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Daniel holds his drink, clear fingerprints in the sweating glass, grasshopper aftertaste sweet and strangely cleansing in his mouth. Crème de menthe and cacao combine like upmarket toothpaste stirred artfully into cold milk. The cigarette he chases it with is drying, ashy, so he lets it burn to its filter on the bartop. His attention is elsewhere.
Louis de Pointe du Lac, young guy, thirties. Dressed neat and clean. Uses words like “befitting”. Makes a drug deal like he’s flogging an art piece. What strikes Daniel most is that Louis ought to be getting more looks than he is. Not for being one of the few Black guys amongst Mary’s mostly white clientele, but for being out of everyone’s league by fucking miles.
Men don’t usually register on Daniel’s radar for their looks – the underfed blondie tweaked out on meth and the hairy biker with two inches of gut hanging over his belt all seem about the same when he’s sucking dick in a bathroom stall with his eyes closed. Looks don’t exactly factor into the exchange.
But this Louis de Pointe du Lac has a thing about him. A kind of beauty that comes less from the structure of his bones than the way he moves them. A drag on his cigarette, a touch to his collar, a finger on the rim of his glass. His body is seamless in its transitions, like all the arrhythmic clumsiness of a normal person has been polished out of him.
And there’s his eyes, too. Nearly silver, or pale blue enough to look gray. It puts Daniel in mind of something ephemeral, like stormclouds, or else the blunt and brutal face of a concrete building.
His companion is— but, “Come back to my place,” Louis says, and Daniel doesn’t even think of saying no.
Louis’ apartment is tasteful. Unlived-in. Neat as a fucking pin with its clean tiles and chrome faucets. Everything is a bland off-white, an uncolorful olive green. Minus the fucking coffin, there’s nothing else distinguishing in it, no knick-knacks or junk atop the lightly veneered sideboards. Yellow lamps in the hallway cast neat squares of amber light on the linoleum, and the rest of the place is left to the shadows.
It’s good, that way. Daniel feels at his best in the shadows. Too much light makes him feel like a shrivelled worm, like a washed-up jellyfish baking on the sand. The dark is gentle, soft in its judgement.
Louis cracks out a leatherbound treasure trove of psychedelics and narcotics, and Daniel gets a holy rush of blood to the head at the sight of it. Angels sing, almost, or maybe it’s the drunk girls outside the window in the street. He takes a minute to choose. He wants the dope, but he picks the coke.
It does the trick. Clarity, cold as a diamond, and a flush of heat chasing it. His heartrate kicks up, and he pulls his shirt off. It seems – environmentally, socially – the right thing to do.
Louis watches him, follows his movements with something predatory, but permissive. Like letting a fish wriggle away before reeling it back in. There’s a kind of buzzing at the base of Daniel’s spine at the feel of it. He’s used to the transactional nature of these encounters. Money or sex for a fix. A story told for a couch to crash on. He’s a mirror, a tape deck, a point of view. Rarely does his own wanting come into it.
“So, I’ve always been curious,” Daniel says, without any planned sense that he’s going to. “When you pick up a guy. How do you decide which ones you’re going to fuck, and which ones are going to fuck you?”
Louis looks on, amused. The gentle condescension makes him look older, like there’s more than thirty years behind his eyes. “This your first time going home with a man?”
“This week?”
Louis smiles. “Then you know how it goes.”
“I just give people what they want. I’m interested in your perspective.”
Louis seems to consider the question. One of his hands goes around his other wrist, fingers slotting back into some remembered touch. “It’s – something you feel,” he says. “It’s in the way you kiss him, the way he holds you, where he puts his hands. Sometimes it’s the way he walks into a room. Like all the air around him goes solid, and it pushes against your body, makes you feel all of a sudden like giving in.” When he speaks, Louis talks like a narrator, a hypnotist, a poet reciting verse. Like he doesn’t expect to be interrupted or talked over. Like he’s casting a spell. “Sometimes, a man looks like he wants taking so bad he’s like a reed bowing in the wind. And sometimes – well. Sometimes, you just ask.”
They’re toe to toe in the kitchen. Louis, his back to the bleach-clean Formica countertop. Daniel, barefoot on the tiles, leaning in like he’s being invited to do so. He doesn’t know if it’s attraction, but it pulls at him like it is. He’s built his fledgling career on self-effacement; his subjects are interesting, not him. Yet somehow, more than anyone he’s ever followed home, he wants Louis to find him interesting.
“There’s something about you, man—” Things are coming out of Daniel’s mouth he can’t stop, tight and giddy like he’s got hiccups. He laughs, high-strung, face split with strange incredulity. “Okay, I’ve never— are you saying you want to fuck me?”
Louis tilts his head to the side. “Do you want me to?”
“Yeah.” Daniel unbuttons his jeans, pushes a hand in. He’s not surprised to find his cock hard, pushing at the fly. He’s a little afraid, heart up in his mouth, but that’s probably why. “I like you like this. All dark and real.”
Louis’ gaze goes to Daniel’s throat, and Daniel feels his pulse tapping at the membrane of his skin like it’s dancing there, playing a song.
“The bedroom, then,” Louis says.
“Not the coffin?”
Louis laughs. “Too advanced for you, boy.”
In the bedroom, the bed is perfectly made, spotless. Daniel goes to it, touches the smooth, cool coverlet. “So, is this a show home? Or do you actually live here?”
“I don’t get much sleep,” Louis says. “Take your clothes off.”
Daniel does, kicks his jeans and underwear to the corner. When he turns, Louis is framed by the window, curtains drawn over false light, the night made artificially bright and then dark again. He’s no taller than Daniel, but his imposition in the space is distorted somehow, like looking up through the surface of a lake, through radio waves.
“Man,” Daniel says, and his mouth is dry. “That was some good stuff you gave me.” He blinks, and then Louis is laid on the bed, arm behind his head, a line of such inviting beauty that Daniel’s coked-out brain ricochets off it, like it’s too much to process all at once – bare bicep, a narrow waist, his flush cock, flexed tendons in slender feet. “You like to move fast, huh?”
“You’re stalling, Daniel.”
“Maybe I want to savor it.”
“Just come up here.”
Daniel gets onto the bed, and he feels the rubbery smudge of his own sweat in the bent crooks of his knees. Louis’ eyes watching him are black now, iris pushed out and swallowed by a void, by oblivion, by the exhaust-laden cloud of San Francisco’s nightlife itself. The far reaches of the room disappear. Daniel is falling, freewheeling into the cold of the open galaxy.
He wrenches himself back. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?” Louis blinks, and his eyes look normal again, minus the ice-blue unreality of their color. Maybe it’s glaucoma. His hand goes up to Daniel’s hip, his rib, over his palpitating chest. “Don’t be afraid. What are you feeling right now?”
A finger strums across his nipple, and Daniel sucks a breath through his teeth. “Kinda – kinda like you said. Like the air’s gone solid in the room. Pushing against me.”
Louis sits up, as graceful as if he had no weight to him at all, then pushes Daniel to lie down on his back, as implacable as if all the weight of the world was in his hands. “And there you are,” he says. His fingers go up Daniel’s neck, press into the tendon under his chin, dig into his cheek, and then slip past his lips and into his mouth. Daniel feels himself stutter like a caught fish, body convulsing with a surge of arousal as the fingers slide deeper over his tongue. Louis smiles. “Bowing like a reed in the wind.”
Spellbound and struck, Daniel nods.
In one quick motion, Louis is down between Daniel’s legs, sucking him down. His tongue is rough with friction, and pooling with spit so copious Daniel can feel it run down balls, to his hole, and Louis uses it to rub a slippery thumb over his entrance.
He’s losing track. Either it’s the coke crackling in his busted neurones or he’s so fucking turned on his awareness of time and space has been replaced by fog. One minute he’s rutting into tight, silken heat with his knees pressed to the cranial hollows of Louis’ temples, and the next, he’s pretzeled onto his back, legs accordioned to his chest, and Louis is fucking into him with two thickly lubed-up fingers.
“Fuck, shit, fuck me—” Daniel twists, arches, grabs blindly for his own cock like an anchor in the haze.
“There you go, boy,” Louis rasps, mouth open on Daniel’s hipbone, warm enamel press of teeth against his skin. Daniel looks down, past the slippery flush of his own throat, away from the sticky strings of fluid webbing from the red head of his cock to his cramped belly, past his thighs dark with matted hair, to Louis’ face, eyes once again mirror-black, set in an expression of wild hunger.
“Don’t call me boy,” Daniel says, breathless.
Louis licks his blood-flush lips. “It’s what you are.”
“And what does that make you?”
Louis doesn’t answer. With some incomprehensible, steel-spoked force, he flips Daniel bodily over, putting him onto his knees, pushing his face into the spotless, clean-cotton pillow. A fist in the small of his back makes a submissive sling of his spine, and then Louis’ cock is grinding into him, splitting him, prising his muscles apart. Daniel breathes through the shunting in his guts, tries to unclamp his jaw and uncurl his toes, and then Louis is inside him, all the way, chest pressed along his back.
“Okay?” Louis says, a breath in Daniel’s ear.
Daniel’s knees slip wider apart. He moans, dragged under. His cock jerks, red-wet head skidding over the thready sheets, precome staining the olive coverlet.
Louis starts to fuck him. It feels – fucking good. Brilliant as cut glass in his palms. Sparkling like sugar crystals in his teeth. It’s transcendent, specifically for the weird, uncomfortable fucking experience of it.
He goes up on one shaky elbow to grab at himself, but Louis lunges forward, pins Daniel’s wrist to the bed like a manacle. The pale-lacquer sheen of his nails catches the light like the mother-of-pearl inlay of some expensive fucking object. Something in it – the elegance, its contrast to Daniel’s grubby fingers gripping onto the well-made bed – drags a sudden memory up from the swamp. Some other guy on some other night. A suit on the floor and a signet ring on the bedside table, blinking gold. A whiteout feeling of humiliation, and the ringing sound of words—
You’re a fucking joke, Molloy. A worthless hack. You're just a junkie with no future.
“You’re not,” Louis says, low, through the fog. He loosens his grip, and his other hand scrapes its nails up Daniel’s thigh, a bright rash of feeling that unspools the dark, knotted thing that was balling up in his chest. Daniel gasps as the clarity flares up on his skin and through his thoughts. “Don’t let them make you feel that way.”
“What the fuck,” Daniel groans, voice thick. His eyes are burning, and the back of his neck, too. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Louis leans in, touches his mouth to the centre of Daniel’s spine, a strange little benediction that makes Daniel shiver. “What do you want, right now? I’ll give it to you.”
“I—I don’t fucking know—” He feels hot, like he’s running a fever, and weirdly like he’s about to fucking cry. His fucking orgasm feels buried somewhere deep under a stack of junk, knocking about at the bottom of a bag like something he wants but can’t find. “Make me come. Fucking – come on me, I don’t fucking care. Do something.”
Louis makes a sound – a strange, low hiss against Daniel’s back. And then his mouth is gone, and he’s dragging Daniel’s hips up, pressing into him at an angle that makes Daniel’s vision go bright with shock.
“Oh, fuck,” he says. “Fuck – there, keep – please—”
Louis fucks him, and Daniel moans like he’s getting paid for it, except this time, he can’t help it, the sound of his own wanton voice rough and grating in his own ears.
“Touch yourself,” Louis says.
Daniel does, hand springing up to his cock like it’s been released from some invisible restraint, and he fumbles wetly with a pins-and-needles rush of blood to his fingers until he can grip himself, hard and tight. He comes, in a kind of stupor, less from his own hand than by the command, still ringing in his head, a coppery taste in his mouth as he realizes he’s bitten through his own lip.
A flash of car headlights goes past behind the cracked curtains and suddenly Daniel is on his back. The breath leaves his lungs as Louis sits up over him, haloed in an amber haze. Louis’ lips hang open, and he grinds into his fist, scratching his own nails across his chest hard enough to draw red welts across his brown skin, eyes fixed on Daniel’s bloody mouth.
Kiss me, Daniel thinks.
Louis shoves a fist between his own teeth, and he comes like that, ribboning across Daniel’s stomach with a groan so deep and low it sounds like the scraping of rocks below the earth.
They lie, a sweat-soaked tangle in a sunken dip in the middle of the bed. Daniel’s skin is burning hot. Louis’ fingers, careless against his ribcage, are cool. The city outside the window is loud and living, even in the night.
“Here—” Louis leans over, cups Daniel’s face in his hand.
The last person Daniel kissed was a black-haired Irish girl with green eyes and a leather messenger bag strap that went across her chest. They met at a café in February. She was reading a book; he was trying to write his. The windows were fogged with their breath and coffee steam. It was sixteen months ago, and she left him for an internship.
Louis pulls up the edge of the sheet and presses it to Daniel’s lip, blotting up the blood.
The moment passes, but the pressure of its absence remains. On the muted green cover, two spots of rust-colored red.
“What was that for?” Daniel asks.
Louis lies back, all well-fucked lassitude and some private joke making a half-smile of his expression. He looks like he’s got something to say. “I need to avoid temptation.”
“Okay.” Daniel reaches over the side of the bed for the pack of cigarettes and lighter in his jeans. He offers one to Louis, puts another in his mouth. When he clicks his lighter, it’s dead. “What kind of temptation?”
A slow, splitting grin from the other side of the bed, and the end of Daniel’s cigarette suddenly flares red. “Well, you see,” says Louis de Pointe du Lac. “I’m a vampire.”
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