a taste part 2
I am a fool. I am so lucky. I watch as your eyes close again, the better to savour what you take from my wrist. Watching your eyelids feels like watching the guillotine fall.
I can’t pull away. When I try, your arms feel like iron, and you rock only the tiniest bit. Blood loss fuzzes my motor control, making me feel hot, weak and shaky.
Watching the rhythmic pulsing of your throat isn’t helping matters.
“Raven, please.” My voice sounds distant in my ears. Neither of us quite know what I’m begging for.
Your eyes lazily open on mine. You can actually feel in your mouth the flutter you cause in my chest. What a miraculous connection!
One of your hands is enough to hold my wrist in place. The other slips tenderly behind the nape of my neck and pulls, forcing me closer. Application of pressure through your fingers and my head is turned. Carotid and jugular lay fluttering beneath a gaze I find dissecting, dispassionate. With horror I perceive how truly you regard me as food. Horror, and an upswell of insane joy.
The connection is broken as you disengage from the wrist, which still oozes. Your lips with their ruddy ombre come closer, place their stain on the soft skin of my neck. A shudder runs all through me as your fangs make twin depressions. There will be no coming back from this fatal bite.
“A real meal,” you whisper, loud so close to my ear. “This has better be good.”
Emotion bursts out of me like the guts from a man sliced hip to hip. A bark of a sob, whether for the reprieve or the denial, followed by a laugh that is part convulsion. You watch my feelings proceed one after the other, aware in yourself of only the most bitter hunger.
“Upstairs. They’re ready.”
You let me go first, in part because I’m so pale you think you should be placed to catch me if I were to fall. I take a break to catch my breath on the second floor landing, casting you a smile, embarrassed by my weakness. You lick your lips of my blood and have to actually catch my shoulder to keep me from collapsing there and then.
“Sorry, been a bit… intense.”
“What has gotten into you? Why weren’t you answering your phone?” A little of your anger comes out, hot this time. You are free but your subconscious is very clear on this: I belong to you. Your teeth ache to bite again.
“I know, I’m sorry. I was just… Look. I wanted to make a gift. And I thought, you always have to do your own hunting. Be the monster.”
I pause to catch my breath. You bristle at the term.
“But you’re not a monster,” I continue. “You’re… I’ve seen you lose your shit at misheard lyrics. I’ve seen you sing a stupid song to a cat then blush when you realised I overheard. I’ve seen you rescue people. You’re alive in a way most of us can only aspire to. And you’re beautiful.” You hear my voice crack. “You’re a perfect expression of a certain kind of being. Even your hunger is beautiful. Perfect.
“It’s not fair that you should be the bad guy because you’re this certain kind of being. So you’re going to do exactly as I say. Then it’s on me.”
You’re left breathing a little heavier by the speech. Is it excitement? Anger, at my presumption? Something else?
I open the door to my room.
Two pairs of eyes look back at you. The room smells of rosewater and a slight tang of fear.
A mother and a daughter, adopted, as the mother is white and the daughter black. Mid thirties and late teen. Both well-built, with the mother running to fat, as is common for the overworked.
“This is a ritual,” I say, speaking clearly and standing straight through strength of will alone. “Raven is a witch. She will perform her part, you two will speak the words I’ve given you, and when she hears them, you will be freed. This is important.”
The mother speaks, imploring. “Andrew, please—”
“This is important.”
The mother is looking at me but the daughter is staring at you like a rabbit in a trap. Both at tied, in a manner that now seems familiar to you, at wrists, elbows, knees, ankles; but also, the daughter’s wrists are tied to the mother’s ankles, forming a human chain. They lie on the bed, draped in blankets rather than clothed,
I gesture you over to the foot of the bed. You hesitate, then obey. A curious inversion when five minutes ago you held my life between your teeth.
“Do you both remember the words?”
The daughter nods but doesn’t take her eyes off you. The mother starts to quote, something Latin, but I shush her. “Not until you are inside.”
The mother asks, “Inside?”
My only answer is to speak to you, gesturing to the daughter. “Start with Brandy’s feet.”
The smell of rosewater grows stronger as you lean forward, swiftly grasping the bound ankles with one hand before the frightened girl can withdraw them. She practically squeaks when you do.
The blood meal earlier was barely an appetizer, and you feel ravenous. Kneeling on the bed you lean yourself forward. Taking the element of surprise you grasp her knees with the other hand and push her on to her back.
Both she and her mother scream when you guide those feet into your mouth and take in her calves, threading her body into your throat like a needle through silk.
You are vaguely aware that I’m speaking sternly to the pair, but the joy of consumption has descended upon you and the main part of your consciousness is enthralled in the texture of skin on your tongue. A liquid growl from deep within you signals the stirring of the organ that will take apart the hips that you are even now levering into your mouth. This one is lean but your fangs still find soft skin over the belly, tracking little pinprick bloodspots as they imperfectly glide onwards.
“Please, no, not my daughter…”
You feel my hand between your shoulderblades, briefly urging you on. Not that you needed encouragement. Already your eyes are looking past Brandy’s, fixed on the larger form of the mother. Anticipatory saliva makes the passage of her daughter all the swifter, and in no time her world becomes that thin dark passage that starts at your lips and ends in the rolling, churning pit inside you.
“Just say the words and you will be freed.”
Whatever. The rough scratch of rope bindings feels deliciously dangerous. With it you can trace the last piece of the unfortunate girl on its passage through the arch of your throat, throat monstrously stretched oesophagus, to disappear from your awareness as it plops into your stomach. Brandy clutches her mother’s ankles the whole way.
The mother is more powerful, but you are practised and, now, you have the whole weight of her daughter for leverage, to say nothing of the poor souls who have recently thickened your waistline. You rock back and forth, not chasing this meal up the bed but summoning her, mouthful by succulent mouthful. Her chub depresses between your jaws in a decadent fashion that makes you want to speal in delight. Kilos of fat are packed away in each mouthful.
As more of her slips inside you you become aware of the awesome stretch as your poor protesting gut struggles to accommodate them both. Where Brandy pulled her mother into your hungry stomach, her mother’s entry now causes her linked daughter to rotate, forcing her head under the growing pool of digestive ooze and blood that your body produced to strip bare your prey. The thrashing of the daughter shakes the fat around your middle. You edge achingly close to an orgasm.
The mother’s terrified eyes are not burned into your mind’s eye. Your very nature sings with the rightness of the act as you swallow down every last inch of her.
You collapse, panting, onto the bed. I speak urgently: “Raven, onto your back.” Too delirious with the influx of meat to argue, you do you.
I commence an almighty massage, manoeuvring your prey beneath your skin like a midwife realigning a baby. Another, urgent passage beneath your ribs causes something inside to relax, and then:
bwoooOOOourrrrrp
I nod to myself, satisfied, and you try to curl up your legs to force another, lost in the pleasure of it all.
Though the two still move beneath your flesh, then only sound that escapes is that of your industrious gut. They are surely speaking, shouting the words I gave them to grant them release, but the sound is eaten by your thick stomach lining, the inches of fat.
My massage grows less frenzied as your passengers slowly grow still.
Heat flushes your face, your crotch, your belly. Such an ecstacy of satiety. I kiss your forehead, your lips; I explore your dripping cunt with fingers and, later, tongue. As you drift in the hot twilight of mind-blowing fullness, I cover you with affection and draw out your lust.
Hours have passed. It is night. The hard edges, already softened by pudge, are softening in fact by the relentless grind of your stomach. The timbre of your alimentary concerto alters as two humans are converted into paste and begin to flow through your intestines, to be sucked dry.
You break the silence. “Why did you disappear?”
I’m curled up around your left side one arm thrown over the dome of your tummy, nuzzling into the side of your neck.
“Got obsessed. With image. Those two, curled around one another inside you. Like yin/yang. Symbol of balance. Melting inside you. You destroying it.” I nuzzle in closer and kiss the side of your neck. “Lost my own balance. Wanted you to take me. Didn’t want it to end. … Did you mean it? When you said all of me belongs inside you?”
“Every word.” You stretch, then flinch as a particularly vicious pocket of gas emerges as a thick, rich belch. Rosewater on your breath. “You know that, right?”
My answer is to pull you into another kiss.