left hand takes
We go out. The heat is oppressive, whether in the house or out of the house. So we go out, because if we’re going to sweat, why not be dancing?
No one else here looks like you do. A pretty crowd of numeral 1’s watch your figure 8. I tell a lie: perhaps there are other large women here. But they hide. What you’re wearing shapes but also shouts. When you spin, your chaotic red-and-black-swirled dress billows out and your belly and breasts flow around you, like music thickened into flesh. When you leap, your landing ripples in your generous thighs. Your arse alone captures the hearts of those who look on.
I’m surely biased. Perhaps there are some in the club who don’t understand. But then again… Your body is a shape written into our blood, a symbol of fertility and heat. You are the platonic form of Woman. I doubt such doubters can exist.
You don’t just dance with me—but how proud I feel when you do! Others you seem to lose yourself with, laughing and dancing and, yes, grinding, with those who catch your fancy. You are a glutton for sensation as well as flesh.
When I watch, something odd occasionally blurs my eyes. A touch here over your partner’s heart, their face, their arm. … I feel my gaze wanting to slip away like water on wax. Despite the heat’s mild delirium I know damn well not to assume I’m imagining things.
So I watch your discarded partners. The ones you touched are brighter but wearier, more prone to breathlessness. They find seats, or walls to lean against.
It’s Throwback Thursday and Sophie Ellis Bextor comes over the speakers. I double over laughing.
You catch my eye and find me smirking knowingly at you across the dance floor. You give the woman you’re dancing with a farewell stroke to her cheek. Her eyes glaze and the skin of your hand and forearm tingles pleasurably. Contact dwindles to a fingertip and then breaks. Not all of the woman remains behind.
I hold up a glass to entice you over and you oblige, weaving your way through the crowd. When you arrive I give it to your right hand then hold out an expectant hand for your left.
The music is so deafening here. I communicate my question by gently stroking the faint weave of scars that dapples your skin, tender like a lover should, and then reach to touch under your shoulderblade.
You give me a slow, mischievous smile, like someone caught doing something they shouldn’t. “Clearly,” your expression seems to say to me, “you don’t know everything about me.”
You drink your G&T in one draught. Cold and fizz describe a straight line from throat to stomach. The sound of your cute belch is lost in the music but I still see you mouth the words, “‘scuse me.”
Glass set aside, you focus on your forearm. It costs you more to obfuscate the sight than it does to allow your essence to saturate the skin.
Every scar bleeds rose petals made of smoke. I gasp, the sound again lost, and bring my hand up to meet yours, a look of wonder on my face.
Where your blood-smoke caresses my skin the flames don’t stop there. If I concentrate I can feel a tingling, like sunburn on the skin but like freezer-burn in my flesh. My heart beats faster and feeds the flames. It feels threatening and exciting. I know something is being taken from me, but you’ve just unconsciously licked your lips, so I’m going nowhere.
Your hand brushes along the length of my arm, my chest. On the surface nothing changes but underneath the surface I bloom, opening up to your touch. Is it blood you’re taking, or more? It feels like more. We flow together, intermingle, and then more of me is gone and your touch roams further.
Your hand doesn’t stop at my skin either. I look up at you with delirious fear when the pads of your finger press through my sternum, caress the fascia surrounding my heart. You steal the blood from my heart’s arteries and it freezes. When my legs buckle you catch me.
Then the rose/blood/petal/coldfire is gone and I am surfacing from a dream I didn’t know I’d fallen into. Enough blood pressure remained to force life back into my heart, just as you knew it would.
You kiss me on my pale and clammy cheek. I crave the heat of your body and, for a moment, you give it. Your right hand strokes the side of my face, giving comfort.
Then you look up. A woman is prevaricating, hovering at the edge of our bubble of personal space. She’s just about decided you’re engaged when you transfix her with a stare.
She’s one of your dance partners. Recovered, which speaks well for her strength and poorly for her instinct of self-preservation. Mute, she hands you her phone, already set on Add Contact. Your name is Cute Stranger.
You smile, and look at her again. Tall, aggressively conventionally attractive with fake eyelashes and French manicure. You don’t normally attract the normals like this, but you’ll take them.
Very deliberately, you hold her phone to your breast and turn your back on her. After a few steps towards the exit you pause and look back, expectant.
When she follows, it’s not to recover her phone.
She dies in an alleyway, but the alleyway is at least clean.
The first kiss is hers. She kisses you wild and possessive, taking your face between her hands. When you reciprocate she lets her arms fall to enfold you, like she’s in control. She tastes like cherry rum and coke.
Your body clearly fascinates her. She squishes herself against you, breast to breast, belly to belly, and if your belly weren’t so fulsome it would be crotch to crotch, too.
I appear at the mouth of the alley, moving carefully, frail like I haven’t slept in days. You look past the woman whose mouth you are conquering and smile at me with your eyes.
You’re still smiling when red rose petals trace all up your partner’s back. She moans and wriggles closer, feeling the intrusion and mistaking it for her own need. Your vampiric touch inflames her passion wherever it wanders, and her veins empty.
She realises something is wrong by the time you’re stroking her neck. Dizziness means you have to catch and pin her against the rough brick wall, but your body is amply up to the task. Her form is engulfed by yours even as her blood mystically filters into your stomach. No flavour, but the fullness, the warm glow, the golden brush of her essence as it plays across your nerves and is absorbed as your own.
The taking hand pushes past the boundaries of her skin. She cannot close off to you, continuing to kiss you even as tears stream down her cheeks. Her skin turns waxy and she shivers: you cradle her heart in your palm.
Her resistance crumbles entirely. The only thing driving her heart now is when you rhythmically clench your fist. You release her mouth and watch her face, still close as a lover, and pump her blood into your grasp. She mouths words but can’t make the sounds: please, please, don’t.
A belch puffs out your cheeks and brings with it the longed-for taste of blood. She closes her eyes.
Sensing that she is almost emptied out you growl. Despite feasting on a dozen people and now draining this woman to death it’s not enough. With wild eyes and mouth open like a starving wolf you push more of yourself into her desiccating body. The blood-flames grow, eating through her drying meat, sucking and devouring, drinking up soul as well as blood. Red dances beneath her skin, inside her slack mouth, pours out the hollow caverns of her eyes.
Then you withdraw. She drops like a burnt-out matchstick. Only her skin prevents her from bursting into splinters.
I’m swaying when you reach me. You slosh gently with every swaying step. Whether it’s from your feeding on me or your feeding on the girl, you don’t know. Still burping into the back of your hand you accept a little of my weight and together we go find a taxi.
You hail it with your left hand raised.