danse macabre

It’s late. I wasn’t staying up for you because I didn’t know you were coming home, but at 2am I hear the door open. You find me in the living room, laptop still warm from where I closed it, sat at the electronic piano. I look surprised but delighted to see you.

You stride in and bring the night in with you. You stop so abruptly that your dress still swirls around you, dark red and black, pleats and folds settling like a jealous lover’s touch around you. Our eyes are fixed on one another. The silence is electric.

What has tonight been, for you? Your lipstick is nonexistent. Your belly is hard to make out under the black dress corsetry, but I think it’s maybe packed with something. There’s soot between the thumb and index finger of your right hand and grass littered all around the skirt of your dress. I smell smoke: wood, and something sweet I don’t recognise.

You grin at me, displaying the sharp, white fangs that have seen so much living flesh. “What were you playing?”

“Valse d’Amélie,” I blurt out, staccato since I kinda lost control of my vocal chords when I saw you.

“A waltz? Good idea.” You take out your phone and pair it with the TV soundbar. A modern song I don’t recognise kicks up, double bass and banjo underpinning it in 3/4. “Up.” You make grabby hands.

I’m only too happy to be grabbed. You show me how to hold you and at first you lead, showing me the steps. But at one point you switch. “I always used to have to do the male part, so it’s your turn now.”

I’m not bad. My swing dancing helps. No shyness to touch you or guide you where I want you to go, just a little stiffness until the music soaks into me. By the fourth song you can relax and just be present, responding to my lead. You slosh faintly during the more energetic turns. I don’t hear it because of the music, but you feel it, and belch under your breath.

You laugh as I suddenly spin you, a move you didn’t teach me, and which almost loses the beat for us. But you fly under my raised arm again in reverse and we’re back in business, turning about the living room, grinning and cracking jokes.

The fifth waltz is down tempo. We pull a little closer. Half way through you rest your head on my shoulder and breathe deep.

Your kiss on my throat is a warning to prepare myself. I feel every millimetre of your teeth as they pierce me, just like I always do. Just like always, I let you deliver the wound and drink. Maybe I pull you a little closer. But as my blood eagerly leaps into your salivating mouth I never stop leading. You control the ebb and flow of my life down your throat, and I control the dance, leaving you to focus on the heat and the taste and the growing full feeling as you take your willing dessert.

As light-headedness hits me I can’t help but laugh. I have no idea where you went and what you did but you came back, and more life and light has happened to me in the twenty minutes you’ve been back than I’d feel in a month without you. My laughter is deep and warm. I feel your lips curl upward in a silent smile as your throat continues to bob.

“I love you, Rey,” I say to you as I stain your mouth crimson.

Your drinking doesn’t change. The regular gulp, gulp, gulp of each captured heartbeat gurgling down your gullet tells me everything I need to hear.