Ines’ fingers snaked themselves around her wrist and brought the tender flesh to her mouth. It was an intoxicating heat that brushed against the pulse point there, but an equally alarming sensation raised goosebumps on her skin, flushed her nerves with an unfamiliar fear. Naomie wondered if this was what it felt like to put your hands to a flame, or walk into traffic blindfolded, or trek through the desert, bloody and decaying, under the gaze of vultures. Fundamentally, was there a difference between seduction and intimidation? Temptation and terror? In her current headspace, Naomie wanted nothing more than to push herself forward on the sword of pleasure that Ines’ had pointed at her heart. In this club, with this mist of smoke and sweat and haze, bass too loud, but not loud enough for the way Ines’ words screamed in her mind, Naomie embraced the fear like a lover in the throes of pleasure: She clawed at it, pulled it closer, felt the way it filled her and sought the little deaths it could wrack into her if she let it.
The woman's effortless manipulation of her senses simply by virtue of her gaze and certainty of her touch cut through the fog of her substance use and delivered a fatal blow of appeal that drew Naomie in. A nauseating movement, so sudden and precise that she barely had time to register it had happened, found her on her back, pain pulsating through her shoulder blades and the back of her head at the impact. A sharp ringing sensation blasted from the back of her head all the way to her temple, bled pain through her gaze, which watered and blurred the overhead neon lights. Naomie felt any control she had on the direction of their entanglement slip through her fingers. A cooling kind of dreadful feeling clawed at each of her ribs and accelerated the dull thudding of her heart. She propped herself up on her elbows to look at the woman, less human and more demon, poised between her legs. Ines was beautiful and she knew what she wanted, those two things a lethal combination that left Naomie defenseless to her demands.
Naomie broke her own rules. She always took payment upfront, and she never let people have a taste before colliding with them. But something about the grip Ines had on her inner thigh, the intensity of her gaze, the way being wanted by a creature like this was disarming, like lowering your head to expose your neck to a blade, made forgetting her own values so simple. Maybe if she had been sober, she would have said no and remembered that she was in a public place, and that she was not the kind of performer to give voyeuristic experiences to surrounding club goers. Instead, Ines’ eyes, the expensive smell of floral perfume cut with a hint of metal, her fingers digging into her thigh, all of these things shoved themselves down Naomie’s throat, rearranged the words that would have denied her, and ripped from her voice box an agreeable hum. The would-be shake of her head turned into a vertical motion, a nod that gave consent to whatever the other woman wanted.
She was under no influence other than the immeasurable sadness that had settled in her muscles, than the drugs that coursed through every blood vessel, than her innate desire to be consumed until there was nothing left. In her state, Naomie would have agreed to anything, no external pressure required. She would have wrapped her hands around Ines’ if they had held a gun in her mouth, and Naomie would have pulled the trigger without encouragement. Her voice felt so unlike her own, like Lexie if she had a death wish, when she voiced an answer.
“Baby, you can have whatever you want.”
inés wasn't sure what made her wait for naomie's consent to draw blood from her warm flesh. in the privacy of her booth, guarded by her hired men, she could have easily pinned naomie down and fed from her without so much as uttering a single word. she could be drowning her thirst with crimson sacrifice by now, but as she hovered over the part of naomie's thigh where crescent-shaped marks now littered across her skin, as her fangs retracted further from her gums and showed an uglier side of her that her father had fought hard to keep hidden from the rest of the world, as they sank into yielding flesh and her tongue finally had its first taste of blood fresh from its source that day — inés understood.
blood, when heated by passion rather than fear, had always tasted better for inés.
