Then, nothing. No words rose on his skin for me to read for a week, until one night the tiny letters rose on his chest. I told him that he had been attacked by something unknown, something monstrous in his twenty-fourth year. Three days later, the story told from the letters on his chest showed that he came back to his senses and the knowledge of what he was some hundred years later in France.
The very next night I traced my hand along one heavily muscled thigh, to read of the moment he gained the awareness back that made him more than a beast. It was unspeakable; he was in the middle of a pile of expensively dressed, drained bodies - an aristocratic charnel house - and alone. James escaped, lived for a time in London and then at the beginning of the 1900s came across the ocean to America.
He began feverishly ran through hundreds of documents, trying to learn more about the fate of his family, the Romanescu of Timi?oara. It was a realization that made me soften - slightly - with my fear and fury toward him.
“If you don’t remember those hundred years, you’re afraid maybe … that you hurt your family?”
His head shot up from his laptop at my question, the first oddly non-graceful movement I’d seen from him. I was immediately sorry I’d opened my fool mouth because he was furious.
“If your desire to read my history was as great as your need to wail and play the victim, I would know now, wouldn’t I?” Rising from his seat, James sauntered over to me, “Why are you keeping that from me, my sweet doll? Don’t I take care of you? Feed and pamper you? Restore you?”
I was so busy with being pressed against the window and trying to find a way to avoid him, that it took a moment for his words to sink in.
“Restore me? What does that mean?”
“Oh, I think you know exactly what that means,” James purred, an unkind little grin twisting his lush mouth. “I can’t drain you dry, you have work to do. You’re still necessary.” He put one arm on one side of my face, then caged me with the other. The fashionable exposed brick I was pinned against was fucking freezing and with the chill radiating off him, my teeth were already chattering. “I’ve had to administer a little pick me up. A restorative, they used to call it.”
“You…” I swallowed against my dry mouth, “you gave me yourblood?You evil bas-”
One huge hand landed on my jaw, stopping my outrage as James kissed the fury out of my mouth, his tongue sliding over my gritted teeth.
“Be a good girl and think about what you want to say. I said that you’re necessary. I didn’t say that meant I wouldn’t punish you.” His fingers tightened just slightly but it was enough.
“I don’t care!” I screamed recklessly. “How could you do that to me? That’s disgusting, stealing my blood from me and then tainting it and putting it back? I hate you!”
I was sick at the realization that he’d fed me his blood - well, my blood really, just recycled through his undead body and given back to me. It was somehow worse that there was something of him in me. I was sobbing, sitting down heavily on the ottoman and putting my hands over my face.
“My poor doll,” my captor was sweet again, so concerned, “you’re freezing. Let’s get you into a nice, warm bath and I’ll wash your hair.”
James spent an inordinate amount of time taking care of me these days, which unfortunately meant he was around more. He fed me and brushed my hair, smoothed lotion over my skin. He’d gathered a vast wardrobe of exquisitely soft, warm clothing and delicate scraps of underwear and he loved dressing me up.
I am turning into his little doll,I’d thought bitterly.
But underneath his faux tenderness, I knew his frustration was rising, his resentment, as if I’d been deliberately keeping something from him. God, I would run my hands over every inch of his unnatural, perfect musculature, I’d really, really tried, just so I could fucking end this. So that I wouldn’t have to endure his jagged teeth tearing into my body again, draining me. Because then I would just wake up again with unmarred skin. That there would be no sign of the damage done to me was even more infuriating, as if my suffering had no merit.
I had tried, over and over to read for him so I could escape this torture. James had promised he’d stop drinking from me after I finished reading the history mapped on his skin, but it wasn’t like I could select the stories. I could only read the tiny, perfect script when it appeared.
Currently…
Shoving away my memories of the last few weeks, I made myself pay attention to now, sitting in the warm, scented water, with James’ arms around me. I thought of a new way to ask the one thing I wanted to know, more than anything.
”How did you know I could, um, read you?”
I stifled an alarmed squeal as his long fingers closed around my waist, briskly lifting and turning me so my legs straddled him. Tightening my thighs so I could keep from pressing my pussy against his growing cock, I persisted.
“I mean, how could you have possibly thought-”
James was smiling at me oddly as his hands ran up and down my sides. From anyone else, I would have thought the smile was affectionate.
“You don’t remember, do you?” When I wrinkled my brow, he chuckled, sliding one thick thigh between mine. “You were heading down the hallway at the office, trying to look over that stack of manuscripts and pathetic pitch letters and you nearly knocked me over.”
I leaned back and stared at him incredulously, trying not to notice that the precise, perfectly detailed musculature of his thigh was beginning to rub in a really distracting way against my center. “Me? Knock you over? Please.”
James laughed, “True. But when you fell against me you touched my bare arm with your hand. You whispered it. A word. Sorin.”
“He is like the sun…” I noted absently, trying to stiffen my spine and pull away from the distracting motion of his hands on my hips.
“Yes,” he nodded. “A name. My name. My true name.” He chuckled bitterly. “Ironic, given that I can never really see the sun again. But you,” he grinned as my clit pressed onto his defined muscle, enjoying my little gulp, “you brought it out, on to my skin.”
