Compulsion Ch. 02

"Then tell me what you want." Her voice had taken on that sharp tone of command that sliced straight to my core.

My head swam, a pang of pleasure racked my nerves, and my answer came involuntarily, drawn up from somewhere beyond the scope of my conscious mind.

"You, " I moaned, "to fuck me...."

Then she was driving up into me, two fingers stroking my inner walls as her thumb circled above, and I took it so easily that the next thrust was with three fingers, and soon I was stretched around four. The pent-up sounds that I was forbidden from voicing only fed back into the pleasure, increased the pressure, reminded me of the intensely compromised position I was in.

Adrian's kisses grew harsher. She sucked at the sensitive spot just below my ear, flicked her tongue against the skin, then let her cool breath soothe the throbbing of the new bruise. As I raked my nails down her neck and across her back, I relished the way she shuddered, and she channeled the sensation back into me. Each thrust was bringing me higher now, and flames were licking along my limbs, and I was so tight around her and my hands pulled at her hair and she growled against my throat. "Come for me."

I went up like kindling. My legs gave out, thighs shaking uncontrollably, but Adrian held me in place against the wall, still deep inside of me. My muscles squeezed around her fingers, each ripple eliciting from me a whimper of pleasure. I curled against her, panting and moaning her name into the hollow of her throat. My shaking hands clutched at her collar.

"Oh, God," I sighed as my mind came back to me. I pressed myself against her to stay steady. "Oh, my God, Adrian..."

Words escaped her. Eloquent and composed as she had been down in the bar, there was something nearly vulnerable about the way she was now. She let out a low breath, and with it a sound halfway between a snarl and a moan, and I was overcome with the desire to touch her. I wanted her to come undone for me as I had for her. My hands, still trembling, snaked down her lean torso to fumble with her belt buckle.

She caught me by the wrists.

"Can't I do that for you?" I pleaded, gazing up at her. Her expression was unreadable--very still, mouth a tight line, and sunglasses still obscuring her eyes.

"No," she said, and released my hands. They fell to my sides. She stepped backwards and there was empty space between us once again. "You can't."

"I can't..." I hugged my arms around my chest, feeling the exposure anew. The cold air raised gooseflesh on my limbs. "Oh. Sorry. I just thought... I don't know. It seemed like you wanted me."

"Grace." She was faintly dismayed, and she took me by the waist, very gently. Her grip was shaky. "Of course I want you."

"Then you have me." It was a self-evident truth, and I laid my hands against her chest, pressed my hips against her, tried to make her understand it. "Whatever you want."

"Mm... That's rather generous of you, isn't it?"

I let out a half-hearted laugh, and she cut it off with a kiss. It was deeper and slower now. I took my time enjoying her, tongue playing across hers. She really was curiously cold--exactly the same temperature as the night air. Now that I was no longer half-ablaze with desire, it was easier to notice. And she was as immovable as the wall behind me. I stroked my hands across the soft plane of her chest, over her jacket, along her lapels.

A quick, sharp pain. I'd pricked my finger on her lapel pin. I broke off our kiss and snatched my hand back, not wanting to stain her clothes. A ruby drop beaded up and I pressed it to my lips, wincing a little at the bright burst of copper against my tongue.

Adrian was upon me. Too fast--like I'd blacked out for a second and missed something. Her fingers closed around my wrists, holding them up against the wall, and her lips crushed against mine. I gasped as she raked her teeth over my bottom lip. The edges were all wrong. Too sharp. The lingering taste of blood tweaked at my nerves. Some long-buried ancestral memory of preyhood made my breath catch in my throat and my heart skip a beat. Danger.

This time she broke the kiss. I looked up at her like a mouse looks up at a cat. Slowly, without knowing why I was doing it, I tilted my head back to bare my throat to her. I couldn't look away from her shuttered gaze.

She hissed out a long, low breath. "You're very responsive, aren't you?"

"You weren't complaining a minute ago." My heart leapt as she leaned in closer.

"I'm not complaining now." Her fingers were biting into my wrists. My pulse throbbed underneath her touch.

Her voice was quiet, and keen as a carving knife. "You must tell me if you want me to stop," she reminded me, and lowered her mouth to my throat. Nipped at the sensitive skin just below my jaw.

I swallowed. Nodded. Waited, although I could not have put to words what I was waiting for.

She was right over my pulse point now, teeth dimpling my flesh. "And you must tell me if you want me to go on."

Of course I wanted her--sharply, deeply, strangely. But I could not voice it, did not know the words to tell her so. It was like it was when I was young, still mysterious to myself, flipping through a coffee table book of Renaissance art, tracing the curves of every reclining Venus. But that had been the tender flickering of a candle, and this was the all-consuming burn of Verschuier's Great Fire. A great fire like Pandemonium. Pandemonium like The Triumph of Death.

"Please," I whimpered, and it didn't matter that I didn't know what I was asking for. Adrian did.

A ripple passed through her. Her teeth grew long and parted my flesh. A distant moan--me or her?--and then nothing but the rush of blood.

Adrian drank. Her throat moved against mine with every draw. My blood flowed through me and into her and I was hers entirely and there was no space between us. She released my wrists, and I lowered my arms slowly, draped myself over her as she took what she needed. My stomach flipped, a feeling somewhere between the lovesickness of a Romantic Antiochus and the seasickness of a Surrealist landscape. And yet... there was a raw pleasure to this union, an intimacy, a deepness of sensation that I had never felt before.

Her hand was between my legs again. She circled my still-sensitive bundle of nerves with the cool pad of her finger. So gentle. She unlatched from my neck, traced the wounds with the tip of her tongue, and let the blood well up before she licked it away again with a shuddering sigh. My hips moved of their own accord. A wave of heat swelled in me and flooded my veins, and my heartbeat surged against her tongue.

The points of her teeth nestled back into the same bite. I quivered--did it hurt? It was hard to tell. My body was not my own. All its sensations belonged to her, to make of them what she wished. Her muscles twitched with every beat of my heart. Each jerk of her fingers stoked the fire that was heating my blood, and I wanted her to take it all from me, to taste my mounting desire in every hot spurt on her tongue. I raised an unsteady hand--it was growing clumsy and cold, like I'd been out in the snow for too long--and ran my fingers through her hair as I came around her for the second time.

The eternal moment ended. She released me and I stumbled away, over-stimulated, overwhelmed, disoriented. Adrian, meanwhile, pressed her forehead and her palms against the brick wall. Her hair hung over her eyes. Her upper lip was curled in a snarl, and the white of her fangs was unmistakable against the red of her mouth. She dripped with my blood.

"Oh, my God," I whispered, touching my neck. Her bite throbbed in time with the last remnants of pleasure that echoed from my centre. My fingers were stained. The blood looked unreal in the sodium lighting of the streetlamps--bright as vermilion.

"Oh, my God," I said, a little louder this time.

Her head snapped up. Her sunglasses were gone.

Adrian's looming presence blocked out the streetlamp, casting her into darkest shadow. But her eyes--they were blacker. They seared into me. How could eyes so black burn so hot? I was gazing up at a solar eclipse--Vision of St. Benedict--and somewhere beneath the transfixion, I knew I should close my eyes, or turn from her. To stare was to be scorched, perhaps irreparably--and yet I couldn't look away. She didn't want me to. I didn't want to.

Her gaze trailed up my neck, and my pulse beat urgently. "Shh. You're okay, Grace." She placed a finger beneath my chin, tilted my head to the side.

"I'm okay," I echoed. My legs crumpled beneath me.

Adrian caught me by the waist before I fell, and set me gently down on a sheet-covered sofa. She collapsed beside me, stretching out her long limbs, head lolling back, eyes shut. Lazy as a lion after the kill. The faintest bloom of colour tinted her cheeks, and her parted lips looked perhaps a shade pinker beneath the bloodstain.

How must I have looked? My dress was still down below my breasts and riding up at my hips. Panties at my knees. Ravished and ravaged and covered in my own blood.

"Let me clean you up," she said, and I was obedient as she put me back together. Her hands slid up my thighs as she replaced my underwear. The sodden silk was cold against my bare skin, but she was no longer so chilled. I wondered if my blood had leant her some warmth. I wondered if she liked the way that felt.

Adrian retrieved my bra, clasped me back into it, and pulled my dress up. Her pointed teeth were still stark against her bloody mouth. She rolled her tongue over her bottom lip, savouring the taste of me, and then she was at my throat again. I tensed, but she didn't bite--just licked and kissed away the spilled blood that streaked my skin. Her tongue retraced all the strange pathways she'd forged, and my thigh muscles twitched.

With a growl, Adrian pulled away, swiped her hand across her mouth, and licked the last traces of me from her fingers. Her dark eyes fluttered shut, and my heartbeat skipped in time. Then she slid her sunglasses back on. When she grinned, she was a raffish art dealer once more--smile lively and even and unbloodied.

"Tell me what you're thinking?" she asked.

Whatever power she held over me, it had ebbed. Her words no longer pulled the responses from deep within me--and so I hesitated as I tried to summon them myself. My mind churned, and I pressed a hand to my forehead, as if that would help me compose myself. As if anything could.

"Was it all just about... this?" I said at last. "I mean, my artwork... me... did it even matter? Or did you just want... Were you just..." Hungry. I couldn't bring myself to finish the thought aloud.

"Oh, Grace." She cast me a sympathetic look as she shook out her pocket square and pressed it against my neck. The silk was soothing against the tender edges of her bite. "You are a wonderfully talented artist. Full of promise, and life to be lived. I want all of that. All of you."

I smiled back weakly. My heart fluttered as if she held it in her hand, as tame to her as a dove to St. Francis. I am a wonderful artist and she wants me.

"But now it's up to you to decide what you want," she continued as she sat me up and draped my coat around my shoulders. I was shivering, I realized. My fingers and toes were tingly. "And how could I ask you to make a decision in this state? It's rather a lot to consider, isn't it?"

It was a lot. And yet the broad strokes of it already stood out clearly in my mind against the roiling background of doubts and anxieties. She wants me.

She was tying her pocket square around my neck, over her bite marks. "Go home and think on it. If this is too much for you--if you'd rather it were all a strange dream--then as these marks fade, so will your memories of me. But if not... then in a week's time, you'll call. You have my card."

"I'll call," I echoed.

Her fingers ran through my hair, fanning the curls out around my neck, and her expression grew serious. "Keep yourself covered until you're healed. You will do nothing and say nothing that might cause suspicion about what I am."

"'I'll say nothing," I said. The last part of her command stuck in my thoughts. "About... what you are..." It stuck on my lips, too, a question I couldn't quite form.

Behind her dark lenses, Adrian's burning gaze trailed across my cleavage, up my throat, and lingered at my bandaged pulse point. "You've seen enough to know, haven't you? There's nothing to be gained from speaking the word. Not when you've already come to understand it so... viscerally."

She drew me in for a soft kiss, her lips barely brushing against mine, hands just skimming my jawline. "Keep my secret," Adrian urged. "It's yours, now, too, for as long as you know it."

"I will," I promised. I pressed my palms against her chest as I kissed her back. Was the thrumming pulse between us emanating from me, or from her? Had she taken my heartbeat, too? "For as long as I know it."