Night Caller
He is, of course, as tender as you’d expect. His hands cradle my head like they would an egg, thumbs at the corners of my mouth. Not sure when it happened, but our breaths have fallen into a rhythm: one inhale from him for every exhale from me. As if he couldn’t bear to let a single atom escape me that he didn’t then capture.
“My sweet one,” he murmurs. Close enough I can see myself reflected in his eyes: pale, unremarkable face, framed by thin, dark plaited hair. As he requested, when he invited me to his home.
For an evening of pleasures undefinable, his message had read. And a night of singular delight.
My hands grasp at the lapels of his jacket. I sway, lost in the headiness of his cologne, and the faint taste of metal beneath it. It rings in my senses like a bell, a drop of blood shivering on the tongue.
“I couldn’t wait,” I whisper back. “All day, I dreamed of being here, with you.”
He rewards me with a smile, presses me closer, until the room falls away and all I see is his broad chest, the rich velvet of his jacket. He dresses like this for my pleasure, which will always come first, he promises. First mine, then his. The proper order of things.
I try to forget how he seemed to salivate as he said it.
“And now the dreary hours have passed, what shall we do with our night?” He winds a lock of my hair around his finger, then kisses it before letting it fall to my bare shoulder. No straps, no collars, no high necklines. He has so many rules, but they’re all worth following. A hundred times over.
“Your message said you had it all planned out.” I run my hands down the button band of his shirt, and — daring more than I have yet — reach up to flick the top button open. “I can’t wait for you to show me. I…need you to show me.”
He growls and crushes me to him, muscles shuddering with the effort of keeping his strength leashed, and exhales a cold, damp breath into my hair.
It smells like shit, his breath. Figuratively speaking. If I wanted to get granular about it, I would say it smells like a fistful of dirt, pulled from a fresh-dug grave.
He takes my chin — a little fiercer than before — and lifts my head so I have to risk his gaze. Coal-dark eyes meet mine, and there I am again, small and pale and alone. His eyes trap me, even when a voice in the back of my head cries out that I should run. That I should have ignored his message, left the city, kept moving until his smell faded from my memory and I didn’t dream of his laugh — but I didn’t. I came here, as I was always going to. A hundred times over.
“You are lovely,” he says, dank breath washing over me again. “You lovely, delicious thing. Come so sweetly to my arms, my soft little lamb.”
No matter how much cologne he wears, it can never mask the stink of him. The blood and the dirt.
I hide my face in his chest and shut my eyes as his hands rove over my body. Searching out the greatest warmth, the places where my skin is thinnest.
Run, says the voice. Run run run run run. Now! Go!
He pushes me against a table. Bends me back, follows me down. A milky gleam of teeth just showing between his lips. I could still run. Even as my hands claw at his back and I wrap my legs around his waist, I could still stop this.
“Sweet,” he says, panting now, drooling on my collarbone, “sweet thing, delicious little —“
Across the room, the timer on my phone goes off. Shrill and loud enough to wake the dead, pun intended.
He freezes, cold eyes going frantic for a moment, then levers himself upright, his face wracked with aborted hunger.
“That can’t be right,” he says. “It hasn’t been two hours yet. There’s no way it was two hours.”
I slip off the table and avoid looking at him. His illusions only hold up at close range, and as I step away, he starts to fade, all the fine velvets and brocades going threadbare, his face an order of magnitude too gaunt to be considered handsome. Sure, the fangs could break skin, but he’s too tired to try, without the playacting to juice him up.
He doesn’t pay me for pity. That’s all he’ll get if I let my gaze linger too long.
“Two hours,” I say, phone in hand. I waggle it in his direction so he can see the clock, and he sinks down into a worn-out wingback chair. “Time flies, doesn’t it?”
He scoffs in an urbane sort of way, hand to his face, fingers fanned out to hide his features. I can feel him looking at me, regardless.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a slot open, to add to —“
“Sorry,” I say, before my sympathy can get the better of me. “I’m due across town in an hour. Busy weekend.”
“May I ask who —“
“No, you may not.” I give him a wry smile. He could guess, given the full moon, but he always asks. The instinct for hunting out competition. “Privacy matters. Book a longer session next time. Or skimp on the seduction.”
He gives me a deeply aggrieved look. “The seduction,” he says, with a spark of the vicious glamour that might still pull in someone less professional than me, “flavors the meat.”
As good a cue to leave as any. “I’ll see you next month, then?”
He nods, already sinking into a sulk as he faces toward the fire. I let myself out, into the humid city air.
Bethany Sherwood writes, reads, knits, and spins deep in Massachusetts, overseen by her cat, Annabelle. Being born on Cape Cod gave her a deep love for the ocean, and a childhood in the Midwest gave her a lifetime of tornado-related anxiety. She posts at bsky.app/profile/theherocomplex, and https://ohtheherocomplex.blog.
