If he had drunk, I could see the cloud of his breath in the air, warmed by the blood in his body. If he hadn't, he could come cold and invisible into the cool room, and make his serpent's way up the coverlet. He would take me out of bed and sit me in a white, gold-leafed settee by the window. From there I could watch the street below from behind a carefully drawn curtain. I had only to twitch up the fabric to look out. I spent many good hours there, watching the street as if a young king in a ruined palace. It passed the time, listening to them argue in the adjoining room, because Laurent wouldn't take blood on account of me and it made Dasius completely desperate. It was my first encounter with blood. I didn't know anything about it. Nothing.

Now of course I know the difference between great loves and small affairs, that blood can be such a small affair, but ignorance made me selfish then. I had no frame of reference for what he felt for me or what I felt. All I knew of him was that he had become my entire world, and I assumed I was his. I didn't know anything about his history, or his patterns. I know now that he is attached to me, and in dark rooms, near the end, he would talk to me when he wouldn't talk to others. In his last days, when he was living in the back of his closet, he would let me slide the door open, and lie in my arms, and let me beg him to stay. I think he liked to imagine the early days we had together, when I depended on him wholly, and could not even stand to think of him with any other and we were all sweet words and playful debauchery. How things turned around on us. How life has its way. I am one of those who remembers the true color of his eyes, and their warmth, and their goodness.

For me, yes, he was truthfully good. In those first weeks, all noise and light was pain. I have heard others compare it to being beaten with thin reeds, pricked with sewing needles, drawn through an unforgiving silver sieve, but I won't compare it to anything. Too much light, too much stimulation of any kind would bring about on me an acute, entire body pain, more like sensitivity to sound than one confined to the physical realm. When he came cool and serpentine to me, sitting up in my bed when I couldn't stand to be touched, I was glad to have him to myself, but when I was in a spiral of pain, I wished for the blood he might have given me. My body had knowledge of the blood that I didn't, that it would make me stronger, hasten an essential change in me which would spirit earthly cares away.

There was a tree outside of my window, just tall enough that its fullest boughs were within reach; or they would have been had my window ever been open. I was sitting there, observing its birds, the first time I realized that I wanted to take my order back. Go out. Leave me. Bring me a young boy to have. Ten of them. Twenty. A thousand. Give me every child who has ever sung a note. Get me the virgin boys of Rome who sing like the heavenly host. Get me the dirty urchins who flee from the gaslights and haunt the carriagewheels of the painted bourgeoisie. Get me the sad-eyed orphans who play by the dockyards of Marseille, who let me play with them as a boy even though I knew my mother. Give them to me. Anything to put that pain away.

Birds in the trees were puffed up, their feathers on end, as spring approached. They chased each other from branch to branch, and when I closed my eyes, their songs were wordless appeals to God to forget Leis, who still prays to Him, because his wants and cries are brutality, and sometimes I knocked on the window glass to disturb the flirting birds. They fluttered their wings not at all at my attention, because I was locked up in a room, and they had so much sky to sing in they need take no note of me. I rested my face on the cool glass and thought ahead to summer, when it would surely be too hot to bear. I feared the weather a bit, but I needed the daylight, to somehow measure the passage of days. I was past counting my prayers whenever I was left alone, but I kept the rosary looped from a button on my shirt to an interior pocket on my waistcoat, so that I could feel the Virgin close when my thoughts turned to self-harm.

I suppose I have always been more easily led into self-destruction than introspection. I shouldn't like to think of myself much. Even then, my thoughts ran more to what was happening to my body than what would become of me. And I can't say that I thought Laurent would stay with me forever, because, as much as I begged him to stay with me, I didn't think of that at all. It was all words, because in the evening, with the curtains drawn, I often hurt so much I didn't know who I was, or where I was, or why. But in the weak daylight, on the eastern side of the house, I listened to the furious whispered rows between Dasius and Laurent, catching stray words. "Please" "Don't" "Can't stand" "I would rather die" "Destroying yourself" and when Laurent couldn't argue anymore, my door would open, and he would come in.

Laurent was and is a true creature of the evening, but as winter crept into spring, he would often come to sleep in my bed in the night, without a word, and so I knew that he had been sleeping near Dasius before the rows. So it was like that, daylight, quiet but for the hushed arguement, mild, when he came into my room. I pulled away from the window to see him. I searched his face for some interest, but his features were drawn. He was wearing dark colors, except for his clean white stockings, and the red ribbon tied meticulously at the knee. I wondered who washed the stockings. I thought of his careful, unmarked fingers working soap through silk. He took his low heels off and tossed them under the bed in one fluid movement.

He took my wrist and looked at it, standing over me. Silent. Then his face broke and he was all anguish.

"No, no," I said, rising to kiss him. He was loose in my arms.

"Dasius says that he will leave us," he hummed, steady through tears.

There was nothing for me to say. I didn't know if it was possible or what would happen.

Laurent didn't say more than that. It was not my business. He turned his head. "Looking at birds, little bird?"

"They are singing words against me, to God," I told him.

He looked at me again, still steady. I kissed the tears from his face, though the blood in them was thin. He had been cool to the touch for some days. "Are you certain?" he asked. "It seems they are only singing bird things."

"I know it."

"Oh don't go mad, my blond. Say anything but madness. I shiver."

I told him that I thought of nothing but blood, because it was true, and that my thoughts had begun climbing desperate walls of desire for the worldly temptation of flesh. I whispered that I would take back any oath, that I wanted for the perfect forgetfulness of blood, and fingernails drawn over a vulnerable, quivering belly, of hot, baited breath. I said that I wanted to be begged to leave off or go on, to give or take pleasure with a kiss, but that the kiss itself was as nothing, because it was the blood that consumed my hours, my mind, and take me with him out soon, now, because I could sit not one moment longer as an empty vessel, wondering at the thoughts of flirting birds.

"Do you say this to me because I have wanted it?" he asked, "or because it is true?"

"The truth, the truth," I told him, desperately, pulling on the tied cravat at his collar, knowing that he was badly done by for blood without my searching mouth.

"I fear that when you come back to yourself, my blond, you will have a horror of this moment," he said, shrugging away his coat. His hand clawed for the fastened draw of the curtain, hoping to drop us into darkness. When the curtain fell, the sound of birdsong fell away as well, abruptly stopped as if little heads had been twisted from tittering bodies.

He tried to speak but I pushed him down on the settee, and he wanted to say more pretty words but I wouldn't be turned away, distressing him. "Where shall we go, sweet breath?" he asked, gasping for air. "A masque?" I covered his mouth and he kissed my fingers. "A velvet bordello?" His lips lingered at my fingertips. "There are many salons which would die to rain pearls upon your beautiful head, my blond. A thousand closed doors behind which you may run not only blood but any of a thousand fortunes. They will give you anything you ask for the pleasure. Say one word."

I pushed my knee between his two so that I might have him at my mercy, though it was illusion. He was and always has been stronger than me by far. Even then, he had a finger behind my ear, a delicate finger, which at any moment might tighten and drag me screaming to the floor. I put a hand under his chin, at his throat, and he gave a soft gasp of censure, as he had done when I had struck him weeks earlier, the softest intake of breath. He need say nothing. By then I knew his secrets and unspoken wants, and had made them my own, because so much of me now is molded after him. A little slap, a little teeth.

"Kiss me once," he said.

I did, kissing him full on the lips, kissing his cupid's bow, and then the little mole beneath.

"Once more," he said. "Oh, softly. Tenderly."

I did, and he was laughing, champagne bubbles of laughter, which haunt me now, though not for the reasons he imagined, not horror. Oh, how I miss him. How I wish I did not have to cause him so much pain in future. Un autre bise un autre bise, another kiss another kiss before the bite, before the sting, before the flood, love me, my blond, my half, my pea, lift the veil of romance over our great horror, the blood, that is so beautiful on your pretty lips.

I said "Take me out of here" and he said "Where?" and I said "Out" and he said "Let us linger here awhile" and I bit him below his lowest rib, which made him cry out, because it is a painful place, as are all places where bone is close to skin, but there is not much blood there. So I returned to our perfect place, near the dimple at his shoulder, and while I drank from him, he whispered in my ear all his worries about Dasius, hands in my hair.

"Why do you care?" I asked him, maybe with words and maybe without, swooning away from the furious, delirious, consuming rebuff of vampire blood. The first draught is as a flick to the inner ear, sending the drinker spinning into confused, sweet reverie.

"What binds us?" he asked, into my ear. "Pet, there aren't words. I wonder it myself. How I would be rid of him sometimes. Perhaps it is his forgiveness I crave, but is that so simple? If he is all forgiveness, then he is none at all. How I hate him sometimes and would like to see him dead. But you hear it even now in my voice that I don't mean it. Perhaps I fear that if he dies, his brother will turn against me, and I do fear that creature at its full powers may be my death. But I see that you are beyond listening, little bird," he said, kissing the curve of my ear. "For now, let us dream together. Tomorrow, oh tomorrow, Anywhere you please."