Those first days, we kept Leis on his side, while he slept. Laurent kept the wounds clean, and tended to his breath. He came and sat with me often, in my room, and held my hands in his without speaking. Often, his hands were blooded, and I sucked this from his fingers, to which he closed his eyes and moaned softly.
He liked to have his hands kissed, his wrists sucked. That to which he would close his eyes, and part his lips, and make quiet sounds of urgency. I would push up the lace at his wrists and press my mouth to his skin, and occasionally he would lean into me and whisper to me in his rough French dialect.
"Oh soft," he might say into my ear, distressed, "he knows what I like best. My head," and lie back, and tell me to undress so that he could touch my skin and steal the heat from my body. I did as he asked, always. Even more occasionally, once abed, he might kiss me, and stroke back my hair, and bite me ungently at the neck from behind, so that I could not touch him or make any other sign of imagined protest.
To be bitten at the neck brings about an instantaneous lightheaded delirium, which clouds the vision and relaxes the limbs. He would bring his arm up under mine, and touch me lightly at the collarbones, and it was so rare that I could not ever speak at all, which I think that he preferred. I have told you that he would often bite me at the hands, which is so unlike such a thing as blooding at the neck, but its own tortured intimacy. If I did not swoon away, he would press his fingers to my mouth again, his fingernails rough against my tongue, and kiss my ear, and urge me, "Sleep."
He liked to hear me softly sigh, or swallow against the bite, or listen to an unintended sound drawn out by the tension, and he liked those things in anyone. These were not born out of romantic love, but the familiarity between us, and he only ever bit me on a whim, and what do I know about his whims? He was good at surprising me. At times, he took an interest in my body, and my pleasure, but over two hundred and forty years, I recognized that these times were not indicative of change in any sense. As often, he might take my hand and remark that it was too dry and wearing on him.
"Why are your hands so rough?" he asked me, some fourteen days after the terrible thing, it being the first words he had said to me after ordering me home. He had me on my side, holding me from the back, and his body pressed against mine through his white robe. He investigated my hands gently.
"I have been doing your washing," I told him, and found it difficult to speak after his biting me so deeply at the throat.
"You took apart the red one?"
"The red coat, the black one, and both gold ones," I said, swallowing. Each of his frock and waistcoats needed to be unstitched to be washed. I would unstitch them, wash them, and leave them for him to reconstruct. They were too delicate to be handled roughly, and had to be dried quickly and evenly.
"You work too hard," he said, blowing on the wound he had opened. "Oh, it bleeds still," he whispered, fanning the punctures with his hand. He touched me then at the forehead, beneath my neck, my side, the loins, beneath my ribs, which warmed me and caused my eyelids to flutter with peacefulness, at his looking after my health. "Go out, sweet boy. Your presence disturbs him."
"I have promised to stop my looking in upon him."
"Do not defy me. But I am pleased with your lucidity."
"Kiss me, dear one," I asked him. "I am tired."
He stroked my hair back from my forehead. I wanted to dig my roughened fingers into him, push them into his flesh and gaze on him. I wanted to mount him and hold him still beneath me, kiss him harder than he liked because it was the language he understood. The hand rested there on my head as if he had fallen asleep mid-gesture.
"Will you not even be angry with me for what I've done?"
"Do you want me to be angry?" he asked, voice indeed heavy with sleep. "Is it punishment you want? Want, want," he murmured, waving it off with nothing more than his tone. "One who seeks punishment finds it in time." His hand traveled slowly from my head to my belly, and he touched me gently below the navel. When the muscles there startled taut, he pressed against them with his fingers flat.
"I don't know what I want."
"That's honest," he said. "You know, in a man, there is such the sense of the heart beating here. With us there is only meat. Are we flesh at all? I wonder it on occasion. How it would be different for us were our rapture so less intimate. Must I always feel you inside every smallest reach of my body when I take hold of you with my teeth? Must I hear you in my head?"
"I do not know what you mean."
"What you've done to me by finding that boy. Dasius, you don't understand it. I have been inside of him. Oh," he paused, his voice quite breathy and gasping, "what will happen? He is the most beautiful boy I have ever known." He kissed my shoulder then, and pressed his wandering hand to my sternum.
"You quiver."
"Oh I quiver," he admonished, smiling against my cheek, and suddenly a little dangerous, "only because my heart beats a little over that other. I think of him with your blood upon my lips and the taste of you lingering in my mouth, even as you continue to bleed. Do you feel badly about it?"
"I don't," I said.
"Do you not want him for yourself?"
"Such that I am already dead."
"Talk to me of it."
But I would not, and he pinched me with his teeth in frustration, wanting some talk of love out of me. He would take my skin between his teeth and pinch me and pinch me, which hurt as much as it made me laugh. His demeanor was different entirely from when he truly desired my injury. "I am a delicious danger, am I not?" he asked me, kissing affectionately the welts he had raised on my shoulder and neck, companionable and happy to be in the first blush of love. I made faces and pretended at the spurned lover to make him laugh and pet my hair.
"Talk to me," he said, trailing his finger along my jaw.
"Ca n'avancera a rien de discuter," I said, it is not helpful to discuss it.
"Eh, dans ce cas-la, va te faire foutre," he whispered, in that case, fuck off, but he kissed my cheek and held onto me so that I could not go, fingernails digging into me. "Fine body, thinned of blood."
"I am glad that he fills you with life."
"Do not be vulgar."
"I do not know what you mean by that, 'vulgar'."
He paused then, and hummed, troubled and unable to find the words to express himself fully. He took in these little stuttered breaths to hum, propped now on his elbow, playing with his hair. "It is just that what you say, it is so inexact. I do not know. You say easily something which is very grand, and that I long for, but well out of reach. Truthfully, I have long desired some aspects of living. Lately, I think on it often. Do not say so easily what is dear in my heart. You hurt my spirit."
"Then I apologize."
"Uhm," he made that sound, uhm, thoughtful, counting my ribs with his fingers. Then whispered, "God help me, come, would that I could screw him slow."
"Who is vulgar?"
He gave me his most leonine smile, his hair catching the light from window, hiding his teeth not at all. "Heaven bleeds, I am in agony. He is so pure and keens beneath my touch. He says words which I want to rattle out of his body." His eyelids fluttered.
"Please keep these thoughts in your own head."
He lay back and I turned to face him. He had powder dusted on his face, and had dabbed on rosy tints, but these drawn features were askew, smudged and uneven. His eyes were half-open, contented by blood and inclined toward rest. I rose shakily, and felt his steadying hand at the small of my back. I dipped a cloth into the shallow basin of water on the nightstand, and came to sit beside him again on the bed. When I touched him with the wet cloth, he closed his eyes and parted his lips.
He didn't talk about what I might feel about Leis, and I did not ask him what his inclination toward the boy was either. All I know about it he volunteered to me, and so I did not know much at all, beyond what I could hear at a shut door. When I finished wiping away his make up, he produced a small silver mirror, more expensive than anything else in the room, and tilted it so that I could see that the deep bite at my neck had closed itself, and he gestured for me to come then, and lie beside him, and he whispered his agony of love, and wept into my hair.
It did not bother me at all to comfort him after the boy I loved. In my mind was a cloud of electricity, and it pushed all thoughts out of my own, and half-lidded my entire world. While he slept, I, light-headed and drunk on the delirium of sluggish blood, went out into the misty evening, wearing only a linen shirt, untied and slack over one bare shoulder, cheap and soiled all else, and in the gardens of the Tuileries, which then was all cruising and cutthroats, found a boy driven toward the former.
I don't remember what that boy looked like, but he was the first of many in that period. Perhaps he had blond hair, and perhaps he was a strawberry blond. There is a certain look to them that I like, which Laurent knew and played up. Whenever he ever sent me boys to drink of, they were of that like. Slim, delicate features, quivering hands, a respectful but fearful nature. But one does not procure all features desired in the small hours of morning, among those men shamed into lechery under cover of darkness. One imagines loveliness when there is no light to see by. He whispered his name to me, and asked after mine, and I told him, "Vampire," and he asked me what that was.
Because he was clean I knew him for a low aristocrat, too lowly to risk eccentricity or much daring. He was perfumed with an exotic mixture of acid fruits and rose. He smelled also of camphor, used then to repel pests, and I tasted this on his skin when I pressed my parted lips to his neck, and as he sighed, that piney balm numbed my tongue and dizzied me. His hands fumbled over my body, looking for some tie to loose or gap to slip into, and before he could find it, my teeth found flesh, and my hand his mouth to silence a cry. But it is so rarely necessary to stop a voice when one bites at the neck. The body is so startled that no thought of screaming comes, and the heel of the hand at the throat chokes the breath away. I pricked him only, and the blood came to me slowly for that, and he drew loose in my arms, sighing as if in some small ecstasy of the flesh. He did shiver, but one reins in the beast which rears at such good stimulus, and I kept what little head I had that I should not kill him in case that he might be missed.
There were perhaps some twenty minutes spent there, stationary as if frozen in the pleasure of one kiss, and it tickled me that he wore a balm to drive away the bite of pests. For the whole of that evening, the whole of my mouth remained numbed.
Laurent, seeing me home as first light broached, stood still in the sitting room, arms hugged around himself, whispered, "Please God, do not laugh at nothing."
But why should I not laugh at the small ridiculous ironies? When laughter is hard.