.

What it would be like from now on—when we became us, together. I told you that I didn’t know; that each lover’s experience is different. There was no way to know what it would be like. I only knew that I was destined to be yours, but that was your choice—I was at your mercy, as I would be forever when it was done.

I could feel your pulse quicken, veins dilating with each sanguine throb of your shadowing heart. It was time now for the shadowing to continue, to draw down the moon and transform the dusk to night.

It was then that I asked for your permission to be yours—and it was then that you made your choice.

“Yes…”

I took you in my arms, brushing your hair gently out of the way as my chilled hand found its way to the fevered thrum of your carotid. I whispered gently that I loved you and would always be yours, no matter what.

You whimpered softly as I pierced your artery with my fangs and drank deeply from the well of your blood.

Soon, my love. Soon, we will become us.