Love Song

Sometimes things just don't turn out the way you expect them to, no matter how well you plan.

I never believed the warnings. It just couldn't happen. Especially not the very first time we made love.

I have to admit it irritated me that he was so sure of me. He was so positive I would never hurt him and that alone should have warned me off. But it didn't, because I was the proverbial fool in love. We planned it so carefully, because we had already come close a couple of times, purely by accident, and such moments were too important to be left to the whim of fate. Fate, after all, can sometimes be a vindictive b***h.

The ground rules were clear and agreed upon by both of us. If I couldn't handle it, if things went too far, I was going to let him go. He made me promise, like a promise had any actual power to bind me. But dammed if it didn't. And I was more frightened of that thought than I had been of anything in many more years than I could count.

I thought I had taken every precaution. I was careful to drink my fill in advance. I drank so so much that I was sluggish, uncomfortable and totally uninterested in anything other than sleep. In fact sleep was all I could think of when we first came together.

But all that changed when…oh god. His lips and hard, hot hands on my icy skin, the way we kissed, and the sudden awareness of what was to come next and not fighting it, not warning myself mentally to intervene before I killed him… Because he never considered I would entertain such a thought. He’s so positive�"he said I've already given him his life and he knows I’m too stubborn to take it back. And he was right. It was a gift given to that bright boyish smile and those deep blue, almost cobalt, eyes…damn him! Men�"they hurt you, all of them. They all do it, then they say they don’t mean to. A meal should never talk back.

I love him so much I hurt. My body was already saturated with unadulterated human blood, and yet I had barely accepted him before I was desperately hungry for his life force. I needed his blood, although anyone else’s would have nauseated me. I couldn't think of any thing else, couldn't hear anything else, feel anything else…just needed the heat of him inside me.

In the end, as I said, he was right. I didn't kill him. Not even close. Held back by centuries of iron control…and that love, damn him. I lay in his arms, my cheek against his chest, listening intently to the steady rhythm of that strong young heart, feeling his essence burning in my veins, knowing it was less than the few vials surrendered to laboratory technicians for the cursory tests routinely performed on their species… and far less than he, my beautiful boy, offered to my teeth as a demonstration of love. I lay there with my arms wrapped around him, feeling his warmth not only beneath and around me but inside me, coursing through my veins, permeating what might be called my soul…if I had one..

I counted almost 2100 heartbeats before he began to stir from sleep and open his cobalt eyes to my golden ones and smiled. It was a smile I had never seen on that beautiful face before, a wicked combination of I-told-you-so and lets-do-it-again…

He’s the kind of guy who will automatically say “I love you” in knee-jerk response to a similar declaration, so immediately you might be somewhat skeptical to any emotional content in that often overused phrase.

But then I am, or was, the sort of woman who will either say “I love you” in the first, early moments of a budding relationship, or never utter the words at all. I tried the more considered endearment once or twice in the early years, but could never do it with the appropriate sincerity. I was far too young, and had way too little control. And in those days, it mattered so little…but that night…I called him ‘my beloved’ time and again, even in languages that been extinct for millennia.

So we did it again. And again. And I never took his heart, never took those few final gulps when the heart fails and you feel the entire life sliding inside you, the great final heat of it. Each time I had his life there with me, looking at me out of those dark, liquid eyes, wrapping itself around me with strands of warm, silken gossamer, warm hands and a mouth that left no millimeter of my chill skin untouched. From the first, I could feel his warmth inside me, savoring the curious sensation of it and it made we wonder…

The last time I truly loved a mortal, I was one. My kind, vampires, have a certain passion for each other, and I've had my fair share of those, maybe more than my fair share, But there’s an innocent sweetness in mortal men that simply doesn't survive the change. They say poetry is what gets lost in the transformation, There’s a certain reverence that is lost as well.

The light-hearted laughter of mortal men and the assessing, questioning eyes? Well, I have thousands of examples caged in my memory, in my heart and in my blood, But, out of all those thousands, there was never one to taste and leave alive. There was no touch without a termination, a death, a bringing-across. I remember hearing stories of vampires who stayed with a mortal for their entire lifetimes and I laughed at them. I compared it to keeping a pet for the span of its’ natural life and I wondered what kind of stupid love that was?

Now I’m finding out…or thought I was.

Then there was the day I cut my hand on a piece of broken glass. It bled…and kept bleeding, and then scabbed and bruised. I couldn't take my eyes off it, my skin, the blue and purple discoloration. I wondered at the heat and feeling of tenderness around the hurt place. It became infected and stayed infected for an entire day until I tore the wound open with my fangs to let it bleed then wrapped the wound to keep it sterile.

I couldn't have imagined this happening. Being wounded. Oh, it sometimes happens to us, but to heal so slowly…I didn't ever remember that happening to anyone I knew.

He is weakening me and I don’t know what to do about it. I’m a vampire, although mostly restricted to our equivalent of ‘fast food’ these days, as we all are, but a vampire none the less. I have no wistful yearning to return to a mortal life with its’ attendant mortal death. That only happens in the stories they tell each other. I look at this mark of dawning mortality on my arm and know I don’t want to die.

But losing him would be worse than any death. I've gotten used to the idea that I can have him. He came to my embrace knowing I was the embodiment of death and he willingly gambled his delicate human life on my much more formidable strength…and his gamble paid off. And now I am faced with the decision of whether or not to dare do what he did. Risk death. And I find that something inside me whispers, yes, I will, and gladly. Because, damn all the fates, I do love him.