Diana Krall sings, "I've got you under my skin..." and I remember a vampire when I hear her voice go dry and husky. Diana croons, "skin," coaxing the word from her throat. My mind sees her slender, oval-tipped fingers push against the white keys of her piano finely, exactly, deliberately and I move with them, traveling down a path I thought I had barred months ago.
The memory comes like a dream on the music.
I open a door to find myself in a bed room with a man I think I know. It has taken weeks of conversation, and hours of expensive evenings to arrive at this inevitable place, dancing slowly but knowingly to ageless music that builds in our blood. He lays me down on his bed, moves beside me, a shadow who breaths against my arm as he kisses it slowly on the soft, inner skin, lingering at my wrist where my pulse pushes against his tongue. He is a scent when my eyes close, rich and masculine, exotic, desired. He is a force as he moves on top of me, kissing downward along my body. I smile.
I think I know what will come: I will relax in comfortable abandon until fulfillment comes to both of us. But in the blackness of surrender, of sensation, he bites me so suddenly, sharply, high on my inner thigh, that I cry aloud. My heart pounds. Red flashes before my wide eyes; I see red, and I start up, but he shoves me back, holds me down with his body and his lips, wraps my pale long, hair around his fist. Some foreign and frightening fear uncoils and writhes inside my belly as I move on his sheets. His mouth is on my shoulders, my neck. Mysterious poison clouds my blood, my mind. My cry becomes a moan of some foreign tongue I never before uttered. I feel...hungry...for this hurt!
I move out of the day dream, back to the light of morning, the jazz plays, the song teases me, gnaws and nudges me note by note back to his teeth. I hear his laughter in the darkness of my thoughts, in the midnight of his bedroom. I protest, but not enough. He thinks I want this. Aroused and alarmed at the aggression, the sharp pain, I am tense, apprehensive at the confusing, hurtful pleasure of his mouth. He covers me with his body, kissing, sucking, massaging until I am soothed, then biting when I think he won't--surely not again, not so hard. But he does. In anticipation and anxiety he takes me where I would not go except for him. He owns me, and even as I push away he pushes into me because he senses I want him that way. I want him that way.
When the duet of our night was finished I came back to myself in the dawning light. I felt strange and alien as I silently observed the secret places where he left his purple mark on my skin. I was horrified, irresistably, curiously dirty and detatched. My blood had cooled, coagulated in my veins, and I moved to cover the evidence from my own knowing eyes. What line I had crossed I could not say; I would not come back here. There would be no encore for the rough song of passion.
Except there is--unpleasantly unexpectedly...erotically. His teeth somehow bruised my mind with an imprint beyond the night in the shape of a bite-mark, a shocked "Oh!" The memory answers its irresistable summons: a song that floated through the air of that moist, malarial night, uncoiling itself, my blood more fevered with every note.
Loves later, the taste of last night's dry martini mingles with the cool crackle-over-ice of Diana Krall's voice. On this sunny morning herTrojan piano springs diseased memory through the radio. The music throws me over its shoulder and carries me back through the velvet purple of my wayward senses to a vampire bed. My finger brushes against my thigh and feels the ghost of his first, tingling-hot bite. I push my thoughts away, resist the memory, and try to picture the man who will inject a cure, love me gently back to sweetness and gentle, murmuring surrender, remove completely the splinter of memory that shoots this vampire infection of desire and its pain under my cool, white skin.
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