Bitten

A young woman has her dreams come true!

She always thought it would be incredibly intimate to be bitten. She’d read all the stories and she’d wanted that for herself. But now, looking at her neck in the bathroom mirror, she realized she’d made a horrible mistake.
            At first, it had been extremely intimate. He had taken her into a secluded area behind the nightclub. She could never tell what he’d looked like because his face had always been hidden by his jacket hood, but his scent had been intoxicating. His smell had attracted her when she first saw him, sitting in a dark corner booth of the club. It had entranced her when he told her he would make her dreams come true that very night. And it had all but taken over her when they stood together in the pale light outside the club.
            He had asked her, in his raspy yet enrapturing voice, if she was sure she wanted what she asked for. And she held in her reaction of “duh” and a flip of her hair. After all, that would make the whole thing less romantic. What a faux pas! Instead she breathed a quaking “yes”.
            He - she didn’t know his name, but there was plenty of time for that after - shrugged his shrugged his shoulders and brought his open mouth to her throat. In the neon lights she saw his long teeth and had a moment of doubt when she saw they were jagged and brown instead of white and gleaming. But before she could say anything, she felt sudden and immense pain as the dirty, broken teeth sunk into her throat.
            For an instant she wanted to push him off, but then he began to swap her blood for his saliva and she began to feel warm. And it was sensual and erotic and exactly like of the stories. She could feel as they traded fluids. She gripped his arms and moaned pleasure and pain into his ear. And just as she thought she would scream with agony and arousal, he pulled away from her slowly enough for her to feel as his cracked teeth slid out of her throat. She begged for their return, gripping his arm harder. He easily escaped her grasp, shrugged once more and, without a word, walked away.
            She thought to follow him, but no, he’d be back. They were One now. There was him in her and there was her in him. Holier than sex. He would never leave her and not come back. They would be together forever.
            He never came back.

            And now she stared into the bathroom mirror, the area around the bandage on her throat black, gray, and dirty green. She supposed that she would have felt her heartbeat there, if her heart had still been pumping blood. She missed that. Slowly, keeping care for the extremely tender and painful wound underneath, she took the bandage away from her neck and winced in disgust at what she saw.
            The entire area had swelled to the size of a cherry tomato and the colors seemed to be some insane watercolor artist’s pallet. Oranges and yellows and reds and greens and blues, pale and grotesque surrounded the two puncture holes in her throat. These, which had a stench to them that turned her stomach, had begun to weep gray and rancid pus, wetting the bandages and forcing a dressing change every couple of hours.
            This, she decided as tears came to her eyes, was not sexy. This horrid wound was not the seductive aftereffect that she had read of in the stories. The pus-dripping, ever-open gouges in her throat were not erotic, nor romantic.
            None of this was what she’d wanted, nor what she’d read about. She didn’t want the sleepless nights, not the cravings of flesh and blood. She didn’t want the intense itch and burn that the sun brought during the day, nor the anxiousness that came to her when she ran the sink’s tap when she redressed her wound. She didn’t want to walk by Giovanni’s and have the smell of garlic make her throat dry and her head faint, as though with heat exhaustion. She didn’t want the loneliness that awaited her every day since that night that her turner, the one who was supposed to love her for eternity (according to the stories), had vanished into the night to fulfill another young girl’s dreams.
            All she wanted was the release from this painful, horrid existence that would never come.

Reviews

[TLK]

Excellent first line. The 'glamour' of vampires, and the quasi-sexual damage they do, is summed up. The line "he never came back" is clearly shattering for the character, but I think a bit more build up would help the reader to feel more of this themselves. The previous paragraph starts to build up their biter-bitee relationship, e.g. "They were One now", but I wasn't given quite enough to really feel it. What exactly of him is in her? How much of her sings in him? An idea of the answers to these questions would lead me, as a reader, to feel much more of her pain at his lack of return.
I would also like to know a little bit about his intoxicating smell. I would imagine it's not much like my smell (onions and old meat), because that is not intoxicating in the slightest.

Her angst in the end is very real, and very effective. The build up for this part is just long enough, I think. I do wonder why she isn't holding a stake to her breast, though. Surely she knows of some way to end her existence?