Then I looked around his room. There were a few posters on his dark blue walls (one of which was a tour poster from the Cure playing at First Ave on July
12, 1984, and I wondered if he had actually been there). Underneath his massive flat screen TV, there was lots of gaming equipment strewn about a slick black entertainment center, but I didn’t see any movies.
“So did you just make up the stuff about the movies?”
“Oh, no, check this out.” Jack picked up a remote control off the entertainment center and hit a button. The entire wall to the left of the TV slid back, like a pocket door, and revealed a gigantic shelving unit overflowing with DVD’s. “That’s cool, right? This was Mae’s idea, because she said having all the movies out in the open was ‘tacky.’”
“But Peter has tons of books out in his room,” I said.
“Right?” Jack shook his head and walked over to inspect his movie collection. “Book are ‘sophisticated.’ Its what I get for living with people who were born before television. They just don’t understand this modern age.”
“Yeah, you have a rough life,” I mocked.
“Hey, my favorite pair of shorts just got thrown away!” He looked back at me, pretending to be heartbroken. “It’s been a pretty sad day all around.”
“About that…” I wanted to segue into asking him more questions about the club, even though I had already decided that I didn’t want to. He tensed up, but it was because he was afraid that I’d call him a monster or something.
“I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Jack explained quickly.
“Most vampires don’t kill people. It would make eating impossible. Even if you take a metropolitan area like the Cities, where there’s a collective population of over 3 million people, about a thousand of that is vampires. But if we killed every time we ate, the population of vampires in Minneapolis alone would kill at least a thousand people a week. We’d eat ourselves into starvation in less than a decade.”
“I didn’t think you’d killed her, but that’s good to know.” A shiver ran down my spine anyway. In order for a thousand vampires to eat, a thousand people had to be bitten each week. Even if some of them lived on blood banks, the way Jack and Mae mostly did, that was still impossible to fathom. “How could all those people be bitten? Why aren’t they talking about it?”
“Very few know they’re bitten.” He was obviously uncomfortable talking about this, but he went on. “We don’t go around blood raping them or anything.
They just think they’re on dates. Lots of vampires — not me — but lots have
‘girlfriends’ or ‘boyfriends,’ but really, it’s like… having a cow, so you don’t have to buy milk.”
“Oh my god!” I gasped, and instantly thought of Jane. She went home with all sorts of guys, and most of them were really attractive and kind of creepy.
She could easily have been a vampires cow, more than once. “But how do they not know?”
“Well, they just think…” He rubbed his forehead and sighed. “They just think that they’re with really good lovers. I mean, it feels really good. So if you incorporate it with sex, especially with drunk or high people, they have no clue.
And it doesn’t really hurt them. It’s not any worse then donating blood. You’re a little weak and woozy, but otherwise okay.”
“So that girl that you bit…” For some reason, I started feeling incredibly jealous. Just knowing that he was with a girl, that he’d fed on someone (which was both disgusting and scintillating) made my stomach twist. “Did you have sex with her?”
“No,” Jack said, but he turned away from me and looked ashamed. My heart sped up anxiously, and he tilted his head slightly, so I knew he heard it.
“But we did… stuff. The stuff doesn’t matter, though. I know guys say that, but for us it’s really true. It was just a way to get what I wanted.”
“Because for you, it’s not the sex. It’s the blood that’s intimate and… sexual.” When I said that, he realized he’d actually made things worse and grimaced. “So what’s it like?”
“It’s like drinking blood.” Rubbing his eyes, I could feel how nervous this made him. He wasn’t sure what I was getting at and just thinking about drinking her blood made him thirsty. On top of that, he could hear the quickening of my pulse. He was putting himself on thin ice, but I refused to let go. “It’s hard to explain. You’ll understand when you’re a vampire.”
“What is it like for her then? What’s it like for a human to be bitten?” I moved so I was sitting on my knees, tilting more towards him, and he was acutely aware of the heat resonating from my body. His hunger filled the room like a fog, permeating through me.
“I don’t know.” Swallowing hard, he glanced over at me, then almost instantly looked away.
“Did she enjoy it?”
The thought of her, some faceless girl, being with Jack and feeling any kind of pleasure sent a stabbing pain within me. Maybe that’s why I did what I was doing. I wanted to know, in some twisted way, but I also didn’t think it was fair that I was the only one feeling jealous and hurt.
“Yeah. I mean, I guess she did. I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his sandy hair and gave me a pained look. “What do you wanna know? What are you trying to find out?”
“What would I feel?” My voice had gone low and soft, sounding strangely seductive, especially for me. I don’t know if I’d done it on purpose really, or if it was just that I could feel everything that Jack felt, and it was playing with my mind. “If you bit me right now. Would it hurt?”
“For a second.” Licking his lips, he kept his eyes locked on me, and his breathing got heavier. “But then there’s the most wonderful sensation you’ve ever felt. It radiates from the bite like a warm heat and your heart speeds up so fast, it should hurt, but it doesn’t. Your senses go into a frenzy, but it all feels amazing…” He trailed off and swallowed hard.
“What would you feel?” I asked softly, and the corner of his mouth turned up just slightly.
“It’s like that, only better. We feel everything at such a heightened sense, it’s pure ecstasy. Nothing else can even compare.”
His eyes touched on the hunger that I had seen in Peter’s eyes when he wanted to bite me, and I knew thinking about Peter was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. Jack had a sharp intake of breath, and I knew he noticed the changes, the way my pulse got louder and faster, and some special scent that was supposed to drive him wild.
I’d been biting my lip, trying to control my own feelings of desire, and then I felt a sharp pain in my bottom lip. Honestly, I can’t say whether or not I did it on purpose, but Jack noticed instantly. His pupils dilated and he exhaled shakily. Unintentionally (or maybe intentionally), I had bitten my lip hard enough to draw blood. It wasn’t very much, but any amount would be enough to send Jack over the edge at this point.
He rushed towards me so quickly I didn’t see him move. His face just suddenly appeared directly in front of mine, his blue eyes staring straight into me. They were completely ravenous, but there was something more behind them then lust. There was a burning agony that came from his poorly repressed affection for me.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” he murmured in a voice so slow I could barely hear it over the pounding of blood in my ears. Defiantly and provocatively, I raised my chin in the air, revealing the smooth skin of my throat.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I was tempting him brutally, even though I knew that it could only lead to our demise. With his insatiable need filling me, it still seemed entirely worth it.
Closing his eyes, he leaned forward and very tenderly, he licked the fresh blood off my skin. Then he wrapped his mouth around my lip, drinking as much of my blood as he could, and he moaned softly. As soon as his lips touched mine, I fell into a state of delirium. A wonderful weakness spread through me, and I arched my back. An intense quivering started in my heart but radiated out all over me, so my whole body shuddered.
When he kissed me fully on the mouth, I thought I would explode. I could taste my blood on his tongue and the intense excitement that went along with it. His mouth felt hungry and needy, but there was nothing forceful or rough about it. His muscles trembled with restraint. I knew the things he wanted to do me, the things that I would gladly let him do, and I could feel how hard he had to fight that off.
Carefully, he pushed me back onto the bed, his lips never leaving mine, and he pressed me into the soft mattress. His body laid on me, and I felt his heart pound against mine. Burying my fingers in his hair, I tried to pull
